WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.000
The world is changing

00:00:02.000 --> 00:00:05.000
with really remarkable speed.

00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:07.000
If you look at the chart at the top here,

00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:09.000
you'll see that in 2025,

00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:11.000
these Goldman Sachs projections

00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:13.000
suggest that the Chinese economy

00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:16.000
will be almost the same size as the American economy.

00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:19.000
And if you look at the chart

00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:21.000
for 2050,

00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:24.000
it's projected that the Chinese economy

00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:27.000
will be twice the size of the American economy,

00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:29.000
and the Indian economy will be almost the same size

00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:32.000
as the American economy.

00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:34.000
And we should bear in mind here

00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:36.000
that these projections were drawn up

00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:39.000
before the Western financial crisis.

NOTE Paragraph

00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:41.000
A couple of weeks ago,

00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:43.000
I was looking at the latest projection

00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:45.000
by BNP Paribas

00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:48.000
for when China

00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:50.000
will have a larger economy

00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:52.000
than the United States.

00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:56.000
Goldman Sachs projected 2027.

00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:59.000
The post-crisis projection

00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:02.000
is 2020.

00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:04.000
That's just a decade away.

00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:08.000
China is going to change the world

00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:11.000
in two fundamental respects.

00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:13.000
First of all,

00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:15.000
it's a huge developing country

00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:19.000
with a population of 1.3 billion people,

00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:22.000
which has been growing for over 30 years

00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:24.000
at around 10 percent a year.

NOTE Paragraph

00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:26.000
And within a decade,

00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:30.000
it will have the largest economy in the world.

00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:33.000
Never before in the modern era

00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:36.000
has the largest economy in the world

00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:38.000
been that of a developing country,

00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:41.000
rather than a developed country.

00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:44.000
Secondly,

00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:46.000
for the first time in the modern era,

00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:48.000
the dominant country in the world --

00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:51.000
which I think is what China will become --

00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:54.000
will be not from the West

00:01:54.000 --> 00:01:58.000
and from very, very different civilizational roots.

NOTE Paragraph

00:01:58.000 --> 00:02:02.000
Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West

00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:05.000
that as countries modernize,

00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:07.000
they also westernize.

00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:09.000
This is an illusion.

00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:11.000
It's an assumption that modernity

00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:14.000
is a product simply of competition, markets and technology.

00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:16.000
It is not. It is also shaped equally

00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:18.000
by history and culture.

00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:21.000
China is not like the West,

00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:24.000
and it will not become like the West.

00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:26.000
It will remain in very fundamental respects

00:02:26.000 --> 00:02:28.000
very different.

00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:31.000
Now the big question here is obviously,

00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:33.000
how do we make sense of China?

00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:35.000
How do we try to understand what China is?

00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:38.000
And the problem we have in the West at the moment, by and large,

00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:40.000
is that the conventional approach

00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:42.000
is that we understand it really in Western terms,

00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:45.000
using Western ideas.

00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:47.000
We can't.

00:02:47.000 --> 00:02:49.000
Now I want to offer you

00:02:49.000 --> 00:02:51.000
three building blocks

00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:54.000
for trying to understand what China is like,

00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:56.000
just as a beginning.

NOTE Paragraph

00:02:56.000 --> 00:02:58.000
The first is this:

00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:01.000
that China is not really a nation-state.

00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:03.000
Okay, it's called itself a nation-state

00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:05.000
for the last hundred years,

00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:07.000
but everyone who knows anything about China

00:03:07.000 --> 00:03:09.000
knows it's a lot older than this.

00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:12.000
This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty

00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:15.000
in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring-state period --

00:03:15.000 --> 00:03:17.000
the birth of modern China.

00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:20.000
And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China.

00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:22.000
Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty,

00:03:22.000 --> 00:03:24.000
still 2,000 years ago.

00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:26.000
And you can see already it occupies

00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:28.000
most of what we now know as Eastern China,

00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:31.000
which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then

00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:33.000
and live now.

NOTE Paragraph

00:03:33.000 --> 00:03:35.000
Now what is extraordinary about this

00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:38.000
is, what gives China its sense of being China,

00:03:38.000 --> 00:03:41.000
what gives the Chinese

00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:44.000
the sense of what it is to be Chinese,

00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:46.000
comes not from the last hundred years,

00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:48.000
not from the nation-state period,

00:03:48.000 --> 00:03:51.000
which is what happened in the West,

00:03:51.000 --> 00:03:53.000
but from the period, if you like,

00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:55.000
of the civilization-state.

00:03:55.000 --> 00:03:58.000
I'm thinking here, for example,

00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:01.000
of customs like ancestral worship,

00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:04.000
of a very distinctive notion of the state,

00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:07.000
likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family,

00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:09.000
social relationships like guanxi,

00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:11.000
Confucian values and so on.

00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:13.000
These are all things that come

00:04:13.000 --> 00:04:16.000
from the period of the civilization-state.

00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:19.000
In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world,

00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:22.000
is shaped by its sense of civilization,

00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:24.000
its existence as a civilization-state,

00:04:24.000 --> 00:04:26.000
rather than as a nation-state.

00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:29.000
And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this:

00:04:29.000 --> 00:04:31.000
Of course we know China's big, huge,

00:04:31.000 --> 00:04:34.000
demographically and geographically,

00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:37.000
with a population of 1.3 billion people.

00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:40.000
What we often aren't really aware of

00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:42.000
is the fact

00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:44.000
that China is extremely diverse

00:04:44.000 --> 00:04:46.000
and very pluralistic,

00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:48.000
and in many ways very decentralized.

00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:51.000
You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing,

00:04:51.000 --> 00:04:54.000
even though we think this to be the case.

00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:57.000
It's never been the case.

NOTE Paragraph

00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:00.000
So this is China, a civilization-state,

00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:02.000
rather than a nation-state.

00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:04.000
And what does it mean?

00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:06.000
Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications.

00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:08.000
I'll give you two quick ones.

00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:10.000
The first is that

00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:14.000
the most important political value for the Chinese

00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:16.000
is unity,

00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:18.000
is the maintenance

00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:20.000
of Chinese civilization.

00:05:20.000 --> 00:05:23.000
You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe:

00:05:23.000 --> 00:05:26.000
breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire.

00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:29.000
It divided, and it's remained divided ever since.

00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:31.000
China, over the same time period,

00:05:31.000 --> 00:05:33.000
went in exactly the opposite direction,

00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:36.000
very painfully holding this huge civilization,

00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:39.000
civilization-state, together.

NOTE Paragraph

00:05:39.000 --> 00:05:41.000
The second

00:05:41.000 --> 00:05:43.000
is maybe more prosaic,

00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:45.000
which is Hong Kong.

00:05:45.000 --> 00:05:48.000
Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong

00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:50.000
by Britain to China in 1997?

00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:52.000
You may remember

00:05:52.000 --> 00:05:54.000
what the Chinese constitutional proposition was.

00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:56.000
One country, two systems.

00:05:56.000 --> 00:05:58.000
And I'll lay a wager

00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:00.000
that barely anyone in the West believed them.

00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:02.000
"Window dressing.

00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:04.000
When China gets its hands on Hong Kong,

00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:06.000
that won't be the case."

00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:08.000
Thirteen years on,

00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:10.000
the political and legal system in Hong Kong

00:06:10.000 --> 00:06:13.000
is as different now as it was in 1997.

00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:16.000
We were wrong. Why were we wrong?

00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:19.000
We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough,

00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:21.000
in nation-state ways.

00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:23.000
Think of German unification, 1990.

00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:25.000
What happened?

00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:27.000
Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West.

00:06:27.000 --> 00:06:29.000
One nation, one system.

00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:32.000
That is the nation-state mentality.

00:06:32.000 --> 00:06:35.000
But you can't run a country like China,

00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:37.000
a civilization-state,

00:06:37.000 --> 00:06:40.000
on the basis of one civilization, one system.

00:06:40.000 --> 00:06:42.000
It doesn't work.

00:06:42.000 --> 00:06:45.000
So actually the response of China

00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:47.000
to the question of Hong Kong --

00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:49.000
as it will be to the question of Taiwan --

00:06:49.000 --> 00:06:51.000
was a natural response:

00:06:51.000 --> 00:06:54.000
one civilization, many systems.

NOTE Paragraph

00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:56.000
Let me offer you another building block

00:06:56.000 --> 00:06:58.000
to try and understand China --

00:06:58.000 --> 00:07:01.000
maybe not sort of a comfortable one.

00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:03.000
The Chinese have a very, very different

00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:05.000
conception of race

00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:08.000
to most other countries.

00:07:08.000 --> 00:07:10.000
Do you know,

00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:13.000
of the 1.3 billion Chinese,

00:07:13.000 --> 00:07:15.000
over 90 percent of them

00:07:15.000 --> 00:07:18.000
think they belong to the same race,

00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:20.000
the Han?

00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:22.000
Now, this is completely different

00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:25.000
from the world's [other] most populous countries.

00:07:25.000 --> 00:07:27.000
India, the United States,

00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:30.000
Indonesia, Brazil --

00:07:30.000 --> 00:07:33.000
all of them are multiracial.

00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:36.000
The Chinese don't feel like that.

00:07:36.000 --> 00:07:38.000
China is only multiracial

00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:41.000
really at the margins.

00:07:41.000 --> 00:07:43.000
So the question is, why?

00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:45.000
Well the reason, I think, essentially

00:07:45.000 --> 00:07:48.000
is, again, back to the civilization-state.

00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:51.000
A history of at least 2,000 years,

00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:53.000
a history of conquest, occupation,

00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:55.000
absorption, assimilation and so on,

00:07:55.000 --> 00:07:57.000
led to the process by which,

00:07:57.000 --> 00:08:00.000
over time, this notion of the Han emerged --

00:08:00.000 --> 00:08:02.000
of course, nurtured

00:08:02.000 --> 00:08:05.000
by a growing and very powerful sense

00:08:05.000 --> 00:08:08.000
of cultural identity.

NOTE Paragraph

00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:11.000
Now the great advantage of this historical experience

00:08:11.000 --> 00:08:15.000
has been that, without the Han,

00:08:15.000 --> 00:08:17.000
China could never have held together.

00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:20.000
The Han identity has been the cement

00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:23.000
which has held this country together.

00:08:23.000 --> 00:08:25.000
The great disadvantage of it

00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:27.000
is that the Han have a very weak conception

00:08:27.000 --> 00:08:29.000
of cultural difference.

00:08:29.000 --> 00:08:32.000
They really believe

00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:34.000
in their own superiority,

00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:36.000
and they are disrespectful

00:08:36.000 --> 00:08:38.000
of those who are not.

00:08:38.000 --> 00:08:40.000
Hence their attitude, for example,

00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:43.000
to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.

NOTE Paragraph

00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:46.000
Or let me give you my third building block,

00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:48.000
the Chinese state.

00:08:48.000 --> 00:08:50.000
Now the relationship

00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:53.000
between the state and society in China

00:08:53.000 --> 00:08:56.000
is very different from that in the West.

00:08:57.000 --> 00:08:59.000
Now we in the West

00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:01.000
overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least --

00:09:01.000 --> 00:09:05.000
that the authority and legitimacy of the state

00:09:05.000 --> 00:09:08.000
is a function of democracy.

00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:10.000
The problem with this proposition

00:09:10.000 --> 00:09:14.000
is that the Chinese state

00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:16.000
enjoys more legitimacy

00:09:16.000 --> 00:09:18.000
and more authority

00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:21.000
amongst the Chinese

00:09:21.000 --> 00:09:23.000
than is true

00:09:23.000 --> 00:09:26.000
with any Western state.

00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:29.000
And the reason for this

00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:31.000
is because --

00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:33.000
well, there are two reasons, I think.

00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:35.000
And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy,

00:09:35.000 --> 00:09:38.000
because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy.

00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:40.000
And the reason for this is,

00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:43.000
firstly, because the state in China

00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:46.000
is given a very special --

00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:48.000
it enjoys a very special significance

00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:50.000
as the representative,

00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:53.000
the embodiment and the guardian

00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:55.000
of Chinese civilization,

00:09:55.000 --> 00:09:58.000
of the civilization-state.

00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:00.000
This is as close as China gets

00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:03.000
to a kind of spiritual role.

NOTE Paragraph

00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:06.000
And the second reason is because,

00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:08.000
whereas in Europe

00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:10.000
and North America,

00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:13.000
the state's power is continuously challenged --

00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:15.000
I mean in the European tradition,

00:10:15.000 --> 00:10:17.000
historically against the church,

00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:19.000
against other sectors of the aristocracy,

00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:21.000
against merchants and so on --

00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:23.000
for 1,000 years,

00:10:23.000 --> 00:10:25.000
the power of the Chinese state

00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:27.000
has not been challenged.

00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:30.000
It's had no serious rivals.

00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:33.000
So you can see

00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:37.000
that the way in which power has been constructed in China

00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:39.000
is very different from our experience

00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:42.000
in Western history.

00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:44.000
The result, by the way,

00:10:44.000 --> 00:10:48.000
is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state.

00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:52.000
Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder,

00:10:52.000 --> 00:10:55.000
a stranger,

00:10:55.000 --> 00:10:57.000
certainly an organ

00:10:57.000 --> 00:11:00.000
whose powers need to be limited

00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:02.000
or defined and constrained,

00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:04.000
the Chinese don't see the state like that at all.

00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:07.000
The Chinese view the state

00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:10.000
as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually,

00:11:10.000 --> 00:11:12.000
as a member of the family --

00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:14.000
not just in fact as a member of the family,

00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:16.000
but as the head of the family,

00:11:16.000 --> 00:11:18.000
the patriarch of the family.

00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:21.000
This is the Chinese view of the state --

00:11:21.000 --> 00:11:23.000
very, very different to ours.

00:11:23.000 --> 00:11:26.000
It's embedded in society in a different kind of way

00:11:26.000 --> 00:11:28.000
to what is the case

00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:30.000
in the West.

NOTE Paragraph

00:11:30.000 --> 00:11:33.000
And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here,

00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:36.000
in the Chinese context,

00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:38.000
is a new kind of paradigm,

00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:40.000
which is different from anything

00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:43.000
we've had to think about in the past.

00:11:44.000 --> 00:11:47.000
Know that China believes in the market and the state.

00:11:47.000 --> 00:11:49.000
I mean, Adam Smith,

00:11:49.000 --> 00:11:52.000
already writing in the late 18th century, said,

00:11:52.000 --> 00:11:54.000
"The Chinese market is larger and more developed

00:11:54.000 --> 00:11:56.000
and more sophisticated

00:11:56.000 --> 00:11:58.000
than anything in Europe."

00:11:58.000 --> 00:12:00.000
And, apart from the Mao period,

00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:02.000
that has remained more or less the case ever since.

00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:04.000
But this is combined

00:12:04.000 --> 00:12:08.000
with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state.

00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:10.000
The state is everywhere in China.

00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:12.000
I mean, it's leading firms --

00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:15.000
many of them are still publicly owned.

00:12:15.000 --> 00:12:18.000
Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo,

00:12:18.000 --> 00:12:20.000
depend in many ways on state patronage.

00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:22.000
Targets for the economy and so on

00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:24.000
are set by the state.

00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:26.000
And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas --

00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:28.000
as we are familiar with --

00:12:28.000 --> 00:12:30.000
with something like the one-child policy.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:30.000 --> 00:12:33.000
Moreover, this is a very old state tradition,

00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:35.000
a very old tradition of statecraft.

00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:38.000
I mean, if you want an illustration of this,

00:12:38.000 --> 00:12:40.000
the Great Wall is one.

00:12:40.000 --> 00:12:42.000
But this is another, this is the Grand Canal,

00:12:42.000 --> 00:12:44.000
which was constructed in the first instance

00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:46.000
in the fifth century B.C.

00:12:46.000 --> 00:12:48.000
and was finally completed

00:12:48.000 --> 00:12:50.000
in the seventh century A.D.

00:12:50.000 --> 00:12:54.000
It went for 1,114 miles,

00:12:54.000 --> 00:12:56.000
linking Beijing

00:12:56.000 --> 00:12:59.000
with Hangzhou and Shanghai.

00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:01.000
So there's a long history

00:13:01.000 --> 00:13:04.000
of extraordinary state infrastructural projects

00:13:04.000 --> 00:13:06.000
in China,

00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:09.000
which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today,

00:13:09.000 --> 00:13:11.000
which is something like the Three Gorges Dam

00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:13.000
and many other expressions

00:13:13.000 --> 00:13:15.000
of state competence

00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:17.000
within China.

00:13:17.000 --> 00:13:20.000
So there we have three building blocks

00:13:20.000 --> 00:13:23.000
for trying to understand the difference that is China --

00:13:23.000 --> 00:13:26.000
the civilization-state,

00:13:26.000 --> 00:13:28.000
the notion of race

00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:30.000
and the nature of the state

00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:33.000
and its relationship to society.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:33.000 --> 00:13:36.000
And yet we still insist, by and large,

00:13:36.000 --> 00:13:40.000
in thinking that we can understand China

00:13:40.000 --> 00:13:43.000
by simply drawing on Western experience,

00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:46.000
looking at it through Western eyes,

00:13:46.000 --> 00:13:48.000
using Western concepts.

00:13:48.000 --> 00:13:50.000
If you want to know why

00:13:50.000 --> 00:13:53.000
we unerringly seem to get China wrong --

00:13:53.000 --> 00:13:56.000
our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect --

00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:00.000
this is the reason.

00:14:00.000 --> 00:14:02.000
Unfortunately, I think,

00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:05.000
I have to say that I think

00:14:05.000 --> 00:14:07.000
attitude towards China

00:14:07.000 --> 00:14:10.000
is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality.

00:14:10.000 --> 00:14:12.000
It's kind of arrogant.

00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:14.000
It's arrogant in the sense

00:14:14.000 --> 00:14:16.000
that we think that we are best,

00:14:16.000 --> 00:14:19.000
and therefore we have the universal measure.

00:14:20.000 --> 00:14:22.000
And secondly, it's ignorant.

00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:25.000
We refuse to really address

00:14:25.000 --> 00:14:27.000
the issue of difference.

00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:29.000
You know, there's a very interesting passage

00:14:29.000 --> 00:14:32.000
in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian.

00:14:32.000 --> 00:14:35.000
And Paul Cohen argues

00:14:35.000 --> 00:14:39.000
that the West thinks of itself

00:14:39.000 --> 00:14:41.000
as probably the most cosmopolitan

00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:43.000
of all cultures.

00:14:43.000 --> 00:14:45.000
But it's not.

00:14:45.000 --> 00:14:47.000
In many ways,

00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:49.000
it's the most parochial,

00:14:49.000 --> 00:14:52.000
because for 200 years,

00:14:52.000 --> 00:14:55.000
the West has been so dominant in the world

00:14:55.000 --> 00:14:57.000
that it's not really needed

00:14:57.000 --> 00:15:00.000
to understand other cultures,

00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:02.000
other civilizations.

00:15:02.000 --> 00:15:04.000
Because, at the end of the day,

00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:07.000
it could, if necessary by force,

00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:09.000
get its own way.

00:15:09.000 --> 00:15:11.000
Whereas those cultures --

00:15:11.000 --> 00:15:14.000
virtually the rest of the world, in fact,

00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:17.000
which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West --

00:15:17.000 --> 00:15:20.000
have been thereby forced to understand the West,

00:15:20.000 --> 00:15:23.000
because of the West's presence in those societies.

00:15:23.000 --> 00:15:26.000
And therefore, they are, as a result,

00:15:26.000 --> 00:15:29.000
more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:29.000 --> 00:15:31.000
I mean, take the question of East Asia.

00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:34.000
East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. --

00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:36.000
a third of the world's population lives there.

00:15:36.000 --> 00:15:38.000
Now the largest economic region in the world.

00:15:38.000 --> 00:15:40.000
And I'll tell you now,

00:15:40.000 --> 00:15:42.000
that East Asianers, people from East Asia,

00:15:42.000 --> 00:15:44.000
are far more knowledgeable

00:15:44.000 --> 00:15:46.000
about the West

00:15:46.000 --> 00:15:50.000
than the West is about East Asia.

00:15:50.000 --> 00:15:53.000
Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid,

00:15:53.000 --> 00:15:55.000
to the present.

00:15:55.000 --> 00:15:58.000
Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning,

00:15:58.000 --> 00:16:00.000
the Goldman Sachs chart.

00:16:00.000 --> 00:16:02.000
What is happening

00:16:02.000 --> 00:16:05.000
is that, very rapidly in historical terms,

00:16:05.000 --> 00:16:08.000
the world is being driven

00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:10.000
and shaped,

00:16:10.000 --> 00:16:12.000
not by the old developed countries,

00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:14.000
but by the developing world.

00:16:14.000 --> 00:16:16.000
We've seen this

00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:18.000
in terms of the G20

00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:21.000
usurping very rapidly the position of the G7,

00:16:21.000 --> 00:16:24.000
or the G8.

00:16:25.000 --> 00:16:28.000
And there are two consequences of this.

00:16:28.000 --> 00:16:30.000
First, the West

00:16:30.000 --> 00:16:32.000
is rapidly losing

00:16:32.000 --> 00:16:34.000
its influence in the world.

00:16:34.000 --> 00:16:37.000
There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago --

00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:39.000
Copenhagen, climate change conference.

00:16:39.000 --> 00:16:41.000
Europe was not at the final negotiating table.

00:16:41.000 --> 00:16:43.000
When did that last happen?

00:16:43.000 --> 00:16:46.000
I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago.

00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:49.000
And that is what is going to happen in the future.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:49.000 --> 00:16:51.000
And the second implication

00:16:51.000 --> 00:16:54.000
is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence,

00:16:54.000 --> 00:16:58.000
become increasingly unfamiliar to us,

00:16:58.000 --> 00:17:01.000
because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories

00:17:01.000 --> 00:17:04.000
that we are not really familiar with,

00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:06.000
or conversant with.

00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:08.000
And at last, I'm afraid -- take Europe;

00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:10.000
America is slightly different --

00:17:10.000 --> 00:17:13.000
but Europeans by and large, I have to say,

00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:16.000
are ignorant,

00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:18.000
are unaware

00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:21.000
about the way the world is changing.

00:17:21.000 --> 00:17:24.000
Some people -- I've got an English friend in China,

00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:27.000
and he said, "The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion."

00:17:29.000 --> 00:17:31.000
Well, maybe that's true,

00:17:31.000 --> 00:17:33.000
maybe that's an exaggeration.

00:17:33.000 --> 00:17:36.000
But there's another problem which goes along with this --

00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:39.000
that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world --

00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:42.000
and that is a sort of

00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:44.000
loss of a sense of the future.

00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:47.000
I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future

00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:49.000
in its confidence.

00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:52.000
Take the 19th century, for example.

00:17:52.000 --> 00:17:55.000
But this, alas, is no longer true.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:55.000 --> 00:17:58.000
If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future,

00:17:58.000 --> 00:18:01.000
try China -- there's old Confucius.

00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:03.000
This is a railway station

00:18:03.000 --> 00:18:05.000
the likes of which you've never seen before.

00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:07.000
It doesn't even look like a railway station.

00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:09.000
This is the new Guangzhou railway station

00:18:09.000 --> 00:18:11.000
for the high-speed trains.

00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:13.000
China already has a bigger network

00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:15.000
than any other country in the world

00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:19.000
and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together.

00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:21.000
Or take this: now this is an idea,

00:18:21.000 --> 00:18:24.000
but it's an idea to be tried out shortly

00:18:24.000 --> 00:18:26.000
in a suburb of Beijing.

00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:29.000
Here you have a megabus,

00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:32.000
on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people.

00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:34.000
It travels on rails

00:18:34.000 --> 00:18:36.000
down a suburban road,

00:18:36.000 --> 00:18:39.000
and the cars travel underneath it.

00:18:39.000 --> 00:18:42.000
And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour.

00:18:42.000 --> 00:18:45.000
Now this is the way things are going to move,

00:18:45.000 --> 00:18:47.000
because China has a very specific problem,

00:18:47.000 --> 00:18:49.000
which is different from Europe

00:18:49.000 --> 00:18:51.000
and different from the United States:

00:18:51.000 --> 00:18:54.000
China has huge numbers of people and no space.

00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:56.000
So this is a solution to a situation

00:18:56.000 --> 00:18:58.000
where China's going to have

00:18:58.000 --> 00:19:00.000
many, many, many cities

00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:02.000
over 20 million people.

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:02.000 --> 00:19:05.000
Okay, so how would I like to finish?

00:19:05.000 --> 00:19:08.000
Well, what should our attitude be

00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:11.000
towards this world

00:19:11.000 --> 00:19:13.000
that we see

00:19:13.000 --> 00:19:15.000
very rapidly developing

00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:17.000
before us?

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.

00:19:21.000 --> 00:19:23.000
But I want to argue, above all,

00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:26.000
a big-picture positive for this world.

00:19:28.000 --> 00:19:30.000
For 200 years,

00:19:30.000 --> 00:19:36.000
the world was essentially governed

00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:40.000
by a fragment of the human population.

00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:44.000
That's what Europe and North America represented.

00:19:44.000 --> 00:19:46.000
The arrival of countries

00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:48.000
like China and India --

00:19:48.000 --> 00:19:50.000
between them 38 percent of the world's population --

00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:53.000
and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on,

00:19:56.000 --> 00:19:59.000
represent the most important single act

00:19:59.000 --> 00:20:01.000
of democratization

00:20:01.000 --> 00:20:03.000
in the last 200 years.

00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:05.000
Civilizations and cultures,

00:20:05.000 --> 00:20:08.000
which had been ignored, which had no voice,

00:20:08.000 --> 00:20:10.000
which were not listened to, which were not known about,

00:20:10.000 --> 00:20:12.000
will have a different sort

00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:15.000
of representation in this world.

00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:17.000
As humanists, we must welcome, surely,

00:20:17.000 --> 00:20:19.000
this transformation,

00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:21.000
and we will have to learn

00:20:21.000 --> 00:20:23.000
about these civilizations.

NOTE Paragraph

00:20:23.000 --> 00:20:26.000
This big ship here

00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:28.000
was the one sailed in by Zheng He

00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:30.000
in the early 15th century

00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:32.000
on his great voyages

00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:35.000
around the South China Sea, the East China Sea

00:20:35.000 --> 00:20:38.000
and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa.

00:20:38.000 --> 00:20:42.000
The little boat in front of it

00:20:42.000 --> 00:20:44.000
was the one in which, 80 years later,

00:20:44.000 --> 00:20:47.000
Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

00:20:47.000 --> 00:20:49.000
(Laughter)

00:20:49.000 --> 00:20:51.000
Or, look carefully

00:20:51.000 --> 00:20:53.000
at this silk scroll

00:20:53.000 --> 00:20:56.000
made by ZhuZhou

00:20:56.000 --> 00:20:59.000
in 1368.

00:20:59.000 --> 00:21:01.000
I think they're playing golf.

00:21:01.000 --> 00:21:04.000
Christ, the Chinese even invented golf.

NOTE Paragraph

00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:07.000
Welcome to the future. Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:21:07.000 --> 00:21:10.000
(Applause)