Most of the world population lives in Asia, about 60%. For most of history, that means that roughly 60% of the world economy, world output, was produced in Asia, as best as one can tell when historians look back and try to recreate economic estimates. In recent centuries, that changed decisively with the rise of Europe and of the north Atlantic because in the 19th and 20th centuries, of course, the United States rose to become the largest economy in the world. Asia was eclipsed in this. Not only eclipsed, of course, it was dominated by European imperial powers.
If you look around 1820 or so, Asia was still more than half of the world economy, but by 1950, after 150 years of the industrial age, dominated by Europe and the United States, the whole Asian economy had declined to around 20% of world output from what had been roughly 60%. This meant China completely being eclipsed and of course in fact attacked and losing many wars, first to the West in the first and second Opium Wars to chaos during the so-called Taiping Rebellion in the middle of the 19th century to the extraterritorial privileges or rights or dominance of European powers in China at the end of the 19th century and then to Japanese invasion in several episodes, starting with the Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95 and then several Japanese invasions, in fact, in the 20th century and the massive invasions of the 1930s. Civil war in China in the 1940s. And this meant that by the time of the establishment of the Peoples' Republic of China in 1949, China had gone through about 110 years of devastating defeats of what China calls the "century of humiliation." China's share of the world economy was estimated to be maybe 2% of world output and roughly 20% world population as of the 1950s. In other words, China was completely eclipsed from its long historical role in the world for at least a millennium, by the way, from 500 to 1500 AD. Before the beginning of the European ascendancy, China clearly dominated the world across many technologies: gunpowder, steam engine, paper currency, the compass, large scale ocean navigation, and one could go on and on, in fact.
So, the story that we see today, taken from a very, very long-term perspective in history is the return of China to the front ranks of power in the world and economic productivity and technology. In a sense, China has returned to its more traditional role in the world, which one could see for much of the last 2,000 years, in fact. The rise of China, in this sense, should be understood as a rebalancing of what was absolutely unbalanced, and that is a European-dominated world.
Of course, now we're at the end of that phase of history. And one should understand, it's not only the return of China. It's also the rapid development of India, it's the rapid development of southeast Asia, the so-called ASEAN countries, it's the rapid development of parts of west Asia in the Gulf countries, for example. All of this is rather fundamentally ending the Euro-centric view of the world or what in the late 19th century to the early 21st century became the north Atlantic, NATO-centered vision of the world, and by the end of the 20th century became the American-centered vision of the world.
And when you have these temporary imbalances of economy and power... The tendency is to put a bulwark under them in ideological or religious or some other philosophical sense to say, "That imbalance is natural." In the United States, the idea of American exceptionalism is very deep. The idea that, "Yes, of course, America rules the world" is a deep part of the belief system, not a superficial item.
So the rise of China is viewed with alarm, it's viewed with disdain, it's viewed with fear. It's not viewed with equanimity. I don't know any American leaders that say, "Well, of course China's a big power that's had a long history of civilizational greatness so it's natural that China's doing well." What you hear is, "China's the great threat to the world. China's rise must be stopped. We must contain China. We must prepare for war. China cheated and stole its way to economic recovery... It's artificial; China will collapse." In other words, many erroneous, superficial, biased, sometimes blatantly racist views to undergird this sense of superiority in the U.S. that built up over two centuries.
~ Jeffrey Sach, "Jeffrey Sachs: Chinese Statecraft and a New World Order," Glenn Diesen, 1:10 mark, May 2, 2025
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