Martin Jacques Quotes
The reason why China forecasting has such a poor track record is that Westerners constantly invoke the model and experience of the West to explain China, and it is a false prophet. Until we start trying to understand China on its own terms, rather than as a Western-style nation in the making, we will continue to get it wrong.
Jacques, Martin. When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. Penguin Press, 2009, p. 11.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston. At the time China was one of the poorest nations on earth, with a series of feeble politicians and leaders fighting each other for the ability to rob the people. Their ancient science and virtues had been forgotten and it was thought of by the West and Asians alike as a failed state. However, Russell observed this one characteristic that could be so important when the rest of the world was learning more and more about everything from science to history. The search for wisdom from wherever it may be also gave them an advantage over other cultures who were more chauvinistic about the origin of whatever they did or thought. Less than a century later China was a superpower, economically, artistically intellectually, scientifically and almost militarily. It only lagged democratically.
At the time, the President wanted to get Chiang to fight aggressively against to Japanese when he was taking large amounts of American monetary aid and military equipment but using it to try and exterminate Mao and his Communists who were fighting the Japanese. FDR was clearly trying to flatter Chiang and his wife and gain political points with the China Lobby but it is not known whether or not he really believed this and other statements. Chiang was a vicious, cruel, corrupt military dictator but he had become a “Christian” and always spoke of the importance of democracy of which there was none in China. Our intelligence from China was very bad at the time, with the secret reports of General Stillwell (the senior American military man in China) and that of a few state department China hands were in total contradiction to the Public information that the President was receiving from Henry Luce and his Time Magazine and the large China Lobby, much of which was ironically paid for with the American AID money given to China. So it is not known whether Roosevelt actually believed this and other statements or was just being diplomatic.
Martin Jacques is a British journalist and academic. Jacques was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, becoming, in his own words, "a member of its Executive Committee, probably the youngest member ever at about twenty-two". He was editor of the party's journal, Marxism Today, from 1977 until its closure in 1991.
