The Writing On The Wall: China And The West In The 21St Century [Paperback]

I wanted to read this book to understand more about the phenomenal rise of China and the effect this might have on the West, the UK and my family. I teach Chinese students, use Chinese products (who doesn't?) and eat Chinese food but I'm encouraged by our media to fear and mistrust China. This book goes part of the way to helping me understand what's going on but it was a hard slog to get to the end because it is so rambling. Having nearly given up half-way through, I'm glad I did not because when Hutton finally gets into his stride he is very good. However, the chapters I enjoyed were not really about China, dealing as they do with the US budget deficit, the polarisation of US politics, the global environmental crisis, the importance of our Enlightenment heritage and the still disastrous effect of the UK class system. All good stuff, but not directly relevant to China. The early chapters on China should be much more clearly written and more focused and I would have welcomed some case studies to illustrate some of the points being made. Chinese history and the Chinese socio-political environment seem to be so far removed from my experience as a westerner that the rather dry history lesson presented by Will Hutton is not helpful. As a non-economist I still feel bamboozled by some of the arguments in the book about the interlocking effects of the values of the renminbi vs. the dollar and euro, the levels of western debt and investment in China etc. A few diagrams might have helped here. I hope Hutton is correct when he argues that we need not fear China and that the West needs to find ways to engage constructively to our mutual benefit. Let's hope our politicians are able to show some leadership in this respect.

"China cannot thoroughly be understood from either a Western or a Chinese viewpoint. To grasp its nature requires an orbital, historical view of both the West and China," says Wei Wang, author of the best-selling business title The China Executive.

Indeed, because of the same approach Will Hutton has adopted, The Writing on the Wall is one of the first truly enlightening books on China.

Particularly admiring is the author's "ambition...[to] help tilt the balance towards international collaboration, contribute to a reappraisal of the so-called China threat and a recognition of the situation as an opportunity..." He also rightly warns: "[China] requires our understanding and engagement - not our enmity and suspicion, which could culminate in self-defeatingly creating the very crisis we fear."

Because of China's increasing impact on the world, anybody who cares about global peace and prosperity should read this book. And unlike many other books on China that are meant to terrify you, this book will enlighten you!

The ancient sage and general, Sun Tzu, wrote, in his still-reprinted work The Art Of War that to win without war is the best strategy. China is striving to do just that. Authors long before Will Hutton made the point (see the works of Richard Deacon, particularly The History of the Chinese Secret Service), but in a way limited to less general spheres of activity.

Hutton makes the point that we in the "West" tend to forget that as recently as 30 years ago, in 1980, China had effectively no private sector in its economy, save for a relatively low number of small craftsmen etc. Indeed, ten years or so before that, China was in the grip of political psychosis, in which millions were killed by Maoist mobs, the death of the first victim, a 50-y-o school heqdmistress being detailed in this book (covered in boiling water and then clubbed to death by school student agitators using nail-studded planks). I found that detail useful, if only because we in Europe still also tend to think of events like the Cultural Revolution as sweeps of History with a capital "H", not really thinking of the victims as individuals with feelings, families, real living human lives. That is particularly true when many think of China, with its huge population.

I found Hutton's exposition of Chinese history before the 20th Century interesting. Most of it was new to me. Some aspects of modern Chinese history also surprized, not least the fact that Mao did not, in fact, walk the Long March, but was carried on a bamboo litter akin to a sedan chair (the way nobles of ancient China were carried, indeed); also, the fact that Mao had 50 private estates after the establishment of Communist Party power in 1949.

I personally began to realize what China might be following a very domestic or small incident, when shopping in Leather Lane Market, London, for cheap tools with which to build a rocking-horse for a little girl for Christmas. All the cheap tools on sale were from China. That would have been around 1983 (the rocking-horse, of a kind, was eventually finished, though not before my modest London bedsit was turned into a kind of Santa Claus' workshop for a month). I started to realize what might be happening in China from that little shopping excursion.

China has moved on and is now not only producing high-quality goods but moving into the "knowledge economy" in a big way. What price the Blair-Brown-Cameron view of the UK's future now, as a high-tech economy? Even if it were to happen, the UK would still not be ahead.

Hutton talks a lot about the tension between the USA and China in relation to the currency China uses for foreign activities (the renminbi). This book was published in 2007, yet the USA is still agitato about this matter. I was struck by the parallel, I think not made in this book, between that present tension and an earlier similar economic cold war, between Japan and the USA prior to Pearl Harbor.

Hutton makes the point, I think his most important, that not only should China accept Western 18th C Enlightenment values, but that Europe itself (and the USA etc) should not lose them as it stands in danger of doing: cutting out human civil rights and the proper place of the citizen qua citizen from a general space occupied increasingly only by "the markets" and private commercial interests etc, throwing away free or subsidized welfare, pensions, education etc in a manic attempt to "compete" with China and even India. In short, Europe must remain Europe and not lose its collective and/or race-soul. This is a crucial point right now, because the UK particularly is led by a (albeit basically illegitimate and not really elected or mandated) clique obsessed with "markets", debts, interest payments etc, a kind of "pound of flesh" regime.

I have to say that I found Hutton's optimism about China not entirely persuasive, but one can only hope that this decade does not end as did the 1930's, in a huge and dreadful international conflict. For me, the biggest hope for a change of attitude in China toward both human rights and animal welfare is the existence in China itself of a small but possibly growing group of intellectuals and others who are standing up against State repression and for human values. Some may say that they will be unable to stand, bearing in mind that China is far more repressive now than was the Soviet Union in, say, 1980, but who knows?

A must-read for anyone interested in the way the world is going in terms of international relations.