This long and repetitive book is exactly about what it says on the cover. Unlike Martin Jacques I hesitate to say the same thing again and again, but his point is that the Chinese have a very long, tenacious, unified, and enduring culture that is overtaking the ‘West’ — he means the United States, a country of recent origin compared to the 5,000-year-old Chinese civilisation-state. Some time in the mid-term future the Chinese will be global masters.
Jacques, a well-known journalist, once-editor of Marxism Today and now a columnist for the Guardian and the New Statesman, lived for some years in Japan, Hong Kong, and China. In his introduction he thanks dozens of friends and colleagues, some of whom, he says, saved him from ‘mistakes and indiscretions’. I don’t know what he was saved from, but what remains is peppered with basic errors of fact so serious that they mar the reasonable things he says. While not original, these include a potted account, repeated many times, of China’s post-Mao economy, an overview of China’s traditional technological developments that I assumed owed much to Joseph Needham’s multi- volume study of that subject, but there is no mention of this in the bibliography; China’s recent entry into the multi-state system; its influence on the rest of the Third World; the recent loss of status, economically and in reputation of ‘the West’, by which, as I say, he usually means the US; Chinese cultural-physical racism. If you know nothing of these matters and pick your way through Jacques’ assertions and judgments there is something to learn.
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