When China Rules the World

Part II. The Age of China

Although parts of China are already prosperous and developed, around half of the population still lives in the countryside. China remains very much a developing country. As a consequence, Chinese modernity can only be regarded as work in progress. Some of its characteristics are already evident, others are only in embryonic form, while others still are not yet visible. It is abundantly clear, however, that Chinese modernity will differ markedly from Western modernity. The reasons for this lie not only in the present, but even more tellingly in the past. China has little in common with the West. It comes from entirely different cultural coordinates. Its politics, its state and its moral outlook have been constituted in a highly singular way, likewise its relationship with its neighbours. The fact that for many centuries the Chinese regarded themselves as constituting the world, as ‘all land under Heaven’, only serves to underline the country’s unique character. Unlike most developing countries, furthermore, China was never colonized, even though many of its cities were. Colonization was a powerful means by which countries were Westernized, but in China its absence from vast swathes of the country meant this never happened in the same manner that it did in India or Indochina, for example. The sheer size of China, both as a continental land mass and, more importantly, in terms of population, were, of course, indispensable conditions for enabling the Chinese to think in such autarchic and universalist terms. It might be argued that all these considerations lie in the past, but it is history that shapes and leaves its indelible mark on the present. Modernity is not a free-floating product of the present, but a function of what has gone before.

The fact that China, ever since 1949, but more significantly since 1978 and the beginning of the reform period, has been single-mindedly focused on the task of modernization — and, with remarkable self-discipline, allowed itself no distractions — has served to emphasize the extent to which China’s modernization is convergent with the West rather than divergent. Here, China ’s experience closely resembles that of its more developed East Asian neighbours. But as China progresses further down the road of modernization, it will find itself less constrained by the imperatives of development, increasingly at ease with the present, and anxious to find inspiration from its past for the present.