Hugh Peyman – författare

A Clash of Civilisations is not inevitable, yet danger mounts the longer the West ignores its top forecaster. In 2023, the OECD sees China's economy as 27% bigger than the US: by mid-century 70%. India too will be larger, leaving America as No.3. Time to Get Real: listen to economists, especially development economists, and those in business who know China.Three giant shocks lurk right ahead for the West: economic, demographic and competence. 90% of the world's population will soon be non-Western: no more accepting exclusion from global decision making. After COVID, Afghanistan and domestic turmoil, many question Western competence to get things right, let alone avoid nuclear destruction.Economic size, not military might, is what counts among Great Powers. As leading military historian Paul Kennedy wrote, military strength is, "inextricably intertwined with economic power and technological progress". This need not threaten the West if understood and managed properly. Indeed, it would mitigate the real existential threats, from the environment to war. Otherwise nuclear conflict, Kissinger's "Armageddon-like clash", is ever more likely.A New New World with growing muscle and some different ideas is emerging. How can the West best respond? The book proposes a Biden-Xi Grand Bargain, as Nixon struck with Mao. Grasp what Yin and Yang offer, as opposites can support each other for lasting mutual benefit.

A Clash of Civilisations is not inevitable, yet danger mounts the longer the West ignores its top forecaster. In 2023, the OECD sees China's economy as 27% bigger than the US: by mid-century 70%. India too will be larger, leaving America as No.3. Time to Get Real: listen to economists, especially development economists, and those in business who know China.Three giant shocks lurk right ahead for the West: economic, demographic and competence. 90% of the world's population will soon be non-Western: no more accepting exclusion from global decision making. After COVID, Afghanistan and domestic turmoil, many question Western competence to get things right, let alone avoid nuclear destruction.Economic size, not military might, is what counts among Great Powers. As leading military historian Paul Kennedy wrote, military strength is, "inextricably intertwined with economic power and technological progress". This need not threaten the West if understood and managed properly. Indeed, it would mitigate the real existential threats, from the environment to war. Otherwise nuclear conflict, Kissinger's "Armageddon-like clash", is ever more likely.A New New World with growing muscle and some different ideas is emerging. How can the West best respond? The book proposes a Biden-Xi Grand Bargain, as Nixon struck with Mao. Grasp what Yin and Yang offer, as opposites can support each other for lasting mutual benefit.

"Importantly, China's Change: The Greatest Show on Earth provides a welcome contrast to such fashionable pessimism … demolishes a series of popular urban myths … and a very convincing case he makes. This, to my mind, is a wholly original approach to understanding present-day China and the book is well worth reading for this alone. … readers are likely to end up considerably wiser about how the Chinese economy has developed and how it currently works. It's difficult to do justice to the exceptionally wide-ranging scope of the book. It is, furthermore, well-written (as befits a former journalist) and highly readable. … a useful corrective for the innate pessimism which has pervaded so much Western economic and financial commentary in recent years."The Society of Professional Economists (SPE)China's Change injects timely, original ideas into the world's most important, if confused, debate over how to manage the twin challenges of anaemic economic growth and accelerating global disruption. Change is the cry from the US to Europe, Asia to Australasia. The snag is the West has no playbook to help. China however, to regain control of its future, has regularly reinvented itself by understanding change's nature through traditional philosophy.This is not idle conjecture. It is what China has done time and again, including most recently with COVID-19 where it identified clear goals, priorities and means to bring the coronavirus under control.This book argues it is time to "Look at China" but stresses China's approach to managing change only supplies the process not individual policies: the how not the what. Policies have to be created locally. In managing change, traditional thought is China's X-Factor, the key to China's record-breaking economic transformation. To grasp this, China's Change provides an understanding of China's past, present and future through its philosophy, history, economics, business, politics, prospects and impact in a way that no other book has done.Two big global questions are answered. Can other countries, firms and individuals find paths out of their dim twilight by adapting China's change process? Can China continue to create one-third of world growth, more than the US, EU and Japan combined, to help cure the last decade's global economic malaise?China's roadmap for change enables anyone to navigate growing global disruption. Ironically China's process is built on such ignored-in-the-West ideas as long-term thinking, clear priorities, gradualism and non-ideological pragmatism that earlier powered two centuries of Western economic dominance. If the West and rest of Asia learn from China to manage change, the next global surprise could be another turning of the tables. There is no end to history, only more turns of the wheel: for now China's Change is again the Greatest Show on Earth.Related Link(s)