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beneficiaries. A state that has never shared power with any other class, group or institution, which has never been subject to popular sovereignty, which operates on a continental scale and which, to this day, is suffused with a Confucian outlook, albeit in a distinctive and modernized Communist form, stands in sharp contrast to the credo that informs Western societies and which has hitherto dominated the global community. While the West has been shaped by the Declaration of American Independence in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, the British Industrial Revolution, the two world wars, the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the collapse of Communism in 1989, for China the great historical monuments are mostly very different: 221 BC and the beginnings of modern China; dynasties such as the Tang, Song, Ming and Qing; the Opium Wars; the 1911 Revolution; Japanese colonization between 1931 and 1945; the 1949 Revolution; and the 1978 reforms. The different historical furniture betrays a different history. China, then, if convergent is also manifestly divergent. While the rise of China since 1978 has been characterized by the predominance of convergent tendencies, well exemplified by China’s current desire to reassure the world that it is a ‘responsible power’, the divergent tendencies will in due course come to predominate as China grows more wealthy, self-confident and powerful. But all this lies well in the future; for the next twenty years or so, as China continues its modernization, it will remain an essentially status-quo power.
    There are two powerful forces that will serve to promote the steady reconfiguration of the world on China’s terms. The fact that China is so huge means that it exercises a gravitational pull on every other nation. The nearest parallel is the United States, but the latter is on a much smaller scale. Size will enable China to set the terms of its relationships with other countries: hitherto that has been limited by China’s level of development, but its gravitational power will grow exponentially in the future. China’s mass will oblige the rest of the world largely to acquiesce in China’s way of doing things. Moreover China’s size, combined with its remorseless transformation, means that time is constantly on its side. It can afford to wait in the knowledge that the passage of time is steadily reconfiguring the world in its favour. Take its relationship with Japan: on the assumption that China’s rapid growth continues, Japan will ultimately be obliged to accept China’s leadership of East Asia. The same can be said, albeit less starkly, of China’s relationship with the United States and Europe. With the rise of China, indeed, time itself takes on a new and different meaning: timescales are, in effect, elongated. We have become used to thinking in terms of the converse: the ever-shortening sense of time. The template for this is provided by the United States, a country with a brief history, a short memory, and a constant predilection for remaking itself. China is the opposite. It is possessed of a 5,000-year history and an extremely long memory, and unsurprisingly conceives of the future in terms of protracted timescales. As a result, it is blessed with the virtue of patience, confident in the belief that history is on its side. If that has been the Chinese mentality since time immemorial, in the twenty-first century it will come to fruition.
    So how will China act as a great power, once it is no longer confined to the straitjacket of modernization? It would be wrong to assume that it will behave like the West; that cannot be discounted, but history suggests something different. While Europe, and subsequently the United States, have been aggressive and expansionist, their tentacles reaching all over the world, China’s expansion has been limited to its continent and although, in the era of globalization, that will change, there is little reason to presume that it will be a West Mark