Systematic Relative Strength

An absolutely mind-blowing review by Joseph Kahn of Martin Jacques’ new book, When China Rules the World, can be found here. Kudos to Mr. Kahn for such a fascinating summary of the book.

Jacques has an interesting perspective. In the developed West, we tend to have Western-centric thinking. Jacques suggests that we look at things differently.

China was the wealthiest, most unified and most technologically advanced civilization until well into the 18th century, Jacques points out. It lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe. Scholars once viewed China as having crippling social, cultural and political defects that underscored the superiority of the West. But given the speed and strength of China’s recent growth, those defects have begun to look more like anomalies. It is the West’s run of dominance, not China’s period of malaise, that could end up being the fluke, Jacques writes.

If we expect the status quo to be largely unchanged, we could be quite disappointed or even shocked, according to the author:

…Jacques argues that the country’s cultural core resembles ancient China far more than it does modern Europe or the United States. It is accumulating wealth much faster than it is absorbing foreign ideas. The result, he says, is that China is nearly certain to become a major power in its own mold, not the “status quo” power accepting of Western norms and institutions that many policy makers in Washington hope and expect it will be.

The boldface is my emphasis. Jacques makes a good point that China is acquiring wealth and influence much more rapidly than it is acquiring Western ideas. Chinese ideals of democracy and political economy are also radically different than in the West.

What will happen in the future? No one knows-but it could quite possibly be something entirely different from what anyone is expecting. Just as very few moderate Westerners can imagine what motivates a jihadist to perform a suicide bombing, so too may we be missing an understanding of Chinese culture. We may think they have the same motivations that we do-and they might-but we could also be completely wrong in that belief. To deal with a much less certain future, investor portfolios of tomorrow are going to need to be globally allocated across all sorts of asset classes. There are no “givens” any longer.