Democracy and Authoritarianism

for nearly two centuries societies have weighed the merits of free market capitalism and socialism debates continue over which system maximizes prosperity and better promotes human flourishing free market capitalism decentralizes economic decisions giving individuals control over what to produce how much to charge and what to buy their decisions are informed by market prices which convey important information about scarcity and consumer value proponents contend that capitalism delivers the best economic outcomes by giving individuals incentives to create and produce critics on the other hand point to the persistence of poverty and market economies and rising inequality as proof that capitalism fails to deliver broad-based prosperity they maintain that this inequality ultimately gives the rich disproportionate economic and political power in contrast socialism grants the government the authority to make most economic decisions the government chooses how to allocate scarce resources based upon what it determines to be most useful to society as a whole proponents argue that socialism ensures society's resources are fairly distributed critics claim that socialism fails to give people proper economic incentives to innovate and produce which ultimately reduces economic opportunities for all opponents further argue that socialism's powerful central governments become autocratic and threaten political freedom so which system is better for humanity for as long as this question has been asked the debate all too often devolves into name-calling an emotional arguments that fail to advance the discussion and yet it is imperative that we keep asking the human prosperity project at the hoover institution seeks to overcome these preconceptions it employs analysis of free market capitalism and socialism and its many variants to assess how each system affects human flourishing [Music] good morning or good afternoon or even good evening depending on where you're viewing this welcome to the hoover institutions human prosperity project i'm bill whelan i'm a research fellow here at the hoover institution as well as the virginia hubs carpenter fellow in journalism i'd like to welcome you to today's broadcast the speaker series is based on the scholarly research and commentary written by hoover fellows participating in the human prosperity project on socialism and free market capitalism the overarching goal of this project is to investigate the historical record to assess the consequences for human welfare individual liberty and interactions between nations of various economic systems this project is research-based with educational and policy-oriented outputs that include long-form essays short videos commentary and in today's case speaker series all of which can be found at hoover dot org backslash human prosperity project let me repeat that for you hoover dot org backslash human prosperity project as a reminder we will be taking audience questions and i encourage you to do so and it's a very simple thing to do you just go to the q a button at the bottom of your screen and type away and we'll queue it up for our guest and we'll do our best to get to your question i'm joined today by two hoover colleagues larry diamond and elizabeth economy who are here with us today to offer macro views on democracy and authoritarianism both larry and elizabeth have written papers on this topic that are available online larry diamond is a senior fellow here at the hoover institution as well as the freeman spoli institute for international studies that is fsi for short at stanford speak larry is also a bass university fellow in undergraduate education at stanford he leads the hoover institutions programs on china's global sharp power and on taiwan and the indo-pacific region at fsi larry leads the program on arab reform and democracy based at the center on democracy development and the rule of law elizabeth economy is a senior fellow here at the hoover institution relative newcomer i believe she started just this fall she's also a senior fellow for china studies at the council on foreign relations liz and liz is an acclaimed author and expert on chinese domestic and foreign policy her book the third revolution xi jinping and the new chinese state analyzes the contradictory nature of reform under his rule larry and liz thanks for coming on today i know you've both been busy larry i'm not sure which number in the five zoom calls you're doing today this is uh but thanks for taking the time and liz you've been traveling all over the country so thanks ever so much for doing this with us today yeah it's a pleasure great to be here so i've taken the time to read both of your excellent papers and liz let me start uh by going to you your paper includes this quote from xi jinping let me read it back to you in the audience quote the banner of socialism with chinese characteristics is now flying high and proud for all to see blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization it offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence and it offers chinese wisdom and a chinese approach to solving the problems facing humanity question liz is chinese socialism transferable thanks bill it's um it's great to be part of this hoover series uh and to be part of this discussion with you and larry um so what makes the idea i think of a china model um and its transferability so interesting is that it first begs the question of what is the china model you know it's sort of broadest level it's it's basically a form of authoritarian capitalism you have extensive uh state or chinese communist party control over political life including social organizations in the media the internet education and you have an economy where the party does retain uh strong control over core sectors but also allows the market to play a role in in many other aspects you can also define it by its institutions i think the way that you know larry does so well in terms of the lack of rule of law or private property rights um and the china models also become known for its priority on the rapid development of state-led infrastructure and special economic zones that offer taxes and other incentives for foreign companies for investing i think when you look at china's engagement with other countries what you find in practical terms is that the core of the model that it is exporting in essence is state-led infrastructure growth controlling the media and civil society and oftentimes some form of grassroots uh political work particularly around poverty alleviation but different countries get different different mix of these elements and so china's transferring different elements of the model in some cases to different countries in different ways let me just give you a couple of examples of how this takes place so in guangxi province which is a poor province in southern part of the country there's a leadership academy that's training officials primarily from southeast asia on how to guide online public opinion how to alleviate poverty and how to develop a strong grassroots political presence through the belton road there's clearly an enormous priority on infrastructure development but also training seminars that are being offered on how to control the internet and do real-time censorship at real on time i'm sorry real-time censorship do manage civil society in the media china's developing safe cities you know which include all of the surveillance technology that china has at home and of course the opportunity to build your entire uh technology uh infrastructure with chinese fiber optic cables satellite system 5g and e-commerce and in some countries we've seen you know huawei engineers have been put to use helping government leaders spy on opposition candidates and then finally i think for countries that actually have their own you know communist or revolutionary party such as in sudan or ethiopia um there's communist party training how to build party organizational structure strengthen ideological work help develop a propaganda apparatus the sudan people's liberation movement has sent hundreds of government officials to china to visit the central party school and to learn how to do party building and manage public opinion so there's not really a but i would say there is a clear pattern and determined effort on china's part to educate and train other countries on uh the china model and maybe i'll make the last point and not go into this in depth but if we there's time and people are interested i do think that china's effort to quote export its model is a multi-level game and it plays out you know in the united nations and it plays out in terms of china using sort of coercive economic strategies uh to enforce you know its political views on other countries as well so it's not just about this kind of political capacity building that i've described it really does play out in sort of different forms in different institutions very good larry in your paper you point out that over the long run democracy is the best system for delivering human prosperity you just look at the numbers 35 or so free nations around the world vast majority are are democracies the only exception here might be those countries that have natural resources oil exporting nations the question is this larry why would a nation choose market authoritarianism over market democracy uh well bill the question is who is doing the choosing right and i can tell you why leaders around the world would choose um authoritarianism over democracy and usually the market forms of authoritarianism uh are not all that friendly to the market they often look like uh either the state capitalism or the crony capitalism uh that you find in china and other authoritarian regimes so bear in mind that there's a very strong relationship between democracy and the rule of law and authoritarian regimes are much more corrupt on average than democratic regimes are and leaders who want to be predators and extract wealth and property from their population uh and love power and want to entrench themselves in it uh have a very strong incentive to have authoritarianism over democracy so um if you look at public opinion around the world bill which i do a lot of you find some things that are very striking number one look at the poorest region of the world in the countries of sub-saharan africa you would expect these to be the country's most attracted to the china model because you know no country in recent decades no country in history has lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than the people's republic of china and it's certainly one of the historical records in terms of the pace of the percentage pace of poverty reduction within its country so certainly africans latin americans uh people in less developed asian countries want the poverty reduction piece of the china model but if you look at public opinion they don't want the authoritarianism piece of the china model and the support for not just the word democracy with all of its kind of social desirability that still lingers on in the world but rule of law presidential term limits media freedom uh judicial independence having an elected parliament rather than a self-appointed executive make the laws support for these things is very enduringly high in sub-saharan africa and it persists reasonably well in latin america and in asia and in many other parts of the world and let me just make one other point i think we're seeing in recent years we can get into this and liz could expand on this at length that there is a backlash a building in terms of global public opinion against the people's republic of china because of the bullying uh and strong-arming way that they've thrown their weight around in the belt and road initiative and the corruption they have introduced and the tolerance for authoritarianism they have introduced into many of the national systems they're doing business with so i don't think there's a broad global public opinion appetite for the chinese political system i think there's a lot of uh undemocratic leadership appetite for that system because they don't want to be held accountable by their own people let's go ahead and build on that yeah i mean i think that's right if you look um across the belton road countries particularly in africa southeast asia latin america even central asia you find that there are a lot of protests against chinese belt and road investment because of the lack of transparency because of the environmental implications and you know kenya had a six year long protest and court case because china was going to introduce a coal-fired power plant into a nature reserve you have people in kazakhstan protesting the government's uh you know apparent uh willingness to transfer land to china long-term leasing of land to china there are many reasons why uh populations throughout these belton road countries are not happy with the way that china does business they want the development they want infrastructure they want growth uh but china's mode of doing business uh you know is not attractive to them and you know it also the labor issue is a huge one because china often uh brings in its own workers uh to do these jobs and so the people at the local level aren't necessarily even benefiting uh from the infrastructure projects uh that china is introducing uh then of course there's the debt issue and you know in in many respects china's own development process right the lack its own lack of transparency the fact that its uh own infrastructure development incurred enormous debt within china the fact that it paid no attention to the environmental ramifications of its development strategy all of these things are exactly the way that it's doing business abroad it's just another way in which it's exporting its model uh so the difference is of course that for these other countries their debt is being held by china it's not being held internally that's actually a pretty significant difference larry two questions i'd like you to get into one is the um question of why private property and property rights are important democracy and secondly i want you to explain what seems a contradiction if the idea that a free society and prosperity go hand in hand explain to me singapore okay uh well let's start with property rights uh the danger uh of any system of government uh is that it will become it will overall society uh and it will become uh tyrannical of course this is what obsessed our uh founding uh constitutional framers right uh and uh therefore you need limited government uh and of course our constitution provides for limited government uh both in terms of limiting the power of the government in general with the bill of rights and so on but also in terms of diffusing power and a federal system down to lower levels and not just the center but it's not enough bill to limit the potential concentration and abuse of power through political institutional and legal designs you need to diffuse the raw material of power resources uh into private hands in order to protect freedom and so uh having a strong system of private property uh goes hand in hand with limited government and it empowers the civil society by giving uh a wide panoply of private sector actors the resources to fund organizations and interest groups that can contend for policy create a pluralistic political system and limit the ability for tyranny singapore is a really interesting case bill i think it is really the only authoritarian country that has achieved a high level of prosperity it's probably now in per capita income one of the 10 wealthiest countries in the world and i talk about the human development index it ranks very high in that as well it's uh really the only authoritarian country that has achieved a high level of prosperity without becoming a democracy along the way like its fellow asian tigers of taiwan and korea and earlier from the meiji area era to the 1950s and 60s japan did and i think the reason why is twofold number one and i don't think it's replicable by the way number one it's uh the unique personality of lee kuan yew who really put a stamp on that system of discipline anti-corruption and this unlikely and difficult to sustain combination of rule of law in the economic realm and strict enforcement of property rights with a lack of full media freedom and a lack of adequate democratic competition but he instilled this ethic he built a political party the people's action party that's been quite dedicated to it and even though i don't admire uh its abridgements of media freedom nor do i think they're necessary to sustain singapore's prosperity you've got to admire what they've done in terms of development and economic governance and the second reason bill is that they do even though it's not a democracy they do have at least semi-competitive elections at regular intervals and the people's action party knows it has to stay on its toes it has to perform and it has to limit corruption or else eventually it's going to lose its market share in the political marketplace and it may fall from power right liz larry mentioned south korea and taiwan and we know two things about those countries experiences number one they became democracies and number two they became middle-class societies you look at china which is undergoing rapid development it wants to become a rich even richer society how does china not become open and free how does it maintain a stronger rule of law not end up becoming democracy in other words how do the chinese leaders prevent this from happening um well i think you know their ideal is actually singapore mine is probably the competitive election part but they have studied singapore for decades and have sent you know upwards of 20 000 uh chinese officials over time to study the singapore model and i think that's you know their uh you know what they what they aspire to i think what they've created of course is um you know a much more comprehensive system of political control than you find in in singapore and um you know i think xi jinping at this point he has uh created a system where the party is is really so intrusive in every element of uh not only the political system but increasingly in the economic system so it's not simply enough to have state-owned enterprises which you know taiwan and south korea both had but even in the private enterprises the communist party is becoming much more active in saying that they're going to be responsible for who's hired and who's fired and and so for she i think it's it's the penetration you know through the system and that control is essential that's one element of of his strategy for uh preventing any sort of political reform is you immediately cut off any kind of dissenting perspectives and you don't allow you know the big tech companies for example to get too big right and you cut them off as we just saw the other week with the ant ipo you stop them in their tracks and you demonstrate who really holds the reins of power the other thing and what they've done effectively up until you know recently is you do maintain this very rapid and fairly extraordinary rate of economic growth and you uh you have performative legitimacy and so as long as people believe that their lives are improving uh the uh you know the argument goes uh they will continue to support the communist party and then the third potential pillar is nationalism and i think you know we've seen over the uh covet pandemic uh period when china's economy originally initially contracted uh that it very quickly turned to nationalism as the source of its legitimacy uh and so you know can china sustain this you know is it going to be just a a larger and more controlling version of singapore yeah i don't actually think so and and i'll just point out that if you look back to the pre xi jinping era to 2010 2011 you really did have a very different political energy uh within china you had a very vibrant internet you had people calling for political reform openly you had you know calls for you know environmental protection you had uh people hunting down corrupt officials via the internet massive protest 10 20 000 people you know on the streets uh mostly peaceful uh there was an an error of of you know this the political reform could happen however slowly and however haltingly one step forward two steps back but that china in fact was you know the middle class was driving for the same types of political change that have transpired in other countries they have the same desires better education greater voice in their you know political future greater ability to make their own economic decisions um so i i think that that um that group that middle class um and that elite class of entrepreneurs and liberal intellectuals they're all still there and we saw them come out in spades in the first month to two of of the pandemic when the internet was once again really vibrant and alive with political discourse and then xi jinping shut it down so i just i make that point only to say that um you know what we have now is probably the most authoritarian and repressive chinese regime that we have seen uh you know since the 19 well and that was even radically different continuous revolution period amounts of dung but but that's not to say that there isn't you know a strong undercurrent of political discontent and dissent in china just because we can't see it doesn't mean that it's not there and institutional power and authority doesn't actually equate with legitimacy which you know is something that larry certainly knows a ton about yes yeah i strongly agree with what liz has just said and i would go further i think there's some significant uh reason to think particularly as china ages as well it's got a demographic problem that george schultz's project at hoover has been detailing that it's not going to avoid the middle income trap of kind of leveling off at a middle income level for the nation we're not talking about becoming a middle-income society of prosperous individuals unless it moves at least in the direction of singapore toward a greater rule of law more transparency more openness and so on uh because this concentration of power and people talk about the corruption crackdown under xi jinping but the fusion of the party in the economic system is an original sin of corruption i would say and unless you break that by separating the party from the state and crucially the party from the judiciary you know you're not going to get over this hump inequality is going to intensify as we see now in the countryside where there's much more massive problems of low education and inadequate health care than in the cities and the chinese communist party under xi jinping is a party of fear and it looks like at least under xi they have doubled down on the authoritarianism option right a question for i'd like both of you to address larry and liz uh larry has written about democratic backsliding in asia and this seems very timely given the just yesterday the entirety of hong kong's elected pro-democracy opposition announced its intention to resign after beijing passed a resolution giving local authorities just new powers to quash their dissent we have a new administration coming in next january and their plate is already full with regards to china given trade issues a possibility of military escalation how do you see a bid administration addressing democracy in addition to these other chinese concerns well we know some things from what biden has already said he's going to call a democracy summit in the first year of his administration to try and invigorate a broad global if not alliance at least network and a sense of common purpose among the world's democracies and restore the visibility of american leadership among democracies he's certainly going to work very hard on an urgent basis to restore our transatlantic and trans-pacific alliances particularly with the democracies of europe and asia in asia japan korea australia india and of course the special case of taiwan um i think that you know he's not going to have the bandwidth in the midst of the economic and public health crisis to spend a lot of his personal or political capital on you know opening up conflicts with authoritarian regimes around the world there's going to be an element of pragmatism i predict to his uh foreign policy but we're going to see uh bill i think more leading with values more expression at least of concern about human rights in the world more presidential expression of concern about hong kong for example which is very alarming what has happened and at the same time i hope the same vigor in confronting china's authoritarian bullying and projection of sharp power that the trump administration has taken a new and important turn on to push back against liz you want to add something to that well i mean i i agree entirely with what what larry said i think you know one of the the weaknesses of the past four years you know has been the emphasis on just pushing back against chinese efforts across the board and i think that larry's exactly right that that is very important um and we have seen the trump administration not the president himself but others in the trump administration stand up uh you know we have sanctions and congress uh sanctions against officials in xinjiang for human rights abuses in hong kong and we've pushed back against you know chinese technology etc but it's really been a very defensive and reactive policy as opposed to advancing a positive and proactive narrative of u.s leadership on the global stage and the importance of values of democracy and markets and so i think that biden administration you know as larry suggested this is going to have this you know democracy summit and you know the uk had the idea of the d10 democracy 10. i think it's going to need to reach out further though and make the case for countries in latin america and southeast asia and africa as to why the rules-based order you know why market democracy makes sense for them as opposed to a chinese system as opposed to a little an illegal order and i think we're gonna have to you know make the case and bring them into supply chains and and support things uh like the clean network you know working with them uh i do think that there's the possibility you know that other countries now have become more activated uh in this discussion as well i think europe now views asia not simply as a economic opportunity but they have begun to appreciate more that um there's a normative battle underway and the democracy matters and security matters and then i think probably to larry's point as well you know we have to be better at home and i think a bite administration will be better at home i think it's very difficult to project strength abroad or propose yourself as a as a worthy model if you're failing and flailing uh in in that regard at home and if you don't really represent what uh originally contributed to make you an admired country and admire democracy you know welcoming your the tired and the poor who are yearning to be free then i think it's very difficult for you to go out and and sell democracy in a convincing way okay we have only about 20 minutes left on this broadcast so let's go to audience questions if you both are willing uh let me just add that these are the most questions i've seen in any broadcast i have done so i apologize we don't get your question maybe you'll have larry liz on another date to do the sequel to this but uh first question comes from steven steven asked quote china has expanded one belt one road adding one orbit one net it approaches the endeavor in a one-way method it has an unchecked appetite for global economic domination but it has no idea how to engender competition to enhance value there's an unbridled hubris in the ccp that is fostering aggressive action along china's periphery has it bitten off more more than it could chew is it bitten off too much sure i i would say one of the uh strengths of of the chinese government is the ability to um have their programs and projects evolve according to the moment in time so uh i think uh steven is right that there is a bit of overreach certainly in the belton road especially as you look now at a lot of the african countries uh calling for debt restructuring and the chinese trying to figure out what they're going to do about that and trying to negotiate deals one by one it's very problematic and they're getting a lot of pressure not only you know bottom up from africa but also from uh advanced market economies you know to do things in a transparent way so i think there's a problem there but we've also seen that you know they've pivoted uh in in some ways now they have a health silk road in the digital silk road which are advanced more by private actors within china again still with communist party guidance inside them but um reducing the burden uh that it places on the government in some ways uh and you know they've opened up their debt market now so that they can get foreign investment in uh to help them and so that the chinese state-owned banks don't have to bear the entire burden uh of something like the belton road so i look at them in you know for a state-run operation they can be surprisingly uh nimble and flexible when it comes to re-adjusting uh sort of the the levers of their you know economic diplomacy and figuring out what's working and what's not i think what larry referenced earlier in terms of the wolf warrior diplomacy and the ugliness and the bullying is a different issue and there they've been completely not you know sensitive and and not very uh flexible or successful uh but at least in terms of trying to adjust what's going on with the belt and road i think i have to say they've done a not uh bad job i guess the one last point is that they showed in 2019 they had the second belt and road forum and you know again a lot of countries were pushing back around the issue of of you know not having a green belt in road against the lack of transparency and the chinese have promised to do better they thus far they haven't really done better and i think one way in which a biden administration could make a difference would be actually to elevate this issue of how china has not lived up to its commitments to do a better job in terms of the governance issues around the belton road uh and sort of hold china to the standard that it promised back in 2019 i think that would bring a lot of pressure to bear on beijing okay larry a question from andrew would some democracies benefit from integrating some aspects of socialism in their system i.e healthcare i think that socialism is a means of state control over production you can have european style social democracy and still have a uh you know largely capitalist system that is quite consistent with democracy i have mixed feelings about single-payer systems and i don't think that's where we're headed in the united states i think if you want to expand health care in the united states taking more people at a lower age into the medicare system and building on the foundations we have are our more practical ways of doing it and more achievable ways uh i think we need to worry uh uh you know about justice and equity if we want to defend and sustain capitalism which is i think a vital uh foundation for human freedom and prosperity uh but you know we need to be careful here you don't have to have a purely free market and no government involvement in the health care sector in order to still have both the foundation of property and limited government and a high level of prosperity this is these are within the boundaries where people debate and countries differ and you look and kind of pragmatically ask what works i do want to say if i can before we move on not only do i endorse everything liz said i want to add on something about china i think we need to recognize that china is trying to bite off a tremendous amount i believe its agenda is to reshape the global system and to dominate it for the 21st century that is why it's trying to rewrite the rules of the international system on the internet telecommunications plant huawei's 5g system in as many countries as possible that's why it's preparing to launch a system of global of digital currency and electronic payments to eventually replace the us dollar and we should not assume that the people's republic of china has bitten off more than it can chew it will only prove to have done so if we up our game and become more vigilant and more um tightly allied as a democratic network of states around the world liz we have a question from eric uh where are she's major vulnerabilities and why is he taking the actions he's taking so i think uh his vulnerabilities institutionally are few in the sense that he has amassed an enormous amount of institutional power in his own hands he sits on top of most of the important committees and commissions that oversee large areas of policy uh he has you know increasingly required that people subscribe to the notion that it's not only the communist party that you need to be loyal to it's xi jinping himself that you need to be loyal to so the two have become uh fused together in a way that we again haven't really seen since since the the high points of the mao era um you know he's interviewed all the members of the central committee and the and the uh um uh you know uh the second tier of the central committee as well uh to make sure that they're loyal to him i think in 2022 when we have a new standing committee and he'll be reselected as general secretary of the communist party for his third term he will only strengthen his hold over the standing committee i think some of the reform-oriented one leaders will move out so i think institutionally he's quite strong he has the anti-corruption campaign that he's used to target his political enemies you know he's upended the two-term limit on the presidency it's hard to find a a crack in in that particular area but again i think if you look at um at the degree to which the creative class the entrepreneurial class and i think increasingly the middle class uh does not like the direction in which he's moving the country you know for see it there can never be enough control right so you're he's constantly looking for new ways to exert control you know over the political space and over the economic space and i think you know we're seeing for example the beginnings of a debate on privacy in china and i think that's very unexpected for many people but looking back at the two congresses in may robin lee who's the head of baidu you know stepped up and said you know i'm not sure which is kind of the chinese google by the way for people who don't know but it stepped up and said i'm not sure that the chinese government should have the right to retain the health information that was gathered during the pandemic that they should be able to keep that now that's an interesting point to be making and now you've had a couple of lawsuits in china from private citizens around privacy issues so i think there are areas of vulnerability um that you know we have to keep our eyes peeled for them you know because the signals can be very small and one last one i do think is important to to note for the moment is vulnerability within the top leadership because i do think that there is a split within the leadership and that we've seen like on a couple of occasions step up and say things that are pretty different uh around entrepreneurism you know and wanting to have more space for entrepreneurs in china and then recently you know he revealed uh at the two congresses that you know half of the population 600 you know million people live in 140 a day or less that was a direct swipe at xi jinping's effort uh to claim you know all of his success in poverty alleviation because while larry is right you know the country has this incredible success story for 40 some years it still has 600 million people at 140 or less a month so uh that that to me those are the really small things that you have to pay attention to to see that you know even though he has all this institutional control his political control is not perfect larry anything you want to add to that well only that 600 million people in pretty low income uh and often miserable circumstances in the countryside is not a small number of people right okay uh larry a question from christian who asks quote what are some practical policies practical policies the usa and its allies can develop to promote liberty prosperity and the rule of law and communist china well um i think we need to relaunch the battle of values and ideas i've been looking over the participants uh in our audience here and at least two of them are friends of mine who spent their careers uh in the public diplomacy sector when we had a u.s information service and i would reconstitute usia in fact i would follow the recommendation um of james clapper and his remarkable memoir and launch a usia u.s information agency on steroids to wage the battle of information and ideas for the 21st century we've got to counter russian and chinese disinformation and authoritarian propaganda we have to ramp up our broadcasting efforts to do that not by descending down to their level of information manipulation and lies but as our you know one of the greatest journalists in american history edward r murrow said truth is the best propaganda and let educate people about rival political systems educate people about the real formulas for national success educate people about the types of institutions uh economically and politically that unlock people's innate aspirations for dignity and freedom and we if we do that bill we will win that battle now i'll just say two specific things um we can't do it by knocking china over the head uh you know or or you know playing by their rules i have been saying for the last several years and i hope i can persuade a biden administration to do this that i'd like to see the united states and other democracies produce about oh maybe a couple hundred million thumb drives and put the body of you know democratic ideas and values and uh you know the thinking about economic and political freedom from different countries and cultures and historical eras in you know about 15 or 20 different languages but chinese russian farsi and arabic would be pretty important ones to start with put them on a thumb drive and just distribute them around the world make them look look like lipstick make them look like keychains and then you plug them into your computers and you start educating yourself this is the kind of way we need to get creative about winning the battle for values and ideas that's a battle we can win so liz it sounds like larry is suggesting that there are ways to get around blocking on the internet and pulling down satellite dishes and so forth yeah i mean i i think you know i love what larry said i think that's great i i guess at a more prosaic level i guess i would say it's actually really important that we be the best that we can be as well and that if we're not that that everything that we do that larry has suggested will not resonate in the right way because you know china does and has in the past looked to the united states you know i remember speaking with a young activist and he told me one of the most important things that uh you know he remembers from the obama administration was uh the passage of the gay marriage act right and what did a profound impact that had you know for gay activists uh in china right and so when we do things when we lead in our best way possible that's what defeats also uh the chinese communist party when we're ugly ourselves and when we're bullying ourselves and when we don't protect our institutions from corruption and corrosiveness and we don't handle a pandemic in an effective way then it's easy for xi jinping and the chinese communist party to say look what's going on over there what a mess that democracy is uh so i think for me it has to begin at home uh we have to be better i i just want to add uh this is why it is is another reason why among the many reasons why it is so important that we treat chinese students in the united states chinese scholars in the united states chinese business people in the united states and people of chinese descent in the united states with respect and equality and a warm embrace we vet them before they come we monitor the conduct of everybody who's doing sensitive research to make sure they're not violating our laws but otherwise we have to uh suppress any instinct for distrust on the or hostility on the basis of someone's nationality or ethnicity this is important to being who we are but as jennifer pond will uh explain uh in her seminar that we're going to have at hoover soon it's also very important for us to winning the hearts and minds of the chinese students who come to study here uh who until recently numbered over 300 000 right and liz maybe you can build on that the two challenges would seem here number one the challenge of scapegoating is the virus seems to be getting worse at the moment not better and then secondly if travel is limited and interpersonal exchanges are limited how you can build that better relationship that larry is talking about right um so yeah the issue of scapegoating i mean i i do believe that there needs to be a real inquiry into the origins of the virus china has to come clean i also pretty much don't believe that the numbers that they've put out about the cases and deaths i think it is much higher than they have said initially i also think they've done a pretty effective job since then in in you know um in taking control over it i think the days of our scapegoating them and saying you know the china virus they're way past their way past we now are masters of our own fate and you know we have to step up to the plate and do the right thing and just a pitch for where i am right now which is new york state and i have to say that you know as larry was talking about all those questions about balancing between the rights of the individual and you know the intrusion of the state and and how do you find that these are daily issues that we have to confront and this pandemic brings that front and center for people in the united states and you know how we how we find that new balance i think is going to determine the future of this pandemic in this country but you know that's a somewhat separate issue just to say i think we're no longer in a position of blaming china for this you know we've we've created our own coronavirus uh state at this point um but there was another part to your question which now just the interpersonal relationship just how do we build them right so look i'll tell you um that via zoom you can be meeting and talking and engaging with chinese morning noon and night and it's a lot easier in some respects to to work across the pacific uh when you don't have to travel there and travel back you can you know pick up it and do a zoom call with a degree of of ease um and i think it the the beginning of it is going to be the biden administration and just beginning to rebuild a bilateral framework uh for discussion and for engagement that's not to say that i think you know we're it at any point going to have a grand bargain you know or that we actually need to pursue particular you know policies to arrive at a grand bargain at this point i don't think that's in the cards but i do think we should adopt a somewhat new tone in terms of uh figuring out listening to what they're saying and transmitting our own message because we need to hear from them in order to be able to you know push back or to find areas of common purpose or or whatever we having the complete collapse of a bilateral diplomatic framework i think is is is not helpful to our cause right we have but two minutes left i'm not going to do something that serious academics and professors like you hate i'm going to ask you for a brief answer to a question that's more fitting a course or a book and the question comes from eileen what will you what would you advise president-elect biden to do differently in order to protect america's value system well um i think rhetoric is very important uh to behave with uh dignity uh to stop uh uh embracing dictators uh with warmth and uh love uh we need correct relations with relations with many of them not least china we have a lot of business to do even with saudi arabia but you know to treat our allies as friends and dictators as people who need to have an awareness of universal values that we're going to represent in the world and i would say at home bill to try and transcend our political polarization we cannot succeed on the global stage to advance and defend freedom if we remain as bitterly divided and tribalistic uh as we have become at home and i hope that can begin in this transition period okay liz that was so beautifully said i think i can only add you know that we do need to open our doors back up again uh we are a nation of immigrants and you know we need to to welcome the best and the brightest and the people who do want to be free and who do want to work hard and make a better life for themselves and who will you know contribute to our country and all its greatness and so i hope we become a more generous nation again well said larry liz thanks for your time today and for sharing your thoughts on democracy and authoritarianism especially how it relates to the competition between socialism and free market capitalism the next installment of the human prosperity project series which will close out 2020 by the way will take place on december the 3rd same time as today 11 a.m pacific 2 pm eastern our speakers will be hoover senior fellows scott atlas john cogan and josh rao and the topic of their conversation impacts of government sponsored programs again you can find the hoover institution online and more information on the human prosperity project at the following address it is hoover.org backslash human prosperity project once again hoover.org backslash human prosperity project again thanks for joining us today on behalf of my colleagues liz economy and larry diamond all of us here at the hoover institution have a happy thanksgiving stay safe stay healthy and we'll do our best here at the hoover institution to help you stay informed we'll see you in december

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 6,562

Rating: 4.3552632 out of 5

Keywords: Democracy and Authoritarianism, China, Hong Kong

Id: nCfURKzOu7c

Length: 53min 53sec (3233 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020