China, Hong Kong, And The Future Of Freedom: Director Condoleezza Rice And Lord Chris Patten

good morning uh everyone uh it may be actually a very late good evening in hong kong and certainly it's a good afternoon to lord chris patton in london uh i'm larry dimon i'm a senior fellow at the hoover institution and uh i will lead this new program on china's global sharp power uh that we're going to have a conversation about today it's my pleasure to welcome you and to to introduce our two conversants um uh condoleezza rice is the tad and diane toby director of the hoover institution and the tamra thomas and barbara stevenson senior fellow at hoover on public policy and of course you know she was the 66th secretary of state of the united states and prior to that 2001-2005 she was the national security adviser to president george w bush we are extremely honored and thrilled uh to have her joined in conversation today by lord chris patton he has served as chancellor of the university of oxford since 2003 and he's perhaps best known for his role as britain's last governor of hong kong from 1992 until the transfer of sovereignty to the people's republic of china on july 1 1997. his career in politics and government began in 1979 when he was first elected to parliament he also served as chairman of the conservative party europe's commissioner for external affairs and chairman of the bbc trust and he also chaired the international crisis group for seven years lord patton is the author of several books including most recently first confession a sort of memoir he has been a steadfast and deeply admired voice in defense of hong kong's freedom and rule of law and a forthright critic of china's authoritarian behavior so condi uh and chris thank you so much and over to you condi thank you very much larry and let me just say from the perspective of the hoover institution we're very excited about this project on chinese shark power undoubtedly the rise of china and how to manage that rise for uh geopolitical prosperity and peace but also for the rights of free peoples so that uh democracy can flourish uh it's one of the most important geopolitical challenges really of of many many decades and this hoover project on shark power is going to bring together people from all over who will help us understand better what china is doing and then to understand better how to meet those policy challenges and i couldn't be more thrilled today than to welcome uh my friend and and colleague uh lord chris patton to talk about one of the most important aspects of that which is uh how to think about china how to think about hong kong how to think about china's global rise and there's no better person to do that so welcome to you uh chris it's great to have you with us thank you very much secretary and uh i've occasionally done things with hoover before and it's always a great pleasure and i know the project you're engaged in now is really important for our future relations with china uh for the future of uh open societies and in particular for the future of universities in open society absolutely and and lord patton and i are going to be informal here i'm going to call him chris and he's going to call me condi if that's all right with everyone and uh let me just start chris with a kind of broad historical question uh taking you back to the negotiations that were conducted with the people's republic of china to allow sovereignty to be handed back to china over hong kong you were the last governor you were deeply involved in those negotiations and deeply involved in the expectation and the hope that china would live up to the idea of one country two systems preserving the freedoms and the unique status of hong kong preserving for all of those who live in hong kong and have prospered in hong kong the ability to continue to do so so let me take you back to that period how did you think about it at the time and did you think that china was actually going to live up to those obligations i assume you did or you wouldn't have signed but uh what did you think at the time what did you think the challenges were at the time the whole system of for the whole concept of one country two systems was very difficult for both uh britain and china um but it covered um a real awkwardness both political and moral on both sides but the chinese um hong kong represented one of the lowest points in qing history um a great humiliation by colonial power but they also knew that more than half the population of hong kong were refugees from events in communist china literally more than half um on the british side it was awkward because we were a bit embarrassed by our our history by that period of the opium wars and so on and we also were in a position in which unlike every other colony we weren't able to prepare the territory for independence uh with democracy and when in the 1970s and 80s there were attempts to push democracy i think frankly um britain was too slow in reacting but it was also pressed very hard by china not to do that because the chinese used to say if you do that and you'll be giving people in hong kong the impression that they're going to be like singapore or malaysia or wherever and they're going to become an independent democratic state and that's not on the agenda cho and lai said that to uh to uh british interlocutors so it was difficult um it was negotiated in 1984 international treaty guarantee hong kong's way of life uh the rule of law uh as well as the freedoms uh around the economy all the liberties of a free society sam finer in his great magisterial book on different sorts of government government and has one chapter on a society which is liberal but not fully democratic and the only example he could find was hong kong so it was on the way to democracy my job when i when i got to hong kong was to try to stand up for what had already been agreed not to go beyond the trees you know we've got to go beyond the the uh constitution which the chinese have put in place but to stand up for the international covenant on civilian political right to try to uh develop them accountable structures um and to try above all to encourage people to believe in the freedoms which have helped to make them so so prosperous somebody once called it a sort of tutorial government and i was encouraged to believe that that the chinese would go along with what they'd signed up to my biggest critic at the time was a very distinguished um british diplomats he'd been ambassador in beijing he tended to think that um the rights uh approach to beijing was by and large after a bit of huffing and buffing to do whatever they wanted and he wrote on one occasion of course he said the chinese leaders are thuggish dictators but they're men of their word he said um and they will deliver what they promised well we know that that's partly true they're certainly thuggish dictators as we can see in but again and again on one issue after another they've broken their word and whether it's on the international health regulations whether it's on south china sea or whether it's on hong kong and one further point about about hong kong actually for about 10 years after 1997 things went reasonably well what changed was xi jinping and uh the real nervousness that the chinese started to have about the threat that um liberal democracy that open societies and their values make to a totalitarian a technocratic surveillance state and i think that one reason why they've been so tough on hong kong is that hong kong represents all those values which they deplore civic society democratic accountability rule of law independence courts um education which allows people to um to develop um as as you would want to develop yourself without having the party lines thrust down your throat so all those reasons freedom of speech all those things they saw in hong kong and they thought represented a real existential threat to the communist party and its control in beijing so um i i think what's happened is is deeply worrying and and i have to say um i actually did think at night in 1997 that while it wouldn't be easy um they weren't going to simply turn that turn turtle indeed i used to think that the longer things went on the more likely it was that china would behave reasonably well about hong kong you make a very interesting point uh chris which is that uh we sometimes don't think about the interaction between what goes on in hong kong and what goes on in china it sits right there in some ways many people said uh perhaps hong kong will infect china not the other way around and and perhaps that's how the leadership actually saw it uh and you you made a very interesting point that for 10 years or so things went reasonably well um and then uh the crackdowns and we've we've seen now just sort of steady erosion of uh hong kong's status but can you go back just a little bit and uh you talked about xi jinping is it really just xi jinping or do you think that it has to do with a china that as it matures as it sees uh that its prosperity has really been its legitimacy with its people and yet it's getting harder and harder to deliver for the higher expectations of people was there something uh going on in china itself that made hong kong even more threatening or was it just xi jinping who saw it differently well i think first of all it is inconceivable and for a hong kong lead for a chinese leader for a leader of the communist party that there can be people in hong kong who may love china but don't love the cons the communist party and that they find impossible because as you know um love china um love the communist party that the two are supposed to be the same thing but i do think that in in the from around 2010 2011 there was growing concern in in china about the impact of globalization of urbanization of developments in the internet and at the same time as they were spooked by that quasi-coup or attempted coup by beauchili and i think that convinced them from 2011 onwards there was a there was a a party uh meeting in 2011 when the communique was actually drafted under a committee shared by xi jinping in which they asserted the importance of cracking down on culture on education on religion on civil society on human rights lawyers and so on and so on and the first thing that happened after 2013 when xi jinping became leader was what's famously called communique number nine which was the instruction to the party to the military and to government officials to recognize that the main threat to the communist party came from liberal values it's an extraordinary um listening um from as i said earlier civic society parliamentary democracy um historical nihilism in other words telling people what happened to tnn men freedom of speech and so on and when people say that there isn't really a a battle of values a war of values there is you just have to read what the chinese communist leadership have been saying to people and i think it was very much related to their sense that they couldn't keep a tight grip and what was happening in china and if they once started um to allow uh the uh sentiments that were underpinned hong kong's success to uh infiltrate china i think there's one other thing which you may think is is a slightly absurd proposition but i know enough people who are knowledgeable about china who believe this to be true one of the main intellectual um supporters of xi jinping was wankieshan who was the um chinese head of the discipline committee um of the anti-corruption drive and before that um he was a vice premier dealing with the economy way before that he was one of the few leaders who wasn't uh an electrical engineer or whatever he actually was actually a museum curator and he was obsessed we met him in hong k in uh oxford a few years ago he was obsessed with topville and not with the not with democracy in america but tockville on the ancient regime and if you look at sales of tocqueville's book of the rco regime which i had to do for history at oxford 100 years ago if you look at sales they spike at a certain point everybody in the central party school is required to read and talkville why because they thought that tocqueville had two particular lessons for them first that people don't become easier to govern just because they're getting better off indeed if you look at 18th century france it was exactly the reverse secondly authoritarian regimes are always always always at their weakest and most vulnerable when they try to reform and when they try to change and i do believe that um the the only plausible reason for the fantastic sale of tocqueville saucio regime in in china is that the chinese leadership actually took those two points very seriously it's a very interesting point and of course from my own uh perspective i remember very well uh the tremendous tremendous fear of the gorbachev effect that gorbachev had in fact been foolish to think that communism could be reformed and many said it was going to work differently in china of course because they had already reformed the economy they had economic prosperity going for them now they could in a sense afford political reform because they had a base of legitimacy which of course the soviets did not have uh but i remember very well after 1989 you know tiananmen square uh was a very clear signal that they were not going to go the gorbachev route which would then allow the uh because because reforming authoritarianism is dangerous so i resonate very much uh with that comment uh before we we go to uh china's broader role and uh and then ultimately how to deal with it i'd like to just briefly take you back to hong kong and uh have you talk a little bit about how you see hong kong's future it is actually after all a place that was important to china as a kind of offshore uh with rule of law with uh with a banking system that worked uh where it was actually important to to china's economy uh have they given up in that importance do they think they can have it both ways or are they trying to crush hong kong in favor of shanghai as a banking system how do how do you think they think about it and what do you think that means for the future of hong kong well as a contribution to the overall chinese gdp hong kong's position has of course changed um when i left hong kong and this wasn't um post hoc propter hock um when i left hong kong um the uh hong kong gdp was not far short of a fifth of china's but with just seven million people um today i guess that hong kong's um uh economy is about three percent of china's it's still very important but because of what's happened to the chinese economy in the last 25 years and hong kong's contribution in that sense is smaller but hong kong is enormously important for um uh inward investment into china and for china's ability to be part of a global economy which is it which is largely working in in dollar denomination and it's hugely important it's very important for ipos about 70 percent of ipo is done through hong kong from chinese from chinese companies why are there so many hedge funds um in hong kong um because hedge funds like others see the importance of the relationship between a free market free flow of information and the rule of law and if you take away two of those things you and and think you can manage with the sort of cronyism and uh so on which apply and no free cr and no rule of law which apply in the whole of china you do run real financial and other risks my guess is that for some time to come the chinese authorities will be pressing chinese mainland companies to do as much through the hong kong stock market and hong kong institutions as possible in order to try to um buoy up the economy for a bit but there's no question that if you take away freedom of information on the rule of law you make a big impact on a society and economy which has been one of the best examples of the relationship between economic and political freedom um working um symbiotically and i think that's been the great secret and the great story of hong kong so i i think that um what china has done in hong kong will have an impact um on china's um international role and the united states um if it was tougher than it has been could make that even more um difficult um but it is it is a problem if hong kong just looks as though it's another part of china how does the rest of the world treat it how does the can it still be an in the independent member of the world trade organization what about its role in the imf all those issues are bound to come up and if you're treated exactly the same in in hong kong what let me give one example or other example in 2013 there was a huge boom in the in the shanghai stock market very much encouraged by um xi jinping the new emperor when that crashed immediately the census moved in first of all to remove any reference to xi jinping's encouragement of uh investment in the stock market and secondly to discourage any mention of the fact that there'd been a crash now if those sort of things apply start to apply in hong kong and what happens when when uh a newspaper in hong kong starts to um to look very hard at the books of an soe of a state-owned enterprise um or um uh even a private sector company which matters to uh to the chinese mainland what happens when that when they do that are they prosecuted are they turfed out they have their visa removed it's going to be very difficult yes you you said something that i just have to ask you to uh to expand upon you said if the united states were willing to get tougher um can you just talk a little bit about uh do you not think that the response to uh to hong kong has been tough enough and then i'd like to broaden this out then to to the to china's policy more broadly so uh but have we been have we done the right things about hong kong yeah i i think you've been pretty tough and i i recall that when i was governor of hong kong i used to go every year from hong kong to washington to argue in favor of most favored nation status for china and hong kong and for treating hong kong separately and i think it's understandable that you've determined that uh hong kong has to be treated as part of china but you could have gone i'm glad you haven't gone further because i think you've distinguished between the impact um on mega hong kong and the impact on on on normal ordinary people and i think you uh you've tried very hard not to make autumn make the normal citizens of hong kong bear the brunt and i think that's a very difficult line to tread but i think you've done it pretty pretty skillfully so far but you could of course have gone much further um in what you did about international financial um activities that come out of hong kong but i think you've played that hand um uh pretty well what i would hope that um uh that the united states and the the the five ism countries in particular all being anglophone would do is more for um for example um young people in hong kong who want to study um in in anglophone universities i think it would be a very very good um initiative for the five eyes to take to a launcher a sort of freedom scholarship for young and hong kongers with bursaries in uh universities in canada us uh australia new zealand and the uk and i you wouldn't need very much money in order to do it so there are other things that can be done but at the moment i think that um the most important thing as far as the us uh dealing with uh um with um uh canada with them china and hong kong is concerned is for the us to avoid giving the impression that it's having to dragoon other countries into um into supporting it i think this is an interest that we all share how we manage the world in the next few years and given the the fact that we're dealing with a large economy um which is probably at peak i can come back to that later if you'd like um which is um capable of such mendacious and loutish behavior let's talk about that uh mendacious and lotis behavior this is a this is a process this is a project on chinese shark power and of course it's meant to contrast with those who wanted to talk about uh chinese soft power for instance through uh belton road or efforts to to change the nature of the way people thought about china and even something like belt and road their their investment in infrastructure program across much of the developing world uh has a sharp edge to it uh you if you can't pay that loan back then we own it so actually china has been pretty aggressive and pretty sharp can you talk a little bit about how you see uh the broader nature of uh the challenge from china uh in the various aspects in economics and in security you mentioned the five eyes of course the intelligence cooperatives but uh countries that deeply uh cooperate on intelligence australia canada etc uh can you talk a little bit about how you see china's global geopolitical footprint and how they're carrying it out are they wise in what they're doing no i don't think they're wise there is there is a tendency on the part of others to think that um it's all a brilliant and carefully uh calculated um uh plan it goes back that to that famous story about um uh i think it was uh henry kissinger's first visit to beijing and he asked show and lie um what the lessons of the french revolution of the revolution in france were and and uh joanne lai says it's it's um uh too early to tell and everybody thinks that's fantastically wise the interpreter afterwards pointed out that he was actually talking about 1989 about the um students in in paris in in 89 rather than rather than the 18th century french revolution so we tend i think to um to exaggerate their their great wisdom and i think they've behaved rather foolishly and they've obviously taken advantage of the fact that our in the last months are our concentration has been on the dealing with the coronavirus and and uh there are arguments um which we will have i hope in due course about how much um we the the chinese are responsible for the appalling ravages of that pandemic because they simply didn't live up to their obligations under the international health regulations from of 2005-2007 where you're supposed to and declare concerns about a uh an a a public health um problem within 24 hours and we know what actually happened i think they've i think they've overplayed their hand i think they've done that with india um why choose this moment to um start a border fight with india they've clearly done it in the south china sea where they've broken every commitment they made to president obama um and you can see i mean i think one or two of your think tanks have produced the the uh the aerial evidence of what's been happening if we we know about the ramming of vietnamese fishing boats in the in the south china sea they've done it in relation uh to uh to hong kong um and their their continuing bullying of taiwan and if you were in taiwan and wanted to know what would happen to you if you went along with uh china's policies then hong kong's a a pretty appalling example so i don't think they've handled themselves particularly um skillfully to put it mildly but it is true that to go back to a phrase i used earlier i think we're at peak china and i think this is the moment when china is going to feel um more muscularity than it's likely to in the future what's the problem in the future the problems are several fold above all demography drought and debt and they are all going to be huge problems for china the other one which perhaps raises questions about how much confidence they actually have in this um technological totalitarianism is that huge nervous about liberal democracies about the sort of things that you and i take for granted and whether it's freedom of speech um or civic society uh or whatever and and i do think that that that reflects a real worry on their part about the existential threat which our values pose to them and it's why i keep on coming back the point that i don't think this is a cold war at the moment but it's certainly a war it's certainly a conflict of values and we've got to stand up for what we believe in and we've got to do it by working together and the way we're picked off one at a time by what the financial times is called uh coercive commercial diplomacy it's pathetic on our part if you're bullied and you stand up for yourself and if your friend is bullied you stand up for your friend i noticed the other day that an example of political irony with chinese characteristics that when somebody suggested that um the young democrats in hong kong should be awarded the nobel peace prize and uh wang yi said it would be a monstrous to politicize the nobel peace prize well where was he when liu xiaobo was given the prize and the chinese immediately made clear that they wouldn't buy anything more from nor from norway for years to come actually after that norway's investment norway's exports to china went up and if you look at salmon which was a particular um sale salmons sales to to vietnam spiked and salmon sales from vietnam to china spiked so a lot of its bluff but nevertheless we shouldn't let them get away with it we have working together not trying to um contain china but to constrain china as gerald c siegel used to say and to oblige them to stick to the rules when they don't stick to the rules which they don't um particularly perhaps in in commercial affairs when they don't stick to the rules we have to call them out on it just to add one point it's extremely interesting to compare from time to time the um chambers of commerce annual reports in beijing american european japanese they all say the same things about china they've all got the same grumbles about intellectual property theft about the difficulty of investing in china about the way in which china takes a completely different attitude to investing in in other countries than we allow them they allow to invest in in china it's inconceivable that the chinese would have allowed a german company to buy its main ai company in the way that the chinese were allowed to buy the main german um ai company so and i i think we have to work together i think it's the most important aspect of multilateralism with china and one thing i think i i beg us all to do is to be open about it not to think we have to be secretive in the way we do these things the more we talk to talk about how we're going to do things differently with china the better it is and the less likely we'll have to actually um have uh endless roused with them we we do have to work with with uh china on a number of issues where there are global public goods but i think um uh i i hope that my own uh our own government in britain will look hard at where we're dependent on particular chinese technological exports where we're uh over dependent on other things and we'll um work to um to deal with that i want to come to the technological cooperation i've got a competition with china in just a moment but let me just ask you a rather specific question how concerned are you uh around some of the blustering around taiwan uh it's been for a long time uh american policy uh that no one should try to change the status quo and that message has always been delivered to beijing but also delivered to taiwan but the the language about taiwan the military positioning around taiwan are are we seeing some kind of sea change with xi jinping does he have different aspirations about taiwan uh how how do you think about uh this situation are are we looking at a period of greater vulnerability for for taiwan i think if xi jinping thought he could get away with it he'd try it um i don't know any other way in which you can explain um the big naval buildup by china um i used to um i used to write quite a lot about israeli and i was always struck by the fact that people used to say he wrote all these novels about about some uh social problems and about uh about uh helping the working class um and then when he was prime minister he did something about it there wasn't any relationship between the two i think you have to take what people say sometimes rather seriously um and i think if we were to give the impression to um to xi jinping that we wouldn't care if he put the squeeze harder on taiwan and even if he intervened military um then it would um it would encourage him to behave really stupidly and i think there are one or two things that we could and should do which would be regarded by china as provocative and by regard and be regarded by some uh liberal democracy some western societies is product prerogative but i think make a great deal of sense for example the fact that taiwan is denied a membership of the world health conference um run by the world health organization it used to be a member until 2017 and then the chinese threw it out even while i think the knights of malta or jerusalem and others are all allowed observer status and i i think that overwhelmingly um the support the financial support of the the who quite rightly them comes from rich countries comes from rich democracies and individual donors in in in those democracies and i think i don't want want us to withdraw from the wwho though i think they behave pretty pathetically in the early days of the coronavirus it's the only who we've got but i do think we should insist come the next um world health conference which i think is next may i do think we should insist on seating uh taiwan as a as a as an observer it's those sort of things which would show that we're actually concerned not we're not going try trying to um go back on the one china policy but we aren't insisting that china should be um should treat taiwan with a with a modicum of civility and if the rest of the if china had behaved over the kuroda virus as well as taiwan did and we wouldn't all have the problem we've got today you were talking about tienen men just now um i was in tiananmen until a week before um the um uh the massacres are in and around the square and i was there as a as a ministerial um vice president of the asian development bank and it was taking place um in beijing that year and it was taking place and everybody thought the exciting issue was going to be this that the the fact that taiwan taipei was allowed to take part in it and that was all those years ago in fact as you know um while the adb meeting was taking place gorbachev you referred to this earlier was arriving in in beijing and the chinese were grotesquely embarrassed by the fact that there were there was this some revolution of fat going on in in the streets that gorbachev could see and i think that had some impact on the on the way they've actually behaved but they've actually dealt with these issues of seating taiwan in international forum before and we should make a point of insisting on it without going back on the one china policy yes one of the places that we're likely to be uh competitors even in some cases in conflict is in the technological sphere uh some have said that we are effectively becoming two separate technological uh universes uh two separate technological spheres if if you look for instance at the internet uh the chinese view of the internet which is a means of social control and the granting of social credits and watching who you talk to and and judging your patriotism by it uh our view with variations among western and and democratic countries but you can pretty much go on the internet and say what you think and talk to whom you please and there's really no great fear that the the government at least is going to to do something about that unless you're talking to terrorists so they're really kind of irreconcilable views of the internet and so i can see that you're going to see separation there but how far do you think that separation is going to go you you mentioned not selling major technological countries to companies to to china we have now in the united states stronger oversight of chinese investment in any company but particularly technological ones through our committee on foreign investment in the united states which mandate has been broadened to look at those issues so how far is this going to go are we really going to become two separate technological universes will there continue to be some overlap how do you see uh that here in silicon valley um that's a big question because uh a lot of particular venture firms and like are actually invested in uh chinese companies so how do you see this uh evolving well i'm i'm a complete um neophyte on on anything technological um but i feel strongly about three things first of all unless we're prepared um to accept the possibility of two different technological spheres we'll fetch up with one that'll be chinese and that worries me um inordinately when we were debating um huawei and in its role in 5g in the uk very few people pointed out the extent to which huawei was involved um in xinjiang in these in the surveillance activities in xinjiang um like that other company i think which i think is called hickfish vision and so i think there are real uh issues and that we have to face up to secondly i think that one one way in which we have to face up to them is by is by recognizing the importance from time to time of greater public funding um of high-tech development and uh if it was really true that huawei was better than um than siemens or ericsson as european companies then that's an argument for us trying to work with siemens and ericsson um and uh invest more with them thirdly we know perfectly well that one area where um china will be trying to steal um uh our intellectual property is is technology there is high tech um it's not i think particularly a problem for us in oxford i'd be more worried about them trying to pick up um uh stuff from our life sciences where i think we're we're world beating or as good as um but um i i do think we have to be very very cautious about for example the relationship between universities and and military universities in china and we were where we've i think been fairly pathetic um so i think there are issues of of public investment i think there are issues um of uh research collaboration and i think that unless we're prepared to um to try to develop our own high-tech equipment will fetch up um excessively dependent on chinese well you just mentioned a place that i wanted to to go uh which is to talk about universities there is in the united states there has long been really going back to the end of world war ii uh a very close relationship between universities that produce uh fundamental research uh even applied research that then becomes commercialized and has in fact driven the uh the revolution in technology if you look at just about any breakthrough technology in the united states over the period after world war ii universities have had something to do with it uh particularly since uh we no longer have the great labs like bell laboratories which was uh the source of so many nobel prizes over a long period of time so universities are key it's been a relationship that has worked because the federal government has been willing to fund research uh without really uh getting um into the details of what the research was supposed to produce so funding fundamental research and recognizing that you can never tell where fundamental research is really going but it's gone in good directions it's gone through the national science foundation uh through the nih national institutes for health when it's about biotech or about about health issues and it's through even the defense department which has had a huge role in funding university research we now come to a point uh where the question of what the chinese are doing to mine that research from universities through chinese students through chinese postdoctoral students some would even say the funding of uh on-campus activities by the the chinese communist party some in the humanities some not uh that that relationship is a bit fraught now between the openness of the university and what the chinese are doing what has been your experience at oxford you mentioned uh the biosciences where oxford is very very powerful what's been your experience how do you think about this how do we balance the openness of universities and the belief that knowledge doesn't have boundaries with uh a chinese view that yes knowledge does have boundaries it ought to serve the interests of the chinese communist party and of the chinese military how do we think about that well first of all anybody who doesn't think about it who's anybody's got anything to do with the university hasn't read um the the chinese um policy paper called patriotic education um from 2019 and or or hasn't read the latest um work on the extent to which soes state end enterprises in the private sector and their research programs in particular are part of united front activity um all um uh trained on this on uh securing um the successful implementation of china's narrative and i i think there are there are three real issues that we have to face up to and it's i think more of an issue for us in europe and or particularly in britain and australia than it is perhaps for you in this sense that we've become more dependent on funding of uh through chinese students partly because the australian and british governments haven't spent enough on funding higher education us themselves and partly as well because we don't have as much of a experience of philanthropic giving to higher education and uh alumni giving back to their to their educational institutions that's not true at oxford but it's true of most a lot of universities um at oxford um about some a year ago we turned down a big um uh project with huawei and the assumption was that this was because of me i didn't know about it until i read about it on the front page of the financial times it was because our own academics had thought this is not a very good idea um so i i i'm content by and large um at our university to um to depend on their on their good sense but um overall i think there are two or three things which we in in the research area which we should be aware of first of all i'm very much in favor without having the government deciding what research we do to actually have a point an entry point in government where we can go and ask whether um issues are going to be really awkward um in security or other terms secondly um i think that it's really important for us to be open about where the funding for research is coming from and where the funding of people's individual posts is coming from and when when occasionally what happens is as you will know um is the most active proponents of um opened a open field for for china are academics who have themselves posts in china as well as in as well as in uh as in is in western societies i don't wish to point any fingers but we know that's true so to be open about the where the funding is coming from and whether people have posts which are funded partly um by chinese by chinese pop state or private donors i think those points about about openness are extremely important my own i think we can deal with those in in in britain i think we can deal with those issues of um big research projects reasonably well i'm more worried about how we cope with with big student populations i mean if you're a if you're a a student at a chinese university you're used to there being cameras in the classroom cameras in the lecture theater and you know presumably that there are paid knocks there are people recruited as informants to tell the state and paid and promised research projects at the end i'm not making this up one knows it one knows it to be true and if you look at the the chinese um the chinese policies um on higher education and the extent to which um universities are regarded as the way you is the way you put the finishing touches to china man resisting any influence from the west so that even i noticed the other day um thomas pinketti um had to have his had to had to deny that his book could be published in in china because they wanted to censor it and so if that's china's higher education then it does pose problems for us not just in collaborating but also in how we deal with uh chinese and mainland student and uh hong kong students when they're when they're with us it's a it's a real um problem i think um so i hope we'll be open to it and i hope we'll talk to one another about it i mean i i noticed that there's a report in the financial times today about both oxford and princeton and deciding that um in the in the social sciences in in chinese history um people will be when they produce essays and they'll be done anonymously so they can't be used against them under the national security law and which has now been passed these are big and difficult issues for us to tackle and we mustn't be seduced by the fact that we've become in europe any sorry in britain and australia so dependent on the income stream from chinese students and deduct them these are really important issues and and universities in my view it sounds rather old-fashioned i know are i think still the still pillars of open societies we have a number of questions that have come in and i just want to uh to pose they're grouped around hong kong many of which you've already answered but there are also a couple of questions about the future and so i'm going to ask you and now condensing a number of the questions that we have here um is there any way to influence the uh internal development of china um is there given that they've delivered 500 million people out of poverty some people would say this is a government that is popular with its people how do you think about influencing and then a number of questions that really say all right and so if you were governing governing in the uk or the united states what would you do about the chinese global rise and chinese sharp power what's your advice to those who have to deal with china well on the first point i think our ability to um to uh uh change um or alter chinese internal behavior is pretty limited except by the way in which we helped you know more about this than i do to change behavior uh in the soviet union and russia and that is by the way we behave ourselves if we are clearly running um successful open societies if what chinese students see when they come to america or britain or australia is a really successful society with openness with all sorts of freedoms which we take for granted if they see that and if that's generally the impression that gets back to china then i think that has more impact on china than anything though i don't deny the importance of public diplomacy but i don't think we're going to convert xi jinping um or his um uh acolytes anytime soon to a belief in um in the uh in tockville's views on democracy in america rather than the views on on the french revolution um so i i think the way we behave is enormously important and secondly which um uh is related to the second question as well it seems to me imperative for us to work together an imperative for um the sort of cooperation we've seen with the five eyes to be more general and i know as well as anybody that none of this will work without american leadership but we all know that if it simply seems as i said earlier to america dragooning other countries into signing up and then it's not going to work at all and for um for us all europe japan south korea australia new zealand uk to be working together to be sharing information to be sharing um concerns um i think is hugely important i'd like to know how many other countries have made a real fuss about hostage diplomacy about the way the um the chinese have behaved with those um to uh innocent canadians who have been locked up i'd like to know how many countries when uh the chinese behaved as badly as they did about the nobel peace peace prize immediately shouted you can't do that i'd like to know how many countries uh uh made clear after australia was threatened with um with all sorts of economic sanctions because it asked for um a wto examination of the of the uh of what happened with the coronavirus i'd like to know how many countries made a fuss and said we're on australia's side so i i think it's terribly important that we talk to one another that we work together and that we share not a determination to build a cold war wall around china but we share a determination to ensure that when china doesn't pay by the rules when it breaks its word when it behaves intolerably then we call it out and i think we should be calling out now at the un and the human rights committee what whatever one says about um the way they their activities have been distorted over the last few years i think we should call out uh china on hong kong and above all perhaps on xinjiang where well what we're seeing is by un definitions the equivalent of genocide and indeed um you have given us a really excellent framework here and it's an alliance framework and by the way people have asked about the five eyes these are the closest cooperative intelligence relationships i think in the world us uk australia i think that what we now face is a question of whether we have a the will and the patients and indeed the ability to have a nuanced policy toward china how do we do it do we have that will can you see us i've always believed free peoples will ultimately win but free peoples have to organize themselves properly any final thoughts on free people's and the challenge from china well free people aren't always very good at organizing themselves um and it's it's maybe easier um there's a wonderful novel by rex warner called the aerodrome which i always used to think about when um whenever i met lee kuan yew or went to singapore um there's a there's a terribly uh a sort of rickety and english village full of yokels um all behaving rather badly all over the place an aerodrome is is opened at the edge of the village there's a very smart squadron leader who comes in um and uh it knocks everything about knocks everything in into into shape but somehow the freedoms uh the liberties um which uh um have uh infused this uh english village full of yokels and managed to survive but we do have to organize ourselves um better and i i find myself endlessly provoked by maobani's arguments about the fact that and the west has had it i don't think we've had it i think the ideas which have made us as successful as we have been um continue to be sustainable um i think that we um i think it's impossible to uh borrow from lots of other people's uh arguments whether martin luther king or nelson mandela i think it's impossible to cage to lock up an idea and one thing i really believe i i learned when i was in hong kong is all the things i'd taken for granted as a as a politician before i went to hong kong are suddenly there and the reasons for its success the relationship between open societies between freedom of speech between freedom of assembly between the freedom of information between countability between civil society all those things come together and help to produce a successful stable society in a successful economy and i i it was it sounds like a maybe a stupid thing to say that in my mid-40s i learned that by seeing it working myself and by helping to organize it and i still think um that uh if if we only have the gumption to stand up for ourselves what we what we believe in as representatives of of open societies um is bound in the long run to be more substantive sustainable than technological totalitarianism thank you very much and thank you for that uh inspirational uh ending uh thank you for your many years of service to your country um and to uh the world and uh we were just incredibly honored to have you uh as a part as a matter of fact the launch of our uh china shark power project and we invite you when we can see people again to come visit us at hoover we'd love to see you again larry back to you okay well uh thank you condi i'll just close with the following points first of all many people have asked about taiwan we also have a project on taiwan in the indo-pacific region and i invite you to write to the hoover institution if you'd like to be put on the mailing list for either the chinese global sharp power program or a program and conferences on taiwan in the indo-pacific region or both uh secondly i want to say to both of you that we've received a large number of questions and i want to many of them have already been answered or asked by condi others i just want the questioners to know i will convey them to our two conversants i've copied them all into a word document so you didn't waste your time in asking them uh and many expressions of admiration for you lord patton for your remarkable devotion to the cause of freedom and human dignity in general and the cause of liberty and the ultimate triumph of it not only in hong kong but in all of uh china and conde if you'll permit me since it's coming from a former marine i want the last words to be uh from him secretary rice i met you in jordan true to your word your staff sent my marines in iraq dozens of containers of ben and jerry's ice cream a much appreciated momento and gift of home for marines who were conducting a very difficult mission always your fan and so i will conclude by saying we are always uh the fan of both of you thank you both so much thank you thank you very much indeed thank you all for joining us

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Views: 20,925

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Keywords: China, Hong Kong, freedom, human rights, China's Global Sharp Power

Id: DLLU233nD1o

Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020