Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Like many journalists who covered China in 1989, I thought it obvious that China's Communist Party would fall to ashes within a few years, having lost all credibility at Tiananmen Square. Got that wrong. As China's economy took off in the 1990s, I knew for sure that steady growth would force the country to become more democratic. Wrong again. (Open, yes. Democratic, no.) At the very least, I figured, a broad swath of Western economists must be right to agree that China's modernization would require a following of accepted rules of Western finance. To develop, China would have to become more transparent and legally accountable, starting with a freely convertible currency. Right? Not really. As Martin Jacques argues effectively in this book, the West has misjudged China because of a bedrock assumption that modern financial and political systems have to follow some basic principles of openness, rule of law and democracy. That is the paradigm that favored the United States, and paved the way for its world domination, from 1945 onward. But China's remarkable progress is not following the script, and is challenging Western assumptions. With clear and compelling writing, Jacques makes the case that when China is the dominant power, it will make the rules. It may even create a new international paradigm, one that is just as hard for Americans to foresee as it was for the British a century ago to foresee their own decline, and as it was for the Romans, long before that. "The West has, for the most part, become imprisoned within its own assumptions," Jacques writes. "Progress is invariably defined in terms of degrees of Westernization, with the consequence that the West must always occupy the summit of human development." In the past few years, there have been dozens of books about China's rise. Most of them are mindless, over-the-top enthusiastic or else utterly alarmist. This one is an exception, a book that offers true food for thought, and plenty to chew on. It shook me from preconceived notions. Jacques has limitations. His predictions about the future get more flimsy as he gets more specific. He glosses over the evils of Mao's era. But his critique of Western assumptions is pretty trenchant.