Martin Jacques's When China Rules The World

1636 Words7 Pages

Far from the turbulent European continent, Chinese agrarian society was uninterrupted until westerners opened China’s gate by military force. The pride of Chinese people for their five thousand years’ glorious civilization collapsed. After the fall of Qing dynasty, although there were many brutal struggles, China successfully transformed from a weak agrarian country humiliated by western countries and Japan for one hundred and fifty years to a rising global power emerging at the beginning of new millennium by reforming and opening up to global market. However, during this process of rapid industrialization and modernization, freedom as an exotic term generated from western ideology centering on individualism and self-determination challenged Chinese people with their …show more content…

First of all, different from the Western definition of justice, justice in Chinese is the obedience of the ordinary people to the ruler whose quality reflects good morality in a hierarchic structure of society represented by Confucian idea of the mandate of heaven. Chinese Community Party regards the unity of China and rapid economic growth in “reform and open” era as its legitimacy to dictate China and Chinese people. Martin Jacques in his book, When China Rules the World, argues that, “the Chinese attach greater importance to unity than literally anything else.” (Jacques, 82) It is significant in the analysis of CCP’s legitimacy because Chinese people value the unity of their country more important than other issues, which is one of the greatest achievement of CCP after the defeat of the KMT in 1949. Since then, CCP has established its legitimacy of ruling even though there are some catastrophic failures in their ruling such as the Great Leap Forward and Culture revolution, which almost took away its legitimacy. Evidences from Callick’s Party Forever also prove that CCP attempts to reinforce its