Frameworks for the Century

Abstract

This book looks forward. It has to, for ‘China has arrived and will increasingly shape our future, not just its own’ (Jacques 2005b). Her role in hosting the Olympic Games in August 2008 and preceding crackdown in Tibet and earthquakes in Sichuan ensured a global spotlight on Beijing and China, but such scrutiny is only part of a wider scrutiny setting for the century. On the one hand, the world is looking at China. On the other hand, China is looking at the world. Her government seeks to present, project and package herself to the world and to the global media and is keen to create a ‘Brand China’ through ‘the uses of national image on the international stage’ (Ramo 2007: 20). The ‘China effect’ (Hutton 2007: 20), the presence of China in the international system, in which ‘China has suddenly become the all-absorbing topic for those professionally concerned with the future of the planet’ (Skidelsky 2005) rolls on. In many spheres, China has become a leading issue for politicians, economists, environmentalists, generals, admirals and media figures. As the European Union (EU) Trade Commissioner put it, ‘China has arrived. After two centuries at the periphery of world affairs, China has returned to the centre’ (Mandelson 2007a). In the twenty-first century, China looms ever larger: ‘many of the greatest questions thrown up in the course of the century will be answered in Chinese characters’ (Anderson 2008).