Martin Jacques in Manila; A must press conference

Let me start this column by saying that I was taken by surprise when I walked into the Intercontinental Ballroom for Martin Jacques’ lecture on China. I could not understand why organizers would choose the cavernous ballroom for a lecture. The title of the lecture was: When China Rules the World.

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The picture was completely different from what I had presupposed. By the time the lecture began all seats were taken. Martin Jacques (pronounced Jakes) is the author of the global best-seller When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order which was first published in 2009. It has since sold over a quarter of a million copies and translated into 11 languages.

He was a visiting senior research fellow at the London School of Economics, IDEAS, a centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy but also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a fellow of the Transatlantic Academy, Washington DC. He was intellectually equipped to straddle both East and West.

More impressive, although he would defend China’s rise in the world, he has had to live with the tragic death of his wife in Hong Kong because of negligence caused in part by racism.

Philippines 2020, The Futuristic Society of the Philippines and the Philippine STAR did well in inviting Jacques at this time when Filipinos need to know more about China. His TED Talk on ‘Understanding China’ has had almost 900,000 views. He has given lectures at many of the world’s top universities including Harvard, Cornell, UCLA, USC, Cambridge, Oxford, Peking, Tsinghua, Renmin, NUS, Tokyo, University of Hong Kong, amongst many others.

It was a treat from an author and a disconsolate widower.

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The 2-hour lecture was a one-man theater production — no microphone just a stage that he walked up and down as he talked, gesticulated and showed maps and graphs. I will have to excerpt from the many things he said.

“China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it’s a huge, developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around ten percent a year. And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country. Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world, which is what I think China will become, will be not from the west and from very, very different civilizational roots. 

…It’s a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion…China is not like the west, and it will not become like the west. It will remain, in very fundamental respects, very different.

How do we try and understand what China is? I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like, just as a beginning. The first is this: that China is not really a nation-state. Okay, it’s called itself a nation-state for the last hundred years. But anyone who knows anything about China knows it’s a lot older than this… 

What gives China it’s sense of being China, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation-state period, which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization-state. Customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, and likewise a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guangxi, Confucian values, and so on, these are all things that come from the period of the civilization-state.

Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han…Without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together.

The relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. We in the West overwhelmingly seem to think, these days at least, that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy, and more authority, among the Chinese, than is true with any western state. 

It’s obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because, in our terms, the Chinese certainly don’t have a democracy. But the reason for this is, firstly, because the state, in China enjoys a very special significance, as the representative, the embodiment, and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization-state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role. 

For one thousand years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged...The Chinese view the state as an intimate. Not just as an intimate, actually, but as a member of the family. Not just, in fact, as a member of the family, but as the head of the family: the patriarch of the family. 

So there we have three building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is China: the civilization-state, the notion of race, and the nature of the state and its relationship to society. And yet we still insist, by and large, on thinking that we can explain China by drawing on western experience, looking at it through western eyes, using western concepts. 

Well, what should our attitude be toward this world we see very rapidly developing before us? I think there will be good things about it, and bad things about it. But I want to argue, above all, a big-picture positive for this world. The arrival of countries like China and India, between them 38 percent of the world’s population, and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years….As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation.”

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Important announcement: A press conference will be held at Ilustrado in Intramuros on Tuesday, Nov. 27 at 9 a.m. with Tanggulang Demokrasya AES Watch and the Center for People Empowerment in Government.

This is the political event of the year — to know just what happened in May 2010 so it is not repeated in 2013 or 2016 or at any time in the future. There will be no excuse for responsible citizens to say they didn’t know. Let us see how oligarchic media will handle this momentous event.