The decline and fall of the West

In the West, history is framed as the Western powers having always been dominant. The West perceives itself as having "discovered" a world, but never, of course, viewing itself as lost.

Seeing itself as always having been dominant and the locus of power and civilization, the West understands itself as needing to use that dominance to usher in Western civilization to the wider world.

In reality, Western dominance at best stretches back to the advent of the "great European discoveries" and creation of overseas colonies. Those colonies, subsequently drained of their wealth — often by use of slave labor — existed for the benefit of the metropole. 

Missing from the comforting Western narrative is that China also had ships that traversed much of the globe, some 100 years before those of the Western explorers. Those ships, under the great admiral Zheng He in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), sailed as far as Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. However, their goal was not conquest and exploitation, but rather trade and diplomacy. 

The Western narrative makes it nearly impossible for most people there to appreciate just how dominant the East, historically speaking, has been in the global economy. 

As a product of Western education, I remember well the shock on first seeing a graph estimating world wealth between the year zero and the present. It showed China and India, far outstripping Europe, as the dominant powers until around 1650.

Then came the Europeans, led first by Portuguese sailing ships, which were later replaced by the ships of greater powers, particularly England. So voracious was the appetite of the latter that they reduced both of the former great powers of the time, China and India, to pauper status. For China, "the century of humiliation" began at the hands of Britain, acting as the globe's first international drug lords, in the Opium Wars.

But now, to borrow a line from a 1960s protest song by Bob Dylan, "the times they are a-changin." 

Leadership in the West moved long ago from Britain to the US, with the latter's primacy seemingly unassailable even into this century. With the US-led triumph over the Soviet Union, it was asserted by American writer and political theorist Francis Fukuyama, voicing what many assumed, that the world had arrived at "the end of history". How quickly, however, has such assertion proven to be grossly presumptuous.

Many will point to Trump as reason for US collapse, but that is to mistake symptom for cause. The US has been in decline from not long after its rise. Triumphant in World War II, it asserted power over both theaters of that war, Europe and Asia. Subsequent overreach, first evident in Asia, and now being repeated in Europe, where following the fall of the Soviet Union, the US pushed its power ever eastward, which has contributed to the current Russo-Ukraine conflict. 

In its over-assertion lay US decline.

Where once it dominated the global economy through postwar structures such as the World Bank, IMF, GATT (now the WTO), and the G7, it now faces a range of alternative economic and cooperation frameworks, such as BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as the Belt and Road Initiative, which involves more than 150 nations and emphasizes development and connectivity rather than bloc confrontation. 

One need also add the loss of the moral ascendancy of the West, something which began to crumble in Vietnam, further shaken through wars in the Middle East, and finally swept away in Gaza. 

Things are not about to return to what so many in the West still feel is the established order. China's economy, still growing around 5 percent per year, will double in just 14 years. From a significantly lower base, India is now growing 6-7 percent per year. Meanwhile, US growth is around 2 percent per year. Doubling will take 35 years, by which stage China and India will have more than quadrupled. 

The performance of the Western metropole prior to the US and Western Europe was anaemic, some nations even going backwards, most struggling to reach 1 percent growth.

The global order is undergoing momentous and rapid change. It may indeed be surmised, the sun is indeed rising in the East, fast setting in the West.

The author is a social commentator and historian based in Newcastle, Australia. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.