Chris Bowlby: The West has Long Feared the Rise of China

Chris Bowlby is a presenter on BBC radio, specialising in history.

The implications for Britain and the west of the rise of China are debated intensely today. Yet we can find a similarly intense version of this debate over a century ago

As Professor Peter Cain of Sheffield Hallam University puts it, China has been viewed by many in the west as “a potential economic giant for a very long time”. His research has focused on the reception of a book published in 1893 by CH Pearson, entitled National Life and Character.

Pearson, a former education minister in Australia, discussed what he saw as the consequences of ever increasing western engagement with Asian and other societies. This, he believed, would transform the balance of global power and undermine British society. The west’s ‘civilising mission’, he claimed, contained the seeds of its own destruction....