AS CHINA marks 60 years of Communist rule, some western commentators will be quick to remind us of its horrors: the millions sacrificed for the Great Leap Forward; the deadly hysteria of the Cultural Revolution; then the bloody repression of student
demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.
However, in this provocative book, the former Communist Martin Jacques argues that the regime installed by Mao in 1949 put an end to China's "century of humiliation" at the hands of the West and Japan. Not only did the Communist Party unite and assert the nation; since Deng Xiaopeng's reforms of 1978, China has grown exponentially to become, it would seem, the future leader of the world.
China's Communists have spectacularly succeeded where their East European comrades abjectly failed: retaining absolute power while delivering growth and rapid integration into the global economy. The capitalist transformation of the world's most populous nation has eclipsed the successes of the erstwhile "Asian Tigers". In the near future, China will overtake its bitter rival Japan, and, by the middle of the 21st century, replace the United States as the biggest economy in the world.
Indeed, the Cold War's remaining superpower, with its economic and cultural model blown sky high by the recent financial meltdown, is already chronically dependent on Chinese credit and cheap manufacturing goods. Military might, the legacy of "frontier spirit", only obscures rapid and irreversible decline. The rise of China, writes Jacques, will be accompanied by that of Brazil and India. Many of us will live to see the previously unthinkable: the end of western hegemony.
The effects of China's rise extend well beyond South-east Asia. Insatiable demand for commodities is re-orienting economies from Angola to Australia. The Chinese diaspora is colonising Africa and Russia, stoking up future demographic and interethnic crises. Easy Chinese credit is decentring the once all-powerful IMF and World Bank, offering a lifeline to undemocratic rulers in Zimbabwe, Sudan and Myanmar.
On the issue of political freedoms, Jacques is sanguine, to say the least. For him, Communist Party rule has reconnected with millennia-old Confucian tradition. China, he argues, has no experience of civil society and popular sovereignty. For so long as the "mandate of Heaven" is not withdrawn, an enlightened bureaucracy governs what the current Paramount Leader, Hu Jintao, calls the "harmonious society". Jacques rightly points to the hypocrisy of the West, which waged savage wars to force China to take its opium.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that a world dominated by the Middle Kingdom is not something to be wished for. Considering themselves to be the centre of the world, the Han Chinese have a strong sense of their innate superiority over other peoples. Despite their increasingly lucrative interests in Africa, they have a tradition of hostility towards those of dark skin.
The age-old ambition to reduce less powerful neighbours to "tributary" status, and to regain "lost kingdoms", effortlessly reminds the European reader of the deadly dream of Grossdeutschland.
In the 1980s, Jacques edited Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of Britain's now-defunct Communist Party. Jacques pioneered the analysis of Thatcherism and the challenging of old left shibboleths, opening the way for the successes (and failures) of New Labour. This excellent book can be seen as a way of correcting the deficiencies of Marxism Today: it challenges western-centric views and emphasises the importance of race in human affairs.
Yet Jacques' anti-western barbs and almost unquestioning espousal of the Chinese cause are curiously reminiscent of the "reverse racism" that seized many communists in the Sixties once the Stalinist "God" failed.
Jacques is aware of the dangers of crystal-ball-gazing. War, economic collapse and ecological catastrophe could well drag China into one of those periods of crisis and introspection which punctuate its long history.
And the Old World isn't beaten yet. After all, China's Olympics opening ceremonies, takeaways and martial arts movies do not yet rival those great Western contributions to global popular culture, themselves often conceived, lest we forget, in periods of wartime and grinding poverty. It is still difficult to see Mandarin, with its grammatical and calligraphic complexity, being used and customised as easily and widely as the English language.
The skyline of smog-bound Shanghai may make some weak at the knees, but others might shed a tear for "Coca-cola-nisation" or even Brezhnev's "era of stagnation".
