China's rise: The three key things everyone needs to know | Kerry Brown | TEDxThessaloniki

[Music] China matters we know that because the current President of the United States is having a huge trade war with China we know it because it is soon going to be probably the world's biggest economy we know it because it is the world's biggest exporter and the world's second largest importer and China also matters because it is likely that in many of the shops that you buy goods in you're probably buying goods originally that were manufactured in China and China matters because last year 140 million Chinese traveled as tourists throughout the world when you think from 1949 to 1976 they're only seven hundred and forty thousand movements in and out of China and then in one year 140 million so that is the difference between the Maoist period from 1949 and today but despite being a country of huge statistics the sort of shock and awe statistics that we all read about in our media China is also a human story it's a story of the rise of a nation after a really tough modern history and the aspirations of Chinese people and that is after all a fifth of humanity so today I thought I would talk about three things three very specific things that will have an impact on everyone here and will have an impact on our futures our global futures and talk about the new land and the new world that's creating their free very specific things the first of which is the nature of Chinese strength and power so modern history we have been very very used to a China which is weak and our mindsets when I say how I mean people in Europe people in North America basically non Chinese we are quite comfortable with the idea of a China which is always marginal and on the edges and this China was bypassed when it was the Ching dynasty in the late 17th century by modernity despite the fact that there was an early phase in Chinese history when it was a great inventor about a thousand years ago it invented the three great propellers of modernity magnetic comp compass the printing press and gunpowder despite it being an innovator at that time it didn't industrialize and while in Europe and Great Britain the gating just a revolution happened in China this simply wasn't the case so China's first real engagement with modernity in the opium war in 1839 was a great catastrophe and it started a hundred years which is still talked about and weighs heavy on the collective memory of Chinese to this day of humiliation and that kind of period of weakness a kind of huge impact on China's prowess and its international image is really still a live issue and yet today under the current leader Xi Jinping we see a China which is powerful it sounds powerful it looks powerful as the statistics have just gone through show it really is powerful and that is a huge change not only for it and its own image of itself but also for us we have to change our mindsets it's not just about China it's about our response to this new kind of power the second is the manifestation of that power of the three that I'm going to talk about and the manifestation of that power is for the first time in modern history China is a naval power that's never happened before from the 1980s it has built up in numerical terms at least the world's largest Navy although of course technologically it's far far behind the United States and that china is a completely new China because until recently until the 1980s it was only really a land power in the very early period from the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in 1400 there was a very brief period of about 15 years when the eunuch Admiral junker built this incredible Navy which reached the east coast of Africa and into Indonesia but that period ended very very quickly and now we were in an era again in which China is a naval power and one that we see manifest its material strength and power on the high seas deep into the Indian Ocean in the South China Sea in the East China Sea in these areas in which it is incredibly important the question really is though how do we interpret that power what do we think about that naval power is it really likely that in the future in our kind of future lives we will be seeing sea battles like we did in the past is it really likely that we're going to see the kind of naval wars that we saw in the last century or is conflict going to be manifested in the invisible world in the virtual world and in that sense has it already started in many ways China's power now is kind of haunting us it is invisible it has this extraordinary invisibility and that virtual war is one the China is always in many what you're already winning and therefore is it really that the naval powers and assets that China has are a great distraction they're a distraction against this kind of real power - China has which is the French philosopher Francois Julian said Horne's that it doesn't act and it's really our expectations as Outsiders observing this that are preyed upon we expect we think that China will act in a certain way but is it really going to do that and is it already acting in other ways that are invisible and behind and within the world in which we live but the third issue they want to talk about today is the most profound and the most difficult and that is that we don't really know what a world run according to Chinese values looks like and in fact no one knows it's never happened before when I say Chinese values what am I talking about it's not just the kind of values that China is run according to today Marxism Leninism and since a couple of years ago this new body of ideas called Xi Jinping thought what we really see is a China which is built it's ideology and it's kind of civilization on profoundly different roots and a different intellectual tradition to that of the West if you think of 2,400 2,500 years ago the period of the great philosophers in Greece and the tradition that kind of flowed from that what we have I suppose is a commitment to this idea of a singular truth the uniform truth and the idea as f/w moat the great imperial historian said of a kind of truth with a capital T but really China is the great dissenter to this idea of the universal you could argue that in a sense the universal with a capital u was created from European traditions and that continues to this day in all of the different discourses that we operate in a specialists and Technica technical experts near China is the great dissenter its intellectual traditions are hybrid the three great teachings that we talk about when we look at Chinese histories and I mean that in the plural there have been many different Chinese histories over the last two and a half thousand years and this idea of at the heart of them the plural mindset confucianism taoism buddhism and these existing happily in a kind of flexible worldview in which there is no desire to have one particular winner in modern times being contributed to by ideas like Marxism Leninism and then the more modern ideas that we get today of maoism and then finally the results of all of this capitalism with Chinese characteristics when you go to China and you look at the landscape you think of this as being a place of enormous hybridity and energy and a living monument to this hybridity at the heart of the Chinese worldview but the issue really is that that well view contests and dissents from the dominant American and European view of the desire for universality and for truth with a capital T and hybridity therefore is something that I think has a kind of uneasy impact upon us it unsettles us it's manifested in all sorts of different areas from our discourse about human rights to our discourse about the rule of law to China's engage in the international system it seems the China since 1978 when reform and opening-up started and after the Maoist period China really started to reach into the world and engage with the why try why the world it has done it with maybe a double mind on the one hand on the basis of utility since 1978 it has really engaged with international systems and with the WTO the World Trade Organization and others really kind of one but on the other hand it doesn't believe in the underlying values and it's clear because Xi Jingping the current leader has said since he came to power in 2012 the China does not subscribe to this set of underlying values and that I suppose is the problem because if China has these values as a fifth of humanity as the world's second largest economy are such a major player what do we do about that is it really likely that we are going to enter into this era of sort of great transformation where the world magically becomes like China and has a Chinese worldview or the China magically changes and becomes like us well we've tried thus the latter for the last thirty years through engagement and I don't think that has really worked it is not likely the China politically certainly not socially or culturally is going to become like the outside world it is an exceptional power it regards itself is very exclusive it regards its attitude to the rest of the world also as exclusive and excluding and therefore when we have on the one hand the United States on the other China we kind of have this possibility of a future which could be perpetually in conflict one in which you have two such different powers who don't really have a common language between them apart from utilitarian capitalism what kind of world would that lead into in the future a world in which China lives comfortably in its kind of sino centric sphere or some people have called a pact Sinica and the world in which America is perpetually frustrated by this great dissenter the contestation of a china that does not accept the american view the european view in the wider view of the world what do these two kinds of powers do when they talk to each other and when they kind of try and finally engage is it going to be that they have real conflict or are they going to live in a kind of zone each of them where they just accept and tolerate each other the only real case in Greece in heat history in deep history which we can think of to such significant powers happily coexisting with very different value sets was 2,000 years ago at the peak of the Roman Empire and Augustus and in the Han Dynasty in China these two amazing powers with huge influence and economies and yet they existed because they had no contact with each other there is no archaeological evidence of any real magnitude that shows that the Han Empire and the Roman Empire ever really had dialogue apart from who through intermediaries and therefore is that likely to be a model for the future we really liked if you see an America in its space a China in its space and just happily living alongside each other like they're living in two separate kinds of blocks of flats or two communities the difference of course between 2,000 years ago and today is that there is plenty of contact American China talked to each other almost continuously and they really have shared space all around them we're really going to see therefore a viable bipolar world a world in which you have this kind of constant tension that we all happily live with between two such different world views this is going to be a world I guess where we are perpetually living in tension where we are living between two houses and those who are ambiguous kind of have to occupy this space in between so this is not an easy vision of the world's future there is I suppose another alternative and that is is we look at the Chinese value system and it's hybridity this diversity and its richness over two and a half thousand years and as we learn more as outsiders about this and engage with this we also feel that this is something this diversity and hybridity that can enrich us enrich our intellectual spaces that it's not a contest it's not a competition we can accept that when China says that it contests the American European idea of a kind of unit for uniformity a universality but that is also itself liberating it gets us another perspective another Vista but these are going to be really really tough choices and it's likely that the communities that deal with them are not knowledgeable not particularly aware maybe not after speed in the kind of view that China has of the world to engage with it properly and so we are at this great crossroads when we look at these two extraordinary traditions the European enlightenment one broadly and the Amit the Chinese one we have a kind of choice we have the pathway in which we really commit to one view over the other or we try and maintain a kind of ambiguity or a balancing between two very different worldviews and we don't commit there is one thing though that is absolutely certain in 1968 four years before the United States had rapprochement with China Richard Nixon who was then the presidential candidate wrote a very famous essay in foreign affairs in which he said it was impossible and if you remember at that time America had no real contact with China it was still the Cold War when Richard Nixon said in that article basically we cannot contest we can't oppose the aspirations and the ideas and the hopes of a fifth of humanity and that really was behind his political commitment to having dialogue and having rapprochement and having deterrent with China and of course we live in that world today the world that was created after he went to China in 1972 but in the modern era I suppose as we see China's incredible as a capitalist country we return to that idea that proposition of Richard Nixon how can we possibly think that a fifth of humanity with their incredible energy their dynamism their aspirations and their hopes are just going to pack them up and live in a little space that's been carved out for them and sort of accept this subsidiary position so when we think of these three issues China's strength China's naval assets as a manifestation of its strengths Chinese values and what they mean and how they could enrich and enliven our worlds or be an issue for them we also have to think this as being a period of great change and transformation for us the great Chinese psychologist Simon Lee's originally from Belgium but then based in Australia for many years said that the most exciting and amazing thing about engaging with another culture in any depth it's the way that it not only changes in front of you but changes you and that's what I think is so exciting about this era the China's rise for all of the challenges and fall of the potential threats and issues is also perhaps the first time in modern history that we have been given this opportunity to change ourselves and think in a different way and that I think is tremendously exciting and I hope that many of you will be able to embark on that incredible journey because it is one that is really going to shape our global future thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 457,272

Rating: 4.4978356 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Economics, Foreign policy, Government, Politics, Society

Id: VKNzht-JOXE

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019