Martin Jacques's Blog

Aged seven in 1953, I sent the F1 driver a letter. Not only did he write back, he invited me to the paddock at Silverstone

My relationship with Stirling Moss started in 1953. I was seven. I lived in Coventry, then the heartland of Britain’s, indeed Europe’s, motor industry. The Jaguar car factory, then makers of sports cars that regularly won at the Le Mans 24 hour race, the most famous race on the calendar in the 1950s, was a couple of miles away. I was car crazy. To the chagrin of my parents, I wasn’t interested in reading. Until, that is, I discovered motor racing magazines and, in the blink of an eye, I learned to read. My idol was Stirling Moss.

I wrote him a letter in 1953, saying how much I admired him and wishing him every success. I didn’t expect a reply. I was just a little kid in a small semi-detached 1930s house in Coventry, a city without much distinction apart from its car industry and its suffering in the blitz. Then soon after I got a letter from Stirling with some photos. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I wrote back.

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By 2010, China was beginning to have an impact on the global consciousness in a new way. Prior to the western financial crisis, it had been seen as the new but very junior kid on the block. The financial crash changed all that. Before 2008 the conventional western wisdom had been that sooner or later China would suffer a big economic meltdown. It never did. Instead, the crisis happened in the west, with huge consequences for the latter’s stability and self-confidence.

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The roots of the dispute come from US president Donald Trump’s “America first” project to protect the US’ position as the world’s leading economy, while encouraging businesses to hire more workers in the US and to manufacture their products there.

Related: Europe is squeezed between a hungry China and surly US | Simon Tisdall

The central theme of this excellent book by Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, is what he terms “easternisation”: the remorseless shift in the global centre of gravity from the west to the east. His theme is not new; indeed, the book is something of a latecomer in this argument. But he pursues this fundamental truth with an impressive single-mindedness and explores its ramifications from south-east Asia and Russia to Europe and the Middle East in an insightful manner, often providing little nuggets of revealing and unexpected information. Since the financial crisis, the west’s decline and China’s rise have accelerated, though many could be forgiven for thinking the opposite was the case given the constant refrains about China’s economic “difficulties”. Rachman, rightly, will have none of it. And he demonstrates how, by the year, the world is being redrawn in the most profound ways by this shift in power.

The major redoubt of resistance to the idea is the US. For the most part, it is in denial of the blatantly obvious. But Rachman shows how, beneath the radar, Obama tacitly accepts the fact but cannot admit it because no major US politician can, it being too dangerous for their reputation. Europe, on the other hand, has, especially since the financial crisis, come to acquiesce in the new reality, which is hardly surprising given, as Rachman puts it, “the European powers are in precipitous decline as global political players”.

Related: The rising power of China will create new political fissures in the west | Gideon Rachman

In the early 1980s the author was one of the first to herald the emerging dominance of neoliberalism in the west. Here he argues that this doctrine is now faltering. But what happens next?

The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade, with no end in sight.

After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.

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Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot

The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, is a function of politics

Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better

Trump believes that America’s pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation’s resources

Who would have guessed just three years ago that the David Cameron government would be the author of the boldest change in British foreign policy since the second world war? That is exactly what is now unfolding.

The process began this year when the British government announced it would join a Chinese initiative to help fund Asia’s enormous infrastructural needs. The UK became the first non-Asian country to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), after which more than 30 other countries joined, including Germany and France.

Related: The howls of China’s prisoners will haunt this royal welcome for Xi Jinping | Ma Jian

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The west’s bears have always well outnumbered the bulls when it comes to the Chinese economy. A new problem is all too often seen as an intimation of impending crisis, a hard landing, consequent social instability, and perhaps the eventual collapse of the regime. Dream on.

Related: Chinese economy is under pressure but will not slump, says premier Li Keqiang

The western world continues to depend on a life-support system, namely zero interest rates, combined with Chinese growth

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The upheaval sweeping Hong Kong is more complicated than on the surface it might appear. Protests have erupted over direct elections to be held in three years’ time; democracy activists claim that China’s plans will allow it to screen out the candidates it doesn’t want.

It should be remembered, however, that for 155 years until its handover to China in 1997, Hong Kong was a British colony, forcibly taken from China at the end of the first opium war. All its 28 subsequent governors were appointed by the British government. Although Hong Kong came, over time, to enjoy the rule of law and the right to protest, under the British it never enjoyed even a semblance of democracy. It was ruled from 6,000 miles away in London. The idea of any kind of democracy was first introduced by the Chinese government. In 1990 the latter adopted the Basic Law, which included the commitment that in 2017 the territory’s chief executive would be elected by universal suffrage; it also spelt out that the nomination of candidates would be a matter for a nominating committee.

Stuart Hall was an utterly unique figure. Although he arrived at the age of 19 from Jamaica and spent the rest of his life here, he never felt at home in Britain. This juxtaposition was a crucial source of his strength and originality. Because of his colour and origin, he saw the country differently, not as a native but as an outsider. He observed this island through a different viewfinder and it enabled him to see things that those shaped and formatted by the culture could not. It took an outsider, a black person from a former colony, to understand what was happening to a post-imperial country seemingly locked in endless decline.

His impact was to be felt across many different fields. Perhaps best known is his pioneering work in cultural studies, but his influence was to be felt in many diverse fields. By the end of the 1970s, it was the connections that he started to make between culture and politics that was to redefine how we thought about politics.

On Friday the new Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and the United States president, Barack Obama, will meet for two days of talks at Sunnylands, a private estate near Los Angeles. It will be their first meeting since Xi assumed the presidency. The future fortunes of the world are bound up with the two countries finding a new kind of modus vivendi. It will not be easy.

We are living through an extraordinary shift of power from the United States, which has been long dominant, to China, which many now accept will be the dominant power of the future. As has frequently been observed, such shifts are generally the cause of great instability and have often led to conflict.

When the Bo Xilai issue first erupted in March and the details of Neil Heywood's murder began to emerge, it was commonly accepted that this posed a huge challenge to the Chinese leadership at a most sensitive time – the imminent change in the composition of the party and government leadership, an event which is surely of greater significance for the world than the forthcoming US presidential election.

There was understandable speculation that Bo Xilai's detention could lead to wider rifts in the party leadership that might prove very difficult to manage and which might even lead to the postponement of the forthcoming party congress until the early months of next year.