Global best-selling author to speak at Town Hall

Jessica Yang, Staff Reporter

On Nov. 4, author of “When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order,” Martin Jacques, will speak at the Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square as a part of the Town Hall of Cleveland speaker series, in part sponsored by Case Western Reserve University.

The Town Hall of Cleveland speaker series aims to bring “engaging, provocative and exciting speakers” to engage the public as well as to educate and inform. Now in its 82nd session, the Town Hall of Cleveland speaker series for this year includes Bob Woodward, who was a reporter on the Watergate scandal as well as a lead reporter for The Washington Post on the aftermath of 9/11, Michael Ruhlman, an award-winning food blogger and Jeff Hoffman, an entrepreneur and innovator as well as founder of Priceline.com.

Jacques is most known for his novel “When China Rules the World,” which is a global bestseller. The novel has been praised by key political pundits such as Fareed Zakaria, columnist for Time magazine and host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, as well as Harvard economic historian, Niall Ferguson.

On top of gaining key political pundit approval, Jacques’ novel has also raised significant academic debate as the novel argues that China’s future economic growth will change the economic landscape greatly and the decline of the Western dominance. Jacques argues that the Chinese will influence the world both politically and culturally, and this new modernity will be different from the one that most people are familiar with. He argues that Beijing will replace Washington, D.C as the capital of the world’s superpower, all without abandoning communist structure and Confucian values.

Jacques is a visiting senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and at Tsinghua University in Beijing, as well as a fellow of the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, D.C. When Jacques was at Marxism Today as an editor, the publication became one of the most influential political publications in Britain.

At the lecture, Jacques will focus on his novel as well as key points he makes in it. The Martin Jacques lecture is at 6 p.m. in the Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square.