China, Trump, and the Future of the Global Order

PLEASE NOTE LOCATION CHANGE.  This event has been moved from the East Asia Library to the Philippines Conference Room in Encina Hall.  See above for map link.

Free and open to the public. Please RSVP here by February 22.

When the author published his book, ‘When China Rules the World,' in 2009, he did not suggest that "when" was just around the corner: rather it lay sometime in the future. Now Jacques observes that the process does not lie in the distant future; it has already started. Both the extent of America’s decline and the speed of China’s rise have been seriously underestimated. Indeed, Trump should be seen in no small measure as a response to America’s decline and China’s rise; furthermore, it seems quite possible that he will accelerate the former and perhaps the latter too. America is in the process of losing its sole leadership of the world. And it will never regain it. Since Xi Jinping’s election, China has stepped forward and begun to show a capacity and desire to be a global leader, though this is still in its earliest stages. Trump’s coming assault on China, of course, could change the picture profoundly: it is not clear whether China or the US will be the beneficiary, if either indeed, with both likely to be damaged in the process. We are entering a very new era: the end of American global leadership, a growing trend towards the balkanization and splintering of the international system, the breakdown of the global multilateral trading system, the end of the US-China accord and the fragmentation of the West.

Martin Jacques is the author of the global best-seller When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. It was first published in 2009 and has since been translated into fourteen languages and sold 400,000 copies. The book has been shortlisted for two major literary awards. A second edition of the book, greatly expanded and fully updated, was published in 2012. A new updated and expanded edition of the book was published in China in April 2016. His TED talk on how to understand China has had over two million views. He is a Senior Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and a non-resident Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy, Washington DC.