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The world is changing

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with really remarkable speed.

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If you look at the chart at the top here,

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you'll see that in 2025,

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these Goldman Sachs projections

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suggest that the Chinese economy

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will be almost the same size as the American economy.

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And if you look at the chart

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for 2050,

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it's projected that the Chinese economy

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will be twice the size of the American economy,

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and the Indian economy will be almost the same size

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as the American economy.

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And we should bear in mind here

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that these projections were drawn up

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before the Western financial crisis.

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A couple of weeks ago,

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I was looking at the latest projection

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by BNP Paribas

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for when China

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will have a larger economy

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than the United States.

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Goldman Sachs projected 2027.

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The post-crisis projection

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is 2020.

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That's just a decade away.

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China is going to change the world

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in two fundamental respects.

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First of all,

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it's a huge developing country

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with a population of 1.3 billion people,

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which has been growing for over 30 years

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at around 10 percent a year.

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And within a decade,

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it will have the largest economy in the world.

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Never before in the modern era

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has the largest economy in the world

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been that of a developing country,

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rather than a developed country.

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Secondly,

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for the first time in the modern era,

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the dominant country in the world --

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which I think is what China will become --

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will be not from the West

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and from very, very different civilizational roots.

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Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West

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that as countries modernize,

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they also westernize.

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This is an illusion.

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It's an assumption that modernity

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is a product simply of competition, markets and technology.

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It is not. It is also shaped equally

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by history and culture.

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China is not like the West,

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and it will not become like the West.

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It will remain in very fundamental respects

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very different.

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Now the big question here is obviously,

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how do we make sense of China?

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How do we try to understand what China is?

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And the problem we have in the West at the moment, by and large,

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is that the conventional approach

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is that we understand it really in Western terms,

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using Western ideas.

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We can't.

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Now I want to offer you

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three building blocks

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for trying to understand what China is like,

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just as a beginning.

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The first is this:

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that China is not really a nation-state.

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Okay, it's called itself a nation-state

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for the last hundred years,

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but everyone who knows anything about China

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knows it's a lot older than this.

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This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty

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in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring-state period --

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the birth of modern China.

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And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China.

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Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty,

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still 2,000 years ago.

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And you can see already it occupies

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most of what we now know as Eastern China,

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which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then

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and live now.

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Now what is extraordinary about this

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is, what gives China its sense of being China,

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what gives the Chinese

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the sense of what it is to be Chinese,

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comes not from the last hundred years,

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not from the nation-state period,

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which is what happened in the West,

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but from the period, if you like,

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of the civilization-state.

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I'm thinking here, for example,

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of customs like ancestral worship,

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of a very distinctive notion of the state,

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likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family,

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social relationships like guanxi,

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Confucian values and so on.

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These are all things that come

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from the period of the civilization-state.

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In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world,

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is shaped by its sense of civilization,

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its existence as a civilization-state,

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rather than as a nation-state.

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And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this:

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Of course we know China's big, huge,

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demographically and geographically,

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with a population of 1.3 billion people.

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What we often aren't really aware of

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is the fact

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that China is extremely diverse

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and very pluralistic,

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and in many ways very decentralized.

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You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing,

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even though we think this to be the case.

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It's never been the case.

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So this is China, a civilization-state,

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rather than a nation-state.

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And what does it mean?

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Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications.

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I'll give you two quick ones.

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The first is that

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the most important political value for the Chinese

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is unity,

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is the maintenance

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of Chinese civilization.

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You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe:

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breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire.

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It divided, and it's remained divided ever since.

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China, over the same time period,

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went in exactly the opposite direction,

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very painfully holding this huge civilization,

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civilization-state, together.

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The second

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is maybe more prosaic,

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which is Hong Kong.

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Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong

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by Britain to China in 1997?

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You may remember

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what the Chinese constitutional proposition was.

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One country, two systems.

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And I'll lay a wager

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that barely anyone in the West believed them.

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"Window dressing.

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When China gets its hands on Hong Kong,

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that won't be the case."

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Thirteen years on,

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the political and legal system in Hong Kong

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is as different now as it was in 1997.

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We were wrong. Why were we wrong?

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We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough,

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in nation-state ways.

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Think of German unification, 1990.

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What happened?

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Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West.

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One nation, one system.

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That is the nation-state mentality.

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But you can't run a country like China,

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a civilization-state,

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on the basis of one civilization, one system.

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It doesn't work.

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So actually the response of China

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to the question of Hong Kong --

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as it will be to the question of Taiwan --

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was a natural response:

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one civilization, many systems.

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Let me offer you another building block

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to try and understand China --

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maybe not sort of a comfortable one.

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The Chinese have a very, very different

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conception of race

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to most other countries.

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Do you know,

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of the 1.3 billion Chinese,

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over 90 percent of them

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think they belong to the same race,

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the Han?

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Now, this is completely different

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from the world's [other] most populous countries.

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India, the United States,

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Indonesia, Brazil --

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all of them are multiracial.

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The Chinese don't feel like that.

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China is only multiracial

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really at the margins.

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So the question is, why?

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Well the reason, I think, essentially

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is, again, back to the civilization-state.

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A history of at least 2,000 years,

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a history of conquest, occupation,

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absorption, assimilation and so on,

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led to the process by which,

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over time, this notion of the Han emerged --

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of course, nurtured

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by a growing and very powerful sense

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of cultural identity.

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Now the great advantage of this historical experience

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has been that, without the Han,

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China could never have held together.

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The Han identity has been the cement

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which has held this country together.

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The great disadvantage of it

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is that the Han have a very weak conception

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of cultural difference.

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They really believe

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in their own superiority,

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and they are disrespectful

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of those who are not.

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Hence their attitude, for example,

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to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.

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Or let me give you my third building block,

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the Chinese state.

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Now the relationship

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between the state and society in China

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is very different from that in the West.

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Now we in the West

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overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least --

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that the authority and legitimacy of the state

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is a function of democracy.

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The problem with this proposition

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is that the Chinese state

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enjoys more legitimacy

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and more authority

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amongst the Chinese

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than is true

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with any Western state.

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And the reason for this

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is because --

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well, there are two reasons, I think.

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And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy,

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because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy.

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And the reason for this is,

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firstly, because the state in China

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is given a very special --

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it enjoys a very special significance

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as the representative,

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the embodiment and the guardian

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of Chinese civilization,

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of the civilization-state.

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This is as close as China gets

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to a kind of spiritual role.

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And the second reason is because,

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whereas in Europe

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and North America,

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the state's power is continuously challenged --

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I mean in the European tradition,

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historically against the church,

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against other sectors of the aristocracy,

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against merchants and so on --

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for 1,000 years,

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the power of the Chinese state

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has not been challenged.

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It's had no serious rivals.

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So you can see

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that the way in which power has been constructed in China

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is very different from our experience

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in Western history.

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The result, by the way,

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is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state.

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Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder,

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a stranger,

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certainly an organ

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whose powers need to be limited

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or defined and constrained,

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the Chinese don't see the state like that at all.

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The Chinese view the state

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as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually,

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as a member of the family --

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not just in fact as a member of the family,

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but as the head of the family,

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the patriarch of the family.

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This is the Chinese view of the state --

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very, very different to ours.

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It's embedded in society in a different kind of way

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to what is the case

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in the West.

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And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here,

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in the Chinese context,

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is a new kind of paradigm,

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which is different from anything

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00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:43,000
we've had to think about in the past.

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Know that China believes in the market and the state.

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I mean, Adam Smith,

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already writing in the late 18th century, said,

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"The Chinese market is larger and more developed

288
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and more sophisticated

289
00:11:56,000 --> 00:11:58,000
than anything in Europe."

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And, apart from the Mao period,

291
00:12:00,000 --> 00:12:02,000
that has remained more or less the case ever since.

292
00:12:02,000 --> 00:12:04,000
But this is combined

293
00:12:04,000 --> 00:12:08,000
with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state.

294
00:12:08,000 --> 00:12:10,000
The state is everywhere in China.

295
00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:12,000
I mean, it's leading firms --

296
00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:15,000
many of them are still publicly owned.

297
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Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo,

298
00:12:18,000 --> 00:12:20,000
depend in many ways on state patronage.

299
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Targets for the economy and so on

300
00:12:22,000 --> 00:12:24,000
are set by the state.

301
00:12:24,000 --> 00:12:26,000
And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas --

302
00:12:26,000 --> 00:12:28,000
as we are familiar with --

303
00:12:28,000 --> 00:12:30,000
with something like the one-child policy.

304
00:12:30,000 --> 00:12:33,000
Moreover, this is a very old state tradition,

305
00:12:33,000 --> 00:12:35,000
a very old tradition of statecraft.

306
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I mean, if you want an illustration of this,

307
00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:40,000
the Great Wall is one.

308
00:12:40,000 --> 00:12:42,000
But this is another, this is the Grand Canal,

309
00:12:42,000 --> 00:12:44,000
which was constructed in the first instance

310
00:12:44,000 --> 00:12:46,000
in the fifth century B.C.

311
00:12:46,000 --> 00:12:48,000
and was finally completed

312
00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:50,000
in the seventh century A.D.

313
00:12:50,000 --> 00:12:54,000
It went for 1,114 miles,

314
00:12:54,000 --> 00:12:56,000
linking Beijing

315
00:12:56,000 --> 00:12:59,000
with Hangzhou and Shanghai.

316
00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:01,000
So there's a long history

317
00:13:01,000 --> 00:13:04,000
of extraordinary state infrastructural projects

318
00:13:04,000 --> 00:13:06,000
in China,

319
00:13:06,000 --> 00:13:09,000
which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today,

320
00:13:09,000 --> 00:13:11,000
which is something like the Three Gorges Dam

321
00:13:11,000 --> 00:13:13,000
and many other expressions

322
00:13:13,000 --> 00:13:15,000
of state competence

323
00:13:15,000 --> 00:13:17,000
within China.

324
00:13:17,000 --> 00:13:20,000
So there we have three building blocks

325
00:13:20,000 --> 00:13:23,000
for trying to understand the difference that is China --

326
00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:26,000
the civilization-state,

327
00:13:26,000 --> 00:13:28,000
the notion of race

328
00:13:28,000 --> 00:13:30,000
and the nature of the state

329
00:13:30,000 --> 00:13:33,000
and its relationship to society.

330
00:13:33,000 --> 00:13:36,000
And yet we still insist, by and large,

331
00:13:36,000 --> 00:13:40,000
in thinking that we can understand China

332
00:13:40,000 --> 00:13:43,000
by simply drawing on Western experience,

333
00:13:43,000 --> 00:13:46,000
looking at it through Western eyes,

334
00:13:46,000 --> 00:13:48,000
using Western concepts.

335
00:13:48,000 --> 00:13:50,000
If you want to know why

336
00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:53,000
we unerringly seem to get China wrong --

337
00:13:53,000 --> 00:13:56,000
our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect --

338
00:13:56,000 --> 00:14:00,000
this is the reason.

339
00:14:00,000 --> 00:14:02,000
Unfortunately, I think,

340
00:14:02,000 --> 00:14:05,000
I have to say that I think

341
00:14:05,000 --> 00:14:07,000
attitude towards China

342
00:14:07,000 --> 00:14:10,000
is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality.

343
00:14:10,000 --> 00:14:12,000
It's kind of arrogant.

344
00:14:12,000 --> 00:14:14,000
It's arrogant in the sense

345
00:14:14,000 --> 00:14:16,000
that we think that we are best,

346
00:14:16,000 --> 00:14:19,000
and therefore we have the universal measure.

347
00:14:20,000 --> 00:14:22,000
And secondly, it's ignorant.

348
00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:25,000
We refuse to really address

349
00:14:25,000 --> 00:14:27,000
the issue of difference.

350
00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:29,000
You know, there's a very interesting passage

351
00:14:29,000 --> 00:14:32,000
in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian.

352
00:14:32,000 --> 00:14:35,000
And Paul Cohen argues

353
00:14:35,000 --> 00:14:39,000
that the West thinks of itself

354
00:14:39,000 --> 00:14:41,000
as probably the most cosmopolitan

355
00:14:41,000 --> 00:14:43,000
of all cultures.

356
00:14:43,000 --> 00:14:45,000
But it's not.

357
00:14:45,000 --> 00:14:47,000
In many ways,

358
00:14:47,000 --> 00:14:49,000
it's the most parochial,

359
00:14:49,000 --> 00:14:52,000
because for 200 years,

360
00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:55,000
the West has been so dominant in the world

361
00:14:55,000 --> 00:14:57,000
that it's not really needed

362
00:14:57,000 --> 00:15:00,000
to understand other cultures,

363
00:15:00,000 --> 00:15:02,000
other civilizations.

364
00:15:02,000 --> 00:15:04,000
Because, at the end of the day,

365
00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:07,000
it could, if necessary by force,

366
00:15:07,000 --> 00:15:09,000
get its own way.

367
00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:11,000
Whereas those cultures --

368
00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:14,000
virtually the rest of the world, in fact,

369
00:15:14,000 --> 00:15:17,000
which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West --

370
00:15:17,000 --> 00:15:20,000
have been thereby forced to understand the West,

371
00:15:20,000 --> 00:15:23,000
because of the West's presence in those societies.

372
00:15:23,000 --> 00:15:26,000
And therefore, they are, as a result,

373
00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:29,000
more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.

374
00:15:29,000 --> 00:15:31,000
I mean, take the question of East Asia.

375
00:15:31,000 --> 00:15:34,000
East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. --

376
00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:36,000
a third of the world's population lives there.

377
00:15:36,000 --> 00:15:38,000
Now the largest economic region in the world.

378
00:15:38,000 --> 00:15:40,000
And I'll tell you now,

379
00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:42,000
that East Asianers, people from East Asia,

380
00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:44,000
are far more knowledgeable

381
00:15:44,000 --> 00:15:46,000
about the West

382
00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:50,000
than the West is about East Asia.

383
00:15:50,000 --> 00:15:53,000
Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid,

384
00:15:53,000 --> 00:15:55,000
to the present.

385
00:15:55,000 --> 00:15:58,000
Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning,

386
00:15:58,000 --> 00:16:00,000
the Goldman Sachs chart.

387
00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:02,000
What is happening

388
00:16:02,000 --> 00:16:05,000
is that, very rapidly in historical terms,

389
00:16:05,000 --> 00:16:08,000
the world is being driven

390
00:16:08,000 --> 00:16:10,000
and shaped,

391
00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:12,000
not by the old developed countries,

392
00:16:12,000 --> 00:16:14,000
but by the developing world.

393
00:16:14,000 --> 00:16:16,000
We've seen this

394
00:16:16,000 --> 00:16:18,000
in terms of the G20

395
00:16:18,000 --> 00:16:21,000
usurping very rapidly the position of the G7,

396
00:16:21,000 --> 00:16:24,000
or the G8.

397
00:16:25,000 --> 00:16:28,000
And there are two consequences of this.

398
00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:30,000
First, the West

399
00:16:30,000 --> 00:16:32,000
is rapidly losing

400
00:16:32,000 --> 00:16:34,000
its influence in the world.

401
00:16:34,000 --> 00:16:37,000
There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago --

402
00:16:37,000 --> 00:16:39,000
Copenhagen, climate change conference.

403
00:16:39,000 --> 00:16:41,000
Europe was not at the final negotiating table.

404
00:16:41,000 --> 00:16:43,000
When did that last happen?

405
00:16:43,000 --> 00:16:46,000
I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago.

406
00:16:46,000 --> 00:16:49,000
And that is what is going to happen in the future.

407
00:16:49,000 --> 00:16:51,000
And the second implication

408
00:16:51,000 --> 00:16:54,000
is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence,

409
00:16:54,000 --> 00:16:58,000
become increasingly unfamiliar to us,

410
00:16:58,000 --> 00:17:01,000
because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories

411
00:17:01,000 --> 00:17:04,000
that we are not really familiar with,

412
00:17:04,000 --> 00:17:06,000
or conversant with.

413
00:17:06,000 --> 00:17:08,000
And at last, I'm afraid -- take Europe;

414
00:17:08,000 --> 00:17:10,000
America is slightly different --

415
00:17:10,000 --> 00:17:13,000
but Europeans by and large, I have to say,

416
00:17:13,000 --> 00:17:16,000
are ignorant,

417
00:17:16,000 --> 00:17:18,000
are unaware

418
00:17:18,000 --> 00:17:21,000
about the way the world is changing.

419
00:17:21,000 --> 00:17:24,000
Some people -- I've got an English friend in China,

420
00:17:24,000 --> 00:17:27,000
and he said, "The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion."

421
00:17:29,000 --> 00:17:31,000
Well, maybe that's true,

422
00:17:31,000 --> 00:17:33,000
maybe that's an exaggeration.

423
00:17:33,000 --> 00:17:36,000
But there's another problem which goes along with this --

424
00:17:36,000 --> 00:17:39,000
that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world --

425
00:17:39,000 --> 00:17:42,000
and that is a sort of

426
00:17:42,000 --> 00:17:44,000
loss of a sense of the future.

427
00:17:44,000 --> 00:17:47,000
I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future

428
00:17:47,000 --> 00:17:49,000
in its confidence.

429
00:17:49,000 --> 00:17:52,000
Take the 19th century, for example.

430
00:17:52,000 --> 00:17:55,000
But this, alas, is no longer true.

431
00:17:55,000 --> 00:17:58,000
If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future,

432
00:17:58,000 --> 00:18:01,000
try China -- there's old Confucius.

433
00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:03,000
This is a railway station

434
00:18:03,000 --> 00:18:05,000
the likes of which you've never seen before.

435
00:18:05,000 --> 00:18:07,000
It doesn't even look like a railway station.

436
00:18:07,000 --> 00:18:09,000
This is the new Guangzhou railway station

437
00:18:09,000 --> 00:18:11,000
for the high-speed trains.

438
00:18:11,000 --> 00:18:13,000
China already has a bigger network

439
00:18:13,000 --> 00:18:15,000
than any other country in the world

440
00:18:15,000 --> 00:18:19,000
and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together.

441
00:18:19,000 --> 00:18:21,000
Or take this: now this is an idea,

442
00:18:21,000 --> 00:18:24,000
but it's an idea to be tried out shortly

443
00:18:24,000 --> 00:18:26,000
in a suburb of Beijing.

444
00:18:26,000 --> 00:18:29,000
Here you have a megabus,

445
00:18:29,000 --> 00:18:32,000
on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people.

446
00:18:32,000 --> 00:18:34,000
It travels on rails

447
00:18:34,000 --> 00:18:36,000
down a suburban road,

448
00:18:36,000 --> 00:18:39,000
and the cars travel underneath it.

449
00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:42,000
And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour.

450
00:18:42,000 --> 00:18:45,000
Now this is the way things are going to move,

451
00:18:45,000 --> 00:18:47,000
because China has a very specific problem,

452
00:18:47,000 --> 00:18:49,000
which is different from Europe

453
00:18:49,000 --> 00:18:51,000
and different from the United States:

454
00:18:51,000 --> 00:18:54,000
China has huge numbers of people and no space.

455
00:18:54,000 --> 00:18:56,000
So this is a solution to a situation

456
00:18:56,000 --> 00:18:58,000
where China's going to have

457
00:18:58,000 --> 00:19:00,000
many, many, many cities

458
00:19:00,000 --> 00:19:02,000
over 20 million people.

459
00:19:02,000 --> 00:19:05,000
Okay, so how would I like to finish?

460
00:19:05,000 --> 00:19:08,000
Well, what should our attitude be

461
00:19:08,000 --> 00:19:11,000
towards this world

462
00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:13,000
that we see

463
00:19:13,000 --> 00:19:15,000
very rapidly developing

464
00:19:15,000 --> 00:19:17,000
before us?

465
00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:21,000
I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it.

466
00:19:21,000 --> 00:19:23,000
But I want to argue, above all,

467
00:19:23,000 --> 00:19:26,000
a big-picture positive for this world.

468
00:19:28,000 --> 00:19:30,000
For 200 years,

469
00:19:30,000 --> 00:19:36,000
the world was essentially governed

470
00:19:36,000 --> 00:19:40,000
by a fragment of the human population.

471
00:19:40,000 --> 00:19:44,000
That's what Europe and North America represented.

472
00:19:44,000 --> 00:19:46,000
The arrival of countries

473
00:19:46,000 --> 00:19:48,000
like China and India --

474
00:19:48,000 --> 00:19:50,000
between them 38 percent of the world's population --

475
00:19:50,000 --> 00:19:53,000
and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on,

476
00:19:56,000 --> 00:19:59,000
represent the most important single act

477
00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:01,000
of democratization

478
00:20:01,000 --> 00:20:03,000
in the last 200 years.

479
00:20:03,000 --> 00:20:05,000
Civilizations and cultures,

480
00:20:05,000 --> 00:20:08,000
which had been ignored, which had no voice,

481
00:20:08,000 --> 00:20:10,000
which were not listened to, which were not known about,

482
00:20:10,000 --> 00:20:12,000
will have a different sort

483
00:20:12,000 --> 00:20:15,000
of representation in this world.

484
00:20:15,000 --> 00:20:17,000
As humanists, we must welcome, surely,

485
00:20:17,000 --> 00:20:19,000
this transformation,

486
00:20:19,000 --> 00:20:21,000
and we will have to learn

487
00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:23,000
about these civilizations.

488
00:20:23,000 --> 00:20:26,000
This big ship here

489
00:20:26,000 --> 00:20:28,000
was the one sailed in by Zheng He

490
00:20:28,000 --> 00:20:30,000
in the early 15th century

491
00:20:30,000 --> 00:20:32,000
on his great voyages

492
00:20:32,000 --> 00:20:35,000
around the South China Sea, the East China Sea

493
00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:38,000
and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa.

494
00:20:38,000 --> 00:20:42,000
The little boat in front of it

495
00:20:42,000 --> 00:20:44,000
was the one in which, 80 years later,

496
00:20:44,000 --> 00:20:47,000
Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

497
00:20:47,000 --> 00:20:49,000
(Laughter)

498
00:20:49,000 --> 00:20:51,000
Or, look carefully

499
00:20:51,000 --> 00:20:53,000
at this silk scroll

500
00:20:53,000 --> 00:20:56,000
made by ZhuZhou

501
00:20:56,000 --> 00:20:59,000
in 1368.

502
00:20:59,000 --> 00:21:01,000
I think they're playing golf.

503
00:21:01,000 --> 00:21:04,000
Christ, the Chinese even invented golf.

504
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:07,000
Welcome to the future. Thank you.

505
00:21:07,000 --> 00:21:10,000
(Applause)