China Brief - Living in Financial Times

 Presented by:   Associate Professor David Martin Jones, Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland

 

The past twenty five years has witnessed the end of the Cold War and culminated in a shift in economic power towards Asia. For many commentators this represents a dramatic, epoch changing, era. The certainties that once prevailed at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 have now dissolved. This change has played out most recently against the ‘drama’ of the ‘Northern financial crisis’ since 2008. Analysts struggle to explain why and what it means for the future. 

 

The intention here is to present three historically informed accounts of the era of volatility which offer competing accounts of East Asian political and economic development.The first thesis assumes global meliorism: the belief that the world can be improved through human endeavor. This progressive, benign, vision holds that despite crises in the international system, human development will ultimately lead to an increasingly integrated and interconnected world. The second thesis, somewhat differently, assumes the inexorable decline of the west coupled with a new East Asian renaissance. It posits that the once dominant debtor nations of the West are in decline and will be surpassed by China and India and ultimately create a New Asian Hemisphere. This thesis is most identified with commentators like Kishore Mahbubani and Fareed Zakaria who envisage a peaceful transition to a new post American   world order. Others think that the process will be more messy and contested. Thus Niall Fergusson fears rapid collapse of US power due to economic and imperial overstretch.  Less prominently advertised is a third thesis that of durable disorder or   unstable peace. It envisages a more messy and confusing set of bipolar and multilateral arrangements dominating the world scene. This presentation will examine these three hypotheses and come to some provisional conclusions about the shape of things to come.

 

David Martin Jones Associate Professor Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland.  He is also Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department, Kings College, London (2011, 2014) and in the Southeast Asian Studies Department, University of Malaya (2007, 2009).  His latest books include ASEAN and East Asian International Relations (with Mike Smith, Elgar 2006); Asian Security and the Rise of China  (with Mike Smith and Nick Khoo Edward Elgar, 2013);  The New Counter Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective  ( edited with Mike Smith and Celeste Ward Gvetner Macmillan 2014); and  Sacred Violence Political Religion in a Secular Age (Macmillan 2014).

 

- Wednesday 19 November 2014

- Level 7, Board Room,  Webb Centre Building, Queensland College of Art, South Bank Campus, Griffith University

-      12:30-2:00pm (A light lunch will be provided)

Numbers are limited and reservations are essential.  To RSVP contact Natasha Vary on (07) 3735 5322 or events-gai@griffith.edu.au by 5.00pm Friday 14 November 2014.