Into the Unknown

A few years ago, I read a terrific collection of essays — It Must be Beautiful — on the great scientific equations of modern times. I loved it, but as I meandered through the book, I was struck by an unexpected poignancy. The first essays, by and large, described breakthroughs that had taken place in the laboratories of Europe. The second half was quite different. Some time in the 1920s, the balance of scientific discovery shifted inexorably to the U.S. A small book of essays held within it proof of a profound historical change.

I found myself thinking of that while reading a new book by Martin Jacques, a British journalist turned academic. Jacques' tome is called When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, and his thesis, which he advances with a depth of argument often missing in similar works, is made plain enough by his title. The most likely scenario for the future, Jacques writes, is that "China continues to grow stronger and ultimately emerges over the next half-century, or rather less in many respects, as the world's leading power." His book is an examination of how and why that will happen, and what it will mean. (Read "China Takes on the World.")

Jacques is right that China's continued development will be one of the forces that shapes the century. It is equally true, as he argues, that China will not be just any old superpower. It has its own distinctive combination of attributes: a huge population, a sense of its identity as a civilization as well as a nation state, a long-standing influence on the nations and cultures that border it, and a diaspora that impacts not just its region but the world. China's habits of governance, Jacques argues, are not those of the Western world; its values (let us say harmony and stability, rather than liberty and justice) are not those of the West. The roles of both the state and the extended family as social mechanisms in China differ from those in modern Western societies. All of this, Jacques argues, means that the 21st century will be one of "contested modernities." Until around 1970, he says, modernity was, with the exception of Japan, "an exclusively Western phenomenon." But as China assumes a bigger role in global economics and politics, that is changing. (See pictures of China's infrastructure boom.)

I agree with much of this. We have learned in the last 20 years that there are many ways of being modern, and that Western liberal democracy is but one of them. But that little collection of essays on the great equations reminds us that a society's characteristics today will not necessarily shape what it will look like tomorrow. History rarely runs in straight and predictable lines. At the end of the 19th century, Germany — or perhaps more accurately, Germanic central Europe — was a technological and scientific powerhouse, its universities nurturing geniuses like Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, whose discoveries changed the way we thought of, well, everything. Then came the carnage of World War I, the rise of fascism and communism, the mass murder of European Jews and the flight of those who could escape it, often to the U.S. All of this contributed to a shift of the center of scientific progress away from Europe. Some aspects of the great European disaster might have been foreseeable in 1909, but none with any certainty. There are too many futures for them all to be known.

This is particularly apposite in the case of China, a country with not only many possible futures, but (as it were) many pasts. There is a crude but commonly held thumbnail sketch of modern Chinese history that goes something like this: Two centuries ago, European powers tried to open a hermetic society to trade; they failed until the Opium Wars forced the issue; China then entered an era of foreign domination and internal chaos, which ended with the imposition of political stability by the Communist Party in 1949; in 1978, after another round of internal unrest, China chose to modernize its economy and adopted market mechanisms to do so, with astonishing success. Cut (in the movie version of this story) to a shot of the crazy skyline of Pudong from the banks of the Huangpu in Shanghai.

Read "Is a Trade War with China Brewing?"

See pictures of China doing business in Africa.