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1 Introduction One of my three major obsessions for four and a half decades is Hegemonic Power Transfer Theory, about how a declining economic power like the USA accommodates itself to a rising economic power like China. (See Power transition theory - Wikipedia)That mathematical science is based upon the consideration and the statistical analysis of the data relating to behaviour of major economic powers over the last two centuries and was principally progressed by Abraham Fimo Kenneth Organski (1923–98) and Jacek Kugler (1923-now, and seebut there are now many other major contributors. Most people I have met (who are sometimes very highly educated) are not well informed about that subject so I have written a primer about it which you can read at George Tait Edwards's answer to Does the USA have a good reason to destroy the military base of China in South China Sea now? Would the US find it too late 5 or 10 years later?1.1 US Hegemony Has Been Ended By American Political Actions And Not By The Rise of China or by Foreign Economic ActivityOne bias in the above question above is the implicit idea that China is somehow responsible for the economic decline of the USA. The principal cause of US relative economic decline is US Government policy particularly since the 1980s and not the actions of China or foreign governments.After 1980 President Ronald Reagan’s deliberate policy to relocate abroad what he regarded as “old, smokestack industries” such as the US companies’ manufacture of the basic inputs of steel and aluminium and also the export of US light motor vehicle industries (along with the export of the feeder SME industries which provided the sub-components to enable the construction of these cars) accelerated US economic decline. These policies created a massive rustbelt in the US States below the Great Lakes and much higher unemployment in the USA. See George Tait Edwards's answer to What are some of the ingredients that make the United States stand out in the world? And with regard to Reagan’s policy of relocating US industries abroad, see para 5.2.4 of George Tait Edwards's answer to Why is China’s economy growing significantly faster than the U.S. economy? And for some details of “the Reagan Plan” see the NYT article REAGAN'S HIDDEN 'INDUSTRIAL POLICY' which reports“The Reagan plan to shrink America's basic industries has been enormously successful. Since 1981, when the value of the dollar began climbing to unprecedented levels as the budget deficit ballooned, some 2 million jobs have been lost in old-line manufacturing businesses. Steel, autos and others have been forced to reduce domestic capacity, set up operations abroad (or enter into joint ventures with foreign producers) and diversify into specialized niches.”And these are only the direct employment losses. The USA had an economic multiplier effect of about four or five during the 1980s becausethe shutdown of steel, aluminium and auto manufacturing industries caused the decline and the destruction of the service industries which had served these companies and their employeesthe “feeder firms” which had produced the sub-components of the auto industries were also moved abroadthe response of local authorities (LA) to their loss of revenue was a reduction in their local employment and LA provision andthe employment which still exists in the rustbelt is more often a lower-quality, sometimes no-fixed-contract jobs, with the R&D for the manufacturing plus the related defence industry subcomponents manufacture also moving abroad.The USA largely Republican Governments since 1980 do not recognise these multiplier effects many of which continue to contribute to the US spiral of relative economic decline today. For example, Gordon Ramsay has recently massively improved the food quality of a Detroit Restaurant and in a normal economic background that establishment would flourish. But the working people of Detroit can no longer afford to eat out as often as they once did, so that restaurant has gone bankrupt.Almost identical effects can be observed in the United Kingdom where an official Conservative policy of industrial shutdown and partisan victimisation of the poor has produced the growth of Austerity-enforced starvation and the explosive growth of food banks along with the shutdown of local restaurants and public houses.These consequences of industrial declines have no positive aspects. Of course the loss of domestic production in both the USA and UK creates the opportunity for foreign supply of domestic demand, and the surge in imports of goods no longer produced locally causes a large balance of payments problem in both countries, but it was the lack of an effective industrial policy and the malign neglect of the side effects of that [in the absence of government remedial action} which is the root cause of both UK and US industrial decline.2 My Re-interpretation of the QuestionLarge well populated rising nations become potential hegemonic powers because of their high economic growth. The USA became a hegemonic power in 1945 because FDR understood the process of economic growth. See my 12 June 2013 article FDR’s American Economic Miracle 1938-44, or the First Economic Bomb - The USA from 1938 to 1944 (Part 1)2.1 The Rise Of Any Large Nation to Potential Hegemonic Economic Power Is Not Limited By or Related to the Western Concept of “Legitimacy”Whether countries can become the leading hegemonic power has nothing to do with the Western idea of “legitimacy” but everything to do with the leadership of that country understanding and practising the economic understandings which lead to relatively high economic growth. In particular, the partial or full practice of the five major aspects of Shimomuran-Wernerian Macroeconomics (SWM) has historically produced high-growth economic miracles while Washington Consensus Macroeconomics (WCM) has continually resulted in low growth and relative economic decline.2.1.1 The concept of legitimacy of national actions is a Western-produced Eurocentric and mainly Anglo-centric idea which has been historically used to justify the “legitimacy” of the actions of the Western “Great powers” particularly the many military adventures of the UK and the USA. The central idea in international law is a value system which regards the position of the West as “developed” and the position of other nations as “undeveloped” and “Less Developed Countries” (LDCs) so it includes an embedded Eurocentric value system, which seems to and does devalue the cultural worth and downrates the achievements of other countries.2.1.2 Also inherent in the Western legal system is the primacy of the personal or corporate individual above the the interests of all others, so that issues are set to be prejudicially settled in Western law in favour of these individuals or corporations. In Western Law a basic assumption appears to be that all group and national interests such as the continuation of a life-supporting environment, a safe society based on individuals not carrying small arms, and group or social gains are less important than the massive personal gains made by billionaires. The misinterpretation in American Law of the US constitutional right for a “free people” to bear arms is a collective national right, and does not say that individuals can, but this is the constant US Media misinterpretation of that constitutional Amendment. That individualistic legal bias in favour of corporations is a big factor in how American politicians behave and which their private media supports.2.1.3 In my view it is a justified exaggeration to say that the bias in US Law in favour of the personal and corporate individual is a major factor which is responsible for the enormous political and social mess the United States of America has now arrived at. The elevation of immediate corporate interests or the short-term interests of US billionaires above long-term environmental, personal, group or national outcomes is an unhelpful bias in US Law. It is easy for large corporations to ruin the environment in the USA and elsewhere without risking any significant timely legal challenge to their profit-achieving activities. The profit-seeking behaviour of the US healthcare system is seen by US Republicans as more justified than the establishment of a slightly more adequate healthcare system such as Obamacare. [See George Tait Edwards's answer to Why is the USA’s health spending so high at 17% of GDP compared to the UK’s spending of 11% yet still doesn’t offer universal care?]The continuation of the mistaken policy of individuals bearing small and murderous munitions results in the USA having the highest suicide rate in the world, because the major use of these freely available weapons is to commit suicide (see When will people realize that guns don't kill people; people kill people?) but the social cost in the frequent incidents of the mass murder of some school children and their teachers cannot be justified by a mistaken reference to personal freedom. The LA times has today produced a report saying that https://www.quora.com/link/More-than-15%-of-childhood-deaths-in-America-are-due-to-guns-study-says/redirect but you can’t read that report except in the USA.The US Republican political preference for tax cuts for the benefit of the rich with Austerity for the workers and the political preference for big finance over the activities of local SME-supporting banks has produced a low 5% invention-to-innovation rate in the USA, ruining America’s potential future. And the lack of US industrial policy has produced the collapse of what was once [in 1945] the greatest industrial economy in the world, as US Republicans folded their arms and took no action as the once-great industrial companies of America after 1980 relocated elsewhere with Government encouragement and support, perhaps creating greater profits for their American owners but destroying the US worker employment and local prosperity these companies had previously provided. These are all observations and do not depend on any economic theory.What academic support exists for such a view? It is not something that American academics usually contemplate, trapped as they are within a WCM mindset, because that’s the only economics education taught in the West. See George Tait Edwards's answer to What's Wrong With Washington Consensus Macroeconomics?2.1.4 The US-promoted ‘international? Law of the Sea”Many US individuals have expressed the view that the “International Law the Sea” allows the militarily powerful US Navy to cruise where it pleases, because that “Law” is seen as eternal and universally supported. Yet that Law was created less than three quarters of a century ago, in 1945, in order to enable trade through international waters and sea channels which lie within close proximity to, and within the coastal sea territory of, nation states. The Law was meant to enable peaceful international trading by merchant shipping, not to facilitate military threat by its misinterpretation by the US to locate much of the mighty US Pacific Fleet around Chinese shores.That American activity could lead to a major conflict between the USA and China. I hope it does not. See China Cannot Be Trumped – George Tait Edwards – Medium and Trump is probably not foolish enough to destroy the world.2.2 Florian Matsumoto’s Critical Review of Onuma’s Attempt to Comment From A Transcultural ViewpointAn excellent detailed criticism, dissection and discussion of Onuma’s recent attempt to to define a “new” international Law can be accessed at Florian Couveinhes Matsumoto’s pdf paper The_End_of_the_History_of_Liberalism_and.the last “Transcivilisational” Man? Onuma’s Attempt to Define a “New” International Law.Which is located at The End of the History of Liberalism and the last “transcivilizational” Man? Onuma’s Attempt to Define a “new” international Law” », to be published, Asian Journal of International Law, 2018It should be noted that Florian Couveinhes Matsumoto is Assistant Professor at the École normale supérieure (Paris, Ulm), Université de recherche Paris Sciences et Lettres, member of the Centre de Théorie et d’Analyse du Droit (UMR CNRS 7074) and associate researcher at the Institut de Hautes Études Internationales (Université Paris II).That paper reaches detailed discussion heights not attained in this Answer. The author’s detailed knowledge of international law exceeds mine by many magnitudes. I accept from the outset that my attempt to summarise part of that informationally precise paper is doomed to failure, as was the attempt of Onumo to adopt a transcultural perspective, but his attempt reveals interesting depths and hints at possible transcultural conclusions.I wish to try to summarise why I think this paper is seminal and state some of its aspects and conclusions to illustrate its importance. There is nothing I can find in English (and this paper was originally in French) which illustrates the great difficulty of successfully adopting a transcultural perspective for the hopeful purpose of achieving a valid legal commentary and arriving at transcultural conclusions. My summary is inevitably inadequate and incomplete. The only fair way to treat this original and ground-breaking paper to quote all of it, but the copyright laws prevent that. The interested reader is invited to study the entire paper with probably undoubted benefits to the reader’s understanding.There are four sections in this 8-page paper as follows. These are:I Dealing (again) with the western perspective on international lawInternational Law is actually Western Law and is inevitably embedded within the cultural and personal perspectives of any commenting author. As Florain Matsumoto concludes in part I:“However, Onuma’ s book also undoubtedly displays the considerable difficulty inherent in such an attempt, or more accurately the impossibility of adopting a non-Western perspective without assuming a revolutionary point of view, a point of view that most Western lawyers describe as philosophical, political, or ideological, and, in a sense, as an erroneous or entirely subjective perspective. Indeed, although the trans-civilizational perspective on international law claimed by Onuma seems to imply a revolutionary stance, his book seems more reformist in nature and only a few criticisms appear to be truly transcivilizational. At least two of these need to be highlighted.”II Two “truly” transcivilizational criticismsFlorain Matsumoto continues:“As one might expect, the most visible transcivilizational criticism relates to the (usually Western-oriented) history of international law. In the sections of the book dedicated to this theme (pp.55 et seq. and 149 et seq.), the author accepts the classical view that today international law is a product of European and then Western modernity (pp. 16, 31, 55 et seq.), but rejects the idea that there was indeed international law “in the geographical sense of the term” before the Berlin Act (1885) and the Shimonoseki Treaty between China and Japan (1895) (p.81). Similarly, he is of the opinion that this law was not “globally valid in the formal sense ” before “most nations representing humankind” became “subjects of international law”, namely before people in decolonized countries freely recognized such a law in the 1960s (pp.57, 63) In the same way again, a truly global law of the sea only arose after World War II (p.320)”Matsumoto comments that both the cultures of China and Islam had influence in determining some aspects of the Western legal system but the cultures of other Asian nations, Africa, and pre-conquest North and South American cultures did not. And Matsumoto observes:“Unlike the criticism of the traditional presentation of the history of international Law, the second truly transcivilizational criticism does not relate to a particular area. In a way, it may be argued that it is the main thesis of the book. According to this thesis (if it may be summarized subjectively), contemporary Western lawyers as well as Western governments place an undue emphasis on the role of international judges (and secondarily NGOs and transnational corporations) as international Law makers, whereas non-Western lawyers and governments place their hopes in the capacities of nation States to rule their countries and regulate their relationships with strangers. More specifically, “the ideas, notions or concepts that people use as cognitive and interpretative frameworks of international law have basically been constructed by male international lawyers of powerful Western nations” (pp. 52-53) and “Western nations [...] have always been characterised by a legalistic culture” (p. 39).The use of Western models for transcultural Law is rejected because“litigation is a pathology, not a physiology of law” (pp. 8, 26, 457) and because “[l]aw without court is normal in many societies in human history” (p. 550). Consequently, “the study of international law in the twentieth century seems to have been excessively judicial-centric for gaining a comprehensive picture of international law” (pp. 116, 252, 258, 408, etc.). For instance, “the ICJ is not an important organ in interstate conflict settlement” (pp. 27, 117, 559-560, 579, 662) and more broadly, most international judges do not resolve most inter- State disputes (pp. 557, 571, 662).”Much of Western Law appears to based more on win-or-lose suppositions rather than the often more appropriate mediated settlement of conflict, and many “commonly perceived features of law [righteousness, consistency, universal applicability, rigidity and formality] work [at times] negatively against conflict resolution” (pp. 585 et sq.).”Because mediated war avoidance could be a major function of a well-ordered international legal system, the usefulness the existing Western legal systems seems less than adequate.III The reiteration of problematic narratives deriving from the western perspectiveMatsumoto points out that although Onuma is seeking a “trancivilisational perspective” and lists his credentials (briefly, as an Asian International Lawyer practising in Asia but mentally constructed by modern European civilisation) he cannot help using the Western classifications of states as more or less culturally developed according to Western measures. As Matsumoto observes“If we do not first deconstruct the myth of a world that follows a unique path of progress (towards Christianity, Western-style Law, the market economy, capitalism, human rights, etc.), and more specifically a progress that is exhaustively predeterminable by a small group of self-proclaimed superior people, it is impossible to obtain a critical distance from Western-centrism.”IV Potential solutions suggested by Matsumoto’s Review of this Onuma bookThese are for a new system of International Law with mankind’s place in the environment as central within that system with considerable implications for the future of mankind. This is the best legal argument for the positive restructuring of law on an environmental basis I have ever read.2.2 There Is No Read-Across From Economic or Military Supremacy To Legal Primacy or LegitimacyThe greater scientific, economic, and military development of the West has often been wrongly read across, or assumed, to create a situation of greater moral or legal primacy. The UK and USA do not have a history which involves any gentle, culturally sympathetic, or altruistic treatment of foreign or colonised people. Racism is still at the heart of the UK Conservative ruling party, and Theresa May, the now-Prime Minister, has suffered squirming embarrassment at a Commonwealth Conference because she was instrumental while in the Home Office of creating the Windrush Scandal, in which documents proving the British residential legitimacy and citizenship of Caribbean immigrants were destroyed, justifying a “Send-Them-Home” policy over which she presided and which often relocated Black British (who had lived in Britain for decades) to the Caribbean.The USA - despite Lincoln’s 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which was intended to free the Black slaves- has continued to practice the legal and informal diminishment of the rights of its native Indian and black and its more recent immigrant populations. The addendum to the 13th Amendment - that slavery is abolished “except for felons” - appears to have created a semi-legitimised Black-slave-creating-culture in some of the Southern states of the USA. Of course the Southern cotton farms needed cheap labour to continue to exist, and the police in the cotton-producing states promptly provided that cheap labour by arresting fit young Black men for minor offences and the Federal Prison system leased their re-created slave labour to the cotton farms. And once imprisoned, Blacks appear to be often mistreated in Federal prisons to ensure their continued incarceration. One statistic tells it all: of blacks arrested, 50% are never released but die in prison.And those who are released run up against a system almost design to deny the restoration of their voting rights. Released black prisoners have to appeal individually to the State Governor and travel to and get a hearing for the restitution of these voting rights and for partisan political reasons these rights may not be restored. Jeb Bush enabled the 2000 election of his brother George W by refusing voter rights restoration in Florida. SeeAll this in the country which the US Media continually describe as “the land of the free.” And see the 2008 now out-of-date but revealing Global Research reportThe Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery? - Global Research2.3 Gandhi’s Key CommentWhen Gandhi was asked“What do you think of Western Civilisation?” he famously replied“I think it would be a good idea.”2.4 It Is Not What China Lacks But What China Possesses That Is VitalThe last part of the question makes more sense if it is reversed, to read “What does China Have that the USA lacks?”This Answer is an inevitably brief summary of a great deal of research (much of it not mine) and a lot of relevant information.There is no necessary “legitimacy” in the rise of powers and major nations have tended to act in their own interests with no regard for “international law”. The League of Nations and the UN have both been failures when confronted by major nations adopting warlike policies. As Mussolini observed, “The League of Nations is all very well when sparrows shout, but is of no use at all when eagles fall out.”What China possesses isa different form of democracy based upon universal elections of local government officials and a meritocratic, well-educated central Governmenta different objective in its pursuit of economic development (rule for the prosperity of all or most the people and not rule for the increasing benefit of the already rich)a much less racist society (historically based upon the assimilation of different peoples and cultures within the Han Chinese people and their culture)a much deeper understanding of the high-growth, low inflation, no-cost investment credit economics/Shimomuran-Wernerian Macroeconomicsa tolerance of other cultures derived from the constant contact with other religions and cultures over centuriesthe central Sun Tzu/“Art of War” idea that conflicts are best settled without warsa large Initiative (the B&RI/OBOR Project) which rests upon the voluntary bilateral engagement of nations (that is, two at a time) and the currency swaps and further negotiations which present an alternative jointly agreed system of making economic progress and removing all aspects of the American third party involvement in the economic progress. This project removes any reference to the American legal system with its third party win-lose approach to the settlement of disputes, allowing conflicts to be settled perhaps more successfully by bilateral negotiation, removes the Bank of International Settlement and US currency from involvement in the initiative, reducing the US power to involve itself or affect these projects, by removing US currency from the project, and even perhaps US knowledge about the extent of the project. [For the data about the declining use of the US dollar as a reserve currency, see George Tait Edwards's answer to With the current state of world affairs, does it look like the US will pay off its debts or will the US lose is standing as economic leader (self proclaimed), and lose the power of the dollar in as the standard universal dollar?] These projects present possible alternatives to the involvement of any part of US Law or reserve-currency dollars in making bilateral real economic progress. Perhaps that is why the post-Spenglerian Western Media continually run down this initiative.3 How Economic Growth Arises I cannot fully cover this topic in this Answer, but very briefly, there are five major sources of economic growthFirst, the SMEs which in all countries are the source of most of the employment and nearly all (about 95%) of the fresh invention and innovation in that country and the major source of further future growthSecond, national prosperity is enabled by a well-developed and well funded industrial factory system upon which the living standards of the workers dependThird, economic growth is increased by a realistic economic understanding which is practised by the government of the country andFourth, the foundation of company success at every scale - in the the small, medium and large enterprises in a country - is only made possible by a system of supporting banks at all sizes within a country, which banks exist to obey Werner’s Third Law that“Thousands of small banks provide thousands or tens of thousands of small loans to small businesses, medium sized banks provide thousands of medium sized loans loans to medium sized businesses and large banks provide many large loans to large businesses.”We can regard these banks as local (like Germany’s SME-supporting Sparkassen banks) or secondary banks (like regional or local authority banks like the Lundesbanks) or primary national banks usually only located in the capital and which also provide loans to national or nationalised industries. The comments that follow are illustrations of the above four key principles but the evidence is so voluminous that it cannot be fully replicated here.Fifth, a Government-funded system to provide a social security net and for the health, education and safety of citizens along with an effective infrastructure is a large and major component of economic development and growth. The best illustration of this aspect of economic growth may be the Nordic countries, where sometimes Government employment is so large that it is the major component in the economy and hence the major reason for high economic development. Another aspect of this issue in modern times is the B&RI/OBOR project where Chinese initiative along with local government funding is upgrading road, rail, pipeline and energy production systems at a speed and on a scale not previously possible.There are numerous examples of each of these five principles and only a brief reference to the major use of each principle is mentioned below with the exception of China, which is applying each principle but sometimes not with full effect.3.1 Funding SMEs is the source of the SME inventions transferred to the factory floor and which pave the way to a greater economic future.The nation which has continually funded its SMEs from local Sparkassen banks is Germany, which has through its local public banking system founded SMEs and funded their development on a scale not present elsewhere. Because SMEs are so numerous these organisations in all nations provide not only the major sources of employment and national output but also the inventions and, where funding exists, the transfer-to-the-factory floor innovations which drive the economy forward.Many large transport-vehicle companies often only provide the body shell of the product and are actually the integration plants for tens of thousands of sub-assemblies which go into making the final product.As Werner von Braun observed about the Apollo rocket“There it goes, over 100,000 moving parts, every one built by the lowest bidder, and it all works.”Modern motor vehicles typically contain about 25,000 sub-assemblies while a Boeing 747 is built from over 5 million parts, mainly fixtures.When major manufacturing industries are closed down in the UK, the number of employees lost which is often quoted by the UK Government are the final numbers of caretakers prior to closure and not the maximum numbers of workers employed in the factory at the height of its production. The many larger tens of thousands of jobs lost in the subsidiary-parts producing and the servicing of the once-flourishing company are not usually mentioned, although these are usually by far the major effect.3.2 The Industrial Manufacturing Economy is the major source of Worker Employment and Dispersed Prosperity in All NationsThe manufacturing industries are the major employers of workers when economic miracles occur. The historical data illustrates that up to 45% of workers are gainfully employed in the manufacturing sector during the greatest dominance of these industries. In WCM economies, their manufacturing industries tends to remain in the range from about 30% to 40% of GDP. [If we look at the Tokyo Zone countries where WCM has been adopted and given up, Japan had a 30.1% share of its economic output originated by industry in 2017, while South Korea has 39.3% from that source and Taiwan has 36%. The still-practicing SWM of China has 40.1%. By contrast, the WCM-practising economies of the USA has 19.1% and the pre-Brexit UK has 20.2%.]3.3 An Understanding of No-Cost Investment Credit Creation at the Central Bank has been and is the Indispensable Key to High Economic Growth Throughout The Last Millennia in nearly all high-growth colonies and nations3.3.1 Wang Anshi’s Chinese Economic Miracle And Its Decline Under The MongolsThe Chinese Prime Minister Wang Anshi was the first investment credit economist whose actions created the world’s first industrial economy and welfare state. This is far too large a subject to be adequately dealt with here.See my limited contributions to that immense subject atHow did Wang Anshi contribute to the economic world?and also see regarding the Rise of the Tokyo Zone economies my blog atShimomuran Economics and the Rise of Japan and ChinaAs well as the first half of my article/Answer about the significance of Wang Anshi at George Tait Edwards's answer to What are major Chinese innovations?4 Financially Restrictive Economic Policies by Political “Conservatives” have Produced The End Of Hegemonic Empires during the Last Thousand YearsIt would take too long to provide the extensive references and data supporting this conclusion, but the interested reader is invite to look up and investigateThe Song Empire and its Decline Under The Conservatives After the defeat of the Mongols, no-cost investment credit creation was once again used by the Chinese governments to stimulate and achieve the then-highest level of economic development in the world. The peak period of the dynastic Ming Empire was the great heights achieved by the Yongle Emperor (who ruled from 1402–1424). That Yongle Emperor was a despotic liberal whose cruelty was as notable as his outstanding economic achievements. The Chinese Conservatives through their restrictive financial policies ended Chinese economic ascendancy in the 15th century.The Scottish Industrial Revolution 1700-1800 and its Decline Under The ConservativesThe pre-independence growth of the three Tobacco Slave states (comprised of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina) was based upon the denominated-in-pounds-of-tobacco promissory notes (or IOUs) of the Tobacco Lords who created vast amounts of circulating credit based upon the stability of tobacco prices (a “specie-backed” alternative currency) and the conversion of these IOUs to goods at the 125 Trading Posts ( or Tobacco Lord Shops) in these three colonies. This is one of the four papers of my PhD research at the University of Southampton so I will say no more about it than I already have.The first century of Scottish Industrial revolution (1900–1800) was based upon the founding of SME-supporting banks in Scotland (from the first Murdoch bank in Scotland in 1730 to the Tobacco-lord establishment of the Ship Bank and the Arms Bank in Glasgow in 1749 and many others) and 88 of the embryo Scottish SMEs were established with Tobacco and Sugar Lord investments derived from the profits of the American and West Indies slave trade plantations. See The Scottish Industrial Revolution, or The Scottish First Industrial Miracle 1700–1800FDR’s Economic Miracle 1938–44 and US Economic Decline After 1980 Under The Republicans - see para 1.1 aboveThe Japanese Economic Miracle and its Decline After It Adopted WCM in 1991 - see How Japan Zoomed From War Devastation into Prosperity 1945–52 and Professor Richard Werner’s book Princes of the Yen5 Conclusions5.1 The Anglo-Centric Legal System is a product of the UK and US Hegemonies and is too culturally embedded in these nations to achieve an international endorsement by all nations. It is culture-specific in its foundation in and references to the West and is not a transcultural legal system and its formation was not based upon all of the major cultures of mankind. It is not effective at solving international disputes.5.2 It is very unlikely that the current international legal system will survive the demise of the UK and US hegemonies because that structure is a product of their culture. A F K Organski and J Kugler, two of the leading lights of the Hegemonic Power Transfer Theory (see the Introduction above) have pointed out that when a hegemonic power transfer occurs, the arrangements that prevailed in the previous era are likely to be changed because although it is possible for these previous patterns to suit the rising hegemonic power, that is unlikely.5.3 The rising nation of China is already creating bilateral currency arrangements with most participants in the B&RI/OBOR programme. That bipartite system seems to be more readily amenable to conflict resolution than any more remote tripartite Western judicial system.5.4 In its own interests and in the best interests of the world, China needs to develop and lead a system for reversing Global Warming. Whether that needs to done within a Chinese-proposed and internationally-agreed alternative legal system is a moot point, but it does seem that a transnational and transcultural legal system might need to be developed to deal more effectively with the acceleration of national growth and the resolution of international conflicts than the Western-based UN and its underfunded institutions (IMF, World Bank, OECD etc) have done.5.5 The most interesting section of the Matsumoto Review of Onuma’s book review is its Section IV Potential solutions. The major issue is the creation of an international legal system which leads to a balanced environment with mankind within it.