Many people believe that China will become the largest and most powerful economy in the world by 2050. Martin Jacques, a creative British Marxist, has just written a book When China Rules the World, in which he says that Middle Earth, as China regards itself, will dominate the world. China will dominate, he writes, because it has always been a single state—centuries before nation states came into existence in Europe. He also regards the overwhelming domination of Han Chinese (92 per cent of the population) as the reason why the communist state still commands loyalty—the Han see the People’s Republic as continuous with the millennia old state. China, believes Jacques, will not become a Western type liberal democracy. It will chart its own path.

When I debated this issue with Jacques on July 3, I demurred, adding two caveats. One was not to project the present into the future uncritically and to point out that strong as the Chinese state was, it could not deal with peaceful protest of students in June 1989 and had to bring out tanks. No stable and confident polity needs to do that.

Now we have in Urumqi, the living proof of the fragility of the Chinese state. What happened between the local Uighur people and the immigrant Chinese was a communal riot such as India is well-used to. The Uighur had heard that some of their fellow ethnics had been victimised in Guangdong province and retaliated against the Han Chinese who had migrated to Xinjiang province. The similarity of this episode with Raj Thackeray’s fulminations against North Indian and their response to Marathi speakers in Bihar is uncanny.

... contd.