WEBVTT

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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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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

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and more sophisticated

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than anything in Europe."

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And, apart from the Mao period,

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that has remained more or less the case ever since.

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But this is combined

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with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state.

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The state is everywhere in China.

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I mean, it's leading firms --

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many of them are still publicly owned.

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Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo,

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depend in many ways on state patronage.

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Targets for the economy and so on

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are set by the state.

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And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas --

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as we are familiar with --

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with something like the one-child policy.

NOTE Paragraph

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Moreover, this is a very old state tradition,

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a very old tradition of statecraft.

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I mean, if you want an illustration of this,

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the Great Wall is one.

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But this is another, this is the Grand Canal,

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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 [Wuhan] 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)