Martin Jacques

Visiting Senior Fellow at IDEAS, London School of Economics and Political Science

Author of When China Rules the World

We are still little more than halfway through the process of China’s modernisation. The next twenty years will see a profound trans-formation of the country and the completion of the modernisation process. China will finally have the panoply of characteristics of a modern country. The most fundamental difference between the first phase of modernisation and the coming second phase concerns its impact on the rest of the world. For most of the first phase, China’s economy was too small to have much of an impact outside its own frontiers, though this has changed markedly over the last decade. The second phase will be very different. In the first phase, China’s modernisation was essentially a domestic matter: in the second phase, such is the size of the Chinese economy, now let alone in the future, that the impact of China’s modernisation on the rest of the world will be enormous.

This is an entirely new phenomenon. Of course, previous examples of modernisation, or economic takeoff – namely Britain and then America – did have a wider international impact, but because their populations were so much smaller and their growth rates so much lower, it was extremely limited. In contrast, China will not only be transforming itself but also transforming the world at one and the same time.

This carries enormous responsibilities and challenges for China. It is still getting used to the transformations and ramifications of modernisation – the whole experience is still a relative novelty – but, because of its global impact, China will be required at the same time to understand its interaction with and impact upon the rest of the world when its experience and knowledge of the world, after such a long period of isolation, is still extremely limited and narrow. Or, to put it another way, China’s global impact demands that it have a cosmopolitan outlook when history and circumstances suggest that it should still be relatively provincial and parochial.

Herein lies an enormous challenge – and burden – for the Chinese, not just its leadership but also its people. No country has ever been confronted with this kind of problem before.