What Happens When China Becomes Number One?

[Applause] good evening everyone um my name is david ellwood and i want to welcome you here to the john kennedy junior forum at the harvard kennedy school this is a special occasion for a number of reasons the first is that this is the albert h gordon lecture which was established in 1987 through a gift from mr gordon who received his undergraduate degree in from harvard in 1923 in his mba in 1925. the lecture focuses on the fields of finance and public policy special attention to internationalization and the terms of the lecture specify the speakers should generally be chosen from outside the harvard community well i think singapore is a bit of a distance although in terms of someone this is someone who's very much been a part of our community in so many different ways i will definitely say that our speaker is a remarkable man he's kishar mahambani's a career in public service is spans government academia and exemplifies the commitment of advancing the greater good spirit of innovation that we here strive for he graduated with first class honors for the degree of philosophy from the university of singapore he then went to delaware's university in canada where he received a master's in philosophy and an honorary doctorate uh he's also spent a year here as a fellow at the center for international affairs at harvard university now he entered the his first part of his career was with the singapore foreign service where he served between 1971 to 2004. um he's had postings in cambodia and he actually served during the war in cambodia there in 1973-74 malaysia washington dc in new york he served as two with two stints as singapore's ambassador to the u.n and as president of the u.n security council he was a permanent secretary at the foreign ministry for five years and then he became a dean of a public policy school everyone's dream job um sure he was president of the u.n security council but um indeed he became dean of singapore's lee kuan yew school of public policy interestingly enough about the exact time i became dean here now i think i know a thing or two about what it means to be a dean in a school with a name of a iconic public figure of whom the nation is proud um and i certainly have been enormously uh honored to be here at the kennedy school kishore took over the school in the name of a living legend and talk about high expectations lee khan you is was a remarkable leader and has been vigorous and engaged was vigorously engaged throughout his life he was one who believed very deeply in the power of education and the notion of a strong merit-based highly accountable government with essentially no corruption to be tolerated at any cost and key shore took over that role of running a school with a living legend and honestly the kennedy schools enjoyed a very close relationship with the lee kuan yew school for many years including through the lee kuan yew fellows program in which mid-career students in public management from the lky school spend a semester here as residents been benefited immeasurably from that association as well as learned so many lessons from watching singapore emerge as a remarkable nation uh at a remarkable time and i too have had this enormous pleasure of getting to know um kishore i remember the first time i met him and it was in davos and again we had just both become deans i think we were both a little concerned about i was i'll just be straight i was scared um and uh here's this guy and so we sort of compare compares you know what we've done before and you know so i'm meeting this guy who's oh well i was you know president security council ambassador u.n various things and so forth i said well i studied poverty um but the um and in fact a great friendship was born and throughout the years we've spent a great deal of time together and so forth um obviously lee kuan yew the remarkable leader of singapore passed away very recently at the age of 92 and we certainly share the grief of of all the people in singapore and what a remarkable man he was i would also just say that one of the things i comforted myself when we were meeting in that first time in davos was well okay but you know i'm going to lean the dean the kennedy school and so forth and um we'll just see what he does after he becomes dean well what he just did was write book after book after book that was on the bestseller list that was talked about argued about these include the great convergence asia the west and the logic of one world a series of books including canadians think and constantly he has pushed and challenged us to think about what a world will look like when the center of gravity shifts from the united states and the west to the east and um indeed and now there's all kinds of talk about what's next for singapore and his is a forthcoming book here can singapore survives about it um it is no surprise that this man who's done so many remarkable things both in running an institution and in his writings was listed by the british current affairs magazine prospect as one of the top 50 think world thinkers in 2014 and he's won so many different awards i cannot mention them but i think the simplest way to frame this is to indeed say keyshore is by far the best way to answer the question posed provocatively in your book can asians think so with no further ado kishore uh thank you david uh the trouble with having such a generous introduction like that is that after that everything is downhill the best i can do is sit down and keep quiet uh anyway it's a great pleasure and and delight to be here and i'm really glad you highlighted the very special relationship david that our two schools have and indeed frankly the lee kuan yew school of public policy which began in 2004 has been successful because it inherited a public policy program that was set up by the harvard kennedy school in singapore in 91 i believe so we've inherited a lot of from the wisdom and advice from the harvard kennedy school i want to thank you very much for that i also want to thank you for mentioning uh mr lee kuan yew as you know uh who passed away i think i'm not giving a big secret away if i say that he was a great fan of harvard and he really treasured the relationship that the liko and your school of public policy had established with the harvard kennedy school and he strongly encouraged me uh to keep it up and i think he'd be very happy to see that the lee kuan yew school is being recognized here again at the harvard uh kennedy school now let me try to now begin my remarks uh in 25 minutes to answer the question i do have actually uh quite a long text but uh i will not i think will be put up on your website of the harvard kennedy school on my website too what i'll give you is a kind of a summary uh of the lecture but let me you start the beginning uh by saying that you know in america i know you begin with a joke unfortunately we asians we don't have jokes i think my title my next book would be an asians joke but i'm going to uh steal frankly literally a joke that was told by one of my predecessors in this uh albert a gordon series his name was richard fisher and this is how he began his lecture when he gave this garden lecture in 2009 he said quote yesterday morning as i got on the plane to fly up here i turned to nancy and i said his wife nancy and said in your wildest dreams do you ever envision me following in the footsteps of mikhail gorbachev george h.w bush david rockefeller and ban ki-moon in giving the gordon lecture at the kennedy school and nancy replied quote i hate to let you down richard but after 35 years of marriage you rarely appear in my wildest dreams i think my wife was there would say exactly the same thing so anyway so to begin you know the in the spirit of the uh uh again the gordon lecture who who said we should talk about developments in the financial sphere the way i pro the way i'm going to deliver my remarks is that i'm going to first tell you three stories from the financial sector and then later at the conclusion i'll explain to you why these three stories are important and in terms of explaining and trying to answer the question i'll first try to answer the question of course what are china's goals and aspirations as it tries to emerge and rise secondly how is the relationship between united states and china played a role in influencing the rise of china and finally try to answer the make the point and which is i guess the critical point i'm going to make at the very end that how china behaves as number one will be very strongly influenced by how america behaves that's number one and that's why these three stories are important and this will begin with them the first story is about an event that happened at the height of the global financial crisis in 2008 2009 and until that financial crisis came about the chinese were very happy they had that they had developed an interdependent relationship with the united states of america so that while china relied on america to sell his exports and to buy his products america in turn relied on china to buy us treasury bills and to make sure that you know the you that the u.s could continue to sell these treasury bills overseas so they both felt that as tom friedman said in one of his columns that they were joined at the hip in a mutually interdependent relationship and indeed i can tell you this as a matter of fact at the height of the crisis when things look really bad the bush administration actually sent an envoy to beijing in 2008 and said please continue buying u.s treasury bills because that's what we need to preserve global financial stability and the chinese were happy to do so and i suspect the chinese even felt a bit smug see the americans depend on us but then lo and behold about a month later in a move that completely shocked the chinese the u.s fed announced the first round of qe measures in november 2008 and as you know with the qe measures essentially the u.s could print money to buy u.s treasury bills and lo and behold the chinese said what's happened to this interdependence the chinese the americans can just turn on the printing press and take away this dependence on china and indeed one commentator at excel merck said the us is no longer focusing on the quality of his treasuries in the past washington's sought to promote a strong dollar through sound fiscal management today however policy makers are simply printing greenbacks and merck said that by relying on the federal reserve's printing press the us has effectively told other nations it's our dollar but it's your problem so that's one story about the relationship financial relationship between us and china he mentioned a second story from the financial world which i think not many people notice now i think you you must have of course you must have heard that the united states has been prosecuting several foreign banks including hsbc rbs ubs credit swiss and standard chartered now for example standard chartered bank was fined 340 million dollars for making payments to iran and most americans reacted with equanimity to this fine paid by standard chartered bank and thought that the bank was just being fined for dealing with the evil iranian regime however few americans actually notice that standard chartered bank which was domiciled in the uk had broken no british laws and had not violated any u.n security council sanctions but because the payments made to the standard chartered system went through the new york clearing system the us dollars entered the territory of u.s laws and so standard chartered bank was fined and this is what is called by the way extra territorial application of domestic laws again remember this story when i come to the conclusion and the third story is about the swift system s-w-i-f-t i think many of you may know what it is it's a system for clearing payments between countries i think it's centered in brussels and when things got very rough between united states and russia recently as you know the united states said that it might consider denying access to russia to the swift system and in a column by farid zakaria one of our mutual friends the graduate of harvard he described the russian reaction to the possibility of being denied access to the swift system and and interestingly enough you know most of us when you look at russia we think putin is the bad guy medvedev is a nice guy good guy but there's what the good guy met vader who said he said the russian response to any denial of access to swift will know no limits so clearly again this was a global system for clearing payments and the united states was trying to use it for uh either for bilateral relations in terms of punishing russia now these are the three stories i'm telling you at the beginning and i'm going to conclude with these stories uh at the end now first of all let me now answer the three questions that i mentioned earlier first what are china's goals and aspirations as it emerges as number one and here the most obvious point that i need to make and emphasize at the outset is that even though china as you know is still run by the chinese communist party i can assure you one thing the chinese leaders unlike stalin or lenin or khrushchev have no desire to prove the superiority of the communist system in fact as you know khrushchev famously said in november 18 1956 whether you like it or not history is on our side we will bury you now the chinese don't have the kind of aspirations that the russians had to in any way prove the superiority of the communist ideology so if it's not communism that they're trying to promote what is it they're trying to promote and the simple answer is that they would just like to revive chinese civilization indeed if there's one thing that motivates the chinese leaders it is their memory of the many humiliations that china has suffered for over a century as you know from 1842 the opium war to roughly 1949 or you can even go beyond that and the one thing that drives the chinese is a simple credo which says no more humiliation for china that's the great motivation and indeed xi jinping when he spoke to unesco in march 2014 this is what he said are the goals of the chinese people he said the chinese people are striving to fulfill the chinese dream of the great renewal of the chinese nation the chinese dream is about the prosperity of the country the rejuvenation of the nation and the happiness of the people it reflects both the ideal of the chinese people today and our time on a tradition to seek constant progress the chinese dream will be realized through balanced development and mutual reinforcement of material and cultural progress without the continuation and development of civilization or the promotion and prosperity of culture the chinese dream will not come true unquote and i think in that in those few sentences he brilliantly captured what is the heart of the aspirations of the chinese people to move away from an era of having been humiliated for a long time to an era where they once again feel proud about chinese civilization and what we can accomplish and indeed if the ccp the chinese communist party could change his name to ccp the chinese civilization party then i think you'll be a more accurate description of the goals and aspirations of the ccp but of course while this may be the motivations many in the west continue to believe that china's approach is flawed because it is not changing its political system and you know you can read in you know whatever wall street journal new york times economist there's this constant belief that the best thing that can happen to china is to have a collapse of the chinese communist party and have a democratic system the one slightly provocative point i'm going to make here is be careful what you wish for because if the chinese political system becomes more democratic it could very well become far more nationalists and far more aggressive as a power and the great paradox here is that the chinese communist party is actually delivering a global public good by restraining chinese nationalism and if you didn't have a strong chinese communist party in charge you might actually get a more nationalist are more assertive china so i believe that is actually in global interest to allow the chinese communist party to evolve and change in its own way and that way i think we will have china that focuses on economic growth and focuses on strengthening its civilization let me now turn to the second question i said i will discuss which is u.s china relations because clearly the relationship between the world's number one power which today is united states and the world's number one emerging power china is a key dynamic and here it is actually remarkable how stable the u.s china relationship is you know in theory when the world's number one emerging power is about to surpass the world's number one power and as you know in ppp terms china did surpass the united states in 2014 you should be seeing naturally logically and i think steve wall might agree rising levels of tension between u.s and china but instead quite remarkably we seeing a very stable and indeed a calm relationship and of course the question is why and here i think we have to give we have to pay a lot of tribute to the united states for having managed very well the relationship with china and indeed the united states has been remarkably benign over the years towards china starting from the days of 1990s i mean i've got much starting of course from the cold war and kissinger's trip and america's efforts to bring china on board in the cold war alliance against the soviet union and then uh opening up the american market as i mentioned earlier to chinese products and even after the tiananmen episode of 1989 when relations within u.s and china could have taken a nosedive uh u.s china relations continued in an even keel actually i remember vividly in 1992 listening to the election speeches of bill clinton when he said famously in his campaign i will not cuddle the butchers of beijing if i become president of america and when he became president we could have very well seen a sharp nose dive in the relations between us and china instead to my surprise and actually saw this in my own eyes in november 1993 at the first aipac leaders meeting which was held in blake island of seattle that's the first time that bill clinton and jiangsu min met face to face and i could see that chiang sa min was incredibly uncomfortable tense and nervous and trying to figure out what the u.s president would do to him in this small close meeting where i was present and to change them in surprise and to my surprise bill clinton coddled the butcher of beijing and it was a very wise decision on his part and by the end of the day if you had watched the body language of chiang sa min and bill clinton amazingly they were almost good friends at the end of the day reflecting the great charm of bill clinton at the time but this this pattern has continued the united states has helped china by getting it into wto the united states has helped china by being sensitive on taiwan indeed coming down very hard on the leaders of taiwan when they tried to push for independence of taiwan so these are various ways in which the united states has demonstrated its wisdom and generosity towards the chinese and of course speaking in harvard university i have to mention it is actually quite remarkable that the world's number one power is training the elite of the world's number one emerging power by allowing it to send 275 000 students to come and study in american universities i think future historians will be wondering why was america so generous in supporting the rise of his number one uh emerging power but these all this have led to this geopolitical miracle that we have today where you have a stable relationship between us and china and also by the way i also have to mention that chinese themselves have been very careful and sensitive and some from time to time actually bent over backwards to keep the relationship on an even keel i was just in belgrade literally two weeks ago and it's the first time i've gone to a modern city and saw the results of bombing by nato on skyscrapers and of course belgrade is significant because as you know the chinese embassy in belgrade was bombed in 1999. almost all americans i speak to believe that it was obviously an accident but a hundred percent of the chinese i've spoken to are convinced he was deliberate but despite the fact of their belief that is deliberate they swallowed the humiliation and said our relations with the u.s are far too important we will swallow accumulation this time and proceed so both sides you can see have made an effort to keep the relationship uh on an even keel so all this brings me to my third part how american behavior and actions will have a significant influence uh on china's role as a number one power and here i must confess to you in all honesty that even though i'm normally quite provocative in things i say i feel a certain trepidation here in saying some of the things that i'm going to say in this section because as you know very famously bob zelik many years ago called on china to emerge as a responsible stakeholder of the global system but when he made that call i think he assumed that of course the united states is a responsible stakeholder of the global system and the hard part here is to try and tell the american american audience that's that's not how of the united states is often perceived overseas and that's why i told the three stories from the financial sector at the beginning of my lecture because the rest of the world quite often sees the united states acting unilaterally acting in his own interests and often at the expense of global interests and david mentioned that i've been the uh ambassador to un uh twice i was there i've served there for almost 10 years and it's it's rather tragic to watch in the u.n as i did at firsthand to see that the institutions that were in essentially created by the united states after world war ii with the guidance of fdr and eleanor roosevelt and all that these were basically american-inspired institutions which have then been undermined by american policies and i think in many ways the united states has been very unwise in undermining these global institutions because every action that the united states makes in undermining these global institutions could then be replicated by china and that's why in my latest book the great convergence uh i decided to begin the book by quoting from a very wise speech that bill clinton gave am i about to mention yale in 2003 and this is what bill clinton said if you believe that maintaining power and control and absolute movement an absolute freedom of movement and sovereignty is important to your country's future there's nothing inconsistent in that the us is the biggest and most powerful country in the world now we've got the juice and we're going to use it but then he added a butt bill clinton he said but if you believe we should be trying to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behavior that we would like to live in when we are no longer the military political economic superpower in the world then you wouldn't do that so bill clinton was being very wise in saying you know as long as america thinks he'll be number one yes we can go on undermining multilateral institutions but if we can conceive of a world in which we are number two then surely it is in america's interest to strengthen multilateral rules and processes but what is strange is that bill clinton only gave the speech once and never repeated that again because i'm told it's political suicide in america to speak about america being number two so most politicians tend to veer away from that possibility but i think the time has come for the united states to think very hard about a world in which it might become number two and china might become number one then surely america's interests change dramatically and that's why if america wants to see a china emerge that plays by global multilateral rules and processes the best way can do so is not by giving speeches or saying eloquent words about how you should preserve the global system the best way you do it is through your deeds and here of course i'm going to conclude by mentioning briefly the latest episode that has happened in u.s china relations and which is of course as you know is the chinese decision to set up an asian infrastructure investment bank which unwisely the united states decided to oppose and as you know and this is in many ways a sign of the times in the past a veto by washington d.c would have meant that all the allies would have stood firmly behind the united states and the united states veto would have held but even to my surprise the first country to break that veto was the number one ally of united states which is the united kingdom and that's a sign of the times that countries are now preparing for a world in which united states will no longer be number one so if you want to have that world to be a peaceful and orderly one the time has therefore come for the united states to ask a very simple question would the united states feel comfortable living in a world where china behaves just as america did when it was a sole superpower thank you thank you kishore um so we now have time for questions as you all know there are microphones in four locations one here one right there one there and one there and the characteristics of a good question of the parent at the kennedy school have three characteristics one you identify yourself second it is short and has but one point and third it ends with a question mark so why don't we start right over there good evening sir my name is nico i'm a mid-year student here at the kennedy school i'm also the co-founder of the future society at the kennedys a new student club and my question regards the role of of china the future of china in the middle east we've seen the middle east being the the big area of tension for the past decades and i was surprised to see if i'm if i recollect properly that the first trip of the newly elected egyptian president mohamed morsi at the time was to go to china not to the us which i saw personally as a big sign and i was wondering whether you could share with us your perspective of how the region the middle east could change in this new era of chinese rise thank you should i answer yes go ahead i mean that you know the it is this is actually a very difficult question to answer because i mean the the tragedy about the middle east is that it is the great exception in a world as i try to demonstrate in a great convergence which is actually prospering and doing very well and because that region is a great exception and to be very candid with you it has a very dysfunctional dynamic it is a very difficult region to have any kind of long-term postural plants i am very confident that the chinese want to see stability in the middle east but the chinese will never try to play the role of the united states which is to go in there and intervene directly and try to influence the political development either inside countries as with the invasion of iraq or in the relations between countries and so on and so forth so and the so when the chinese emerge the one thing they will not try to do is to try and replicate american policies in the middle east so next question is right over here do note there's microphones here and here and since i just go around if you're standing in line head to one of the other microphones hello my name is patrick um thanks so much for this very thoughtful and inspiring talk as a german i try to be the diplomat between the us and china so my question is how can millennials contribute to as kissinger would say a peaceful coexistence between the us and china uh i think the millennials have an enormous contribution to make and the first thing they should do is read my book the great convergence uh i'll tell i'll tell you it's a serious point i'm making here i'm selling my book but i'm also making a very serious point the see the one key point that many people have not understood is that there are many respects in which the world has changed fundamentally but one way in which it has changed fundamentally is that uh and i use a simple boat metaphor to explain this change in the past when seven billion people live in 193 separate it was as though they were living 130 separate boats with captains and crews taking care of each boat and rules to make sure the boats didn't collide now that's the old world order now what's happened is that the world has shrunk and it's become small dense interdependent so the seven billion people in the world no longer live in 193 separate boats the seven billion people literally live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat but you only have you have captains and crews taking care of each cabin and no captain or crew taking care of the global boat as a whole and that's why you have global financial crisis that's why you have global warming that's why you have global terrorism that's why you have global pandemics happening also so i think my generation's problem is that we've got so used to the idea that the only way you solve the problems in the world is by getting independent sovereign countries to talk to each other and resolve the problems but the world has changed so much that our ideas about how to handle the world of tomorrow are still bound by 90 in fact it's bound by 17th century westphalian concept so we the millennials have to persuade the leaders of all the countries that the things that make us interdependent in the world are far greater than the things that divide us and you've got to find a way of throwing away all the textbooks you use in the harvard kennedy school and write new textbooks so it's very clear we should we should put your textbook number one right here please i'm a mid-career mps student here at the kennedy school and i'm a big fan of yours i'm so glad to see you uh my question is i mean i've been following your readings and thomas friedman and farid zakaria everybody talking about the post-american world when you look at the world's top 20 universities not a single university is from china or at least top 10 universities there's not one from china you see universities are not like stadiums that you're preparing for olympic games it takes you 10 years to prepare stadiums like look at institutions like harvard or yale you know it has taken 300 years to establish institutions like harvard how is china planning to fill that gap of universities because like you so religiously talk about the power of higher education of institutions so how is china going to address that issue if it's going to be the world number one power when like not a single university from china ranks only the top 10 universities in the world yeah well it's it's since then a lot i see i've got a few questions if you don't mind i'm going to give very short quick answers firstly i'm very pleased to inform you that having about two three weeks ago the new york institute for international education iie came out with a new book called asia as the next higher education superpower and the introductory essay was co-written by me and the fellow author uh timing by the provost please please read that essay because it actually gives you a lot of data to talk about trend lines yes it's true that the largest the best universities in the world are still in america and so it'll take some time but the trend line is very powerful in terms of development of new universities institutions of higher education so forth but the second point which is which a very critical point that i need to make here is that america has been remarkably generous to the world by training the elites of the world in american universities and i always say that one reason why east asia has defied all conventional wisdom and why east asia remains peaceful is that the elites in east asia including the japanese the koreans the chinese the taiwanese the indonesians the thais the singaporeans and malaysians have all studied in american universities and you know what happens they use the same concepts they understand each other and they can get along with each other now this is a remarkable contribution that american universities have made towards peace in east asia that no one has fully recognized so it it's in fact good for the world that america retains the best universities as long as it continues to train the best minds from the rest of the world in these universities right up here thank you very much my name is peter wu i'm a junior at harvard college my question is when china or if china becomes number one what is the future for hong kong in the future for taiwan well i think both will do very well i mean and for the simple reason that you know there is what i call a rising tide of prosperity uh in the region now they will have short-term political challenges i mean hong kong unfortunately never ever developed the art of managing and resolving political disputes and so on so forth so it's going through a painful learning phase and the same way i think in taiwan or so you might have short-term political problems but by and large both will remain more or less as autonomous economic entities benefiting from the growth of the region and i want to emphasize since i come from singapore and singapore and hong kong are seen as competitors all the time it is actually in singapore's national interest to see hong kong thrive and succeed because we need competition from another city state and therefore we can both do equally well right up here hi my name is chi um last name jai i work for the internal think tank unit of a large american company um thank you for presenting a view that perhaps not to the sophisticated audience here at kennedy school but i think perhaps in the u.s in general that is a little bit different i follow non-western specifically chinese press as well and i think the point of view that you presented is quite normal from a non-western press coverage point of view but if we look at the average western press and the public discourse here and hence policy here that point of view perhaps is odd um just like you highlight with the belgrade embassy bombing we can actually have u.s and china looking at things from two totally different angles so my question is how do we bridge that public perception gap to then move toward more harmonious bilateral relations yeah i mean i must say that that's a very difficult question because i the thing that you know as i get older i get less and less surprised by things you know it's quite normal but one thing that's really surprised me is that on the one hand uh the united states has clearly the freest media in the world the best finance newspapers the best finance television stations in the world but i can tell you this you know as someone who travels to these 30 40 countries a year when i come to the united states and i go to my hotel room in charles hotel and turn on the television i feel that i've been cut off from the rest of the world and literally the insularity of the american discourse is actually frightening and like oh my my this is also true by the way i mean i've said this to my friends there anyway in new york times this is true the new york times this is true the washington post this is true the wall street journal there is an incestuous self-referential discourse among these newspaper journalists and so on so forth and they reinforce each other's perspectives and end up misunderstanding the world because you know the one key point i emphasize is that the era of western domination of world history was a 200-year aberration it's coming to an end and as a result of it you've got to learn to understand non-western perspectives in the world and it's actually quite frightening that in many ways i find american intellectuals behind intellectuals including in serbia where i just was or greece or in istanbul because they are much more aware what's happening in the world than most american intellectuals are i don't know how to solve that problem right over here thanks uh my name is raza i'm a mid-career mp candidate here and also from malaysia so both malaysia and singapore and countries around east asia have been benefiting greatly from the economic rise of china we trade with china we benefit from that but there's also the specter of um of security china's nine dash claim on the south china sea um you know some skirmishes along the way and also the increasing militarization of china is growing defense budget so my question to you is um i think the entire world is looking to see whether china is true to its rhetoric of peaceful rise but particularly relevant for east asia because we so nearby and we're directly affected by this so what are your thoughts on china's rise as not just an economic power but also potentially a military power as well yeah again very quickly number one overall there's no doubt that china has been rising peacefully but for some strange reason and i would say in the years 2010 to 2012 or 13 china began to make serious mistakes in his foreign policy the one big mistake it made for example was when the japanese arrested the captain of a chinese fishing trawler the chinese put enormous pressure on japan to release the captain and they succeeded and then foolishly they asked japan for an apology and i told my chinese friends you already humiliated the japanese by forcing them to release the captain chinese fishing trawler why humiliate them further by asking for an apology then as you know they made mistakes in the south china sea and for example uh in the asean foreign ministers meeting in july 2012. in phnom penh cambodia the asean countries wanted to have a use the usual reference to south china sea china put pressure on cambodia the chairman to block it and then for the first time in 47 years the asean countries failed to produce the usual boring long joint communique because of chinese pressure so they've made serious mistakes but what is astonishing to me is how quickly they learn from the mistakes and i can tell you the most support the the one of the most surprising things i did in 2014 was to be invited to beijing by two separate chinese think tanks and in a fully recorded conversation and they only ask me one question please tell me what mistakes has china made in his foreign policy and i was there i was stunned by that because you know i've never been invited to washington dc to talk about mistakes in american foreign policy but i get invited to beijing i mean that's a sign of the times that is how different the world is today so i think and i think the chinese i want to emphasize one point the chinese themselves have not clearly made up what kind of power they want to be and they are torn by contradictory impulses and that's how we react to them how we act as a role model for them that will make a huge difference and here in the area of the military i can tell you one key point i keep saying it is now in america's national interest to stop aggressive naval patrolling 12 miles of china's shores because if you do that 20 years from now there'll be aggressive chinese naval patrolling 12 miles of california shores let's not push for that let's work towards a new world where we no longer have to use the military and i think at the end of the day there will be no war within united states and china why not gradually de-escalate the military competition i think it can be done right over here thank you thank you david and thank you for the great presentation my name is xing chai zhang i'm from china it's great honor to have this opportunity to talk about to ask questions i'm the founder of my lab tea company and my question is you talk about mr xi jinping and they're talking about uh our purpose to revive our culture so what do you what do you think is china's core culture and how china can how chinese core culture can contribute to the world and what we can learn from other civilizations through this process thank you very much well um i i suspect that many more experts in this room here on chinese culture and civilization but i can tell you that there are obviously many roots of wisdom in traditional chinese culture and i'm actually hoping that you know if you look back over the longer history of china over the past two thousand years or so it's actually surprising how few military adventures the chinese had overseas and in general they have actually as you know within the chinese uh confucian ethos the guy who's a soldier is at the bottom of the value chain right so and so maybe developing a a a in ethos in which the military is not so important is one possible thing that can emerge from chinese culture and civilization but you'll see things coming in in many areas for example in the medical area for example i think chinese medicine will become more and more important and just as you know the western medicine looks at the human body and tries to slice it up and looks at your kidney and looks at your liver and looks at your heart the chinese look at the whole system of the body and say let's figure out the whole system and i think in that sense as chinese medicine becomes re you know rejuvenates itself it'll also make a development so there are many other such places like this and chinese poetry chinese painting all that will come back in a much stronger way so you will actually see one of the happiest things i look forward to for example the next 20 years is that there'll be not one but many major asian cultural renaissances taking place in the world and one of them will be from china right over here thank you very much hi my name is subin kim i'm a student at harvard law school um thank you for coming to talk to us today it was a great lecture um some say aiib is um in some sense china stepping stone towards um possibly undermining us us dollars position as a reserve currency and preparing itself as the new reserve currency for the world or at least the competing alternative i'm curious about your response to such arguments oh i think uh i i don't think the the aiib is a step towards replacing the u.s dollar as the global reserve currency is actually the chinese uh basically using the aib on the one hand to find a use for the money that they have and on the other hand there's also a demand in asia for more infrastructure even the adb has estimated that asia needs seven trillion dollars of infrastructure and that's what it's using his money for but at the same time i do agree with you also that the chinese have begun thinking about how long can they rely on the us dollar as the global reserve currency because traditionally the global the reserve currency is always the reserve currency of the world's number one economic power now china is not yet in nominal terms the number one economic power but within five years ten years depending on your uh guesswork and what the rates of growth will be china will become the world's number one economic power let's say within ten years and then in that world if you have a world in which china is the number one world economic power and the us dollar remains at the global reserve currency that will be a major global contradiction so it's actually better for us now to find a solution to that global contradiction before it becomes a big problem because this will definitely be a big problem 10 years from now right over here yes my name is charles data i'm a student here at the kennedy school arguably in the era of u.s superpower democracy could be argued as the main value that the u.s has been pushing around the world how about when we imagine the day that china will be a superpower what do you think will be the main agenda that will be pushed around the world okay let me begin with the good news they will not ask any country in the world to set up a communist party i guarantee you that i actually believe in the long run china itself will eventually become a democracy the destination is not in doubt it's only the root and timing that you take and i can tell you the chinese learned so much from the collapse of the soviet communist party because soviet union went overnight from a communist system to a democracy the russian economy imploded became smaller than belgium infant mortality rates went up life expectancy came down and the chinese saw that and said we don't want to see that in china so they will not make an immediate transition uh towards democracy but in the long run i think they'll move in that direction but unlike the united states of america the chinese do not believe in proselytizing their beliefs they do not believe that you have to copy or emulate them to succeed and they also believe that it is far better for people to admire and respect them for their deeds rather than to pay attention to their words so in a sense we will have a very different world when the world's number one power in the world is no longer a missionary power in the world right over here technological institution down the river um my question is similar to the one that was just asked i think your point is very well taken that you learn how to behave when you number one by looking at the person who's now number one we're good to our parents so our children will take care of us in our our old age but how many years after china becomes number one do you think there would be real press freedom or artists would have freedom or the delhi lama could come to tibet how will that ever really happen with the communist dynasty that you praise which you can only get away with in cambridge by the way uh well the um you know the question of freedom in china i think is a very critical question you know i first went to china in 1980 and i arrived in beijing for a start there were no skyscrapers there were big roads there were no cars only bicycles people who walked people at the time could not have the freedom to choose where to live where to work what to wear you know no not not any kind of personal freedom today you go to china the chinese people can choose where to live where to work what to study what to wear where to go and you know when i first went to china 1980 not there wasn't a single chinese tourist leaving china last year 100 million chinese went overseas freely and a hundred million chinese returned to china freely now if there's no freedom in china if china was this despotic oppressive state would a hundred million chinese come back to china so clearly there has been an explosion of personal freedoms in china on a scale that the chinese people haven't experienced right now you mentioned difficult things like the dalai lama and i agree with you that china should deal with the dalai lama but isn't it shocking that the united states of america which is the world's free society in any way in in many ways actually prevented some islamic scholars from coming to teach in american universities barely 10 years ago that's shocking so and all i can say to you is no country is perfect every country has got to learn to improve itself i want to take advantage of my position here to ask you a question that no one else seemed to ask but since you asked rhetorically yourself is that after lee kuan yew can singapore survive you know my favorite answer is buy the book no i i i actually i did it's not generally an acceptable answer here i know i know i know no actually i did launch a book three weeks ago in singapore called can singapore survive but i i'm actually the answer i give is very simple the probability of course is that singapore will survive i mean singapore will not just survive singapore will do very well because you know the mr lee kuan yew and the founding leaders of singapore created some of the strongest institutions in the world in some areas we the quality of mind of the singapore civil service i think is number one in the world the quality of mind of the singapore judiciary is also probably number one in the world the quality of the singapore military is probably among the top 10 in the world singapore's education system is already ranked among the top three or four in the world we have the world's best airport the world's best functioning port so we have created a whole ecosystem of excellence in singapore and with that ecosystem of excellence singapore is poised to take advantage of a major historical opportunity that is coming its way because just as london served the european century and new york served the american century the one city in all of asia that is comfortable with all the major civilizations in asia with chinese civilization with indian civilization with islamic civilization and also western civilization is singapore so singapore is going to become the new york of the asian century so it's a great time coming ahead for singapore but okay right there uh my name is ihabel gamel i'm a mid career from the troubled area of the middle east my question to you is that do you have any doubt about china's economic goals going forward so the rise to the number one is based on a wonderful story of eight percent growth year over year yeah demographically there's challenges there's a lot of challenges in the economy do you see the story really continuing to become the nominal number one in the world yeah i'm really glad you raised that question because i've been here for 48 hours and i must say almost every person i met in harvard the first question they asked me when we talk about china is can china sustain its economic growth and of course it's possible that there could be a massive slowdown in china they could go to grow at three four percent or whatever so that's possible but if i was a betting man i'm prepared to take bets with you all that i think china will be able to sustain growth of seven percent now the re one there's a there's a very good reason why the chinese have decided to slow down their economic growth because they are now shifting from one model of economic growth to another model of economic growth they used to rely a lot on export led growth they can no longer do that because they're no longer the big markets in the west that they can rely on they're trying to switch to an internal consumption that growth and it takes time to do that and if you are running a fast train around a corner is best to slow down and do that and secondly you know if you look at the amount of investments that china has put in the infrastructure the world-class infrastructure that china has built in their ports airports roads rail and so on so forth that kind of world-class infrastructure reaps dividends plus the chinese communist party is in many ways one of the most meritocratic organizations in the world and the quality of mind of key chinese policy makers has never been as good as it is today now if you have a government staffed by remarkably good minds taking advantage of a world-class infrastructure i would say the possibility of maintaining good growth is is is there and within asia by the way you know the china is big but even the the the chinese uh 1.3 billion people but in all of asia there are 3.5 for 4 billion people that market is becoming more integrated too so that they'll also benefit from the integration of that region so there are many other sources of growth apart from the export that growth that they had in the past so i if i was a betting man i would say they can sustain the seven percent growth all right i'm afraid we have time for just two more questions right there hi uh my name is jack mulhern i'm a former tour guide at the john f kennedy presidential library um i just had a quick question one thing it's a great honor to have you here first of all but um i attended the law school about six months ago and tommy co the u.s ambassador to singapore he posited a theory that 11 times one country has always been on top and they've always in the history of humanity been superseded by the country number two i'm just wondering if this is inevitable due to what i've noticed china's doing they're buying factories in indiana that are producing rare earth elements that we need for our cell phones and our f-14 and f-16 fighter jets and so forth and i'm not saying that they're not benign i'm just saying that this is what's happening and so i'm wondering it's a inevitability that the country is always number two supersedes the country that's now economically number one well i i'm not tommy ko by the way uh uh is a singapore ambassador former singapore invested in the u.s a brilliant guy in fact i succeeded him as ambassador to the u.n uh i would i mean of course it's never inevitable that the number two will overtake number one as you know japan was supposed to overtake uh and i see that professor ezra vogel has left but he wrote the famous book saying japan is number one uh and and the japanese never became number one that happens from time to time and it's conceivable that china will not become number one it's conceivable but you know the probability is very clear that you know if you have a country with a population of 1.3 billion people china and a country of 300 million people united states if the average chinese can perform at 25 the level of the average american china will have a bigger economy and if you have any doubts about the capacity of the chinese mind to do well look at the exam results of chinese students in any leading american university right you look at the list of phds that come to collect you see the success of the chinese intellectuals so what's happening here by the way is that you know i always say that you know western education was developed for the western mind but one thing we haven't noticed that in the last 10 years when you take western education and you combine it with a asian mind including the chinese mind it has an explosive effect so the asians are thriving with western education and inevitably this is going to fuel the rise of china in a big way and i'm very confident that the average chinese can perform more than 25 the level of the average american and that's why i think china will have a bigger economy right over here i'm afraid the last question hello um my name is mabo andy salam a student at the business school to thank you for being here this evening my question is how would you characterize in all the likelihood the u.s china refuses to specifically in the range of 15 to 25 years where while china will likely be number one the u.s will likely be a close number too uh yeah it's it of course it's possible that the united states will be a close uh number two to uh china but you know many of the projections that i've seen i'll give you for example goldman sachs has frigid projected that by 2050 the number one economy in the world will be china and i've been speaking a lot about china the number two economy in the world would be india and each united states would be number three so and it's is actually surprising that so few americans uh speak about that world is it's already impossible to speak about being number two it's even harder to speak about being number three but that frankly is also going to happen you know i uh i i wrote an essay recently in which i said that you know if you look at the most successful ethnic community in the united states everyone i would have thought in the past would have been the japanese or the chinese or the koreans or the jews but the most successful ethnic community in united states by far is the ethnic indian community and if you look at one statistic if the average indian in india can achieve half the per capita income of the average indian in america india's gnp would not be 2 trillion but 25 trillion and if you go to india as i do the sense of optimism about the future is phenomenal so i've been talking a lot about china china china but there's actually another bigger asian story there's also india and other states that are doing very well so in that world of tomorrow it is just by sheer mathematical logic the amount of space that 300 million americans have carved out for themselves politically economically when they represent less than five percent of the world's population has been phenomenal has been exceptional but it cannot carry on because the rest of the world has stopped underperforming and if they start performing normally and america will continue to remain a strong dynamic successful country but its relative share of the global gnp can only shrink demobility thank you so much i should say we're going to have a reception here momentarily so those of you would like to stay and chat a bit more uh key shore has uh a flight i think about last week here about 8 15 but at least to be around for a little while for those of you who didn't get a chance to question thanks again

Channel: Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics

Views: 1,201,231

Rating: 4.4675031 out of 5

Keywords: Business & Economics, South & Central Asia, Trade Relations

Id: RO3izbn201s

Length: 73min 45sec (4425 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/VirtuaKiller76]

Every powerful nation thinks they're number one. We need to just form the Federation already and reach for the stars.