Martin Jacques: Understanding the rise of China
The world is changing with really remarkable speed. If you look at the chart at the top here, you’ll see that in 2025 these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it’s projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. We should bear in mind here these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crises.
世界正在以惊人的速度飞快得改变着。如果你看着这上方的图表,你会看到在2025年，高盛投资公司的这些预测表明中国经济规模会和美国经济几乎相当。如果看2050年的图表，预测表明中国经济规模将会是美国经济的两倍，印度的经济规模将会和美国的经济几乎持平。在这里，我们应该记住这些预测是在西方经济危机之前做出的。
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP (Banque Nationale de Paris) PARIBAS for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2010. That’s just a decade way.
几周前，我查看法国巴黎银行的最近预测，中国在什么时候会超越美国经济，成为第一大经济体。高盛投资公司预测2027年。危机过后的预测是2020年。这也不过只有10年的光景。
China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it's a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10% a year. And within a decade it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country.
中国将在两个基本方面上改变世界。首先，中国是一个幅员广大的发展中国家它有13亿人口，在过去30年间它以每年10%左右的经济增长率发展。在未来10年间，它会有世界上最大的经济体。在世界现代史中，以前从来都是发达国家还没有一个发展中的国家变成了世界上最大的经济体。
Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world which I think is China will become, will be not from the West, and from very very different civilizational roots.
第二，在现代史中第一次在世界上，我认为中国会变成大国，它有别于西方国家而它是从非常，非常不同的文明根源发展起的大国。
Now I know it’s a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also Westernize. This is an illusion. It’s an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition markets and technology. It is not; it is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very different. Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China? How do we try to understand what China is? And the problem we have in the West at the moment by-and-large is that the conventional approach is
that we understand i t really in Western terms, using Western ideas. We can’t. Now I want to offer you 3 building blocks for trying to understand what China is like just as a beginning.
现在我知道西方国家有一个普遍的假设随着国家的现代化，它们也会西方化。这是个幻想。这是对于现代化仅仅是竞争，市场和技术的一种产品的假设。中国的现代化不仅仅是这样的，也是由历史和文化共同作用下形成的。中国不同于西方国家，它也不会变成和西方国家一样。它会在非常基础的方面表现得非常不同。现在这的大问题明显是，我们该怎样认识中国？我们该怎样了解中国？在西方我们现在的问题大体上是传统的方法我们用西方的术语，用西方的观点来了解真正的中国。我们不能这样。现在我想给大家3个基础理由来试着了解中国只是起个头。
The first is this, that China is not really a nation state. Okay, it's called itself a nation state for the last hundred years. But everyone who knows anything about China knows it’s a lot older than this. This was what China looked with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of warring state period—the birth of modern China. And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China. Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2000 years ago, and you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now.
首先是这个，中国事实上不是一个民族国家。在过去的几百年，中国自称是一个民族国家。但对中国很了解的人知道中国比这历史要悠久得多。中国是在公元前221年也就在战国时期的末期从秦朝一统江山起，现代中国就诞生了。你可以看到现代中国的边界线。随之其后的汉朝，还在2000年前。你可以看出中国已经占据我们现在所知的华东地区的大部分，绝大多数的中国人当时在那儿居住现在还生活在那儿。
Now what is extraordinary about this is what gives China it’s sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation state period which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization state. I’m thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like “guanxi”, Confucian values and so on. The se are all things that come from the period of the civilization state.
这点非同寻常的是，它赋予了中国做为中国的意义，也赋予了中国人成为他们中国人的意义，这不是从过去几百年，也不是从民族国家开始形成这种认识，这跟西方发展也不一样，而这一阶段，如果你喜欢，可以说是文明国家的阶段。我想到这儿，举个例子吧，传统习惯例如：对祖先的崇拜，非常有特色的国家概念，诸如此类的，非常有特色的家庭观念，社交关系如关系，儒家价值观等等。所有这些事都来自于文明国家的阶段。
In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization state, rather than as a nation state.
换言之，中国不像世界上的西方国家和多数国家，它由它自身文明所形成，它
