Mandarin, anyone?

How are your Chinese  lessons?” We asked our  granddaughter Kristin, 8. “So-so,” replied this International School second grade. “Why?”

“You and Kathie will need Mandarin,” we replied. Katarina, 5, is in kindergarten. Both grapple with Swedish, their mother’s language. Their playmates and nanny speak Cebuano.

“China will irresistibly shape our future,” writes Martin Jacques in Observer. He updates  his 2009 book “When China Rules the World” that foresaw Beijing’s economy overtake the United States after 2020.

That proved an underestimate. Economist  projections assert that China will pull ahead in 2018. International Monetary Fund’s  world economic outlook imply 2016, the Guardian  claims.

Beyond crystal-ball gazing are hard facts. China  dislodged Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy in 2010. Flush with cash, housewives made China’s grocery shopping the world’s largest.

The surge started in 1978. China’s economy   was a 20th that of the US. Not anymore. At  21st century’s start, China had behind it years of growing 9 percent to 10 percent annually. Overall size rose to a quarter of America’s economy.

China chipped at US dominant global power status, notably in trade. In 1990, no country  had China as main trading partner. By 2000, you counted a few on your fingers. Most clustered in east Asia.

A decade later, the list grew to include Japan, Africa, Australia, Chile, Brazil, India, Pakistan, the US and Egypt. Beijing  emerged as the world’s largest producer of manufactured goods last year. America yielded  a standard it bore for 110 years.

These are tectonic shifts.

“The global effect  is of an entirely different order,” adds the Observer. “The world is tilting on its axis in even more dramatic style” than when Europe ruled the roost—until dislodged by an upstart colony of then 13 states.

“We no longer have any alternative but to abandon our Western parochialism,” Jacques argues. But the shift in mind-set that faces us is colossal….”

During the 19th and 20th centuries, every non-Western country was compelled to understand the West in its own terms. “Now, it  is now our turn to make sense of a country so different from our own. It will be a Herculean task. We always look West, hardly ever East.”

The result is we “insist on living in a world that was rather than is. We are so far behind the curve.” Why?  Does part  of this hangup stem from ill-fitting prisms?

Ascendancy bred, first in Europe, then the US, a Western-centric mentality. The West is the fount of all wisdom. The only  universal model of modernization that worked was westernization. “Our sense of superiority closed our minds.” Few entertained the idea that a backward China, shorn of democracy and  bereft of Enlightenment principles, would  flourish.

“We were not even curious,” Jacques recalls. We insisted “on seeing China through a Western prism. We refused to understand China in its own terms. Our arrogance bred ignorance.”

Ever heard of China Development Bank and  China Exim Bank? Few have. Yet they lent more to developing nations than the World Bank in 2009 and 2010, “just as the Rothschilds funded much of Europe’s industrialization in the 19th century.”

China made the renminbi available for settlement of trade. Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corp. foresees that half of China’s trade, with the developing world, will be paid  in renminbi by 2015. Is this a process where the renminbi could dislodge the dollar as the world’s dominant currency?

Overall figures can mislead, though. China’s huge population base whittles down per capita income. Well-being is reflected better in  modern human development indices. These   factor in education, health, justice, etc. Other equity measures include political freedoms and human rights.

Norway tops 187 countries in human  development ranking gauged by the United Nations. The next four are Australia, Netherlands, the US and New Zealand. China is  in slot No. 101. Given the massive poverty, Beijing won’t break into the magic circle of 47 countries with very high human development  anytime soon.

In the Philippines, we’re  wedged between Moldova and Egypt at Slot 112. Like China, we huddle with 47 other countries with middling “medium human development.”

The West has primarily been shaped by its experience of nation, the analysis claims. In contrast, China is not even primarily a nation state. It is a civilization state. China has been molded by its sense of civilization.

“Unlike Europe, China never sought to acquire overseas colonies. Instead, Beijing established a tribute system in east Asia… The Chinese state bears a fundamentally different relationship to society compared with any western state. (This) lies at the heart of the Chinese pysche.”

The Bo Xilai scandal rocks a China set for a leadership change November. Tibet’s rash of  immolations continue. Asean countries are edgy over Chinese claims that butt into seas  within their exclusive economic zones. The US stationed troops in Australia November for a “region has some of the busiest sea lanes in the world,” President Barack Obama said.

“Learn Mandarin,” we prod Kristin and Kathie.  As a Chinese proverb says, “When the sea is wide, the mountains are high—and the emperor is far away, my heart is at rest.” (e-mail: [email protected])