Seeds of fascination
artin Jacques insists China achieving a moderately prosperous society is the biggest contribution to human rights in modern history.
The author and academic says the achievement, which has delivered 850 million people out of poverty, has changed the world.
“It has enriched so many people’s lives and enfranchised them in a way that they would not have imagined 35 or 40 years ago. It is a colossal contribution to human rights. The world has been transformed by this achievement.” The 74-year-old author of When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, one of the seminal works on China in recent years, says this landmark achievement is not always fully recognized in the West, although those in the developing world are more than aware of its significance.
“Developed countries do not really understand what it’s like to live on the other side of the tracks. Developing countries, where a lot of people are very poor and still have agrarian economies, absolutely do.”
Jacques, who was speaking from his London home, where he has been during the UK’s coronavirus lockdown, insists that China becoming a moderately prosperous society has also fundamentally changed the world.
“The shift of the center of gravity of the global economy is steadily eastward. In 1980 the epicenter of the global economy was off in the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between Europe and the United States. But ever since it has been shifting and is now somewhere around the Persian Gulf moving toward the Indochina border.”
Jacques has had long experience of Asia, living and working in Hong Kong in the 1990s and early 2000s.
He shot to prominence as a leading figure in the debate about China when in 2009 he published which became an international bestseller.
In the book Jacques put up a rigorous defense of China’s government and economic system when others were predicting the country’s collapse. However, the book had its critics and was dismissed by the former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten as “silly”.
Jacques’ main argument was not that China was going to take over the world but that it was going to shape it.
“People were predicting at the time that China was going to be heading for one hell of a crisis. Well they were right about the crisis but it wasn’t going to be China that was going to have it but the West with the collapse of its financial system.”
Jacques, who has held a number of academic positions in China, including visiting professorships at the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and at the China Institute at Fudan UniMarxism versity, has had few doubts that China would emerge to become moderately prosperous or xiaokang, a term of Confucian origin.
He argues the milestone marks China becoming an inclusive society in which poverty is eradicated and the interests of everyone are taken care of.
“Moderately prosperous society has a double meaning really. Firstly, that there is no one or virtually no one living in extreme poverty. And, secondly, you have reached a point where a country can afford to provide public goods which it could not afford to do before in terms of education, health service, transport, infrastructure, including all of these in rural areas also.”
Jacques said this has been an evolution but China is now at a point where it has the luxury of making choices.
“China has now got air to breath in a new kind of way. They can be more expansive. They can think about how they want to do things; they’ve got choices. China has arrived at that point where the whole life of society is becoming more enjoyable, more stimulating, more rewarding and there are more opportunities for all age groups. It is arriving at a much more comfortable place.”
China’s success has been achieved by having a strong government at the center driving reform throughout a period of unprecedented fast development, he says.
He doubts that the country would have become a moderately prosperous society if everything had been left to the market and private sector.
“The Chinese development model is the very antithesis of the Washington Consensus model, where you leave everything to the private sector. It is built on a state which can define the public interest, define the interest of the country, and then pursue it. It’s not just a cacophony of private interests and private voices, all competing with each other.”
One of China’s key strengths has been its ability to think long term and have a really well thought-out strategy, he says.
“It is a government that has been able to think ahead and have real strategic capacity. It is a government that has always been pragmatic or, as Chairman Mao said, one that seeks truth from facts.”
Jacques was born in Coventry in the English West Midlands just after World War II and was brought up by parents who were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He himself became one of the youngest ever executive members of the party when he was 22.
He went on to study at Manchester University, where he took a first in economics and also gained a master’s, later gaining a doctorate from King’s College, Cambridge.
He started his career teaching at Bristol University before switching to journalism in the late 1970s when he became editor of
Today, which became one of the UK’s most prominent political magazines, featuring interviews with politicians across the political spectrum.
Jacques was a friend and mentor of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and describes himself as being in the European Communist tradition of Antonio Gramsci rather than the faction of the party that remained admirers of the former Soviet Union.
He went on to be deputy editor of The Independent, a UK national newspaper, in the mid-1990s.
His interest in China began when he visited Guangdong on holiday in 1993 and saw the huge development taking place there as the country’s reform and opening-up began to take place.
He was intrigued by the idea as to whether this was a new kind of modernity or a replica of Western development, the concept on which his later book was based, he says.
He moved to Hong Kong in the late 1990s with his wife Harinder “Hari” Veriah, a lawyer, who got a job there.
Jacques was devastated by her sudden death at the age of 33 in Hong Kong and has said was inspired by her.
One of the major points of his book is that China’s development should not be seen as purely an economic story, as it is often seen in the West.
He insists that becoming a moderately prosperous society has also been transformative of Chinese people themselves.
“You don’t transform a country like this without the people themselves being transformed. If your living standards are being transformed — in fact, doubling every seven years — your whole life is changing and also at an extraordinary speed. It is a huge social and cultural transformation.”
Jacques said that this transformation has made Chinese people innovative, which can be seen in the dynamism everywhere in society.
“This is one of the points I make in the book, that you have this mass innovation. And I don’t mean by this just the people in the research and development laboratories of Alibaba, Tencent or Huawei, but society at large. China has become increasingly fertile ground for development.”
Jacques is very supportive of President Xi Jinping’s approach to tackling poverty.
Xi has made poverty eradication a personal mission since he was Party chief of Ningde, in Fujian province more than 30 years ago.
He has set out in his book
and in other writings and speeches four important principles: avoiding a poverty mentality (if you believe you are poor, you will be); adopting development measures suitable to local conditions; strong leadership and coordination; and not wasting money on grandiose projects just because they may be popular.
“These are very relevant ideas,” Jacques says. “It sums up the practical approach that has been followed. The Chinese have had a very intimate knowledge and grasp of what the problem of poverty is, and how to tackle it, and so they’ve gone about it in a very specific applied, incremental, pragmatic way.”
It is difficult for China to be a blueprint for development for other countries because the country is so unique, although many in the developing world find it an inspiration, he says.
“One of the things that makes it unique is its sheer size. This has given it huge bargaining power with the West and the advanced world because they have wanted access to its market.
“You get all this nonsense now about the leaking of technology, but the only reason why foreign companies wanted to collaborate with Chinese ones is that they wanted to sell into this huge market.”
Another advantage China has is that it has never been colonized, although it was subject to treaty port arrangements in the 19th century, he says.
“This has given the country a great sense of itself. You have this unbroken civilization going back millennia. Other developing countries don’t have that. Africa was treated appallingly by the European colonizers, as was Latin America. These countries often have an identity crisis as a result, which often holds them back.”
Jacques also believes China’s contribution to human rights is not understood in the West because the concept is always associated with Western liberal democracy and individual rights.
“China is a Confucian society where the family and society at large is more important than any individual. One of the greatest human rights is the right not to be poor and not to go hungry. What China has achieved in pursuing a successful development strategy is a miracle really.”
India gets a lot of credit in the West for being the world’s largest democracy yet its citizens are some of the poorest in the world, he says.
“Poverty is so widespread in India. There are huge prejudices against women and health, and sanitation standards are awful. India is way behind China in human rights in any holistic sense. There really is no comparison.”
However, Jacques believes the overriding reason why China has managed to become a moderately prosperous society is the strength of its governing system and leadership.
“You can see this now in the way that it is overcoming the coronavirus pandemic. China’s leaders have been incredibly pragmatic and have as a result built a great society. They have asked themselves what the problems were and have set themselves goals and put in place policies to overcome them. It is the most remarkable achievement of our times.”