The Rise of Asia: A Restoration of the Natural Order of the World

The rise of Asia is not something new. It is the restoration of the natural order of the world.

This graph is still flawed in a way that heavily benefits the West, as it rushes all the way to the year 1700 and as such does not display just how incredibly long the period of Chinese and Indian worldwide economic domination truly was.

But it does showcase a few crucial aspects. China was the dominant economic world power for most of recorded human history, until well into the 19th century. The only competitor there ever was, was India, for example under the Mughal rulers. No other nation ever came even close to China and India at their zenith until less than 150 years ago.

The only way the West was able to subdue both Eastern powers, was by excessive amounts of violence. As Samuel Huntington said, the Western “superiority in applying organised violence” was what won them the world in the 19th century.

The Opium Wars were the crucial and pivotal point in recent Chinese history, starting the Century of Humiliation and causing the collapse of China in favour of Europe and, later on, America. While Europeans barely remember this conflict ever happened, as we are conditioned to forget anything bad our society ever did (aside from the Holocaust), for China the Opium Wars were a watershed moment that determines pretty much everything that happened from 1839 onwards: from the theft of Hong Kong and Macau to the Japanese occupation period, to the ongoing secession of the US satellite province of Taiwan.

This is an internal driving force that lies in the back of every Chinese stateman’s mind, from Mao Zedong’s rapid industrialisation program, to Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms to Xi Jinping’s expansion of Chinese defence capacities. This is the “Never Again” that forms a pillar of Chinese national consciousness, which Westerners continuously fail to understand.

India went through an even worse fate. Renowned economist Utsa Patnaik calculated that, under direct British colonial occupation, India was looted of $45 trillion in wealth between 1765 and 1938. Conservative estimates, like the one by the journal World Development, place excess mortality to be 50 million casualties caused directly by British colonial policy between 1891 and 1920 alone. A period of just 40 years. Damage of apocalyptic proportions, that India still has not fully recovered from even to this day.

In both cases, Britain was the main culprit and driving force behind the destruction of both India and China. And even then, as the statistics show, the British Empire never got anywhere near the economic prowess that either of the two Asian realms possessed at their height. Britannia may claim to have ruled the waves, but it sure never managed to rule the historic scoreboards.

Only the United States ever managed to be a challenger, and temporary victor, in the competition with China for the title of economic hegemon. But that time has already passed, and China is once again on top. As human history has shown us it should be.