Martin JacquesReseñas

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 China está de volta! Não convém negar esta realidade. Esse país imenso, rico de história, de cultura e de invenções, prepara-se para retomar o seu lugar na história e no mundo.
Os EUA, potência industrial que surgiu durante a II Guerra Mundial, estão a definhar em termos económicos, políticos e militares. Atrás dos EUA seguem o mesmo caminho de declínio todos os países ocidentais.
Estas são as duas tendências que se observam após a crise financeira de 2008. Atenção, tendências! O futuro ainda não está decidido. É que ambas as tendências têm um denominador comum: o neo-liberalismo americano e ocidental. Foi o neo-liberalismo que ao deslocalizar a indústria para a China, transferiu a médio prazo a riqueza, crescimento, emprego, etc. para aquele país, em troca de lucros imediatos para alguns empresários.
Se o Ocidente se reformar, acabar com o neo-liberalismo, mudar as regras do comércio internacional, salvar-se-á do descalabro e a China não crescerá tão depressa. Porém, para isso, seria necessário estratégia e visão de futuro e não a negação do desastre anunciado, tal como o autor observa no final da obra.
Seja como for, ainda muita coisa irá acontecer. O autor não considerou a Rússia, como se este jogo se jogasse a dois. Pelo menos a Rússia é uma peça importante neste jogo. A Índia também terá uma palavra a dizer, até porque é o principal aliado da Rússia.
Nada é ainda definitivo. Mas no Ocidente convém começar a pensar em reformas para evitar conflitos e, talvez, a III Guerra Mundial.

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

This is an intentionally opinionated history of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Burns brings his considerable historical knowledge and literary skill to bear on what has sometimes been the most respected institution in American government, and at other times derided as partisan and backward-looking. As he traces its development from the words in the Constitution and the brilliant, energetic, ambitious, and forward-thinking John Marshall, through to today's Roberts Court, it becomes clear that Burns considers the latter view to be correct for most of the Court's history.

Certain bad Court decisions, such as Dred Scott, are well known, and I have a strong interest in American history. Despite that, I found much of the surprisingly sordid history of Court decisions turning the meaning even of the 14th and 15th Amendments on their heads, inventing a distinction between state and national citizenship, and applying "due process" and other procedural and substantive rights almost entirely to property and the regulation of economic activity, and reducing civil rights of individuals to almost nothing, to be a revelation.

The interplay between politics and the Court, and the persistent conservatism of the Court over decades and generations, even in the face of true national crises like the Great Depression, is disturbing and disheartening. When he reaches the Warren Court, Burns is in some respects downright gleeful, but also aware that it is the flip side of the intransigent Court that opposed Franklin Roosevelt's efforts to create legislation and take action that would alleviate and reverse the Great Depression. In both eras, the personalities and political views of the Justices, rather than the myth of dispassionate, high-minded jurisprudence,

As we proceed forward from the Warren Court to the current Roberts Court, once again a conservative Court with an easy willingness to strike down as "unconstitutional" progressive legislation, Burns begins to lay out the polemical purpose of this book. He argues that the power of the Court to strike down legislation and to be the final arbiter of Constitutionality in all things, is unfounded in the Constitution or any supporting evidence of the intentions of the Founders, and that it has done more harm than good, threatening the foundations of democracy. His proposed solutions will sound radical to many, and certainly don't entirely agree with him myself. Nevertheless, even as a polemicist, Burns remains calm, rational, clear, and thoughtful, and this is an argument well worth reading and considering.

Recommended.

I borrowed this book from the library.

China will replace the United States as the world's dominant power. In so doing, it will not become more western but the world will become more Chinese.

Jacques argues that we cannot understand China in western terms but only through its own history and culture. To this end, he introduces a powerful set of ideas including China as a civilization-state, the tributary system, the Chinese idea of race, a very different concept of the state, and the principle of contested modernity.

First published in 2009 to widespread critical acclaim - and controversy - 'When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of a New Global Order' has sold a quarter of a million copies, been translated into eleven languages, nominated for two major literary awards, and has been the subject of an immensely popular TED talk. In the three years since the first edition was published, the book has transformed the debate about China worldwide and proved remarkably prescient.In this greatly expanded and fully updated paperback edition, with nearly three-hundred pages of new material backed up by the latest statistical data, Martin Jacques renews his assault on conventional thinking about China's ascendancy, showing how its impact will be as much political and cultural as economic, thereby transforming the world as we know it.

Martin Jacques is one of Britain's foremost public intellectuals. A Visiting Senior Research Fellow at IDEAS, the London School of Economics' centre for diplomacy and grand strategy, a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a Fellow of the Transatlantic Academy, Washington DC, Martin Jacques is widely respected as a leading global expert on what could prove to be the most important geopolitical event of the past 200 years: the rise of China. He was editor of Marxism Today from 1977 until the journal's closure in 1991, and has also worked as deputy editor of The Independent. He has been a columnist for the Times, the Guardian, the Observer, and the New Statesman, as well as writing for international publications such as the Financial Times, Economist, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Daily Beast, Volkskrant, Corriere della Sera, L'Unita, South China Morning Post, and Folha Des Paulo.

A very interesting premise. The book is divided into two parts, of varying quality - about the fall of the western world, and the rise of the Chinese. Covers both topics from a historical, economic, and political perspective.

Some of the conclusion are very interesting (e.g. China will modernize in its own way with a relatively authoritarian government, and not necessarily follow the Western method of industrialization which also involves greater social liberties), but some of the chapters and assumptions are so repetitive and unnecessary as to be useless. Chinese people enjoy Chinese food? Well, do go on.

In summary, the book has some interesting ideas, but they are mired in repetitions and some incredibly obvious remarks. I suggest one read it, but with a critical eye.

Well-presented but somewhat dated by 2010.

When China Rules The World 的副題已經將本書的主旨點明，隨著中國崛起，由西方文明所代表的世界觀將會全面改寫，全球進入新秩序。 作者指出，一個佔全球人口五份之一的國度的崛起，將根本改變人們對何謂現代化的觀念。現代化不再等同於西化。中國，以獨特的歷史觀，必然會在主宰全球秩序時，給現代化下新的定義。最簡單不過的例子是在金融海嘯後，西方所代表的自由主義經濟觀受到強烈質疑，「北京共識」之說此起彼落。更重要的是，中國不會走上西方自由民主的道路，而會在中國崛起的背景下，恢復其泱泱大國的心態，在中華文明的軌跡上重拾其光采，主導世界潮流。 對於作者的說法，我想基本上已經不能說是預測，因為無可否認，中國的盛世已經來臨。不過作為一個在香港殖民地方成長的人，我的心裡有兩個問題。第一，就算民主是西方文明的產物，難道民主自由，保障人權等等不具絕對的價值嗎？當我認同這些是絕對價值，我又不禁想到，自己的這些想法，有幾多是因為我在香港成長所引致的呢？我實在不能相信，在我們眼前的中國人，原來不相信民主自由是普世價值。沒有民主，不是因為共產黨，而是因為中國的文化，實在令人難以釋懷。 第二，作者說到儒家價值在中國的根深蒂固。我又不禁想到，南韓同樣受儒家影響，現時已有超過四份一人口成為基督徒。現時基督徒在中國的人數大約佔人口百份之三到四（CIA - The World Factbook 數字），如果基督徒的數目跟南韓相約，到底會對中華文化產生什麼影響？如果有影響，又會不會影響中國怎樣看世界呢？

I couldn't help but notice no one has reviewed this book yet, so I venture on doing so despite only being 1/4 through it. In any case, Jacques has me absolutely captured. I am a student of history and an absolute nut for geopolitical analysis. So far, this has offered both while at the same time incorporating cultural appreciation and an analysis of the global landscape that just makes sense to me. It is definitely worth a read.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you are worried about current trends in politics, this will calm you. We’ve been there before. The battle between the Court, Executive, and Legislature began with Marshall’s court; unenumerated rights and processes were at the forefront of debates constantly in the early 19th century, the decisions in Marbury (judicial review) and McCullough (national bank) plus numerous others also illustrate the battle over national v. state rights; extreme partisanship; the division of the country by sectional and class interests, east v. west, industrial and financial v. agricultural and rural; and not the least, the Electoral College and election of the President with the election of 1800, and 1824 (John Quincy Adams defeated Andrew Jackson in 1824 by garnering more electoral votes through the House of Representatives, even though Jackson originally received more popular and electoral votes.) And so it goes, with only the personalities changing. The issues have never been resolved.

The book’s title is perhaps misleading. When we think of "packing the court" FDR's attempt to add justices to the court immediately springs to mind, yet ever since Marshall's Marbury decision that shifted an enormous amount of power to the court with judicial review, presidents have used political cronyism to add their political adherents to the court. Some one term presidents, like Trump, have been very fortunate to be able to change the balance of the court in their favor by adding a large number of justices that favor their political view. Until Trump, Ronald Reagan had appointed the most justices. William Harrison, Andrew Johnson, Zachary Taylor and Jimmy Carter, all had none. Washington (obviously) and FDR each had eight, so FDR got to pack the court anyway, given his many terms in office.

I won't go on about the validity of Marshall's decision even though one would think that "originalists" would be appalled by judicial review as it was certainly unenumerated, but it does make one stop and pause to realize that unelected judges can have an enormous influence on the direction of the country for many years, an influence even contrary to those in elected office.
I was surprised to learn that following the failure of the Jefferson administration to impeach Pickering and Chase in their effort to get rid of Federalist judges, Marshall was so terrified of the prospect of impeachment that he wrote a friend proposing to mollify the Republicans by giving Congress in concert with the president the right to overturn decisions of the Supreme Court.

The whole idea of judicial review has been in or out of favor depending on whether the Court’s decisions favor your particular political position. The Warren Court was lambasted by conservatives for its unabashed use of judicial review to promote many policies conservatives argued were not in the Constitution, totally ignoring the 9th amendment and the actions of the preceding conservative courts. “Since the 1790s and especially since the Civil War, conservatives had praised the Founder’s wisdom in supposedly establishing a judiciary empowered to block rampant majorities and cheered when the Supreme Court used that authority to defend the rich and powerful. Now that the [Warren] court was, for the first time in its long history, consistently using that power to expand liberty and equality, conservatives angrily pointed out that judicial review had no basis in the Constitution.” Much of the criticism came from within the court itself, e.g. Byron White, a Kennedy appointee, who charged that the liberal majority was exploiting the power of judicial review to invent “new law and new public policy.” He neglected to mention that’s what the conservative courts had been doing for more than a century.

LBJ’s attempt to pack the court completely backfired. He persuaded (term used loosely) Arthur Goldberg to leave the court to become UN ambassador when he learned that Warren had decided to retire early because he feared a Nixon victory in the election. Johnson then tried to elevate Abe Fortas to the position of Chief Justice, but the southern Democrats’ conservative antipathy to the Warren Court’s civil rights meant he was facing a hostile Senate. That he and Johnson had been close friends, even speaking almost daily on the phone, his confirmation became impossible. See the excellent Battle For The Marble Palace: Abe Fortas, Lyndon Johnson, Earl Warren, Richard Nixon and the Forging of the Modern Supreme Court by Michael Bobelian for the sordid details.

The pendulum (see The Cycles of Constitutional Time by Jack M. Balkin) for more on the conservative/liberal cycles and how it’s affected by politicization) began to swing in the other direction and Trump’s successful packing of the court may be the harbinger of the end of the current cycle, we’ll see.