作者：Niall Ferguson 2009年12月31日金融時報
我正在努力回想，自己是在什么地方、什么时间顿悟的。是2005年第一次在上海外滩漫步的时候？是在尘雾笼罩的重庆市，听到当地一名共产党官员将堆积如山的碎石描述为未来中国西南金融中心的时候？那就发生在去年，但不知为何，它比同时期北京奥运会开幕式的热力四射给我的印象还要深刻。抑或就是上月在卡内基音乐厅(Carnegie Hall)聆听才华横溢的中国青年作曲家林安淇(Angel Lam)的作品时？她是古典音乐东方化的代表。我想可能就是那个时候，就在这个十年接近尾声的时候，我才真正领悟：我们正在经历500年西方统治的最后阶段。
“西方统治”：这个宏大的标题是上学期我在哈佛(Harvard)所授课程的名称。下面的副标题甚至更为夸张：“世界强国的主要推动力”(Mainsprings of Global Power)。我想要提出的问题并不是特别有新意，但似乎正日益成为现代历史学家可以关注的最有意思的问题。大约从1500年开始，人口更少、显然也更为落后的欧亚大陆西部逐渐开始统治世界的其它地区，包括人口更多、社会发达程度也更高的欧亚大陆东部，这究竟是为什么？
我的补充问题是：如果我们能够找出一个充分的理由，来解释以往西方的统治地位，那么我们能否对其未来做出一个预测呢？
换言之，这个由文艺复兴(Renaissance)和宗教改革(Reformation)之后西欧崛起的文明所主宰的世界，是不是正在走向末路？在科学革命和启蒙运动(Enlightenment)的推助下，这种文明跨越了大西洋，最远传播到澳大利亚和新西兰，并且最终在工业时代和帝国时代达到鼎盛时期。
我希望向学生们提出这些问题，这本身就表明过去10年具有某种特殊的意义。我最初到美国来执教，是因为纽约大学斯特恩商学院(New York University's Stern school of business)的著名捐助者、华尔街资深人士亨利•考夫曼(Henry Kaufman)曾经问我，为什么一个对金钱和权力的历史感兴趣的人，不到金钱和权力真正集中的地方来呢？除了曼哈顿市区，还有什么地方配得上这个称号呢？
随着新千年的到来，纽约证交所(New York Stock Exchange)已经不言自明地成为一个庞大全球经济网络的节点，这个网络由美国人设计，也基本上为美国人所有。
当时网络繁荣无疑即将结束，而当民主党偿付国家债务的承诺开始变得几乎可以相信的时候，一场令人不快的小小衰退，让他们丢掉了对白宫的控制权。
但小布什(George W. Bush)上任还不到8个月，就遭遇了一个重大事件，强有力地突显出曼哈顿在西方主导的世界所占据的中心地位。基地组织(al-Qaeda)恐怖主义分子摧毁世贸中心，是以一种骇人听闻的方式向纽约致敬：对于所有真想挑战美国式全球秩序的人而言，这个城市是首选目标。
随后发生的事件振奋人心。阿富汗的塔利班(Taliban)统治被推翻。“邪恶轴心”“政权更迭”的时机已经成熟。在伊拉克，萨达姆•侯赛因(Saddam Hussein)被赶下台。“有毒的德克萨斯人”（Toxic Texan，指小布什）的民意支持率持续高涨，有望连任。拜减税措施之赐，美国经济出现反弹。“古老欧洲”的怒气无济于事，更遑论美国的自由派人士。
如果如黑格尔(Hegel)所言，拿破仑(Napoleon)是“马背上的时代精神”，那么前动作片巨星、加州州长阿诺德•施瓦辛格(Arnold Schwarzenegger)就是悍马方向盘后的时代精神。这一切让我深深着迷，我发现自己开始关注帝国，特别是大英帝国为美帝国提供的教训。
当我反思美帝国的崛起以及可能的衰落时，开始逐渐清晰地认识到，在美国霸权的核心存在着三大致命不足：人力不足（派往伊拉克的兵力不足），注意力不足（公众对于长期占领被征服国家的热情不足），以及最重要的一点，财力不足（相对于投资而言，储蓄不足；而相对于公共开支而言，税收不足）。
还是在2004年时，我曾经警告，美国已在不知不觉中，开始依赖东亚资金稳定其失衡的经常帐户和财政账户。因此，美国这个未公开宣称的帝国衰落的原因，可能不是兵临城下的恐怖主义分子，也不是给他们撑腰的流氓政权，而是国内的财政危机。
美国洞口大开的经常帐户赤字正越来越仰仗亚洲央行的资金来填补，其中中国逐渐占据主导地位。认识到这一点，至少对我而言，是这个十年间顿悟的时刻。
2006年末，莫里茨•舒拉里克(Moritz Schularick)和我共同创造了“中美共生体”(Chimerica)这个词，来描述在我们看来，勤俭节约的中国和肆意挥霍的美国之间无法持续的危险关系，实际上，我们指明了即将到来的全球金融危机的解决办法之一。
过去十年，美国超级权力的幻象并非一次、而是两度破灭。复仇女神第一次出现在萨德尔城的后街小巷和赫尔曼德省的山谷里，她不仅显示了美国军事力量的局限性，而且更重要的是，揭露了新保守主义者对于大中东地区民主浪潮的愿景是多么幼稚。随着2007年次贷危机升级为2008年的信贷紧缩，并最终演变成2009年的“大萧条”，复仇女神发起了第二波攻击。雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)破产之后，“华盛顿共识”(Washington Consensus)和“大缓和”(Great Moderation)的虚假事实被永远抛到了九霄云外。
剩下的是什么呢？在这十年的尾声，西方世界只能艳羡地看着中国政府对美国信贷紧缩影响下出口的惊人骤降迅速做出回应——人们本以为这种骤降可能会让亚洲一蹶不振。
正当发达国家跌跌撞撞在第二场大萧条的边缘徘徊之际，中国经济增长只是出现了些许放缓，这要归功于高效的政府刺激计划和大规模的信贷扩张。
当然，就此以为中国未来十年不会面临任何问题，也过于天真。以一种威权主义的计划资本主义管理一个有着13亿人口的社会存在诸多困难，迄今为止实施这种制度的只有人口仅450万的城邦国家新加坡。但不变的事实是，在2007至2009年的金融危机期间，亚洲最新、规模最大的工业化革命也几乎没有停下稍事喘息。
这是多么惊人的一场革命啊！将26年间国内生产总值(GDP)增长10倍与70年间增长4倍比较一下就可以体会的到。前者是中国在1978年至2004年间取得的成就，而后者是英国在1830年至1900年间的战绩。或者不妨考虑一下这个事实：本世纪初，美国GDP超过中国GDP的8倍，而现在几乎不到4倍。如果高盛(Goldman Sachs)首席经济学家吉姆•奥尼尔(Jim O'Neill)的预测是正确的，那么中国最早将在2027年赶超美国：还有不到二十年的时间。
在过去500年间，西方是如何获得相对于东方的优势的呢？我的答案是6大“杀手锏”：资本主义企业、科学方法、基于财产私有制和个人自由的法律和政治体系、传统帝国主义、消费者社会，以及“新教”工作伦理（韦伯(Weber)起的这个名字可能不太恰当）与作为目的自身的资本积累。
中国显然已经复制了其中几点（第一点和第二点）。其它可能正在吸纳的过程之中——辅之以某种“儒家”改良（帝国主义、消费和工作伦理）。只有第三点——西方的法律与政治形式——在这个一党专政的“人民共和国”还没有任何兴起的迹象。但中国真的需要民主制度才能实现持久繁荣吗？
未来十年很有可能给出这个问题的答案。但话又说回来，或许还要再过500年我们才能确定，在西方统治之外，真的存在另一种可行的选择。
译者/何黎
尼尔·弗格森（Niall Ferguson），英国籍苏格兰人，英国当代著名历史学家。他是哈佛大学历史学与金融学教授，牛津大学高级研究员，斯坦福大学胡佛研究所高级研究员。著有《货币崛起：金融如何影响世界历史》(The Ascent of Money)、《文明》、《帝国》、《罗斯柴尔德家族》等。
The decade the world tilted east
By Niall Ferguson 2009年12月31日 金融時報
I am trying to remember now where it was, and when it was, that it hit me. Was it during my first walk along the Bund in Shanghai in 2005? Was it amid the smog and dust of Chonqing, listening to a local Communist party official describe a vast mound of rubble as the future financial centre of south-west China? That was last year, and somehow it impressed me more than all the synchronised razzamatazz of the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. Or was it at Carnegie Hall only last month, as I sat mesmerised by the music of Angel Lam, the dazzlingly gifted young Chinese composer who personifies the Orientalisation of classical music? I think maybe it was only then that I really got the point about this decade, just as it was drawing to a close: that we are living through the end of 500 years of western ascendancy.
I am trying to remember now where it was, and when it was, that it hit me. Was it during my first walk along the Bund in Shanghai in 2005? Was it amid the smog and dust of Chonqing, listening to a local Communist party official describe a vast mound of rubble as the future financial centre of south-west China? That was last year, and somehow it impressed me more than all the synchronised razzamatazz of the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. Or was it at Carnegie Hall only last month, as I sat mesmerised by the music of Angel Lam, the dazzlingly gifted young Chinese composer who personifies the Orientalisation of classical music? I think maybe it was only then that I really got the point about this decade, just as it was drawing to a close: that we are living through the end of 500 years of western ascendancy.
“Western Ascendancy”: that was the grandiose title of the course I taught at Harvard this past term. The subtitle was even more bombastic: “Mainsprings of Global Power”. The question I wanted to pose was not especially original, but increasingly it seems to be the most interesting question a historian of the modern era can address. Just why, beginning in around 1500, did the less populous and apparently backward west of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world, including the more populous and more sophisticated societies of eastern Eurasia?
My subsidiary question was this: If we can come up with a good explanation for the west’s past ascendancy, can we then offer a prognosis for its future?
Put differently, are we living through the end of the domination of the world by the civilisation that arose in western Europe in the wake of the Renaissance and Reformation – the civilisation that, propelled by the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, spread across the Atlantic and as far as the Antipodes, finally reaching its apogee in the age of industry and empire?
The very fact that I wanted to pose those questions to my students says something about the past 10 years. I first began to teach in the US because an eminent benefactor of New York University’s Stern school of business, Wall Street veteran Henry Kaufman, had asked me why someone interested in the history of money and power did not come to where the money and power actually were. And where else could that be but downtown Manhattan?
As the new millennium dawned, the New York Stock Exchange was self-evidently the nodal point of a vast global economic network that was American in design and largely American in ownership.
The dotcom boom was ending, to be sure, and a nasty little recession ensured that the Democrats lost the White House just as their pledge to pay off the national debt began to seem almost plausible.
But within just eight months of becoming President, George W. Bush was confronted by an event that emphatically underlined the centrality of Manhattan to the western-dominated world. The destruction of the World Trade Center by al-Qaeda terrorists paid New York a hideous compliment: for anyone serious about challenging the American global order, this was target number one.
The subsequent events were exhilarating. The Taliban overthrown in Afghanistan. An “axis of evil” branded ripe for “regime change”. Saddam Hussein ousted in Iraq. The Toxic Texan riding high in the polls, on track for re-election. The US economy bouncing back thanks to tax cuts. “Old Europe” – not to mention liberal America – fuming impotently.
If Napoleon had been, in Hegel’s phrase, ‘the Zeitgeist on horseback”, then Arnold Schwarzenegger, the action-hero turned governator of California, was the Zeitgeist behind the wheel of a Hummer. Fascinated, I found myself focusing on empire, in particular the lessons of Britain’s empire for America’s.
As I reflected on the rise, and probable fall, of America’s empire, it became clear to me that there were three fatal deficits at the heart of American power: a manpower deficit (not enough boots on the ground in Iraq), an attention deficit (not enough public enthusiasm for long-term occupations of conquered countries) and above all a financial deficit (not enough savings relative to investment and not enough taxation relative to public expenditure).
Back in 2004 I warned that the US had imperceptibly come to rely on east Asian capital to stabilise its unbalanced current and fiscal accounts. The decline and fall of America’s undeclared empire might therefore be due not to terrorists at the gates nor to the rogue regimes that sponsor them, but to a fiscal crisis at home.
The realisation that the yawning US current account deficit was increasingly being financed by Asian central banks, with the Chinese moving into pole position, was, for me at least, the eureka moment of the decade.
When, in late 2006, Moritz Schularick and I coined the word “Chimerica” to describe what we saw as the dangerously unsustainable relationship between parsimonious China and profligate America, we had identified one of the keys to the coming global financial crisis.
The illusion of American hyperpuissance was shattered not once but twice in the past decade. Nemesis came first in the backstreets of Sadr City and the valleys of Helmand, which revealed not only the limits of American military might but also, more importantly, the naivety of neoconservative visions of a democratic wave in the greater Middle East. And it struck a second time with the escalation of the subprime crisis of 2007 into the credit crunch of 2008 and finally the “great recession” of 2009. After the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the sham verities of the “Washington Consensus” and the “Great Moderation” were consigned forever to oblivion.
And what remained? By the end of the decade the western world could only look admiringly at the speed with which the Chinese government had responded to the breathtaking collapse in exports caused by the US credit crunch, a collapse which might have been expected to devastate Asia.
While the developed world teetered on the verge of a second Great Depression, China suffered little more than a minor growth slow-down, thanks to a highly effective government stimulus programme and massive credit expansion.
It would of course be ingenuous to assume that the next decade will not bring problems for China, too. Running a society of 1.3bn people with the kind of authoritarian planned capitalism hitherto associated with the city-state Singapore (population 4.5m) is fraught with difficulties. But the fact remains that Asia’s latest and biggest industrial revolution scarcely paused to draw breath during the 2007-09 financial crisis.
And what a revolution! Compare a tenfold growth of gross domestic product in the space of 26 years with a fourfold increase in the space of 70. The former has been China’s achievement between 1978 and 2004; the latter was Britain’s between 1830 and 1900. Or consider the fact that US GDP was more than eight times that of China’s at the beginning of this decade. Now it is barely four times larger – and if the projections from Jim O’Neill, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist, prove to be correct, China will overtake America as soon as 2027: in less than two decades.
What gave the west the edge over the east over the past 500 years? My answer is six “killer apps”: the capitalist enterprise, the scientific method, a legal and political system based on private property rights and individual freedom, traditional imperialism, the consumer society and what Weber probably misnamed the “Protestant” ethic of work and capital accumulation as ends in themselves.
Some of those things (numbers one and two) China has clearly replicated. Others it may be in the process of adopting with some “Confucian” modifications (imperialism, consumption and the work ethic). Only number three – the Western way of law and politics – shows little sign of emerging in the one-party state that is the People’s Republic.
But does China need dear old democracy to achieve enduring prosperity?
The next decade may well answer that question. Then again, it may take another 500 years to be certain that there really is a viable alternative to western ascendancy.
The writer is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, author of The Ascent of Money and a contributing editor of the FT
