No Cold War: Dialogue between Jeffrey Sachs and Zhang Weiwei

in fact we'll start now so um welcome everyone to this special event an in-depth dialogue between professors jeffrey sachs and jungwei wei hosted by the no cold war international campaign today we're honored to have such two two such highly respected and knowledgeable guests to discuss the state of u.s china relations a particularly timely discussion on the eve of the u.s presidential uh we now have people signing in from all over the world we've had registrations from over 50 countries in latin america africa china southeast asia the middle east europe the us india and so on so we're truly a pres an international event today my name's jenny clegg i've been studying and researching about china's development and its place in the world for many years and have written amongst many things a book on china and multipolarity and i'll be moderating this event so 2020 was always forecast to be a propitious year but nobody expected what has come about in the midst of this terrible pandemic we see countries moving apart just as they should be moving together to find solutions not only to the covert crisis but to the world economic downturn and not least to climate breakdown in particular we're seeing the serious deterioration in the relationship between the two greatest world powers the us and china according to henry kissinger the architect of u.s china engagement relations are now the worst that they've been for 50 years after the last decades of u.s china engagement the policy has gone into reverse trade tensions are being followed by the ratcheting up of a technology war increasing military tensions and the beginnings of a fracture in diplomatic links bringing us to the cusp of a new cold war it's not only about the erraticism and racism of trump the uncertainty arises from the underlying trend of a rising china and the u.s in relative decline there's much talk of the thucydides trap the likelihood of collision between a rising and a declining power one such instance was that of the opium wars of the mid 19th century between a chinese empire sliding into ruin and a rising imperialist power of britain today the tectonic plates of the world are shifting the system of western dominance which has held sway over the world for centuries is subsiding and a new multi-narrative multipolarity is beginning to emerge what is happening really presents a tremendous challenge to our ways of thinking about and understanding the world avoid a collision we must it would have devastating global consequences and to do so will need concentrated and determined effort it will require a new vision a fundamental shifting of mindsets what is needed is deep dialogue between the two powers at the forefront of this shift a dialogue between civilizations as it were so this is the rationale behind this event our two speakers today are at the forefront of thinking on international issues in america on the one hand and china on the other the format of the event will be as follows i will invite each speaker to give a presentation for 15 minutes and then ask each to respond to the other for five minutes we'll then move to a q a session we have 90 minutes altogether and if you have a question you can use the q a function so it's my great pleasure first of all to introduce you to professor john weiwei who is director of the china institute at fudan university in china and that's a leading think tank in china he's also a board member of china's national think tank councils he was a senior english interpreter for deng xiaoping and other chinese leaders in the mid 1980s he's written extensively on china's political and economic reforms the china model of development china's foreign policy and comparative political governance and is best selling an award-winning trilogy are said to be china trilogy are said to be the most popular books on china among chinese people the volume the china wave rise of a civilizational state is available in english and indeed opens the door to understanding chinese ways of governance for the west so first of all over to you professor zhang thank you jenny for your very kind introduction hello professor jeffrey sachs hello everyone i'm extremely delighted to join this dialogue with professor jeffrey sachs and i appreciate your great work for sustainable development worldwide i endorse wholeheartedly the key message of this no cold war campaign that the new cold war against china is against humanity the world is equipped with the pandemic with economic recession with climate change so launching a cold war against china is really against interest of mankind as we all know many cold war advocates have already portrayed china in a very negative light and created a lot of confusion and even fear in the mind of many people in the world and these rhetorics include one the so-called society trap in which a rising power and the status quo power are bound to conflict with each other or even fight war with each other and two china like the soviet union is bent on exporting its ideology and political economic model to the outside world and three china pursues expansionism and four china is a one-party dictatorship and china human rights record is deteriorating rather than dispelling or somehow disputing each of these rhetorics in detail which time do not permit here i will focus on a larger picture of political culture and the political traditions of china and the united states at least from my perspective i try to highlight some major differences between our two countries i will also explain to what extent china is strikingly different from the united states and the soviet union and why the u.s led cold war if any against china may end up in failing and one striking difference is what you may call that in the american political culture somehow there is far more from my point of view zero some gain perspective than china's than chinese political culture as should you enjoy w bush's slogan with us or against us during the war during the iraqi war and it's also shown in donald trump's tweet chinese having lived too well at all expenses as if u.s trade deficit means american laws and chinese gain i think donald trump needs to take a crash course uh on international trade with professor jeffrey sax if you kindly agree to accept him as your student an example uh can illustrate the difference between the chinese pluto culture and american political culture in many ways united states people have asked this question this country a given country is our friend or foe and in china we tend to ask a different type of question we will ask whether this country is a friend or potential friend in other words from my point of view the chinese political culture is on the whole more long-term oriented more inclusive and more about win-win after all our famous philosopher confucius said over 2500 years ago he talks about what's called the harmony in diversity and behind this difference is perhaps two vastly different religious traditions the chinese one is arguably more inclusive and syncretic than the american one which is i think more exclusive for one thing in china's long history we experienced many wars and conflicts but very few religious wars which was unfortunately a hallmark of western history with a more exclusive religious tradition in china we can say buddhism taoism confucianism have well coexisted well and to vary degrees they have they are intertwined and they are enriched by each other's wisdoms this absence of religious wars was a source of inspiration for european enlightenment in the 18th century and in spite many enlightenment giants such as voters leibniz and spinoza to learn from china with this understanding we can debunk the above mentioned for rhetorics or army corps fallacies the suicide trap is obviously not applicable to china as virtually all those falling into the trap as argued by professor allison are those dipped in zero game tradition whether it's ultima empire versus hubspot empire or in the 17th century or the uk versus france in the 18th century furthermore as part of china's inclusive tradition china does not have a messianic tradition to convert others we have encountered a lot of european american missionaries in china but have you ever encountered chinese missionaries in your country probably very few or no china has no interest whatsoever to export its ideology or its political economic model anywhere not to manage to impose its model on others that the americans have been trying to do in other words unlike the soviet union or the united states china is not an ideological power banter exporting its values and political system to be honest if the united states thinks its political system is great please stay with it we do not envy you to be honest i personally think the u.s today needs urgent political reform and other reforms perhaps more than many other countries on this if required china may offer some advice we claim to be the expert on reform because we carry out reforms each every day every month every year over the past four decades to improve everything in china that's the reason why china is bouncing so fast the fact that many developing countries now look to china and china model for inspiration largely due to the fact that they have tried the american model in their countries perhaps failed miserably i remember myself publishing oped back in the year 2006 in the international herald tribune now today's new york times international edition arguing that as long as the american model remains unable to deliver the desired outcome for these countries as shown the failure from haiti to afghanistan to iraq the china model may become more appealing to the world's developing countries today we could also recall a message from george cannon the architect of the containment policy against civilian junior during the cold war he basically argued the american governance model internal governance must be sufficiently attractive to the outside world otherwise it would be difficult to achieve the purpose of containment today indeed given the depths of the pandemic the recession and the racial divide even possible constitutional crisis uh in the coming days and months really i'm concerned that america first may end up in america lost i hope america will overcome its gridlock its problems along with the same logic of inclusive culture china does not have an expansionist tradition as compared with the united states china is a country that build a great wall to water of aggression rather than conquering others even when the chinese military might or military power was far more powerful than european countries state when china's admiral changhu made his many overseas vayage in the first half of the 15th century about 80 years before the columbus discovery of the americas chinese did not colonize others but traded a lot with others this tradition is also reflected in the difference of state behavior between china and united states when the united states became the world's largest economic power uh in around 1890 it launched the war against spain and occupied the philippines and cuba but when china became the world's largest economy in 2014 in terms of purchasing power parity it had the military capacity indeed to overtake say within 24 hours a few days all the disputed islands in the south china sea but china did not do that china has chosen not to do so rather china prefers a negotiated solution to whatever territorial disputes with its neighbors furthermore when china first tested its nuclear device in 1964 china declared that it will not be the first to use nuclear weapons nor were to be the first no it would be nowhere to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states if all nuclear powers can do the same as china does perhaps our world will be free from nuclear war and nuclear threat china's military modernization is largely to be honest reaction to repeated accumulations inflicted upon china by major western powers since the 1840 european war which started as you may know a central accumulation for china china now has developed a powerful capacity for national defense capable of deterring any foreign invasion and aggression i always remind some american hawks that during the cold war between the united states and soviet union there was no hot war between them but there were unfortunately two massive hot wars between the united states and china first in korea and then in vietnam which all ended in america's failure and the u.s should not make the same mistake again it's against america's own interest is against humanity i also hope that the united states will plead to the advice of british historian i think it's also yale professor paul kennedy that all imperial empires end with imperial overreach and rather than wasting money on new weapons systems fighting endless wars across the world it's far better for the united states to restrain itself save resources improve the debilitated the militant infrastructure within the united states on this channel can also offer advice and we are the expert on infrastructure as for describing china as a one-party dictatorship this is a at least very ignorant of china if not stupid china is a civilizational state it's an amalgamation of hundreds of states into one of its long history a civilization state is a melbourne of the world's longest continued civilization and a huge modern state so it's the size of china the internal population is roughly 100 average european states put together so this is a very unique country china was you first unified in 221 bc and since then china has been governed by some kind of one unified ruling entity or if you prefer a one-party system otherwise the country would break up in catastrophe that happened in china's long history several times and the chinese communist party is a continuation or even the first evolution of this great tradition to be honest to understand the modern china it's essential to know that communist part of china is unh overwhelmingly positive force for china and virtually all reputable international surveys revealed that the chinese polity enjoys tremendous popular support for instance in the survey by ipsos 2019 the question is very simple whether your country is on the right track in china it's 91 yes united states the 41 percent in the united kingdom is 21 in this latest dahlia research which is a research company based in germany it shows 95 chinese think their government did a great job on the pandemic control this is the highest approval rating among the 35 countries surveyed and the china exports every year roughly between 130 million to 150 million tourists abroad the largest in the world every year and 99.9999 returned to china so washington tried to depict china this kind of china as a country with deteriorating human rights this laughable you know uh the worst violation of human rights in this century the u.s launched the war against iraq at least over 100 000 civilians died and millions upon millions become homeless of course black lives matter movement and i cannot breathe all this reveal the depths of human rights abuses within the united states my final point is that even if the united states wanted to impose a new cold war on china i don't think it will succeed so far very few countries are willing to join it china is the world's largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity china is the world's largest consumer market it's also the largest trading partner for over 130 countries and china also has the world's largest middle class 400 million people middle class larger than u.s population real middle class with decent job and decent income and properties china is also in the full frontier of the new industrial revolution and china is also the first major economy to have fully recovered from the pandemic we have just witnessed 630 million tourists within china during this chinese national day one week holidays the country now becomes largest base for global fight against the pandemic and for global economic recovery my sense is that if the united states wants to contain a country like this united states may itself be isolated i remember joe biden mentioned the four daunting challenges faced in the u.s today in his campaign speech the unprecedent uh the unprecedented the pandemic economic recession climate change and the ratio divide in fact to handle these challenges except the racial divide which we cannot do much about and the united states may need china's help not the other way around so rather than launching a cold war against china the u.s had every reason to seek china's cooperation china champions a shared future for mankind which united states rejects regrettably in retrospect if the united states could have accepted say part of it or see 20 or 30 percent of this great idea put forward by chinese leader xi jinping the u.s could have perhaps done much better in fighting the kobe 19 pandemic drastically reduced less its testosterone if they had chosen to work with w-2 with other international organizations and with china in conclusion let us work together and reject categorically the notion of the cold war which was based on the so-called mutually assured destruction or mad let's embrace a new notion i call mutually assured prosperity or map map or perhaps still better the notion of globally assured prosperity gap if united states china and other major powers and the whole international community can work together for the common interest of mankind for peace and for development i hope today's dialogue will be a modest contribution to this idea of map or map or gap not only for china for the u.s but also for the whole mankind so thank you very much thank you thank you so much professor zhang for that uplifting uh talk and your very profound observations um it's now my great pleasure to move on and introduce um professor jeffrey sax who is a leading u.s economist a professor at columbia university new york where he's the director for the center of sustainable development and where he formerly directed the earth institute between 2002 and 2016. he's a senior un advisor he's advising secretary general antonio guterres on sustainable development goals and he's also a best-selling author of a number of influential books and his latest book the ages of globalization geography technology and institutions was published just this summer he's a powerful advocate of multilateralism and in recent months in particular he's been swimming against the tide of negativity in the u.s towards china speaking out in favor of constructive dialogue so over to you please jeffrey sachs thank you very much jenny and thank you very much professor zhang for your wonderful talk which i concur with i like your idea when donald trump leaves the white house i'd be happy to have him in a trade class and if he'd make a deal he can leave as soon as he wants but we should have him leave absolutely no later than january 20th 2021 uh on the inauguration of uh i'm counting on it president biden because we need a new start in the united states and if trump uh he may be on trial by then for tax evasion but anyway i'd be happy to have him in a trade course and he much needs i much need some basic training i i think the one point that i would uh immediately make uh on your remarks is that we can't really talk about china says this and the u.s says this and the u.s needs this and so on because the u.s is very divided itself and my view is that trump is the worst president in american history and the most dangerous president that we've had in american history he certainly doesn't represent most americans on anything and the issue really on detentions and the trade and so forth is that a lot of it is in the hands of uh very few people uh almost everything i would say everything that trump has done on trade or trade war with china or other actions on china have been by executive decree or emergency powers under u.s law not even by legislation so they hardly have been debated publicly understood publicly or do they reflect in any broad and deep way any views of united states citizens on this there probably aren't deep views among most of the citizenry because unfortunately issues like these are complex they require historical knowledge they require a lot of discussion and dialogue it helps of course when we have personal relations and experience it's been my pleasure and honor and education to visit china almost every year for dozens of years my first trip was 40 years ago and i've been coming many times a year for most years for the last 30 years so it makes a big difference to have these contacts and unfortunately even though we live in a connected age we don't have the personal contacts as much as we need for an interconnected world to have the depth of understanding personal relations sense of each other's perspectives and history and therefore views are easily manipulated on all sides uh and they're subject to uh crazy ideas propaganda uh cultural means uh and in the u.s context to uh a absolutely terrible president in the last four years who's really a xenophobic racist and uh idiot in my view sorry to use the language but he's just not knowledgeable about almost anything uh and because of that we have uh really a dangerous situation i think and i hope but nobody can be sure that it will be less dangerous after uh the election uh on november third if the votes are counted properly and uh if we don't have some disorder in the united states i'm counting on us having a new president and a chance for a fresh start on these issues not that things will be entirely easy because the anti-china sentiment runs relatively high in uh elite mainstream media circles right now partly because trump makes it that way partly as you say because there is a strain of american thinking that uh is conducive to this kind of idea it's it's got two elements i would say that are conjoined historically one is a uh and you touched on it a long-standing protestant evangelical vision of america within by u.s people and i apologize people on the chat are saying don't use american because that means all of the americas but i have to use shorthand just for the english language so excuse me to all my friends in in the americas and especially in latin america i'm going to say america but i mean the united states of america just for shorthand but there is a protestant evangelical strain throughout american history that says this is a god backed country and it is the providential authority of americans to spread out across the north american continent and then later to have global leadership and this is a a cultural even religious kind of view and that has been linked to another deep idea of american foreign policy for the last 75 years really 70 years i would say and that is the united states as the dominant world power first fighting uh against uh soviet uh uh uh communism in in the way that it was expressed uh you mentioned george cannon and containment and then for other purposes but a deep american foreign policy idea that the u.s should be the state with the dominant military power and economic power and of course china's rise has called that into question and you put these two strains of thinking together and it's created a lot of elite anxiety in the united states that oh my god there's a a major challenge to american primacy and because of the cultural uh religious overtones that are added to this one adds a lot of other adjectives about china uh to this discourse and it gets fairly widespread play and the tone against china has been uh therefore increasingly more and more negative during the trump period now trump himself represents a particular political base of the evangelical white protestant uh population and the perfect exemplar of that is uh pompeo the secretary of state whom i regard as the worst secretary of state we've ever had of the worst president we've ever had but pompeo himself is an evangelical protestant who surely believes and states the god-given backing of america and he is on a crusade and it's a very dangerous one and he's traveling around asia trying to uh mobilize uh support for us hegemony or leadership or primacy or whatever term one wants so this is a very particular political uh constellation that is the worst that we have to offer now let me uh move beyond that though and just try to put the issues into what i hope is some broader and constructive perspective we are in my opinion uh and i've been writing about this for many many years at the end of the american dominance period and that is a certain kind of uh also uh mechanical implication if you will of the declining share of the us in the world economy or in other dimensions of global economics of finance geopolitics technological leadership and so forth the u.s really was dominant in many ways politically militarily technologically in 1950 in ways that it is no longer today and china's rise over the last 40 years is of course the most important geopolitical event that has changed this but not the only one because there have been [Music] many many countries that have advanced tremendously in technological capacity and strongly in the asia-pacific region especially in east asia so china's not the only country but it's by far the biggest and most consequential of this sort so we are geopolitically uh in a new era it is an era in which no country can lead and no country should lead it's an era where we need cooperation uh as you said we need multilateralism uh because no single country can be a dominant leader and the idea at this stage of having blocks of countries is only profound mistaken uh simplification to the complexities that we face right now uh the idea of a new cold war that divides two blocks of nations is a kind of insanity and an invitation to mutual destruction rather than to solving the problems that we face so what do we need to do to achieve truly a multilateral constructive approach that i think is the most important challenge that we face in true foreign policy in the future and i would say in this regard it is of course partly the united states uh elite understanding that the days of the 1950s arguably are over we need a very different kind of uh approach uh we need to understand that unlike the historical episode where with all complexity respected the british empire in a way was followed by the american empire this is not a situation in which the u.s empire will be followed by a china empire or by any other hegemonic power but by a multilateral system under uh rules of the game that stop us from killing each other and enable us to cooperate on crucial areas such as fighting climate change or protecting biodiversity or ending poverty or as we face in the current moment fighting a devastating pandemic disease so we have to understand first what is it that we're moving towards it's not a china-led world it's not an america-led world it must not be a two-block world that's insane uh it needs to be a multilateral rule-based world where we can gain the benefits of cooperation and there i think there's real work to do it's not easy to do this and as the two leading economies and the two most powerful countries the united states and china are going to need extra care and extra institutionalized connections with each other and more and more cultural and intellectual exchange is just exactly as the one we're having right now in order to get this right because these issues are not simple and they are not at the core of our daily lives and uh there are hardliners on all sides uh and we need to talk down the hardliners in the united states and vote them out of office but similarly in china and elsewhere hard-line nationalist views would be devastating in a period when we need a multilateral understanding so what is it going to take on multilateralism first the world has agreed in a fragile way but it has agreed to certain basic approaches for the future most importantly sustainable development that's embodied in the sustainable development goals adopted in september 2015 and in the paris climate agreement adopted at the end of 2015. the most important practical step for multilateralism is that we follow through on things that we have agreed uh because the world unanimously by that i mean all 193 u.n member states agreed to the sustainable development goals or sdgs and the paris climate agreement because we need those agreements similarly the world agreed to the convention on biological diversity because we're destroying biodiversity so what we need is a global politics of seriousness to address the challenges that we have realized are so significant that even all governments agreed to do something about them but i can note that there is a lack of serious follow-through in general to commitments that we've made and all of our countries fall short on that now importantly president xi at the u.n general assembly in september made a very very consequential announcement when he said that china is committed to reaching net zero emissions on carbon by 2060. this is a great breakthrough and europe previously had made an even bolder commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 when president biden is in office i count on him to make a similar commitment to net zero emissions of the united states by 2050. then i think we need a deep institutionalization of this so that china europe the us and other countries work together seriously with real professional engineering studies real detailed plans uh not just tweets and god forbid if we could just get presidents to stop tweeting this would be the first advance of multilateralism and international relations twitter is awful in this regard one should never do foreign policy by twitter it's insane to try to put complex issues into 140 characters and it could blow up the world by misunderstandings so we need to institutionalize the fight against climate uh change human induced climate change similarly china will host top 15 of the convention on biological diversity this coming year in kunming this should be a breakthrough to save biodiversity from human destruction and china has a real opportunity to help lead the world in a deep multilateral system and china's really good at systems really good at bureaucracy but in the positive rational sense to say we have a system to protect biodiversity china has done some very important initiatives on geographic redlining to protect endangered regions and this could be institutionalized globally the third area that i would point out and it's really the one that triggered a xenophobic reaction in the united states is the advanced technologies around artificial intelligence and uh and digital you know for exam example 5g and huawei and the problem here is that we're in the midst of a dramatic technological revolution that could be of wonderful benefit for humanity but we have no rules of the game around it right now it's a kind of lawless environment and we don't even know what kind of surveillance is really being done we don't know how data are really being used i have no idea what google apple facebook and so on does with my personal data but i don't like that i don't know and i i i'll finish in just a moment sorry to run on but just to say this is what triggered the heated response from the u.s was the sense that china had caught up and was getting ahead in a militarily highly relevant technology of machine learning artificial intelligence autonomous weapons 5g china's ahead and so on and that is really what triggered the i would say a paranoid and racist and evangelical crusader response but it was this sense of china made in 2025 oh my god they're ahead of us what are we going to do but not on a commercial basis per se but on a security basis so it's a sense of vulnerability but the truth is we don't have rules of the game right now and we need to put artificial intelligence and autonomous battlefields and all sorts of other horribly threatening cyber warfare technologies under diplomatic negotiating frameworks as we did with nuclear weapons not perfectly but at least for god's sake we got them under some kind of legal regimen so that we reduce the chance of us blowing ourselves up well cyber warfare and all that comes with it is incredibly dangerous and we need rules of the game to move forward let me just end by saying one uh one basic point this uh session today i i very much value it i'm sorry to have run on too long but i'm really grateful there are 400 participants from all over the world uh participating we need to figure out how to have this kind of dialogue in a rich and deep way the biggest risk is people who know nothing having power because when they do they can blow us all up and when we have the connections the knowledge the in-depth discussions the institutional and cultural connections we will not only survive we will thrive thank you very much thank you so much professor sax for that really interesting presentation very thought provoking and useful observations again so um it's now for me to call on professor jung for five minutes to respond to what professor sax has said yeah uh yes uh thank you for this very thought-provoking uh presentation which i agree almost 100 percent and when we look at this uh history of cold war indeed a country like united states and china have every reason being the major powers in the world to at least you know get out well with each other for common interest of mankind and uh so i think uh professor jeffrey sachs you mentioned this idea of what we call ecological civilization you mentioned this sustainable development uh a renewable energy uh in the case of china we have no problem whatsoever because we use the term ecological civilization over the past five years china has indeed devoted itself to change a lot of old policies and i give an example in shanghai for instance we have 800 rivers each every river every section river there'll be some one response for its cleanness and each one you can you know with the app on your smartphone you can check the quality of water so there is a tremendous change for the better in china's internal you know whatever climate conditions but of course we think this is for mankind as well so i'm glad you mentioned this china commitment to carbon neutral for the year 2016. you mentioned another example of this cooperation the rules governing ai the digital revolution i think this also another area when we look at this whole history of big powers during the cold war the old cold war china united states were somehow sharing this geopolitical purpose to check the soviet expansionism and then when this element was out we came with this idea of economic exchanges booming trade so economic relations became the really uh foundation of our bilateral relations it seems there is always need something substantial in bilateral relations between the two major powers so the next foundation could be you know sustainable development renewable energies green technologies if mr biden comes to power if donald trump is still in power i don't know perhaps things will get worse before they get better so that's my brief comment on your wonderful presentation thank you oh thank you so much professor jung for keeping to time there um so professor sucks if you'd like to respond to professor zhang's presentation and his latest comments i i won't over abuse my time because i already spoke very long so i think we could go to the discussion uh just to say some of the people in the chat think that i'm exaggerating uh about trump because the u.s is just the evil to the core i disagree with that uh and um i i have not been a lover of u.s foreign policy in general for a long time people could look at my book in 1920 2019 called a new foreign policy beyond american exceptionalism it was not about trump it was about american foreign policy but there is something different here some other people took exception to my saying that trump was the worst president because they said presidents during slavery were worse i don't want to argue the point let's just say that trump is the worst president in modern history and it makes a difference because in the u.s system the word emergency appears in so many parts of legislation uh executive decrees are the basic mechanism of governing one should understand that almost everything that trump has done other than a tax cut for the rich which i despised uh has been done through uh executive order rather than through legislative backing so please uh for for all that uh i also disagree with the us uh there there's more hope and it does make a difference who's president okay thank you very much now um we'll move on to the uh questions we have well we obviously have a very lively discussion going on on uh chat um we also have a lot of contributions in the q a um it's quite difficult to um know what to select but i think that there is a couple of themes that uh that maybe we can go into in in a bit more detail um and um there's a question here and i perhaps um you might feel that it's been answered but anyway i'll put it and then you can judge um what is the us rationale for pursuing a cold war and to what extent are there more level-headed forces in u.s political circles that would adopt a more collaborative approach so that's not just asking about the um election itself but it's this uh question about whether there are different forces actually within u.s political circles um that uh perhaps can be engaged with and i think we can have a chinese point of view uh professor zhang can perhaps talk about whether there are some sections um of the us establishment that are worth talking to more than others um can i start though with um with professor sax is there anything else that you want to add to what you've said yes there certainly is a very strong contingent of american academic leadership and policy leadership that believes in multilateralism and i believe that in its finest moments the united states contributed extremely importantly to multilateralism i think on this 75th anniversary of the united nations we should remember that america's greatest ever president franklin roosevelt was the political mover and in many ways the political intellectual father of of the united nations as a concept and as a reality and i believe that the u.n charter and its uh moral charter the u.n universal declaration of human rights of 1948 which eleanor roosevelt did more than any other person to bring to reality are the two great foundations of multilateralism there are many people including myself that are deeply steeped in that multilateralism i have spent the last 20 years non-stop working for and with the united nations uh and uh believe profoundly in the un as a system for peace and for sustainable development and for human rights and believe on its 75th anniversary we should rededicate ourselves especially this generation to those purposes so this is why i say this is not uh beyond hope it's on the contrary uh there is a a great uh uh part of american intellectual life which uh sees multilateralism as uh it's a core principle and many of us have fought from the vietnam war to uh the wars of the middle east wholeheartedly and vociferously uh within our own country and uh will continue to champion uh the un charter as the framework for preserving peace and so i just want to be very clear about that it's it's far from hopeless it is a practical challenge some people have been writing uh in the chat room that i'm i don't you know that i'm being stupid because it's all the us military industrial complex and so on or i'm somehow belittling listeners by making it over personalistic i'm not i'm i've been involved in these issues for 40 years and as a u.s citizen for a lot longer than that i am not oversimplifying and it's not so simple as the u.s military-industrial complex it's not so simple as trump it is a struggle at all times in changing circumstances to try to hone to a sane smart objective course and that's what we need to do in a new context in 2020 thank you very much we want to hear what you have to say and we support you speaking out i just want to make that clear and professor zhang on that question for china china is a staunch supporter of the united nations system it's charter and multilateralism indeed china itself is a major beneficiary of multilateralism and china can also contribute a lot to multilateralism to the u.n system and i remember just now this question concerning the u.s anxiety and how to explain this i share with professor zak's view that u.s is used to being the number one for so many decades now i know there is a top secret in the united states united states may become number two for all kinds of reasons no one can discuss this but my good friend singaporean senior scholar professor mabu bani gave a lecture at harvard he said united states should be ready to become number two and then he give a rationale he said actually nothing to worry about because over the past two thousand years china was the number one the largest economic power for roughly uh 1800 years so the u.s became the number one the largest power was an aberration and china was a normal say that's his rationale indeed i think you know whether which country is a bigger insider economy in technology china is much more open-minded on that if we can follow this idea of win-win cooperation and mutually beneficial if we all commit to the un rules and we have perhaps even designed new rules for the new frontier if the chinese society i i think if the two countries china united states can both uh move in the direction of mutual understanding and cooperation it's a tremendous plus for world peace and common prosperity so that's my brief comment uh thank you very much now um we've had quite a lot of um questions and points uh in the q a about uh the danger of a hot war so we have a question here uh is there a danger of cold war escalating into a hot war and that was a question that's come from australia so um professor sachs there's always a danger of a hot war and this is the most important thing to to realize uh events can get out of control i we're living in a complex environment with complex systems where the systems themselves are so complex they're sometimes not understood the issues do not necessarily come down to decisions by leaders terrible blunders mistakes accidents can happen and that's why we have to tone down the rhetoric and tone up the institutionalization of cooperation at all levels the world came within uh the world came within a second or two of destruction in october 1962 in the cuban missile crisis it was one naval officer countermanding the order of another uh captain of a soviet submarine that stopped the launch of a 15 kiloton nuclear torpedo that most likely would have set off complete global destruction neither kennedy nor khrushchev wanted that destruction they were trying to back off but actions taken through a series of accidents in the caribbean in anti-submarine and submarine warfare by local naval personnel who were not obeying orders nearly set off thermonuclear war everybody should study this reality to understand it we don't want to live by a trip wire there are thousands of nuclear warheads and between china and the united states we can destroy everything and these are not fully controlled rational systems where you can breathe and sleep easily these are systems that need de-escalation and control so when you have someone as stupid as trump and he is stupid and he's dangerous and he's loudmouth and he's ignorant it makes a difference believe me because it triggers all sorts of behavior all through bureaucracies through the public uh and so on and don't misunderstand that's why this is not a game that's why cold wars are not cold necessarily even if the leaders want them to be just rhetorical terrible things can happen and so we shouldn't be playing around with this and the point is that uh for relations as complex as the issues we're talking about right now on uh connectivity uh online battlefields uh autonomous weapons cyber warfare uh plus all of the other issues of a pandemic and all the rest we need deep institutionalized engagement between countries not uh rattling uh not tweets and and not uh even you know trying to round up allies it's so stupid what pompeo is doing right now uh traveling around asia trying to create an anti-china front this is mind-bogglingly stupid we need to talk to each other in detail about the realities that we're facing right now and pleased to understand that things can escalate even when no one wants them to escalate that's the whole history of the last century and a half how accidents can happen and how things can get out of hand yeah thank you very much uh professor zhang yeah i share professor zak's view on that and indeed this particular time in a way it's dangerous we should guard against any war provocations and actually for from our point of view from chinese point of view perhaps it's first of all a major problem the united states system uh i remember jamie carter former u.s president said openly he said over the past 214 years the united states was without war for only 16 years so the united states spent too much resources too many resources on war and afghan war iraqi war already cost us three trillion dollars and more and he said in contra china devote all these resources to infrastructure to development so that makes all the difference between china and united states so this is a clear message and we should really uh convince u.s leadership that trigger happy or this not the approach right approach at the same time we need all kinds of institutional arrangement uh including certain arrangements which are familiar with which leftover from the cold war between united states and the soviet union some kind of disarmament approach some kind of institutional early warning system with modern technology that would be easy you know so surrounding the political commitment both sides three sides multilateral approach to really de-escalate tensions wherever it is thank you um thank you for those uh comments both of you are on that really important uh question that's very much in people's minds um i think i'll move on to another area that um that we haven't really talked so much about which is um on the global economy and there are a couple of questions here um what are the implications of the new cold war on the global economy and the role of the us and china within it and um another one on the coupling is economic scientific and technological decoupling a serious possibility and what would the consequences be so what do you what are your views on the future for the global economy and the role of the us and china within it um changing or otherwise and this question of uh decoupling so um can i come to you now first um professor zhang i think this idea of economic decoupling between united states and china may happen in a limited way because it's against the basic logic of the market force if you look at the situation in china now in fact the more u.s investment coming more u.s companies coming for one thing china has really done a good job in controlling the pandemic it's a full economic recovery and investors see the opportunities however if there is a new cold war although i think it's difficult to really realize this kind of new code if it's really launched with the support with us allies if that really happens it will indeed hurt the global economy and for one thing it will waste a lot of resources mainly they could have you be used for development for prosperity it will be diverted to military expansion military buildup which be a waste of resources waste of money and on the whole you know the major difficulty with this cold war approach to china is we don't buy this we were not we're not soviet union united once some hawks want to launch a code war against china charles said we will not accept it you want to build a block we will not build a block you want to deep coupling with china we want to continue embrace globalization multilateralism so this economic logic may play a greater role in terms of promoting further kind of integration economic integration maybe it will happen to it's understandable at certain level for instance some countries prove to have a more local production for some basic goods masks whatever so this is understandable but this overall chain of production chain of supply line uh may continue uh with some adjustment so on this i'm slightly optimistic for the tech war it's already happening you know uh i hope it will be overcome you know uh in the coming years but if it's not overcast stereotype war uh i'm slightly you know positive on that because today of course united states very powerful in many technologies but china is also very strong in many other technologies so ideally they can cooperate with each other otherwise you know there might be in the two systems for many things just like in the u.s has a gps we have beto and you have this uh andrew and we have now this uh huawei's harmony so so there'll be two systems and then it will be divided in the world but as far as the chinese approach concern even we build this new system we try to make them also adaptable to the whatever the american system as well so we try to embrace this idea of one global community well in terms of technology in terms of economic development we have this indeed very broad mind you know we believe in shared future for mankind thank you very much uh professor sax i think uh this issue of uh decoupling is probably most uh um relevant in the digital area all of the relevant digital technologies whether it's connectivity uh uh computation uh artificial intelligence and so on and so we should perhaps focus on on that for a moment first the value of having global standards uh in the digital area is improved over the last 50 years by having global standards we've greatly accelerated the technological progress and the interoperability the connectivity the economies of scale and scope of the digital era so the idea of creating a decoupled digital world of different camps or lack of interoperability would be an extremely cost mistake now we don't have full uh obviously full connectivity because lots of applications are blocked within china lots of applications are increasingly blocked within the united states and therefore when the u.s now advances further attempts to impede china's access to advanced microprocessor chips for example there's a kind of fertile ground on which that's taking place i'm against it because i think it is dangerous invidious uh not uh um uh by any means the appropriate response to the circumstances but uh and mainly i don't wanna see our most important sphere of technological advance that can do so much to improve humankind save the environment help on health and education and governance in countless other areas become militarized divided and subject to a very divisive cold war mentality now having said that we are going to enter more industrial policy by region almost surely because every major region will want capacity in various technologies that are near the cutting edge and so china has industrial policies the u.s has industrial policies europe will have industrial policies and that will be part of the lay of the land in this fast-changing digital process but we ought to have guardrails understanding uh updated rules of the game within the wto on this new dramatically dynamic and disruptive area of economic activity this is the second point that i would say yes there will be industrial policy of major regions i have no doubt about it but let's have it under the rules so that we don't lose the benefits of global standards and global interoperability and global connectedness then finally on the issue of uh blocks to a huge extent uh china needs to be very proactive in uh preventing this also now again despite what some people are saying in the chat room about my naivete you're open to your your claims but i think there will be a big difference with trump out of office uh of course i'm gonna be engaged in uh my own uh uh struggles in that case to uh help make a more progressive uh and multilateral view within any administration that comes to power because nothing simple ever we we will have fights ahead and arguments ahead but in any event trump actually made a lot of progress in getting other countries to buy into this u.s hard line just yesterday italy of all countries part of the belt and road initiative said we're not going to have huawei in the system uh and there are many reasons for this these countries are dependent on the us militarily uh they're afraid of the us uh but they also need uh more assurance from china a lot of china's neighbors are just afraid merely of the fact that china's a giant uh compared to the neighbors and so there is a sense my god you know where is our security and so china as a giant uh as a superpower needs also to build constantly that confidence of other countries as well it goes with the territory and i think i would i'm a big believer for example in rsep rcep the regional comprehensive economic partnership which is currently 15 countries the 10 asean countries plus china japan korea plus australia new zealand i think china should very proactively promote arsep as a diplomatic venture to build confidence within the asia-pacific region because china needs to build confidence also it's a powerhouse irrespective of the us put aside the whole u.s question just china's relations with other countries china needs to build that kind of confidence so i think that this will be an ongoing issue but the bottom line is decoupling is possible but profoundly unadvisable and we need to therefore establish proper rules for a new technological age which is not the rules of wto 1994. yes thank you very much um now um we have so many questions um i i do want to give our two speakers uh the opportunity to make some concluding remarks so what i'll do is i'll just mention a few um just a few of the other questions that have been uh sent in and then i'll invite uh each to uh give their their final remarks so um um we've we've talked a bit about the u.s uh presidential election uh what is the significance of the u.s presidential election for u.s china relations um and what do u.s and chinese governments need to do in order to reverse the drive towards confrontation uh perhaps we've covered these but maybe you might want to say more um and uh there's a question on the pandemic to what a step effect extent has the pandemic affected u.s china relations and um there's an interesting one as well in what ways is the rest of the world affected by deteriorating u.s china relations and what role can other countries play in helping to improve the situation that's a question from the philippines interestingly so uh please um our two speakers uh if you wish to respond to any other points that have been raised during the course of the discussion or you want to address any of those questions or you just want to make some final comments can i ask you uh to do so so uh can we go with professor sax please at first great well first to say thank you for a wonderful discussion and uh for organizing this and for participants from all over the world uh i'm most appreciative we need to end the pandemic urgently china has shown that you can suppress the pandemic successfully other countries in the asia pacific similarly have shown this is possible the u.s europe and latin america need really to learn some lessons from this because it has been running out of control because of poor leadership and poor techniques of public health management 2021 could be i'm hoping it will be a very constructive year moving past the pandemic getting it under control with the i hope new vaccines that come online but then several important global events in 2021 uh cop 15 on the convention on biological diversity cop26 on the uh un framework convention on climate change and the paris climate agreement a world food summit i would think that the best way to encourage what we're both calling for is to work together in a highly professional and systematic way towards the success of those multilateral objectives because by working together on a goal-based way we can establish all of the win-win opportunities that both of us see as so important thank you very much for the chance to join today thank you professor john yeah thank you jenny and uh indeed you know i share professor sack's view on this particular issue of multilateralism and i just read an article by our common friend mr john ross and now he's with remy university and he said professor jeffrey sachs the third force neither republican nor democrat because there is a bipartisan some kind of consensus on being a bit tough on china but you stand for cooperation between china united states i think this is a very much appreciated right position at the right time for the right course now the problem is with the u.s election whether it's donald trump or joe biden in power i hope the there will be more wisdom uh in the coming years to handle this complicated bilateral relations and the problem with donald trump at this particular stage is his especially his secretary of state pompeo tried to impose uh something on others to join our block and so many countries have to give have to make a choice either with the united states all with china which is to be honest very stupid i hope all countries concerned will reject this kind of approach it's one asia one pacific one world it's one international community don't let this cold war mentality setting i think this will be the very important message from our dialogue today thank you so much thank you um well unfortunately um we've come to the end of this event um i think it's been a truly fascinating and invaluable discussion and a big thank you to both of our speakers we're really appreciative um i think your messages have been really positive and i'm taking away a lot of positivity from this i also think that you've put before us a great agenda uh a very wide agenda and a detailed agenda that has to be addressed multilaterally and this is the message that we have to get across uh around the world to all echelons of society and especially to those generations uh that are going to have to take this agenda forward um so we have a lot of uh campaigning um ahead of us we need to make sure that this message of multilateralism really is absorbed and really is put over um and so we encourage you to um follow and join the no cold war campaigner our campaign was launched just four months ago um and we issued a founding statement um which you can read on our website no coldwar.org the founding statement which our speakers have referred to a new cold war against china is against the interests of humanity and it's been translated into 17 languages and has been signed by many prominent politicians intellectuals social movement leaders campaigners and journalists across the world so you can read that statement and please do sign it we have some exciting webinars planned in future and obviously we want to do um one on the environmental issues which are going to be so important as professor sachs has said next year but our next one is actually um on saturday the 14th of november and it's um uniting against racism in the new cold war and we have a very different range of of uh interesting speakers from diane abbott np from britain um roxanne dunbar ortiz loki li jing jing the chow collective glenn ford and so on again you can find more details on the no coldware.org website um and finally uh my thanks go to um the workers behind the scenes that have done so much um to organize this event that's carlos martinez john ross fiona edwards vijay prashad and the chow collective and others from no cold war and again my profound thanks to our speakers for their uh wonderful thought-provoking analytical and challenging um presentations and engagement with the questions of course we've had a very very lively discussion on the chat and uh an enormous welter of questions uh in the q a so apologies to those people that uh didn't get their questions answered i know that there are all sorts of questions on belt road initiative and socialism with chinese characteristics i'm sure uh that these are things that we can discuss in the future so again thank you very much and um i will bring this uh event to a close on the dot i think so [Music] [Music] 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Channel: No Cold War

Views: 58,748

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Id: eAFU4Y1C-10

Length: 85min 30sec (5130 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020