This is uncritical of China to the point of sycophancy. It even goes as far as treating Chinese medicine as a genuine science and not a Chinese version of homeopathy that it is. I can only assume this book is sponsored by the communist party. I hope everyone involved in making this is suitably embarrassed. ( )

A robust qualitative and quantitative account of China's rise to power in the closing decades of the 20th and beginning decades of the 21st centuries. When China Rules the World certainly makes its case with more than enough supporting data.

Much of the informative qualitative aspects are traced through a high-level view of Chinese history, revealing the longevity of the Chinese culture, little-known innovative aspects of the earliest Chinese rulers, inventors and explorers, as well as overviews of Chinese cultural behaviors, political philosophies, social sentiments and its notable lack of outward imperial expansion. Indeed, China refers to the latter half of the 19th through the 20th as its "century of humiliation" while, by the beginning of the 21st century it finds itself leading the economic world order admist the faltering Western institutions that have dominated it for the last century and a half.

Unsurprisingly, most of Jacques' argument stems from the quantitative analysis of Chinese economic performance, relative to the global economic order and, if the intuition wasn't already there for you, the rise of Chinese influence around the world is convincingly an incontrovertible reality. The argument is made through countless references (contained within roughly 100 pages of notes and bibliography) and a few anecdotes from Jacques himself (observed through his professor fellowships held at several Chinese universities through the early aughts and aught-teens).

While the last update was over 7 years ago, there's little that seems to have changed in the general trend that Jacques has illustrated throughout this book. The only shortcoming I had with it, and this may merit a separate text altogether, is the lack of detail on domestic political function, structure and organization. While there was a small subsection or two on domestic politics, very little of it made any mention to particulars and instead fell to the more qualitative anecdotes and inferences made by Jacques. Whether this was due to far less rigidity in domestic Chinese political protocol (as compared with its Western counterparts) or that it was simply not what Jacques was attempting to explain was not easily discerned within the text.

Regardless of this, Jacques has put together a comprehensive and quality argument for why China will rule the world. For anyone interested in foreign policy, global finance, economic power and even Chinese politics, Chinese culture and its history in terms of Western notions and concepts, I would recommend this book for reading, perusal, or reference. ( )

This is, as everyone says, an important and timely book. Of course it is. The more interesting point is that it's actually rather good, and admirably coherent. Unlike some other recent books on China, which seem to hinge on one idea and uses it as a crow-bar with which to attack all issues relating to China (Will Hutton is definitely guilty in this regard), or one approach to the world (as with Kissinger and yet another book nominally about Realpolitik but which often seems to be more a thinly veiled memoir and extended process in self-on-back-patting), Jacques has an entire arsenal of observations. Indeed, there are so many, that one has to reach beyond military metaphors and say he also has an orchestra of ideas. This is important, because he does not simply rely on economics (central though this is), rather illustrating the importance of philosophy, geography, politics, geopolitics, and history in understanding a nation.
Beyond this, Jacques calls on us of the west (be we colonizer or colonized) to understand just what it means to be western. In understanding China we begin to understand Ireland, Britain, France, America - only from the outside in. It is something of an exercise in ideology critique, then, since Jacques again and again isolates what we take to be givens (democracy as the root of political legitimacy, as one stand-out example), dusts off the cobwebs of accumulated assumptions and lazy thought, and hands back a rather different object to us. He recognizes the rhetorical nature of the title too, pointing out that military or political supremacy after the American or European model is not in the make-up of Chinese civilization, or at least not beyond what China considers to be its rightful territory (thus what is to outsiders the curiously -at times almost unintelligibly - fraught relationships with Tibet and Taiwan). Yes, certainly a timely and important book. ( )

Book. RLS library gives away lots of books for political education. This book is missing a description. Write a description of about 150 words and you can take it or a random book home. OR, you can exchange 2 books for 3 random books of ours. All books can be borrowed at our office. ( )

This review originally appeared on Goodreads (hence the reference to large numbers of other positive reviews):

Thoroughly bemused by the number of positive reviews this book has received - I found it over-long, repetitive, turgid in its treatment of statistics and questionable in its central assumption that the West is doomed to decline and China is destined to soar off into the stratosphere where it will dominate the new world order in a largely benign manner. I am not the only reader who seems to have felt that way, but I would have to admit that we do seem to be in the minority - so maybe I am missing something.

It was not that there was nothing to like about this book - it is commendably ambitious, taking a very long period of history in its scope, and it makes the valuable point that the last few hundred years have been an historical anomaly so far as China is concerned (because for much of recent human history it has been one of the most advanced civilisations on the planet).

But I can't help questioning Jacques' central assumption, which is that China is on some unstoppable upward trajectory which will make it the dominant world power. In particular, the very fact that China fell behind as a civilisation for the last couple of hundred years rather undermines his hypothesis because it shows that successful, advanced civilisations can falter and enter a period of stagnation and/or decline. And you only have to look a bit further East to Japan to find an example of a country where, for years, everyone used to say that it was in the ascendancy (at least in economic terms) and Japanese firms were destined to out-compete US and Western European firms, but Japan has faltered of late.

He also writes off the US as a world power and I'm sure he's right that the influence of the US will decline if China becomes more powerful - but the US has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to bounce back after major setbacks. It may well be that competition from China will be good for the US, forcing it to be more creative in its diplomacy and rely less on its military supremacy - but Jacques doesn't seem to want to give that possibility any houseroom.

As for the economy, Jacques seems to be aiming to bludgeon the reader into unconsciousness with statistics about how fast the Chinese economy is growing. But where precisely is it heading? What we haven't seen coming out of China is clear evidence that it can compete with the US in terms of innovation - so far, Chinese firms have proved themselves better at copying than innovating. Again, this doesn't really figure in Jacques' analysis - he just looks at recent statistics and assumes that China will carry on growing at much the same astonishingly fast rate.

The Chinese were certainly a highly innovative civilisation in the past, so there is no reason in principle why China could not regain that status in future - but I just don't think any of this is as cut and dried as Jacques seems to think. In particular, China's current political system is not likely to be one that will foster individualism and the innovation that often goes with it - so if the Chinese government wants to take its economic growth to the next stage, it may have to contemplate some reforms that are not to its liking politically.

No doubt Jacques would say that in making this point, I am guilty of the arrogant Western assumption that democracy goes hand in hand with a market economy (so China is bound to gravitate towards a Western-style form of governance eventually). And if I were saying that things are definitely going to turn out that way, he would be absolutely right to criticise me for it. But I'm not - all I'm saying is that it's one of many possible ways that things could develop in China. This would have been a far more interesting book if Jacques had been more willing to question more of his own assumptions, including his central hypothesis that China will inevitably become the dominant world power.

I found "China in the 21st Century" by Jeffrey Wasserstrom to be a much better read - in some respects it's almost the polar opposite of Jacques' book in that it offers a far more balanced and insightful analysis, being careful to give airtime to competing viewpoints. Mercifully, it somehow also manages to be much, much shorter (3 cheers for brevity and concision!): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9147306-china-in-the-21st-century

And if you want an antidote to Jacques' questionable assumptions about China, try this one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16104795-china-goes-global ( )