We're in a period of transition of great powers becoming weak powers, said Professor Niall Ferguson in the keynote speech at the CLSA conference in Hong Kong yesterday. If you don't recognise this, you will foresee incorrectly the results of the next few years.
He paints a prophetic picture of Chinese soldiers standing guard over Chinese economic interests in Africa, and protecting those assets by force if threatened. This, he says, is how you start an unofficial empire. However, nobody in China would describe it as an empire for ideological reasons, given that they got rid of their emperor in favour of a republic.
Ferguson is a historian of international renown and the author of...
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