Era of Contested Modernity

In a new book on China by the British writer Martin Jacques (which I've not read), reviewed in the New York Review of Books (unfortunately behind the wall), we find this insight into China, and how different it is from the US:

The British journalist Martin Jacques and the American political analyst Christopher Ford both seek to explain how China will behave on the world stage by exploring China’s intellectual traditions. Jacques argues that culture is the key. It is of utmost importance, he says, that we understand that China is not a “nation-state” in the usual Western understanding of the term, but rather a “civilization-state” founded on the Confucian legacy of “emphasis on moral virtue, on the supreme importance of government in human affairs, and on the overriding priority of stability and unity….” This is a worldview that emphasizes respect for hierarchical relationships; it privileges the collective over the individual, and regards opposition to the state not only as dangerous to the established social order but as downright immoral to boot.

Jacques believes that these fundamentally non-Western values, coupled with long-held Han Chinese beliefs in their own innate cultural and racial superiority, challenge Western assumptions about the primacy of individual rights and the principles of institutionalized conflict that lie at the heart of democratic systems. And this, in turn, means that we are now embarking on an era of “contested modernity,” one in which Western nations no longer impose their own values on the world at large.

The reviewer (Christian Caryl) isn't so sure, however, that the change going on in China will stay within the banks of the past traditions:

The dynamism and volatility of the society depicted by Hessler, one might conclude, do not have a great deal in common with the grand, “classical” ideological systems presented by more high-altitude observers like Jacques and Ford. China may not be on a road to Jeffersonian democracy, but the Party has a great deal of adapting ahead of it if it intends to maintain control. China is changing the world, but it is changing itself even more, and we should expect plenty of surprises along the way.

As for the US and its relationship to China, it has been suggested by some who think that Obama was (and is) fundamentally influenced by Zbig Brezinski and his view of foreign relations (from his days at Columbia University), that the reason we are still in Afghanistan has very little to do with either Al Quaeda or the Taliban.  Rather, our occupation there is more clearly an attempt to have a primary military presence near the borders of China in Central Asia. I think that that theory has some merit, especially when you consider that the US government is rarely candid about its reasons for doing much of anything (e.g., the invasion of Iraq).