China's Role in a Shared Human Future - Martin Albrow

This book is about China’s role in the world to come and includes the author’s recent explorations of China’s readiness to assume a global leadership role. The book effectively links the study of Max Weber, an important Western theorist during the global transformation of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, with the study of Xi Jinping's thinking during the global transformation from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. According to the author, on the one hand, Western classical theory can still provide the core ideas for rethinking today's global cooperation. On the other hand, Xi Jinping's ‘The Belt and Road’ initiative, though only a very recent attempt to show how China as a new player in the world can help to heal its divisions, has as its foundation Xi’s thinking on the governance of China, which has demonstrated that the initiative will serve as a means to promote global peace and cooperation rather than strengthen great power rivalries. The author believes that we can shape global ethics in the process of rediscovering the deep roots of common civilized values that will underpin the global cooperative recovery. This book will be translated and available in Chinese. It is expected it will help a wider readership from China and other countries and regions to understand China and how it can contribute to the shared human future.

Professor Martin Albrow is one of the foremost sociologists in the English-speaking world and one of the greatest experts on globalization, perhaps the most significant driving force of our times.  In his pioneering work The Global Age (1996), written when the term “globalization” itself was quite new, he set out the main dimensions of the profound changes that had begun to transform world society. In its most fundamental meaning, “globalization” refers to the intensifying interdependence of individuals, institutions and states across the globe. … In this book Albrow does a remarkable job of shedding light on these extraordinary changes and on the pivotal role that China is likely to have in shaping their further evolution. As the United States pulls back from its former global role, China not only can, but must, assume a pivotal position in shaping world society for the better. ——Professor Lord Anthony Giddens, from Preface of this book

What is the process of incorporation of Chinese ideas and thinking into a transcultural public social science? Is the Belt and Road project the successor to Western economic globalization? Is Asia going to be the continent that works through the dilemmas of sustainable modernity? Martin Albrow is one of the very few social scientists who has the authority, experience and ambition to give us the answers, in this rich collection of essays. ——Professor Sam Whimster, Editor, Max Weber Studies

Professor Albrow’s book provides a fascinating counterpoint to Western-centric notions of China as a ‘rising power’. It is unique in providing a globalist view of how China understands its new role and how its leadership is already fundamentally reshaping the architecture of the world in the 21st century. China is becoming a global nation and this book explains how. In the process, sinology and global governance scholarship just got more properly global. ——Associate Professor Olaf Corry, PhD, University of Copenhagen