East London, 2055. Civil servant Colin Xiaoping Smith exits the high-speed rail station. The fare is automatically deducted from his WeChat wallet, and his instructor is alerted that he will be late for his training course on modern industrial governance. He hurries in. “Xiaoping, you’re late!” Colin Xiaoping Smith has no Chinese ancestry — picking a Chinese name is de rigueur and makes things easier for ex-pats like his instructor. Nor does he speak Chinese — his knowledge of the language is confined to the pinyin transliterations one sees on every road sign. Pointless for the ex-pats, but a ubiquitous attempt to satisfy a desire to appear modern and sophisticated. His son attends a school funded by a notable Chengdu billionaire and receives an excellent education, if stripped back somewhat to accommodate foreign cultural preferences and backward technology. Colin Xiaoping has his doubts, privately, about some of the more political content — but he is glad his son gets the instruction in ethics and modern science the country sorely needs.
Here in the 2020s, we are starting to realise something is happening, but the challenges China poses lack the immediacy of Russian aggression and the shock of American transactionalism. The enormity of what is coming eludes us. We respond half-heartedly to China issues as they arise, while convincing ourselves that, overall, things are fine. We point knowingly to Chinese “overcapacity” and the vagaries of its housing market. We still assure ourselves that the Chinese are too communist or too Confucian to really innovate. We indulge in selective amnesia about the electric cars, the drone swarms, the AI models, the hypersonic missiles, the fusion reactors. We repeat the mantra that demographic collapse will be the end of them, despite their robots and automated factories, and not of us, despite our unsustainable welfare systems and the failures of mass migration. Though we might despair at our current governments, we can always fall back on the inherent superiority of democracy and the heritage of the Enlightenment, and tell ourselves that all will be well.
We delude ourselves.
This complacency is deadly. At no prior point in modern history have Western nations and their institutions been stretched to breaking point by growing internal crises at the same time as another civilisation has become the world’s driving technological and economic force. We risk finding ourselves on the receiving end of the kind of civilisational crisis the industrial European empires visited on the rest of the world in the 19th century.
Two decades ago, the first “China shock” saw the gutting of industry across the West as its cheap goods rendered American and European manufacturing jobs increasingly unviable. The second has now arrived as the advanced manufacturing and technological superpower outcompetes the US and Europe as the go-to provider to the rest of the world.
We are entirely unprepared for the third China shock. It will arrive when China’s influence, technology and expertise, essential for global development, displace those in the West as the default reference point for human progress.
It will deal a body blow to American confidence, accelerating its turn inwards and straining its alliances to breaking point. But while a diminished US will endure, in Europe the third China shock will be existential. In sector after sector, we are being eclipsed without hope of catching up, and our geography does not afford us long-term security or quasi-self-sufficiency. Where European nations retain a niche lead, for example in semiconductor lithography and certain areas of advanced robotics, time and scale are on China’s side. Meanwhile, where Beijing ruthlessly pursues a vision of its desired place in the world, European governments have long since subordinated “national interest” to universal values and “global” concerns, even treating with suspicion popular expressions of distinctive cultural identity that could be mobilised positively to build national resilience. Competition with China is no longer an option.
No 20th-century analogue exists to this predicament. To understand the challenge, it pays to look beyond the last hundred years to China’s own encounter with Britain and other industrial powers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In 1793, Lord McCartney failed to impress the Qing emperor with Britain’s offer of trade, his own embassy noting the sophistication of the society they were dealing with. Less than half a century later, Britain’s industrialisation had progressed so far so quickly that it effected a devastating defeat on the Qing in the first Opium War.
Despite this, the Qing court remained confident in the superiority of their system. The technological edge possessed by the Western barbarians, while significant, did not yet appear insurmountable. By the second Opium War of the 1860s, this delusion was no longer tenable. Yet the Qing elites held out in their convictions until the end of the century before finally accepting the need for reform. In the intervening decades, they had required Western assistance to put down a rebellion which claimed more casualties than the First World War. They had been defeated, humiliatingly, by a Japan which had understood the need to adapt, and they faced the serious prospect of being carved up into colonies by the European powers. Ultimately, they left things far too late to prevent a Han nationalist revolution which, in 1911, put an end to a millennia-old model of governance and political legitimacy. All the while, they had become more and more dependent on those same predatory foreign powers for technology, infrastructure, and expertise.
This crisis did not occur in a vacuum. Since the late 18th century the Qing empire had experienced a crisis caused by population explosion, growing ethnic tensions and rebellions on the imperial frontiers, and an undercurrent of Han ethnic resentment of the empire’s Manchu rulers. Such an embattled society was entirely unprepared to deal with the industrial powers.
Today, China is resurgent in its confidence as a civilisation reshaping the world
The impact did not prove existential simply because the Qing’s technology was outclassed. It was because the Qing political institutions, already strained and presided over by a ruling class long past its prime, could not compete with the efficiency of industrial nation-states with a much sharper grasp of geopolitical reality. On the deepest level, it was because the basic worldview underpinning millennia of Chinese history, rooted in the fabric of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist thought and the inevitable role of the emperor in perpetuating the centrality and superiority of Chinese civilisation, was thoroughly repudiated. The result was a century of civilisational trauma.
Today, China is resurgent in its confidence as a civilisation reshaping the world, but the consequences of the encounter with the industrial powers are visible everywhere. The country is governed by a Leninist party, has an institutional structure derived from a Western blueprint, and is inhabited by citizens who wear clothes and consume popular culture heavily influenced by the West. Almost two hundred years after the Opium War, China’s success is rooted in the fusion of industrial modernity and its own civilisational traditions that eluded the Qing. China’s growing confidence in its ability to prosper, and to compete with and outdo the West, has encouraged its leaders and its people to reexamine what they once abandoned. At the grassroots this is visible in a revival of Confucianism, resurgent interest in the Chinese classics, and even the trend for traditional Hanfu dress. At the top, the same Communist Party that once denounced China’s past wholesale now embraces a nationalist interpretation of it and pushes its distinctiveness internationally through its Global Civilisation Initiative.
That China is proving better adapted to the 21st century is a notion difficult for Western elites to entertain
Meanwhile, Western elites pointing to the inevitable endurance of democracy, human rights, a liberal rules-based order and free market principles look more and more like Qing courtiers conducting astrological rites as old Peking burns. The third China shock has coincided with a last-ditch attempt by liberal governments to make their vision of universalist individualism a reality, and with the rise of a resurgent Right convinced of Western exceptionalism. Both convictions have a long history in the West, and both are now unsustainable.
That China is proving better adapted to the 21st century is a notion difficult for Western elites to entertain even as the signs become too many to ignore. Consequently, China policy across the West consistently falls short when it does not fail outright. From Britain’s fudge of “compete, cooperate, challenge” to the EU’s interminable quest to define “economic security” to America’s penchant for decades-too-late attempts to rebuild supply chains, the West has proven incapable of taking China’s civilisational challenge seriously.
These shortcomings can be attributed at least in part to the difficulty of abandoning long-held convictions about the superiority of the liberal model. But the problem is not limited to out-of-touch elites. The new Right, already in power in America and awaiting the final failure of liberalism in Europe, draws heavily on narratives of Western cultural exceptionalism as the wellspring of human progress. But while this part of the political spectrum might maintain a greater interest in matters of “culture” and “civilisation”, in practice it has left little room to account for China in these terms. As China builds a new world in which it is the primary reference point for human achievement, it will become much harder to attribute industrialisation, modernity, and science to the unique brilliance of Christianity or the Enlightenment.
Facing this reality requires a wholesale rethink of Western culture and its place in history. A critical mistake the Qing reformers made was to believe first that Britain, while distinctive, would behave like other barbarians had in the past, and second, that Western technology and institutions could be adopted without a need to adapt to the underlying Western thought that shaped them. A world in which China drives the development of new information technologies, from advanced AI to quantum computing to social media innovation, is a world in which those technologies are built on very different assumptions from any that have come before. The more successful, influential, and technologically sophisticated China becomes, the more its own cultural heritage beyond the Communist Party will come to the fore.
Yet across Western politics, China remains a black box. Too different, supposedly requiring decades of study to even begin to understand, and too discomforting to deeply-held convictions if looked at too closely. Governments and pundits fall back on tired and inadequate analogies with the Cold War, the 1930s or — if you’re very lucky — the road to 1914. A view of China as a civilisation more complex than a cut-and-paste caricature of the CCP stapled onto last quarter’s GDP figures is alarmingly rare.
This is entirely insufficient when faced with the realities of China’s growing influence, good and bad. There is much to fear in the West from censorious CCP-backed AI, but might not brain-computer interfaces informed more by Daoist understandings of a connection between mind and body prove marginally less dystopian than alternatives built on consumerist self-actualisation? Might not an ethics of technology in care which recognises Confucian familial obligation prove a better model for ageing societies than a marriage of enshrined individual choice and an unsustainable welfare state? If such questions mean nothing to our leaders, then our prospects for successful adaptation do not look good.
The challenge is beyond anything the West has previously faced. However, the fate that befell the Qing, and the century of misery it ushered in, can be avoided if we grasp the cultural dimensions of what is at stake both in the encounter with China and domestically. We must recognise the need to adapt, but to do so on our own terms. A society stubbornly convinced of the universality of its values and its own exceptionalism cannot do this — its fate is not simply one of geopolitical subjugation, but of civilisational crisis.
In 2055, Colin Xiaoping hopes that his son’s generation can use their education to strengthen Britain without the need for Chinese instructors. Perhaps his grandchildren will see the beginnings of a successful, modern British nation — its system of government reformed and efficient, its scientists and engineers educated here rather than in Beijing or Hangzhou, the chronic undercurrent of violence beyond the Chinese development zones and their security companies kept in check. Maybe even a British defence industry and modern army — something not seen since the Americans left two decades ago. When he really lets his mind wander, Colin Xiaoping imagines his grandchildren walking beneath advertising screens featuring British rather than Chinese celebrities, wearing the suits he recalls from his youth rather than the ubiquitous modern Hanfu, maybe even rediscovering Shakespeare and Dickens as equals of Cao Xueqin and Lao She. His attention returns to his Chinese instructor.
