Beijing: 22 December 2020: For over two hundred years we have lived in a Western-made world, one where the very notion of being modern was synonymous with being Western.

The twenty-first century will be different: with the rise of increasingly powerful non-Western countries, the West will no longer be dominant and there will many ways of being modern. In this new era of 'contested modernity' the central player will be China.

Far from becoming a Western-style society, China will remain highly distinctive. Continental in size and mentality, and accounting for one-fifth of humanity, China is a 'Civilization-state' whose characteristics, attitudes and values long predate its existence as a nation state. China is already having a profound and much discussed economic impact, but its influence will be far greater than this: China's rise signals the end of the global dominance of the Western nation-state and the rise of a world which it will shape in a host of different ways.

As it rapidly re-assumes its traditional position at the center of East Asia, the old tributary system will resurface in a modern form, contemporary ideas of racial hierarchy will be redrawn and China's ages-old sense of superiority will reassert itself. China's rise will change the world as we know it from one made in the West to increasingly shaped by China. ~ Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World, The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World is imminent.