China Daily Global Edition (USA)
LOOKING EAST
British scribe Gideon Rachman writes a new book to tell theWest about the shift in the balance of power, Andrew Moody reports.
people have been going on about it for 20 years. The second acknowledges the trend but says it is all a bit of an exaggeration,” he says.
The author says during the writing of the book his own perspective also changed.
“I started with a relatively crude viewthat there would be some sort of transfer of power to Asia. Although in broad terms that remains true, there were a couple of things that mademequalify that picture a bit.
“Firstly, there is no East in the way that there is aWest. If you talk about theWest, there is a Western alliance called NATO that links the Europeans and the Americans. Asia, on the other hand, is actually very divided.”
One of the questions Rachman addresses in the book is why the West ever became dominant in the first place when China at the height of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) seemed unassailable.
“As the Chinese will always remind you, China was the world’s largest economy and the dominant civilization. If you look at the big-civilization histories, there was a period when it was not at all obvious that Europe was going to be the dominant culture,” he says.
“You had a very flourishing Islamic culture as well as a dominant Chinese empire. It is really only with the European imperial age, which emerges for complicated reasons but largely because of a technological and war-fighting edge as well as the ability to develop markets that got them ahead,” he adds.
Rachman, who recently was awarded this year’s Orwell Prize for journalism, dates the beginning of Western dominance to the end of the 15th century with the arrival of Portuguese explorer Vasco da GamainAsia. But the domination began to drain away after the end of World War I because of the weakening of Europe and the rise of the US.
Rachman was born and brought up in London but his parents were South African of Polish and Lithuanian-Jewish descent.
After studying history at Cambridge, Rachman joined the BBC World Service before going off to freelance in the US. He joined The Economist in 1990, where he had various roles, including spells in Bangkok and Brussels. He moved to FT in 2006, where he now has a roving global brief.
Easternisation is Rachman’s first book after his ZeroSum World was published six years ago. It also partly examined whether in the wake of the financial crisis, the West had become vulnerable to a rising Asia.
It is likely to prove timely with the renewed focus on the South China Sea. US President Barack Obama has already made clear where his country’s foreign policy priorities lie.
“It doesn’t make sense for America to spend 90 percent of its time worrying about the Arab world or even Europe now. The 21st century is clearly going to be in economic and, increasingly, in geopolitical terms about Asia and America,” says the author.
Rachman believes that despite those who argue otherwise, the rise ofChina isnow a permanent geopolitical feature.
“You get these recurring debates in theWest, where you hear people saying, “Well, surely this is not going to go on forever and the whole thing will blow over.” It is clearly not going to be the case. You have only got to look at the development of the West which went through periods of massive turbulence. Just look at the American Civil war and the military defeats of Japan and Germany (after World War II),” he says.
“China has somehow figured out how to do industrial development and achieve rapid economic growth and that doesn’t necessarily disappear.”