Conclusions

Abstract

Writing about shades of grey is simply not as enticing as stark black or white predictions of impending chaos or more often impending power. Getting the message over to policy makers and into the collective popular conscience encourages rather exaggerated positions. But when it comes to writing about China the tendency to exaggerate is perhaps even stronger than usual. The world has been waiting and fearing China’s rise since at least the eighteenth century and at last there seems to be evidence that it is happening. Add the speed of China’s transition from virtual isolation to key player in the global political economy to the size of the Chinese population, multiply by vague concerns about ‘communism’ (and/or the impenetrable nature of Confucianism), and the result is a vision of a disciplined workforce mobilised behind an organised national effort to return China to a self perceived ‘rightful’ place of global dominance. Here is a new power that is ‘different’ – it doesn’t share ‘our’ values and doesn’t do things the way that ‘we’ do, with long held grievances about its past treatment and unresolved territorial claims that threaten regional and perhaps even global security. At the other extreme, once a specific understanding becomes dominant, the best way of challenging that understanding is by providing an equally stark alternative – impending collapse for example.