The Malaysian prime minister Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak is reported by Bernama, the official news agency, as reading a few books at a time and the latest were 'When China Rules The World' by Martin Jacques and 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. 
Because of a jam-packed week, my time at this year's World Economic Forum was limited. But as is always the case with Davos, there were more than a few snapshot-worthy moments. Things got off to an interesting start before I even arrived. I happened to be on the same flight from D.C. to Zurich as Larry Summers, who was reading Martin Jacques' weighty tome, "When China Rules the World. His review: "Interesting...and disturbing."
(Arianna Huffington Davos Diary, The Huffington Post)
The must read book for the Washington set today is Martin Jacques’, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. The journalist’s tome has a status amongst DC intellectuals best compared with the one Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat had five years ago. Obama’s economic advisor Larry Summers was spotted brooding over it on a plane to Davos recently.
(NRC Handelsblad 18/02/2010)
The Washington Post
Martin Jacques, a British news columnist, became fascinated by the manic modernization underway in China when he visited there in 1993. He saw construction cranes working round the clock, roads streaming with trucks and carts, and peasant women balancing wares on either end of a bamboo pole. The vibrant energy and evident willpower got Jacques musing: Would the economic boom follow the Western model? Or would China pursue modernity in its own way?
Jacques went for a holiday in Malaysia. One day, while he was out for a run on the beach, his eye chanced upon a dark and attractive woman. A 26-year-old lawyer, she was not an obvious match for a pink-skinned, pointy-headed, chronically unmarried Brit who was nearing 50. But the woman, Hari Veriah, who was born in Malaysia to Indian parents, was fearless and modern-minded, and her Asian perspective was like tinder to his spark.
New York Times
Historians may someday debate whether the financial crisis that began a year ago is most notable for how much damage it did to the United States, or how little it inflicted on the world’s major rising power, China. Helped by huge state intervention and buoyant optimism almost surreally undiminished by the crisis of confidence across the Pacific, China has had a very good downturn. It is closing the gap with the world’s most developed economies faster than anticipated and could overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy when the final figures for last year are tallied.
China’s already rapid emergence is changing many things, from diplomatic alliances in Africa to the status of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency. It may also open minds to a provocative thesis that, until a short time ago, might have been dismissed as breathless hyperbole.
