Can the Chinese Communist Party Rule for Another 100 Years?

hi everybody welcome to this evening's scc zoom event i'm rebecca bailey and just before we get into tonight's event i want to flag one coming up next week i think if you're interested in today's talk you'll definitely want to tune into this one we'll be talking to professor hans van deven from the university of cambridge about the chinese communist party's history as you'll all know the ccp is celebrating its 100th anniversary on the 1st of july if you've been watching the news today you'll have seen the very grand ceremonies start to kick off the party's ability to reinvent itself over the course of the last century has led to it being able to cement itself into pretty much every aspect of chinese society today it's been called the most powerful political machine ever created and its power does not seem to be waning at all today but the question we're asking is can it reinvent itself enough to stay in power for another 100 years and to answer that question we're joined by a very distinguished guest eric lee eric is a venture capitalist and political scientist in shanghai whose 2013 ted talk a tale of two political systems attracted huge attention both within and without china he's the founder of guancia.cn a trustee and advisory board chairman of sudan university's china institute and he also still finds time to serve as a trustee of asian society hong kong as ever if you have questions you can send them into question fcchk.org that's question singular at fcchk please try and get them in early because otherwise we never get time to get them all in now there's so much to discuss i'm going to hand over straight away to our moderator fcc president keith richburg keith over to you thank you very much rebecca i think we'll see you later on if we get some questions coming in and uh thank uh thank you eric for joining us we really appreciate it i'm here in hong kong you're in shanghai correct yes that's the founding of the communist party if i'm not mistaken so are you there for the birthday party i'm not here for the birthday party birthday party i'll try to go there on thursday all right where the first congress took place okay well let's get right to it i think you've got uh some opening remarks you want to make on our theme and then we've got i've got some questions and we'll get to some audience questions before we go so uh without further ado i'll turn the floor over to you eric well thank you keith uh i'd like to thank the fcc for having me here tonight um so there's an old saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks and the chinese communist party is about to reach 100 years of age as a political organization though is it getting old or is it still young and therefore can learn new tricks i'd like to explore the answer to this question and that would determine the answer to the larger question posed as a title to this talk the past five to ten years have been a transformative era for china both in terms of its self-perception and its perceived relations with the world the changes that have been taking place have far reaching implications i think i like to argue that this transformation is driven at least in decisive part by the party's undertaking of a major self-reinvention actually self-reinvention has been a hallmark of the party i count at least two major self-reinventions in the past one was in 1949 when the party transformed itself from a revolutionary fighting force into a governing institution few predicted it will last but it did the second was in 1979 as we all know when the party reinvented itself from a closed and centrally planned economy manager to a market economics reformer i'd like to suggest that a third one is taking place right now and the most important aspect of this current reinvention of the party is that it is winning the hearts and minds of china's youth in terms of china's own development now the most significant event was the 19th party congress in 2017. it was then that china officially declared a paradigm shift namely from a single-minded pursuit of economic development to the goal of achieving more balanced development and what is called common prosperity now this pivot did not come out of blue it was the culmination of economic and social development some years in the making china's headline pursuit of economic growth in the last 30 to 40 years since then shopping reforms had achieved tremendous results as we all know but new challenges also emerge as results or side effects of market economics official corruption inequality and environmental degradation to name three major ones now corruption was tackled ferociously beginning with the 18th party congress in 2012 with notable results on the social and economic fronts we have observed significant social trends taking place in chinese society especially among young people those who were born post 90 and post 2000 the so-called jolen hoes and lingling hosts they're qualitatively different generations from previous generations from my generation for instance they've grown up with a lot of education and china that has been increasingly prosperous and strong as opposed to my own generation we were primarily concerned with china being poor and lacking development so we wanted market economics to propel development almost no matter what the costs these new generations they see the main challenges to them and chinese society as a whole rooted in inequality there are many significant signs that indicate young people's perception of capital and market have turned negative and their support for socialism and communism have increased marginally now the party is seeking to get ahead of the trend and rebalance economic gains to build a more equitable society the intense campaign to eradicate extreme poverty in the entire chinese nation was historic and unprecedented the recent government initiatives to bring in monopolistic companies is another example of effort from the other end it's called containing the unchecked power of capital i believe we're only seeing the beginning of this paradigm shift this presents a challenge to the party china's young generations want to fix inequality but also they desire economic opportunities that will continue to raise their standard of living so the country needs to continue on this path of sustained economic growth for obvious reasons now how to achieve a more equitable society of common prosperity while at the same time keep china's society entrepreneurial which is essential for further growth is the challenge and this is the trend that we ought to watch another paradigm shift has occurred in the same period and it was china's perception about the world and its relations with it especially the west i would probably put the pivoting moment at 2016. the trump era showed the chinese people in america that was so drastically different from the perception they had for many decades my generation looked up to america and many even if advocated china changed its political system and ideology in favor of liberalism now young generations today they see an america that is rather belligerent toward china of course and that is poorly governed with inequality problems worse than chinese owned with politics that seems so dysfunctional and society so polarized and hostile from within and a bit of a bully on the world stage so as i said before the post 90 and 2000 generations are very different so their perceptions of america and the west are fundamentally different from ours when we were at their age and several significant recent events helped consolidate this shift one was the pandemic of course how china handled it and how it was attacked initially and to this day and they see how the us and europe have handled it and then came the attacks on china with regards to hong kong and xinjiang i'm not here to debate the specifics of these issues or the merits of these issues i'm just pointing out that that the western attacks on these two issues have caused a near total loss of their credibility in the chinese public a vast majority of chinese public resent the hong kong protests and the violence that's just the fact and everyone here knows the uyghur population of xinjiang has more than doubled and for western government and the media to call it a genocide seems totally politically motivated so you know before for many years western criticism of china did have some support within the chinese public especially among the commercial and intellectual elites because some of these criticisms resonated and and the chinese knew they had problems but this time it's different this time they see a portrayal of china in the west that is so dramatically different from the china they live and experience every day especially among the young people as i said the post 90s and 2000 generations are more patriotic and more confident to begin with and they respond naturally to the party's call for greater confidence in china's own past indeed contemporary chinese youth are on course to be the strongest supporters within chinese society of the party's long-held goal of pursuing china's own development path both politically and economically i would argue that today's chinese youth their dispositions and their inclinations are more in sync with the party's outlook and intent than ever before nearly 400 million strong the post-90s and post-2000s the jolene hose and lingy host 400 million of them they form the backbone of china's future and the party's current vigorous self-reinvention is placing itself at the vanguard of chinese youth this indicates that it is still young indeed the question is can the party harness this synergy with china's new generations and turn it into effective governance for the long term the party needs to steer the raw energy and aspirations of china's youth to a productive socialism and away from excessive populism toward healthy patriotism and away from narrow nationalism if it can do this it will deliver on the material and spiritual aspirations of china's new generations and as a result i think will stay in power for a very long time to come now success is not a short but i wouldn't bet against it thank you keith well thank you thank you for that we've got a lot to pick apart there so thanks for agreeing to take some of our questions you know this question of whether china can keep uh can keep growing and whether the party can stay in power is occupying everybody you know i'm a member of the council on foreign relations and this just came out the latest edition of foreign affairs the cover is can china keep rising so everybody said that you have that too so everybody's asking the same questions a lot of questions in there let me let me let's let me pick apart the membership of the party first of all it's uh 92 million members according to a survey recently by zhongdang university i believe they said of the uh 2.1 million new members that came in in 2015 uh only something like 5 700 were migrant workers and the vast majority were actually urban white collar people from shanghai where you are beijing etc so my question is does this party have any relation to the marxist leninist party that was founded in 1921 that was supposed to be workers and peasants i mean what what what's what's marx's leninist about it now well good question obviously it's still a marxist party uh it's ideologies is both chinese tradition and marxism um what's called the simplification democracism marxism uh now another i'll give you another number um of the new members of the chinese in 2019 okay nearly two million new members new people join the party eighty percent of them are people under age of 35. okay so it's a very very young trend and those young people of course if you know in china and most of my college students now 80 last year 80 of our college all college students in china expressed a strong interest in joining the party okay so if you know chinese society we have a college entrance exam gao cop okay which is you know one line equal to everybody and if you visit chinese college campuses you'll know these kids come from all backgrounds unlike you know universities and colleges you'll find in many western countries they come from wealthy families mostly from certain races mostly i think i mean of course they have affirmative action in america but we all know so but in china college student college students those who enter college from vast different backgrounds from poor rich urban rural all sorts of places and 80 of them want to join the party um so i i think the party still is very much with the vast majority of the chinese people well let me continue on that because this uh jongdan university and a couple of others i'm looking at specifically they surveyed 1 800 new party members and asked them why they joined the party and the vast majority said career advancement so they weren't joining it because they believed in the ideals they were joining it because they wanted to get a better job and you know they thought when you're applying for a job it's better to be a party member is that really meaning that they're believing in the ideals of the party or they're just doing it to advance their careers there's there's nothing wrong with that and i hope i hope that the two coincide i hope those who believe in making china a better society also find better jobs fair enough and let me let me ask you the reinvention i think and i agree with you i think one thing about the communist party is it's reinvented itself several times in the past but another one of the strengths of the communist party as far as i know it and i've been looking at it for a couple of four decades going back now is has always been self-criticism they've always gone back and self-criticized when thing and said look we made mistakes now we're correcting those mistakes there doesn't seem to be a lot of self-criticism now and i say very specifically that for example there are whole areas of the past that are just off limits for discussion and debate you don't hear any discussion about the great famine you don't hear any discussion about the cultural revolution certainly not 1989 and it almost seems as if everything started with the opening in reforms nobody ever wants to talk about what came before is that healthy well let me uh disagree with that okay i think there is a extraordinarily high degree of self-criticism within the party right now through this self-reinvention okay now first of all self-criticism is only useful when it's relevant um and and let me just point out the parties to be engaged in three major major areas of self-criticism since the 18th party congress one is political corruption okay from 2012 on every single newspaper every single television you can't get away from chinese official media without reading and hearing about the horrible situation with corruption and they attacked it because of that self-criticism okay second environmental degradation okay you can't get away from media reports from the party itself about we got to fix the environment we screwed up okay and and anybody who lives in beijing will tell you how much improvement they've had in the air in the past five six seven years okay 10 20 years 10 15 years ago you go to beijing you can hardly catch a day with blue sky now most days a blue sky okay self-criticism third most important right now inequality okay you know um the last campaign to eradicate extreme poverty in the country the campaign lasted about eight years they took the last 99 million people out of absolute poverty nearly 2 000 party members died in the process several million of them went to the front lines they went to rural areas with harsh conditions okay so why did they do that self-criticism they realized there was a problem that economic reforms have lifted a lot of people made a lot of rich people and built this great big middle class but many many millions of people were left behind and there was something wrong with that so the entire campaign was driven by self-criticism fair enough those are all those are all three fair points of self-criticism i guess what i'm thinking about is and again bear with me here for a second if you look at what's happening in the united states now where they've had a lot of historical problems with slavery racism they're going through this cathartic moment where they're discussing all of these issues europe as well after the black lives matter movement europe is going through a reckoning with its own past of colonialism etc in china it seems again the past is always blocked off nobody wants to talk about it it's not open for discussion uh you can't talk about they even try to crush any memory of what happened in 1989 when will china have that kind of historical reckoning when will the party go back and say look we made some mistakes that doesn't diminish their power now well race is always a big problem in america i i know it's that's from the the country's dna so i think i uh i will support uh a great discussion a greater discussion in america and that came very late uh you know come on when did lincoln live 150 years ago whenever it was okay now you're doing this and you call the self-criticism and you're asking china when you're gonna do it about 1989 come on cut people some slack well i think we didn't wait until after uh it's been since lincoln that we've discussed race in america i'm sure i'm sure i'm sure things have happened in the history of the people's republic will be discussed much much sooner than how soon you you address the race problems in america okay fair enough by the way if any of you have questions please send it to question singular at fcchk.org that's question singular at fcc fcchk.org let me just ask you a couple more questions here um first of all the party used to and one of its other strengths i mentioned one strength was always self-criticism another one was it always allowed a lot of decentralization and a lot of innovation at the local level and when i was covering china there was a lot of stuff with grassroots democracy going on in villages and in in in counties i don't hear about that anymore it seems to be more of a top-down node innovation and i've never even heard anybody speaking about this kind of village elections or grassroots democracy what happened well the pendulum does swing from uh one period to another you know and in the history of the people's republic uh the pendulum has swung several times between decentralization and centralization okay and it will take too long to go into that history uh i know the cyclical history right but but you know we had a period of decentralization for a couple of decades uh and it's now swinging towards more centralized uh power i think that's correct um driven by changes in circumstances and and the needs of the development of the country but but i'll tell you there's still tremendous amount of innovation and policy innovation and economic activities at the local level so if you i mean i was just in suzhou i was in uh eu you know different cities uh in china different counties uh the county governments provincial governments they're being very aggressive in coming up with economic development policies that are that are uh that work within the specific circumstances in the regions they're in uh very aggressive yeah i mean for example wong yang when he was in charge of guangzhou was credited with a lot of innovative policies there and he moved up to the center but you know i mentioned you know uh self-criticism was always a strength local decentralization and local innovation was always a strength a third strength i think and that people have credited this was always collective leadership you know nobody got too powerful and leaders stepped aside does china still have that kind of collective leadership well that's also the pendulum does swing and has won for many times uh between collective and more centralized more collective less collective um you know the uh during the 16th and 18th party congress those 10 years they had nine members on the center uh standing committee of the the poly bureau uh it was you know bigger uh um than than before so the pendulum swan toward you know a greater collection a larger number of people at the top and and and there's something good about it but also it led to certain inefficiencies certain um uh uh power being diffused um and now they're in a new phase so so they they shrank it uh at the 16th party congress back to seven um and then of course we have a leader that's that seems to be more powerful than leaders in the past uh but you know the pendulum does win i mean i i think it is still a the decisions are made by the central committee under the leadership of the uh of the party secretary secretary general uh and the standing committee of the politburo that system that those institutions stay intact is it is it fair to say and you may disagree with me here but is it fair to say that this the party at least with this new centralized leadership and xi jinping in power they don't like dissent i mean they don't like criticism they don't like dissent there have been academics who've been you know lost their jobs for dissenting they've been bloggers who've been arrested my question is where are the checks and balances if you've got that much power centralized and you don't like criticism you don't like descent well i'm not so sure the kind of dissent that you have in liberal societies and how productive that is um you know the kind of descent that you're talking about i mean i assure you there's a lot of criticism in china there are a lot of differences of opinions within the party institution when they discuss policies at different levels lots of debates and all the policy decisions that come out at the end are results of of debates vigorous debates i know that for a fact but the kind of descent that you're talking about i don't think we need in this country just look at the countries that have it they're not being governed very effectively they are polarized their government's dysfunctional their people hate each other their medias hate each other we don't want that okay but i mean you know when you think about it good that's a good answer but when you think about it the party 92 million members that's only six percent of the population of china which is about 1.3 to 1.4 billion can six percent of the population really represent you know the entire population of china it is it is bigger than what i call the holy trinity that runs america the holy trinity the one america is also in in in some way a one-party state and it's run by a party called the holy trinity i call it wall street silicon valley and hollywood these three groups of people including the nannies that they employ no more than 100 no more than a million people they make all the decisions in america that's why you have all these dissatisfaction in the country well some people would add in the gun lobby and a lot of others in there as well gun lobby too into that trinity but uh but seriously i mean what what are the checks and balances in a in a one-party state if what if what if the what if the party what if xi jinping's got something wrong let me tell you without real checks and balances the party will not have survived this long okay so so when we when we talk about all these cons abstract concepts like checks and balances or democracy for that matter okay we are not folk only focus on procedure we ought to focus on outcome okay when you have these really beautiful things like checks and balances and democracy of people's will you when you have them the outcome should be success success means people are satisfied and their lives are getting better and they look towards future with optimism and society is cohesive okay i don't care what kind of procedures you have if you don't achieve those outcomes i don't think you're democratic i don't think these checks and balances do any good so are you one of those who believes that the east is rising and the west is in decline well i wouldn't put it in those terms i mean i i'm one that i hope liberal societies could rejuvenate themselves you know liberalism needs some self-criticism liberal liberals in liberal societies should learn from the party state in china the party stay in china is being very good as at self-criticism that's why they reinvent themselves you only reinvent them yourself when you see problems otherwise why would you reinvent yourself right so liberal societies have been failing at that for the past decades because they take their system for granted they think there's some kind of moral imperative that sometimes somehow they take their system as a given that it works it's the best thing you've got so of course you don't need self-criticism you don't need to reinvent yourself um i i i i hope for a world where we have a we have a degree of pluralism a degree of plurality different kind of systems and ideologies could coexist and compete so i i wish liberalism well well let me let me ask a question that might be slightly provocative don't mean it to be but i i mean and i mean it with all seriousness i mean most people would say that the vast majority of chinese support what what the communist party has done and what the communist party is doing why don't they have what if they have an election like in singapore where the ruling party has been in power they have elections to legitimize their rule every once in a while they continue to stay in power but that kind of rejuvenates and allows them to claim legitimacy from the people well we have a system of selecting capable people from the population and move them up to lead the country and they've proven to be great leaders and effective leaders they have delivered countries i mean singapore is a small place i don't want to use as an example okay countries especially big liberal societies at least in the past few decades with your elections have not been able to produce leaders that are capable and effective and can deliver so the best way for you to convince the chinese to have elections to make yours work well let me ask you a question then without elections where does the communist party in china get its legitimacy they i mean they were originally a revolutionary party they won the war they get their legitimacy like i said based on outcome okay procedural legitimacy i think is what is getting liberal societies in trouble it's what getting liberal politics in trouble as long as you follow procedure even if you elect people that are completely incompetent even if you elect people that are selfish that are corrupt that don't deliver you're still legitimate um we don't want that we want leaders who get their legitimacy by delivering if you can deliver the goods you are legitimate so it's performance legitimate performance-based legitimacy correct whatever we want to call it i think democracy needs a set of new measurements i think democracy needs to be measured by outcome not by procedure but what what happens in china if the economy suddenly collapses you've got a demographic challenge looming ahead you know you could always have some economic problem with debt etc if the party is tying its fate to making people richer how long can that go on again the question i'm not sure i'm trying to keep rising i'm not sure i'm not sure if this party is tying itself by making people richer i don't think it's the right term to put it the party right now like i said in this current phase of reinvention is tying itself with the future of china's more equitable and productive not making just a few rich they want to lift everybody okay they are tying their legitimacy with that mission and i think most of chinese people agree with that mission and they need to succeed if they fail they'll lose legitimacy okay if they succeed they'll keep that legitimacy for a very very long time okay so there's no need for any kind of election no need for even a referendum on whether you support the party i i've already said what i wanted to say um if like i said if they deliver they will have legitimacy okay we don't want a system where you hold a vote and you don't deliver and you're still legitimate that's bad okay fair enough let me let me ask you something that often has me scratching my head and a lot of outsiders who care about china been following in a long time scratching our heads which is at the time when the party and president xi are at the peak of power china is about to become the world's top economy if not already there they're at the peak of their military success why are they so thin skinned why is it that a basketball owner who i've never heard of can put out a tweet and all of a sudden it hurts the feelings of the chinese people so you take the nba games off the air or you can shut down a newspaper because it's uh running editorials that somehow are threatening the national security of china i mean why why so thin skin and particularly those young people you mentioned can be online very thin skinned about the what i consider very minor things i don't know i think you got to put yourself in their shoes you know i think the the west especially america have been extraordinarily arrogant you've been lecturing everybody so much everywhere in the world you're so used to lecturing people and humiliating people you don't think you're humiliating them and finally you gotta you got somebody who's grown big enough and say no we're not gonna take that anymore you think they're seeing skin and that's the case you know that's okay well when uh a chinese communist group puts on twitter a picture of a rocket going up saying here's china lighting a fire next to indians cremating people because of the virus this is how we light a fire this is how india lights a fire isn't that being arrogant i'm not sure i've seen that picture before i don't know what the intent of that picture is but i think it expresses a particular view it's it's it's a view that the indian people are not being treated well the the leadership of india needs to have some self-criticism it speaks for millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions of people in india that are suffering i mean how can you i mean there's nothing wrong with that how about what how about when you think about these people who are dying who are sick we're really being buried every day you can't even put out a picture and say something for them how about what i don't think that was uh i think it was mocking india quite quite frankly how about the how about these uh twitter accounts coming out from people in china and some of these young people you were talking about that were mocking new york because of the number of dead going during the corona virus or they've been mocking news uh they've been mocking australia because of a situation uh that happened before with afghanistan i think that's where the winning i don't think i don't i i don't know what you're referring to if you're referring to the oil painting of an australian soldier putting his knife and an australian girl that's i totally support it i think it's it's a horrible thing these australian soldiers did okay this is an artist rendition of the tragic events that took place in afghanistan it's not mocking it is serious so you think these kind of warfare it was a crime it was a crime and they needed yeah an artist attempted to call it that to show it to the world what happened it was an artistic rendition it wasn't a photograph it was a painting and so you mentioned uh countries being arrogant you don't think china is acting arrogant now i hope we won't be arrogant all right but even if we are we're far behind someone else well let me ask you a question then another question uh china's at the as i mentioned they're at the top of their power economically militarily uh but you know i just looked at the recent pew survey of 14 countries and uh excuse me for looking down i want to get it accurate negative views of china have increased in every one of the countries that they surveyed 81 percent negative in australia 74 in uk germany 71 negative spain 63 negative south korea 75 negative u.s canada i mean the negative views of china and negative views of xi jinping in asia and in europe and in the us and canada why is that i've i've seen those numbers and it's very interesting until i noticed something else okay you know i noticed very interesting trend and that sets china apart from these other countries many of these countries okay in china we have two trends going opposite directions okay in china we have you know the chinese people's view of their own government of their own country has been improving significantly they're getting more and more positive yet other peoples in other countries their view of china have been have been deteriorating then you notice these people views about their own countries and about their own governments are also deteriorating so they're just unhappy well if you if you dig into those numbers what it actually says what the pew report says is that this negative view of china and uh negative view of xi jinping's ability to handle things are directly related to the coronavirus and particularly because uh you mentioned and i think it's correct that once february of 2020 came along china with its lockdowns in quarantine managed to handle the virus extremely well but nobody likes to talk about how what happened in december of 2019 and january of 2020 when they were locking up doctors and arresting bloggers who were trying to warn the world what was going on why won't china become more transparent and allow people in unfettered access to find out what happened hey we had our first known case of coronavirus at the end of december 2019 at the almost last few days of the year okay and we had the wuhan lockdown in january 20 something merely three weeks passed from the first known case of a virus that's completely unknown to mankind to a complete lockdown of a major city and a major province in china that was also unprecedented in human history three weeks three weeks we showed the world how serious this virus was in action three months later i mean six months later in america and europe you were still debating whether you ought to wear masks why were doctors being uh why were doctors being called into the police for trying to wait wait a minute wait a minute i don't you can talk about all these specific events you want i mean i can go to america and find all these things that are happening in america okay you guys were in america and europe you you were debating with me people were protesting about wearing masks they're insulting political leaders in america or insulting american people for wearing masks nobody's defending america we're talking about china here yeah what i'm saying is you got to cut people in some slack you can't be too arrogant okay don't be too arrogant you gotta we have three weeks we have three it took us three weeks like i said from the first known case of coronavirus of a virus that was completely unknown to the world ever in history took us three weeks to shut down an entire city of 10 million people there were supposed to be something enough to show the world how serious it was there was supposed to be some information sharing that was set up after the sars epidemic between doctors in china and the world and that didn't happen yes it did yes it did you got to read the history that the the the genome sequence of the coronavirus was put into nih in bethesda and shared with the world i think in the first two weeks of january like i said again it took us 10 days took china 10 days maybe two weeks to share the genome sequence with the entire world okay look we're all at the same starting point i mean everybody was surprised by the virus i mean we weren't geniuses here we took us some time to figure out whether it was serious to begin with okay and it took us three weeks we showed the world in action how serious it was we locked down wuhan we locked down hubei province okay nobody's ever done in human history well look i'm not going to go back and debate the history of that but what i want to ask you the question is again i'm going back to these negative views of china which if you believe the surveys a lot of that is tied to the coronavirus and a feeling and it may be inaccurate a feeling that china's not being a hundred percent transparent when countries like australia for example have asked for an international investigation china says we're going to cut off trade i think come on what why are they being so resistant to a real investigation so we can find out how this thing happened we can argue all day long about how open there are to investigations at least china was the only country that did allow whl to come in and investigate no other country has done that i mean you have countries that have 10 100 times more deaths thousand times more infections you know why why isn't the whole being called to go investigate there because the because the virus first was identified in wuhan and they're trying to find out if it came from the wet market or if it was an accidental lab leak but what about how it espresso quickly it well maybe it spread because that lockdown of wuhan didn't come until afterwards part of chinese new year so where are these countries being investigated you know so so i'm just saying look there's a degree of openness every country has a degree of openness and i think in comparison china hasn't done so badly all right i mean we have our own problems i i get it we got we got problems okay but but but i hope i think one of the reasons why negative views of china have been rising in the rest of the world in other parts of the world especially in the west that's linked to the coronavirus is that the base like this one the one you and i are having are not being aired in western societies enough would this be where aired in china i hope well i hope it needs to be aired in america it also needs to be heard in china the chinese already know the chinese debate should be aired in china right now so everybody can hear this maybe it should be but but but america and europe need it much more all right well with that i'm going to give you a slight break here and i'm going to turn it over to rebecca bailey who's got a couple of audience questions coming in uh rebecca do you have some i do i do um hi eric um our first question is from frederick demopoulos uh he i've subbed your question down a bit frederick sorry um he says rule-based societies tend to scale more efficiently whereas relationship power-based societies tend to be more flexible in periods of great social or economic change like china's seen over the past few decades so first of all do you accept that premise i guess that that rules-based societies are more efficient over the long term if you accept that do you think that china's willing to move towards a rule a more rules-based system as a as it sort of enters i guess this next stage of its reinvention and if if that is the case would that change how the ccp has to operate well i'm not sure what that means um i'm not sure how he defines rules-based societies i guess i guess would you would you characterize china of course i do i i i i'm yes i do so so the premise the premise of the question is somehow china is not rude based and only america and the west are rules based i i disagree with that premise different countries have different rules and how they work those rules we have rules here i tell you if we don't have rules we won't have thousands of these corrupt officials in jail okay okay um the second question is from alejandra reyes he says a lot has been made of xi jinping eliminating the two-term limit on the presidency uh with some analysts arguing that this is a sign of the atrophying of the party itself and a sort of i guess what keith was saying earlier about a move away from collective leadership um what what are your thoughts on xi's move and has there been any pushback within the wider party against that um i think the chinese public and the party in particular are had been very supportive of this constitutional amendment um and and the country felt that i'm just stating what i see on the ground here okay the country you can disagree with those views but i i feel that most people here think this was the right thing to do given the circumstances and and the stage of development of this country and the international environment it faces um and institutionally it brought the office of the presidency in line with the other powerful offices uh in the country was the party secretary the general secretary ship of the party and the chairman of the military commission both of them did not have term limits so are you saying that xi jinping doesn't have more concentrated power than any other leader no he does he does i'm just saying the country is is supportive of that but that is a change right that is a change away from like the huge entire era so you said that the circumstances necessitated that change but what what are those specific systems i've already i've i've said that the the the pendulum has swung many times from more centralized power to less centralized back to more centralized back to less centralized so it's nothing new oh it's nothing new it's always this country's institutions have always been evolving and if they evolve wrong they'll pay a price if they evolve right they'll succeed all right and they've been evolving correctly most in most cases i mean they made mistakes like cultural revolution was a mistake the great leap forward was a mistake and they corrected course but i guess i guess what what people are interested to know is you said there are particular circumstances now that make the pendulum swing i guess necessary well let me know what are those perfect questions good question good questions let me give you the circumstances that i think demanded stronger and more centralized leadership in this country okay one official corruption okay we had a huge corruption problem before the 18th party congress huge and it was getting worse and worse and they needed to correct that and they needed more centralized power to implement the most aggressive most ferocious anti-corrosion campaign known in history in the entire chinese 5000 year history and they've been succeeding at it okay without centralized power they will not have been able to do that second they need to have a basically move from like i said headline pursue economic uh market economics and economic growth to a more balanced and more fairly distributed economic system and you need a centralized power to do that to redistribute essentially okay third environmental degradation okay you you needed stronger central leadership to implement environmental policies and laws all the localities and regions were competing on economic growth so they were putting the environment on a back burner and you needed to to to organize and have stronger central power to say to put put the environment which is always long-term not short you know against short-term gains and you need a stronger leadership at the top is central leadership centralized leadership is that the same as like in individualized leadership which is what we're kind of seeing now which again change all leaderships are individualized leadership is always in persons they don't exist in i mean leaders are not computers the american leadership is is individualizing joe biden okay so you can't computers don't run countries human beings do there's still a difference between a committee and a person but sorry i'm diverging from our audience questions i have one last one for you from dr matthias bach and he says china is not just its tier one cities and mathias has has lived in a lot of cities outside of i guess like you know your main big ones he says his experiences that unless beijing defines an action the kind of local government is basically either paralyzed or robotically executing something which he thinks is a sort of disadvantage and you often end up with these situations where people don't want to be the bearer of bad news so you you're not necessarily getting like an accurate picture on the ground related up to your central government um i mean do do you agree with that analysis i guess but also can the ccp overcome that problem if it is a problem yeah um so i think it's all everything some had a degree okay you you want to achieve a balance that works you want you don't want to you want a situation where local governments and local leaders have the latitude to make decisions on the ground you you don't want to go so extreme that like i said the the problem with the environment okay and the problem with corruption um so so you you want some centralized leader stronger centralized leadership to to fix some of those problems to implement the right policies but of course you don't want to go so far the other way the local governments are paralyzed i don't think that's happening i just don't i mean there's always risks of that happening and i'm sure you can find instances of that happening it's a big country but i think in general we're at a place where you know the balance is being kept reasonably well and i think the country will succeed from this point forward thank you very much i'm going to hand back to you keith thank you for the questions we have well thank you very much rebecca and eric can i just follow up on that question a little bit i don't want to belabor what happened in wuhan with the virus but what rebecca was just asking about in that question could that have just been a situation where local officials were afraid to tell people in beijing hey there's a problem here yeah like i said this was a virus that was unknown to mankind it's unprecedented for hundreds of years we've never seen anything like it so so i don't think you can keep information from someone when you don't even know what that information is i mean i think it's unreasonable to say okay people in wuhan in on january 5th they should have known this virus is going to cause this this the worst pandemic in 500 years come on i mean even you know when everybody knew when app months after they shut down wuhan millions of people in america did not think this thing was anything any big deal okay we're gonna go we're gonna circle it back around because i keep trying to say that there were people in wuhan who were trying to sound the alarm and they were being arrested that's that's none other than people of course people sound alarms but how could you know in fact let me go back to the in fact in the early days some people were calling i thought it was stars but it wasn't stars okay nobody knew anything that was a source-like zoological virus no it was not stars at all okay so if it were sars sharks like that would if it were stars donald trump would have been right it would have gone away magically okay so the people the people were sounding alarms was calling the stars okay then then donald trump would have been right well one of the things one of the things you'll never hear me do eric is defend anything donald trump ever said so uh but let me we agree let's get back one thing we can agree on but let me get back to uh the party let me ask you uh just a broader question um what do you think are the main challenges or the main dangers for the party both inside of china and in its foreign relations coming up over the next uh five years to a decade what are they what should they be looking out for yeah like i said i think in china domestically the big risks and the challenges are when they pursue a more equitable society which is i think the the top of the agenda for the party political platform okay this is the reinvention that's taking place we're swinging from economic growth at all costs to more equitable society common prosperity in that process the risk is they don't get the balance right okay we need to have a balance that we need to redistribute and move more benefits to common people and bring the entire society up but at the same time if we misdirect that if they misdirect that initiative they they uh they they destroy entrepreneurial initiatives which is what made this country so successful for so long uh that would hurt the economy and that will come back and and and hurt the party and the country okay so so to get that balance right is no easy task uh but if they don't do it we're going to be in trouble too because the wealth gap is is widening so they have to do it and and they have to take the risk and i wish them well how about on the foreign relations side biggest dangers biggest challenges you know that much better than i do we read that every day in papers on tv i mean the obviously the biggest challenge unfortunately is to manage relations with the us uh which is used to running the entire world uh and telling everyone how to run their uh countries and and it's finding very difficult somehow another country could potentially even surpass it and that's a difficult uh situation to manage and i think china needs to needs finesse it needs to stand its ground because obviously you know china should not be contained and won't allow itself to be contained 1.4 billion people cannot be contained their aspirations for better life for a stronger country cannot be contained but at the same time they need finesse let me ask you a question do you think these wolf warrior diplomats who are adopting donald trump's trash mouth tactics on twitter and you know insults and all that do you think that's been a benefit in china or do you think they need to dial it back i think the wolf wolf warrior thing was a made up thing i think the world is just not used to a china that could talk back right and you better get used to it and it's not worth warrior it's it's they're just being normal they're being frustrated they're seeing their country being portrayed wrongly being demonized by western politicians and media and they're reacting to it for the first time in many decades they kept their mouth shut and now they're saying wait a minute we can't allow this to go on and we're going to be normal like every other country to express our views openly for the record wolf warrior was a term that came out of china not out of the west they called themselves no no no no it was a movie that had a movie a chinese movie it would be like me calling uh american diplomats rambo diplomats you know but we don't do that okay it was a label that being placed on people who who have changed their behavior uh uh from the past but the label was put on them by western media and western politicians i guarantee you no westerner i know has ever seen wolf warrior any of the wolf warrior movies and wouldn't know what it is except rebecca she's seen it oh yes they do well they've never seen the movie that's another problem they've never seen the movie but they do know where the label comes from i mean it's being often referred to in the new york times and cnn yes the chinese rambo-like movie you know but they they haven't seen the movie i agree okay and one last question for me and then before i get a recommendation from you for an author uh one last question what and again i'm just throwing this out there i know you haven't researched this i'm looking at the seven standing committee members of the politburo i don't see a single woman i see the membership of the communist party they're very weak on women uh i thought mao said women hold up half the sky why aren't they half the communist party um i i there are a lot of women members of the communist party uh we don't have enough of them at the top um i do hope that we improve on that we need some self-criticism on that okay there you go i just got all right that's the lead of our story tomorrow we got some self-criticism out of eric lee saying they need more women at the top of the communist party well uh last question i always blame it yeah i always like to ask our guests there thank you for for joining us here i always like to ask our guest before you go because a lot of people are in quarantine or in pandemic so they're catching up on their reading uh what are you reading these days and what can you recommend well i'm reading an old little book i had it for a long time i read it before you know we haven't been able to travel anywhere and i've been wanting to go to venice because i love venice i used to go frequently and i found this little book on my bookshelf that i neglected for many years it's called no vulgar hotel by judith martin okay what's the title again no vulgar hotel no ogre hotel and it's a book about venice as beautifully written uh if you like europe you like venice you like culture um it's a it's a good book it's a good read well fantastic well i don't think we're going to be getting anywhere anytime soon because we don't want to come back to hong kong and do quarantine again rebecca just got out of 21 days quarantined uh uh er eric you're in shanghai i know you don't have to wear a mask there everything is fine but please stay safe anyways and uh and i want to thank you for joining us thank you rebecca for fielding those questions and thank you audience members for joining us for this uh talk today i hope you found it enlightening uh we hope to be back with live events coming up very soon at the fcc eric has already promised when he's back in hong kong and we can travel again you'll come back in person you're an fcc member i believe i am a member of the fcc and i miss you all all right well i miss you we'll get you here either uh on your own or on a panel when we can do live events again coming up very very soon thank you all for listening thank you keith richburg and uh good evening thank you all for joining everybody good night good night eric

Channel: The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong

Views: 197,122

Keywords: Eric X. Li, China, CCP, Chinese Communist Party, Communist Party of China, People's Republic of China, Chinese Politics, Democracy, Communism

Id: Jr75blwvIHo

Length: 59min 9sec (3549 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021