Howard French: In Case You Missed Them: Books by Martin Jacques and Yasheng Huang

On China Beat, Howard French writes about two new books about China from Huang Yasheng and Martin Jacques:

It’s an open secret that many in the publishing industry see book subtitles as vehicles for shameless hype, pushing their claims to the limit in order to juice reader interest. During the week of Obama’s East Asian sojourn, though, the subtitle of Martin Jacques’ new offering, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New World Order, may have suddenly seemed like it wasn’t such a stretch. At the very least, the appearance of a book like this from a major publisher like Penguin Press is a telling measure of a profound and ongoing shift in perceptions about the staying power of American — and, more broadly, Western — might and vigor, in the face of the challenge of a fast-rising China.

On this subject, a recent Pew survey highlighted the gap between perception and reality, showing that 44% of the American public already believes that China is the world’s leading economic power. Just 27% named the United States.

This, then, surely is a great time for a book to take a hard look at the relative decline of American power along with the stirring rise of China, followed by a host of other emerging global actors, and come to some informed and well-reasoned conclusions. Most see this story as fundamentally based in economic history, but on this subject, and indeed on economics in general, Jacques has little of interest to say.

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