Contributor(s): Martin Jacques | Martin Jacques renews his assault on conventional thinking about China, above all, the failure to grasp how China is different and how this difference will come to shape the world in a very different way from the Western era. With Western thinking lagging well behind the curve of China’s rise, he explains how the Western financial crisis has dramatically accelerated China’s global impact and influence. Martin Jacques is the author of the global best-seller When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, the second edition of which, updated and greatly expanded, was published earlier this year. He is a visiting professor at Tsinghua University and a non-resident fellow at the Transatlantic Academy, Washington DC. He was a visiting senior research fellow at LSE IDEAS. John Gray is emeritus professor of European thought at the LSE and author of The Immortalization Commission: the strange quest to cheat death and many others.