The Avoidable U.S.-China War – A Conversation with Condoleezza Rice and Kevin Rudd

well thank you very much and to this wonderful audience I think we're going to have a great time hearing from the inestable Kevin Rudd former prime minister of Australia and now shepherding the Asia Society I just want to say I want to thank the Asia Society for the long friendship and colleagueship that we've enjoyed and look forward to many more opportunities Margaret thank you very much now as as we've just said there will be a q a at the end I am a professor so if you don't raise your hand I will call on somebody I believe on cold calling but I suspect we'll have plenty of time plenty of questions and we'll try to leave the last several minutes to do so but I have the the Cat Board seat belt so I get to start by asking and I will call you Kevin and of course because she'll call me candy I have the the opportunity to ask Kevin some questions but I first want to advertise the the book The affordable be sure to get the book there are free steak knives so let's start by talking with the audience introducing the audience to the man of the hour in China Xi Jinping he's about to have a big month ahead of him he's been planning this for quite a long time talk to us about him well what is he driven by what does he want and then I want to ask some specifics about from your book uh very well put about the view of the U.S and his China dream but why don't you start with who is he what's he driven by good well thank you Conde for being with with us today in this conversation and all of our friends at Hoover it's great to be back at Stanford that's a great institution great University and we're pleased to collaborate with you through the Asia Society Xi Jinping I probably had I don't know uh eight or nine one-on-one conversations with him over the years and since I've left office a number of small group conversations so it's not a foolproof mechanism to understand the personality of a leader of a major country but it gives you some insights I think I think the first thing that strikes you between the eyeballs with Xi Jinping is his enormous level of self-confidence like there is something I never sensed for example in hujinta um reflecting the fact that in every conversation I've ever had with Xi Jinping I never saw him use a note he either has an eidetic memory which is just an ability to absorb the script which have as you know if you've been in the business for a while you can just through repeat but his ability to move flexibly from subject to subject I found unlike his two sets of predecessors dung never used a script but Chung's have been and who Jintao did so self-confidence secondly and as I would chat to him when he was in Australia I used to chat to him in Chinese when he was visiting I'm a Chinese speaker for all my sins there are many sins the um and here's a profound interest in his own history of China and the history of the Communist Party he steeped in his institutional and National History and Nepali this partly disagrees with much of the analysis and in China about the guy which says that he's not sophisticated or well educated on the rest of it not in my experience his ability to move subtly across questions of party history National History and some world history was quite impressive and I think certainly what I don't think I'm imposing this as a post-facto memory but you know when you meet folks in political life and National political life who you know have a defined sense of absolute Mission he's one of them I'm reluctant to use the term man of History because we know what that refers to in the current International political environment who's a man whose initials are V and P um and but this guy sees himself as a man of History pushing the country forward against a defined plan for the future no sense of humor um and despite my best efforts over multiple glasses of Australian red wine all sorts of things which I found enormously amusing that I was saying but but didn't Melissa Day from the general secretary the Chinese Communist party so that's the guy that I've encountered right you said that he has a deep sense of History one thing that I often encountered with some of my counterparts the people in in the on the Russian side was that it was a deep sense of history but it was a warped sense of History a distinctive sense of History brought up in the Chinese system would you say that it is an accurate sense of History how would you characterize his sense of History um twofold party history which is its own beast in the Chinese system they call it danglish it's like this received set of orthodoxies like the evolution of cpsu in in the Soviet Union a recently Orthodox reflection within a capacity for some honesty about stuff that went wrong on National History obviously through the prism of party history but still able to deal with challenges and criticism like you know when I'd uh reflect on the excesses of the cultural revolution and and the Great Leap Forward and that sort of stuff like these are not happy episodes in the history of the Communist party and Xi Jinping on the public record on China says we don't discuss these things anymore because they give rise to what he describes as historical nilism which is uh so many problems in the party's history that undermines belief in the party's mission but you can challenge him on it but no his rendition is relatively Orthodox world history because he doesn't read English and doesn't speak English um it will always be done through the prism of stuff written in the Chinese lens but what he does read and the other leadership read is Chinese translations of the stuff you and I write in the international media probably you more than me actually so um and that I find interesting because that acts as a I won't say a corrective but at least there's an opportunity to get through uh because it it's what we foreign barbarians think and write and therefore can be observed as such Open brackets of course it's wrong in close brackets but at least it's there to be read well if it's a matter of History um what does he want his legacy to be at the end of his at the end of his life let's let's not confine it to his political life what does he want history to say about him well his mother is 96 his father died when he was 89 and his father was a member of the polypyria and I think Xi Jinping uh having put the pork dumplings down has decided that he probably can live quite a while so and so when we talk about him being reappointed at this party Congress for another five years realistically once you've purged as many people as XI jinpinga's Purge in the last 10 years you cannot leave office you've got to stay there because otherwise they're going to come and get you yeah um authoritarian systems are like that when I lost office in Australia that can come up come after me and get me though some of them wanted to and so it's slightly different so therefore when you say when he leaves the scene which in my view is when he dies so I think barring an act of God this guy is going to be general secretary or chairman of the Communist Party one formulation or another at least until the late 2030s he's now 69. by the time you finish the 23rd party Congress in 2037 he'll be a tender age of 84 almost young enough to run for president United States the uh see I can say that I'm not a republican that's a bipartisan comment well taken so what does he want his legacy to be given that he's going to be around for quite a while my judgment is as follows Three core things one to preserve the party as a revolutionary party of control within China and resist any forces predisposed towards us removing the party's power or reducing it he's looked at the collapse of the Communist part of the Soviet Union he's terrified by it and therefore will not compromise on it so his his view as reflected in a conversation which he had with a friend of mine once which was pointed to his veins and said done they warmed the schweiger the party is in our veins so anyone who's got a view that there is a a nice transition to a happier form of political pluralism I think they need to get real number two I think he does want to China to have become at least a bigger economy than the United States and to be on the road to becoming the preeminent Regional and Global power over America um and I think when you look carefully at the texts that's quite clear it's not said in those explicit terms but when you look at the official Dogma which is jonghya means of wedafushing the great Rejuvenation the Chinese people it means bringing it back to China's Global position as it was before we foreign barbarians arrived in the first place and that is as the preeminent power and the last thing is Taiwan he wants that under his belt and that is part and parcel of the um of the mission statement whether he secures it or not depends not just on him but on all of us as well I want to come back to Taiwan in a moment but um if if he wants to supersede the now uh dominant power the United States well how does he view the United States is it that he can do this China can do this because the United States is a declining power we always talk about a rising power a rising China does he see the United States as a declining United States and therefore there's an opening or are there things that he has to do to make certain that the United States declines how does CC how does he see us he's uh on the question of how does China achieve that National goal he sees the responsibility as lying in two baskets what do they do which is continue to fuel the growth of the economy but that's where he has a problem because if he continues to fuel the growth of the economy through a through a continuing Vitality of the Chinese private sector which is what's got China where it's got to so far then by reimposing ideological controls over the Chinese private sector which is what he's doing and has been doing for the last five years he therefore collapse Chinese growth well when I say collapse it radically reduce it average six or seven percent down to maybe two or three percent so that's his basket of what he needs to do and based on that to continue to radically invest in the Chinese military and to radically invest in China's technological self-reliance across all the semiconductor categories down to three and six millimeters nanometers not millimeters now on the United States which is it takes two to tango and great power relations um if you read the audiological literature which these guys produce not just in the more formal speeches but the stuff that you dig for and the party's theoretical journals those exciting things you read on a weekend when you should be reading a good novel but nerds like you and me that we read this other stuff um the the consistency and the Resonance of the language about the rise of the East and decline of the West and about the world's growing multi-polarity and about the irresolvable problems in the American democracy the systemic divisions which now prevent the Americans from acting on the global stage effectively A House Divided unto itself cannot stand to paraphrase that great American president um the conclusion in this system is that structurally the United States and the West is in structural decline and that an alternative development model his form of what I call State capitalism increasingly however a Marxist form of State capitalism is the alternative model development model not just for China but for the world so it's this cocktail of it I think in a rational self-belief in uh the inherent success of his new development model which is highly State controlled unlike under John who and done and secondly I think an equally irrational view that this country is incapable of continued reinvention either politically or economically which the last hundred years demonstrates that you've been remarkably good at to use a good Marxist term you've just described for him though a set of contradictions because he in effect wants to outpace the U.S economy and yet do you think he understands that the move towards statism uh toward the uh the killing of the goose that laid the golden egg among the private companies uh that the bringing down of of sanctions the decoupling uh the fact that the United States he gave that speech when he said I'm going to surpass the United States and all of these Frontier Technologies and that was a kind of Sputnik moment for the United States does he understand uh that there's a contradiction between the path that he's on and the desire to get to an economy that will outgrow that of the United States do you think he does he get that does he listen to anyone about that because another way to learn this would be to listen for instance to a lika Shang who might make that argument true I'm glad you used the word contradictions because I've had two I've just completed some research project on XI jinping's ideology and it's enough to drive a man to drink because I've had to re-read dialectical materialism re-read historical materialism re-read [Music] um the intersection of opposites their resolution through contradiction and struggle and I once read the phenomenology of Mind in order to understand it's a long time sorry about that takes a long time yeah yeah okay have you recovered yet not really because I've got to say wrapping your head around this entirely different systemology and it's not just it's not just a conclusion about the future cause of History which is historical determinism it's also a rolling epistemology for understanding what's happening now right in this world of contradiction and struggle so the irony is yes he sees himself and Prides himself in being a Numero Uno dialectician not something you'd boast about your local football club but a a first-class dialectician the intersection of progressive and reactionary forces contradiction resolution through struggle and you move on to inexual advance to socialism and communism probably by next Thursday night at least here in Stanford that's kind of the world view but notwithstanding that um you have this puzzling contradiction about his contradictions which is the one you've just alluded to okay so I'm Xi Jinping I'm looking at Jack Ma I'm looking at tencent I'm looking at this bright brilliant Breezy Innovative world-beating Tech sector Tech platins pintai jinji out there and rather than saying Go China he's seeing threat threat and threat because a they're controlling too much data in his view B they're all billionaires hmm increasingly problematic because they become alternative status figures within the country other than Party leaders and believer leaders and see if this private sector continues to grow and it's now 61 percent of GDP then wither the party or the party with us now so he's got all that in the back of his head so he thinks he's being a great dialectician by saying I'm going to head this off at the pass make okay I'm ahead of the contradiction right right okay I've spotted where struggle must occur and I've um and I'm ahead of the curve in doing so his failure in doing that is to he has no intrinsic understanding of what a financial Market is what a normal Market in the economy is this is not part of his ideological National Security political training so whereas he thinks he's actually acting dialectically to prevent the private sector from ultimately marginalizing the party he is killing the goose that gold laid the golden egg because he doesn't comprehend it does he have people to come in and say shirada Uncle she um this is not wise I think there are one or two who could say that but the evidence to date is there's been in this shift to the left on economic policy which has now been underway for five years since the 19th party Congress in all the areas that you listed before and a few others the evidence to date is there's been precious little course correction despite the slowing of growth I think they may find by the way there's a footnote to that answer they may find a way after the Congress and before the next national people's Congress in March to begin to experiment with the current Hong Kong model of exiting zero covered but that's quite a separate matter to the other ideological shifts to the left between private sector and public sector which I think have been much bigger forces and slowing the economy let's go to U.S China relations um when you were prime minister I was Secretary of State for a short period of that and the prospect for a manageable U.S China relationship looked considerably better I think all of us thought we were managing through a relationship we had an integrationist narrative about China I remember Bob zellick my Deputy giving the responsible stakeholder speech which apparently the Chinese couldn't translate and spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the heck that was but not us that's what we medium rare is the way it came in is that right yeah I remember very well asking the Chinese to chair the six party talks with North Korea and to be fair they they did a reasonably good job of doing so and so I don't really want to be one of those you know old folks who looks back and say oh those were the days but those were kind of the days so what happened how did we get to where we are now when you have to write a book titled the avoidable war I think three big things have changed since the good old days and uh and I'm not critical of American policy magazine Parts Bob selects a good friend of mine I remember sitting in his office in the state department when he was your deputy and he showed me the draft of the stakeholder speech and I thought it was a good I thought it was good speech I didn't think of the translation problem um I should have but I didn't so what's changed since uh uh that has given rise to the need to write a book like this in a matter of really a decade right one the change in the balance of power it's an objective fact in international relations that if you no longer have power equilibrium and you have an emerging large disequilibrium that this of itself is destabilizing and China's self-perception plus those of us who objectively measure these things says militarily economically technologically they're much more powerful than they were and their foreign policy influence in the world off the back of the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy and that is really turbocharged ahead so the Chinese conclusion that I think partly the objective reality is the balance of power has moved more in their Direction was moving more in their Direction number two Xi Jinping is a different leader I I'm from an old-fashioned School of international relations Theory which says that leaders have agency leaders actually make a difference President Bush made a difference as we were discussing earlier today candy when he did what he did to reign in the then Taiwanese president Century bien who was taking a very dangerous course in the direction of Taiwanese Independence in that period between 2000 and 2008. so leaders make a difference you can make a difference now Xi Jinping is in his own worldview there to make a difference to adjust the status quo to move China towards the status that we just referred to before and if you want um and if you want an example of how how he's just doing that look at this campaign of Island Reclamation in South China Sea remarkable but that's just one of a dozen illustrations what's the third Factor third factor is that since H.R McMaster did the National Security strategy in late I think it's November of 17. the United States symbolized there and then that the United States was not going to be a passive player in this process as Beijing was seeing it and it would begin to react and that acquired bipartisan support one way or the other you know the two political parties in this country May disagree about what you call this thing but basically strategic competition is the the framework as McMaster correctly concluded at the time um and so really these are the three structural factors I think which have changed and that's why we're in now in a state of profound flux but there is therefore no substitute framework for managing a relationship whose fundamentals have therefore changed how to manage relationships though can you give us a strategic framework for how we might get to a place that I'll put it this way and then I'll ask you about the rest of the world it feels right now as if it's consistently and constantly on edge yeah the US China relationship and I am a veteran of the April 2001 incident in which the Chinese downed an American reconnaissance correct ep3 on Hanan Island they kept our crew for seven days for three days we couldn't get them to talk to us and I actually found my counterpart at a barbecue in Argentina and got the argentines to get him to a telephone so that we could talk that's how the communication shut off at that moment it's a good you're a superpower we could track him down through somebody else I think well done yeah yeah well we were we were very grateful to the argentines for doing that but but I mean that was a kind of dangerous moment but the overall context of the relationship was one of management we'll get through this I I wonder if you had that kind of incident today given the kind of fraught nature of the relationship how well we would get through it so if I'm writing that we're and you called it in flux but I would say influx in a pretty dangerous place uh you would think that we want to get back to something that's more manageable what's the recipe for doing that well the reason I wrote this book is because I've been thinking about this for some years I started uh when I left politics in Australia which is code language for losing an election by the way the uh uh I came the United States so you're at Harvard and I began thinking about this question of what I called then constructive realism and then subsequently managed strategic competition and essentially it's kind of like this it's not rocket science I'm an Australian we don't do rocket science the um but it's just it's realist right there are two ways in which people often think that you can manage deep and destabilizing strategic competition one is my first diplomatic person when I was a career Diplomat was stalker so I love the scandies but the idea that you can sprinkle Scandinavian fairy dust over this relationship and only if these two countries really understood each other better it would all be okay tomorrow morning no so the problem is they both think they do understand each other quite well and they don't like what they see so I'm not into the fairy dust business I'm into the realist business so there is a strategic competition underway but there is no guarding framework for it to which both sides can recourse in order to re-inject stability or equilibrium when you need to so what I argue in this book under this concept of managed strategic competition is one in the five areas of what I describe as strategic red lines as mutually perceived by each side Taiwan South China Sea East China see Korean Peninsula we often leave that off the list but I think it's really dangerous still and and five cyber and space which I group together even though they are different um right at present we have unmanaged strategic competition and a rolling exercise of push and shove in each of these domains in a normal non-tense environment with this tool lots of what I describe as diplomatic insulation around the relationship you wouldn't mind so much a bit of push bit of shove here are the rules but we know we're going to stabilize at present though it's unmanaged strategic competition and if you've observed kids pushing and shoving sometimes they fall over and then it's on for young and old um the analogy I used recently to describe the U.S China relationship is right now is a bit like this in your mind's eye those of you who have a father or a grandfather and Uncle with a workshop in the backyard and your father and grandfather or Uncle loves welding okay and he's out there and with his uh a neighbor they willed every every afternoon they just love welding there's sparks flying everywhere except when you look closely on the floor it's a concrete floor um there is water all over the floor and you see the cables leading into the welding equipment have no insulation around them at all in fact they've been frayed for some years now and so you ask the question what could possibly go wrong interestingly China his foreign minister Wang Yi picked up that analogy and used it back at me the other day in the age of society in a speech the other day so my problem with unmanaged strategic competition is that's what where it's happening so around many strategic competition the argument is each side advance in high-level diplomatic negotiations with the other side what it perceives to be its own bottom line in each of these five category areas now I know and you know as diplomatic practitioners you'll never get agreement on that because the other side will regard it as irrational but it's useful to know as opposed to presently establishing the equilibrium point through a voyage of discovery second and third elements of the logic of managed strategic competition are relatively straightforward which is in the rest of the relationship Beyond those five you have non-lethal strategic competition in the other domains consistent with the framework of the relationship which everyone's intellectually acknowledged at the outset the rest of foreign policy risk to security policy trade investment technology the rest like it's a competition and you're just out there to seek Advantage including on ideology human rights and a framework for the future of the International System and the last category is still carving out sufficient political and diplomatic space for strategic cooperation and collaboration in areas where it's really necessary for yourselves it's the two big powers and for the global public good climate change Global Financial stability Global Public Health next pandemic and nuclear non-proliferation so that's the argument and as I say in the book it's not perfect I can poke holes in it myself but I my challenge is for someone to come up with something better and I haven't heard one yet I have really just uh two more questions and I'm going to ask the mic Runners to get ready and for you to get ready with your questions so we can turn to the audience I'd like you to Now put on your Australia hat and how's the rest of the world seeing this U.S China welding competition with The Frayed wires all over the place and that may lead to this question of Taiwan and how is the world seeing the possibility of conflict over Taiwan well the rest of the world feels even more anxious than Americans and I think the Chinese feel because we're smaller okay and even though the rest of the world may think they would not necessarily be direct combatants in a U.S China military uh Campaign which is Means War and killing by the way let's just be very clear about this these are not clinical terms it's a lot of death um the rest of the world sees a the uh a massive Global recession borderline depression because if you start to do the maths on this the two the world's two largest economies which between them represent about 35 percent of global GDP domestically kind of shutting down global trade shutting down as everything goes onto a war footing I think what happens to financial markets what happens to equities markets the sheer economic impact to this is frightening for large code corporations and nation states and secondly for American friends and allies the question would be what will be asked to do and can we do it and that will be a question of what then America does in the event of a Chinese military action against Taiwan and and therefore is that a winning plan or a winning strategy and thirdly at a much broader level short of War itself it's the paranoia that I see right around the world about people being drawn into a once again a binary order return to a fear we're not there yet that will return to a new Cold War Cold War 2.0 we're not there yet because of the overwhelming size the economic relationship still it was to summarize the sentiment in Southeast Asia I think it's that Northeast Asia slightly different twist because of proximity to the main theater particularly in Japan South Asia India's changing somewhat because of their own irresolvable border disputes and frankly making binary decisions of Their Own but interestingly Europe which is uh historically saying I wish you two guys would just get on so we can just get back to making money uh in the uh The Unofficial European national anthem on China is money money I've got love in my tummy we'll have a seminar on human rights and security that's all you guys over there in Asia is that about it that's been my experience of it anyway but these guys the Europeans interestingly and you would know this from your own extensive experience Conde internationally now and with counterparts is the the Europeans are now looking at China's tacit support for Putin and Ukraine and scratching their heads and saying our assumptions about the China of old probably don't apply anymore and so whether it's Berlin or Paris or London or even amongst the nordics of what I find is people now really scratching their heads as to what new China strategy they may need in the developed and developing World however the rest of Latin America and the rest of Asia and Africa they don't want a binary order at all because they would feel and are concerned about being squeezed well the title of your book uh definitely begs the question the avoidable war does not suggest that it is necessarily something that will happen without action so how do we avoid war it didn't say the avoided war it says the avoidable war so what does that mean in terms of policy particularly uh you've you've very nicely laid out some timelines about Taiwan and so forth and I just want to come back to that and please do get your questions ready we'll come to you right after this answer I think um a part of the reason for the title is my good friend and colleague from Harvard Graham Allison wrote destined for war in 2015. which is all about thucydides trap you know there's a big academic debate about that it really has had an effect I think on the way in both which Chinese and American policy Elites think about the trajectory on which they can be on which they are possibly on which is we are destined for war competing ideological systems one power seeking to replace each other Athens Sparta you know all the analogies in history Etc and so I felt some frankly necessary burden to say to my friend and colleague Graham here is a response which is we ain't destined for anything I'm not a historical determinist I believe in agency and that's why I have argued that that it's avoidable secondly my judgment at least for the rest of this decade is that neither the United States nor China want a war over Taiwan because they have both looked into that Abyss they've stayed over the edge and said that's a long way down and it contains within a whole bunch of unknowable risks so therefore the challenge for the 2020s in my judgment is this how do you reduce the risk of War by accident and that is what managed strategic competition is all about it provides guard rails the term I use strategic guard rails around these five strategic red lines and a framework for the rest of the dimensions of the relationship but the other part of the jigsaw then is this and people legitimately say yeah but what about Kevin if you believe that Xi Jinping regards the 2030s as a more optimal time for China to take military action to secure Taiwan which is currently my belief based on what the evidence that I see then what's going to stop him then so the answer to that is the second part of the equation which is the U.S and Taiwan and allies have to engage now in a radical investment in believable deterrence over Taiwan Taiwanese defense in itself its military structure and capabilities it's its ability to develop an effective porcupine strategy mindful of what's unfolded in Ukraine together with the United States providing sufficient military equipment and the rest and arms to Taiwan under the Taiwan relations act in a manner which will upset the Chinese but you've been doing it for years anyway [Music] and that way by the time you hit the 2030s there is still there is an enhanced risk on XI jinping's part when he looks at Taiwan and the chair of the military Commission in Beijing comes in and says Vice chair of the military commission comes in and says this is still too risky we could lose and the first chapter first paragraph of swinda's Art of War which every Chinese political leader has read is war is a great matter of State never to be undertaken lightly if you lose the war you lose the state so it is increasing the risk calculus on the part of the Chinese system both financially economically but critically militarily but I think we've got six or seven years to play with so that's kind of how the logical bits fit together in this yes all right we'll turn to the audience uh now so I'm going to move this way so that I don't right here on the the left yes and and may I ask if you just identify yourself and please brief questions because we have a lot of people who want to ask questions okay thank you for guys a very illuminated speech I am Zoom from China and currently a master's student at Center of East Asian studies in Stanford so I want I have questions for both of you so do you think that at next administration of China which will um which will get public in about 10 days will carry out transformation back to developing the private sector instead of the public sector when understanding that develop of economy is fundamentally important to surprise United States thank you just a quick answer on that um XI jinping's Economic Policy advisors will be saying to him now we need to course correct back towards the market to rebuild economic growth secondly ideologically Xi Jinping is going to find that very difficult to do because it will run against the core ideological resolution of the 19th party Congress five years ago in 2017. so what's the likely outcome I think the likely outcome is one of muddling through you're going to have a congress communique in my judgment which will continue to reinforce the importance of Marxism leninism State and party control more common prosperity and possibly some new drem and jinji people's economy something I hadn't heard since the 1950s until recently and on the other hand you're going to have a series of injunctions to the New Economic team to get the economy going by enhancing State investment in the economy and and harnessing again somehow mysteriously the enthusiasm of the private sector so it's not going to be a return to maoism but it's not going to be returned to dungism either it in my judgment we'll be muddling through but that doesn't restore six percent growth might get you to four percent growth but doesn't get you to six they'll try and finally finesse that by crab walking out of the current so-called Dynamic zero covered arrangements and that will be done through a series of Trials based on the Hong Kong model starting in November I believe oh I'm okay Bob King that's my name uh given the war in Ukraine and the relationship between China and Russia what's the probability that Z can prevent Putin from using a nuclear bomb um this is beyond my pay grade I'm sitting next to someone who's an expert in the old Soviet Union the modern Russia and that's Conde so I'll just say something really dumb and then throw it to Columbia and that is there is no way in the world that Xi Jinping within the Chinese political system domestically let alone internationally could justify XI Jin as justify of Vladimir Putin using a tactical nuclear weapon secondly it is my view in the absence of any evidence available to me but it's my view that the Chinese will have communicated this military to military to the Russians in the course of the last several months not just the last several weeks and thirdly my conclusion is it is highly improbable as a result uh quite apart from other factors pertaining to the use of tactical nuclear weapons like which way is the wind blowing do they work because they've been in storage since you know since the Battle of Trafalgar I mean they've been around for a long time dust them off you know and see if it's still operational and and thirdly what will actually be the nature of the American retaliatory response which the National Security advisor Jake Sullivan has already spoken about and in my judgment effectively and publicly so put all that together I think a combination of a genuine fear in the Russian system about the nature of the response from the United States and NATO plus the Chinese saying no way Jose in Chinese not in Spanish that I reckon uh I'm on the skeptical side yeah absolutely outstanding summary uh yes now I agree completely and I I also think that uh if Vladimir Putin really wants to be a pariah with everybody that would seal it um given and I I think the other points are probably even more more Salient but can you even imagine yes right a little footnote which given you've raised Ukraine and and Vladimir the Impaler the um uh let's just say the Russian military move against Putin This is highly speculative but you don't have to be a road scholar to work out that things are not going well in the Ukraine from a Russian perspective secondly the conscription Mass conscription of Russian men is not going well thirdly oligarchs tend to be falling out of Windows regularly yes they're quite clumsy aren't they falling out of those windows there's a window gonski and so put all this together and again I have no expertise in Russian domestic politics China I have a feel for Russia I don't so therefore this is a pure hypothesis if Putin is forced to resign or is actually physically taken out this would have a reverberating effect back into the Chinese political system that's the simple point I wanted to leave with you not sufficient to cause Xi Jinping to fall politically but it would be disempowering and I think the fact is um ability comfortably to discharge leadership as he currently sees it without uh rolling correction from his colleagues it would be such a dramatic event yes in the Russia China relationship has such an historical importance from the lens of Beijing it's just worth reflecting on that sidebar for the moment so I do have to say things are going in a very bizarre fashion two Russian men have shown up in Alaska and asked for Asylum which is a rather strange turn but I want to know what was Sarah Palin's response foreign yes hi my name is Ava Zhao um just a quick question since you mentioned deterrence towards the end of your talk I recently learned about the Silicon returns whereby um I think 90 of the world's semiconductors are made in Taiwan and apparently there's some discussion thinking that because um because of that China would be foolish to attack Taiwan and destroy the world's economy I just wanted to get your thoughts on that and whether it's a legitimate deterrence I think um it's important to be um rational in our analysis of tsmc that's Taiwan semiconductor Corporation role in terms of the supply of global microchips those which are the most advanced in the world which they currently do and the current you know technology threshold within tsmc is between three and six nanometers so this is and they are at The Cutting Edge you've got to admire what this Corporation has done by the way just remarkable talk about the success of the Taiwanese economy I mean let's just grew out of electronics Industry over 20 years it's just remarkable anyway um you hear arguments that this will either cause China to take Taiwan in order to get a hold of the tsmc gear which is simply in my judgment a fallacious argument and there's a reason for that is that there's multiple contingency planning underway to deal with that in the event of a Chinese action you don't arrive one day with the Chinese equivalent of the 82nd Airborne and then control tsmc's fabrication facility it's not like that and on the reverse logic that China would never do it because it would destroy the world supply of semiconductors I think the similar corrective needs to be in mind that there is a strategy now in the United States and with its major partners and allies over time to achieve a much greater globally diffuse semiconductor source of Supply it'll take some time but already tsmc based on my information is locating fab here and you'll see that with some of the other Advanced chip manufacturers partly off the back of this new Chips act to the United States of Congress right and if and if Kevin if you're right about the timeline here of the 20s the the semiconductor landscape could look quite different in 10 years than it looks looks now yes thank you I'm nandani Tandon I'm a venture capitalist investing in healthcare my question is given the convergence of incentives of the Court countries Australia being one of them also how effective do you think these four countries can be in that region to ensure that America does Remain the number one and I also want to say I can't wait to read your book given your brilliant sense of human deep understanding and thank you secretary for hosting this yes and and the four countries you mean of the Quad the quad yes Australia India yes yes the quadrilateral security dialogue for those of you not familiar with the debate is the United States of course Japan India and Australia I think the thing to understand clearly about the quad is it's not a military Alliance and the members of the Quad describe it it as a strategic collaboration framework but what's remarkable about the quad as it's unfolded over the last year or two is the range of activities it's now embracing in terms of technology and secure sources of Technology Supply including what we're just talking about as far as semiconductors secondly energy and a whole range of other domains as well quite apart from classic foreign policy coordination so it's it's in a state of evolution and I think those who have framed the quad have done a highly intelligent job offered of it because it is designed to be elastic over time second point I'd make is our Chinese friends have been shocked that this thing came into being because their assumption was look at Delhi and look at Tokyo for example where is the natural worldview or commonality of interest between the two of course there's an answer to that it's called China um but the Chinese historical assumption has been that the divisions between the quad countries for such an order of magnitude that if this thing could only ever exist on paper and not in reality but I think China radically underestimated the extent to which its own actions in pushing the Strategic envelope on the Sono Indian Border in the South China Sea in the East China Sea uh punitive trade actions against Australia because an Australian prime minister uh one of the conservative Australian prime ministers called for a global independent inquiry into the origins of covert 19. put all that together you create sufficient momentum out of Chinese wolfhari diplomacy writ large and Military strategy writ large to cause otherwise disparate actors to coalesce the final point of the logic I think is what does it do in reality I've noticed the Chinese reaction has gone from being dismissive to being concerned to being abusive about it which usually indicates that people are concerned and what it does as a question of strategic reality is that it provides the countries of Southeast Asia in particular with greater freedom of strategic maneuver because there's almost like a band of strategic robustness now surrounding them geopolitically and geographically and so therefore rather than feeling that you're just being sucked into the cyanosphere you actually have a countervailing force and against the overall logic of the balance of power and the open questions are does it become a quint with the Republic of Korea huge debates between Seoul and Tokyo over that because Japan's not so sure and does it end up being a sextet it's our friends in Ottawa have indicated that they're interested in joining as well so this is evolving in a quite Dynamic fashion but I think on balance is stabilizing yes for just one more question I've not gone to that side I'm going to go to the yes you see hi uh so sorry let me go out um so last year uh Jack ma went missing after he gave a speech that as I remember it was fragrantly against China's current economic system do you think xuxing ping is more adamant on reeling and billionaires after this very public display of infidelity towards China's economic system this is our last question I just want to say two other things where I go to the questions just to acknowledge all of our men and women in uniform I can see up the back thank you for your service and I see two other people wearing uniforms in this room who are wearing my campaign t-shirt from an election which I won Kevin O7 you see so you get the order of Kevin later on um just to conclude on the question of uh on the question of given what's happened with the billionaire class can he rebuild confidence on the part of the private sector I think that's the essence of the question thank you for nodding the um uh I think it's a tricky old business the reason I say that is that the private sector in China is not hugely different to the private sector anywhere else like they are phenomenally creative full of entrepreneurs enormous work ethic a savings ethic and that's why they've been so phenomenally successful I mean what's achieved by the private sector in Chinese Tech just look at what's happening with the digital Commerce Revolution through a combination of Alibaba and and financial and all the rest of it was breathtaking you know it's amazing and honored goes so you look at this and you say this is just extraordinary and Jack ma who I've known for a very long time became the hero of this generation and other generations of Chinese entrepreneurs saying I could be like that you know and Jack ma is very poor background Jack ma lined up outside the Australian Embassy in 1985. for four days asking for a tourist visa to travel to Australia to spend a month in a language School uh with a pen pal he'd made in Australia and he'd been learning his English of radio Australia's English language broadcast which is why Jack's English is a bit strange so uh so it's Chinese with an Australian accent think about it the uh so here is a guy who was just so determined to succeed that he did all of that and at the admiration of the world not just Chinese people okay just the admiration of the world you think how how do you do that so the idea that you can in any political culture or any system anywhere in the world simply say sprinkle fairy dust and say forget about all that stuff forget about the fact that there have been a series of punishments meted out to this group of people forget about the fact that we're now changing the rules about the Chinese Tech sector forget about the fact that we're attacking we're attacking private sector Tech monopolies but we're living public sector monopolies in place and forget about the fact that we've just said that if you're a really successful firm you will now spontaneously donate 12 billion dollars to your local favorite charity forget about all of that because it's all over and we really do love you what do you think the response would be the next morning unlikely to be hugely positive so there is a counter narrative and I'll finish on this condition when I say this to Chinese Regulators I've got many friends in the Chinese system because I've been in and out of the country now for God 35 years um they say yeah but for every one of those billionaires who who they say to me are unhappy with us there are literally tens of thousands of Chinese millionaires who want to earn tens or hundreds of millions of Renminbi but not become the world's biggest billionaires in other words there's plenty of others in the system wanting to do the same we're just not going to allow them to become that big I'm not sure that works it's a qualitative judgment I don't have a database for it but the proof will be in the pudding that is what happens after this Congress there will be statements made political statements to reassure the private sector you will see appointments to the new premier's position the vice premier's responsible the economy which may have pro-market folks there but if you've got this recent Collective memory which you've just referred to in your question plus an ideological overhang which says we are Marxist Learners true and blue then I'm not sure that the animal spirits are going to be easily reconjourned within that system so I think we're looking at sub-optimal Chinese growth but it's too early to say that we've reached Peak China and that therefore the model is broken but I think the model now is under great duress Evan thank you please join me in thanking the honorable Kevin Rudd for a really stimulating conversation but also go and buy his book The avoidable War thank you very much thank you [Applause]

Channel: Asia Society

Views: 302,185

Keywords: asia society north california, program, current affairs, geopolitics, the avoidable war: the dangers of a catastrophic conflict between the u.s. and xi jinping’s china, u.s.-china relations, kevin rudd, condoleezza rice

Id: qvVP0JHPSEc

Length: 59min 53sec (3593 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2022