Book review: When China Rules The World

Even as it was still being written, this seminal work - a "tour de force across a host of disciplines" - was already causing a stir, said Mary Dejevsky in the Independent. Martin Jacques' ambition, which he has pulled off with meticulous attention to detail, is "to challenge what he regards as a dangerously false premise: that the rise of China will be benign".

On the contrary, he warns: China is set to be the dominant global superpower and the Western world has "much to fear". Why? Because China is still a unitary and racially homogenous state (a "civilisation" state, not a "nation" state) which will continue to be more different, more insular and more hostile to outsiders than we realise.

In the West, there has long been a comforting consensus that if we "treat China nicely, as potentially 'one of us', Beijing will return the compliment". But as Jacques so clearly shows, that assumption is wrong, said John Gray in the New Statesman. This is "by far the best book on China to have been published in many years" and will prove "indispensable" to anyone wishing to understand contemporary China. But its true importance is in overturning the assumption that China will become more "Western" as it develops. It won't. "The rise of China is the real thing, a world-changing event that marks the end of Western hegemony".

Up to a point, said Will Hutton in the Observer. Jacques' central thesis is interesting enough: that "Western-defined modernity" - the marriage of democracy, Enlightenment values and capitalism - is about to be contested seriously for the first time. But his enthusiasm for the idea leads him to wildly overstate China's economic power. There is simply no prospect of China ruling the world, unless you "breathlessly" pretend that its recent phenomenal growth rates can be extrapolated far into the future.

Similarly, Jacques' oddly old-fashioned obsession with culture, civilisation and unchanging racially-defined "mentalities", leads him to undervalue politics and the potential for change, said Ian Buruma in the Sunday Times. Jacques trots out all the China-is-different cliches: that the country is not ready for democratic institutions because they "have not existed before, or because China is too big, too complex or too Confucian".

But without freedom of speech or a flourishing civil society, China's development will be fatally undermined: the prospects of it "ruling the world" are slim.

When China Rules The World, by Martin Jacques, 592pp (Allen Lane, £30) The Week Bookshop £27 (incl p&p) ·