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Friday, December 2, 2022

Ferguson’s Conception of the West’s Challenger

Grinning Nixon meets Dour Mao

(21 Feb 1972)

“What we are living through now is the end of 500 years of Western predominance. This time the Eastern challenger is for real, both economically and geopolitically. It is too early for the Chinese to proclaim “We are the masters now.” But they are clearly no longer the apprentices.” ~ Niall Ferguson in his book Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011) 

Ferguson is the arch-conservative propagator of the idea that the West is the best. According to his myopic worldview, the West is always pitted against the rest. He sees the end of the West’s global hegemony as a great cataclysm for all of mankind. 

His argument that China has graduated from being the West’s apprentice to a challenger is wrong. The West and China are conjoined twins—they share the same economic and ideological heart. China is a creature of Western ideology (a mix of communism and capitalism) and its economy is closely linked to the economies of the Western powers. If one falls, the second will be doomed. 

In the twenty-first century, the West and China are like two Titanic ships which have crashed into the same iceberg of reality. They are going down together.

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