The Peking Duck offers a review of a new book, China Shakes the World, by James Kynge.  Sounds like a great read – I haven’t seen it yet but will order it.  China Law Blog also recommends it. 

     What struck me, some months ago, when I first saw a reference to this book, was its title, which was used by Jack Belden for his 1949 book, China Shakes the World.  Belden  riffed off the same Napoleonic quote for the title:  "Let China sleep; for when she wakes, she will shake the world."  But the way in which China then shook the world was rather different from its shaking today.

     Belden was one of those present-at-the-creation journalists, like Edgar Snow and Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby, who witnessed the civil war and early years of the People’s Republic.  Their books pushed against the anti-Communism of the McCarthy era and lent a certain legitimacy to socialism in China.  The "Chinese model" then was defined by a communalist, Maoist project that contrasted sharply with the capitalism of The US and Western Europe.  China was supposedly shaking the world with a bold, new vision of human possibility.

     Fast forward sixty years and things look rather different.  Socialism is widely seen as a failure, producing in China the world-historical disasters of the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution.  Almost no one in China now, save a few decrepit apparatchiks, cares about Marxist ideology.  In the rush away from socialism a new traditionalism has been adopted: the revival of Confucianism and Taoism definitively mark the end of the "shake" that socialist China transmitted to the world, as reported by Belden.

     But I wonder what the world will look like sixty years hence.  Perhaps the lesson we should draw from the demise of socialism in China is that the future, the not so distant future, may be very different from what we are experiencing in the present.  If any of us stood up in 1950 and made the prediction that China would be a capitalist power in 2000, we would have been laughed off the stage.  I absolutely agree with the premise of Kynge’s book: China is now a capitalist power, or a power that has found ways to benefit enormously from a capitalist world-economy.  But will that still be the case in 2050?  Maybe.  But, by then, China may be shaking the world anew, in ways we can hardly conceive of now.