When Will China Be the World's Most Powerful Country | Interview With Martin Jacques

modern china is by many measures the greatest success story in the history of humanity according to the world bank more than 850 million chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty in recent decades with the country's poverty rate falling from 88 in 1981 to just 0.7 in 2015 just this year the country announced they had in fact eliminated extreme poverty all while posting economic growth and leading the fight against covid its gdp has tripled since 2008 and already by one measure it's larger than the united states meanwhile china has constructed high-speed rail across the country spanning some 35 000 miles in the last 15 years and is gradually seeing its economic might percolate through to cultural and political influence in ai synthetic biology and renewable technology it is starting to even take on the best of the west yet we're also told it is a repressive corrupt regime where workers and civil rights are non-existent and where minorities particularly in xinjiang and tibet face repression forced labor and massive state violence leading companies like huawei may be starting to compete with the biggest names in europe and north america but they're also so we're told a trojan horse the chinese communist party to extend its perfidious authoritarian reach in short the rise of china is bad news for democrats and those who care about social justice so which is it joining me to discuss that today is martin jack author of the best selling when china rules the world the end of the western world and the birth of a new global order martin welcome to downstream thank you the book was first published in 2009 as a hardback 12 years later does china now rule the world can we put a date on it was it 2020 is it going to be 2025 2030 i don't think we can really i mean i never meant the title literally i just meant it as a sort of uh you know a sort of metaphor if you like drawing on a popular proposition you know if i rule the world of the song and all that kind of thing um to uh dramatize in a way uh just the extraordinary rise of china that's been taking place um and i think the world is now in varying degrees very aware of this phenomenon but actually putting a date on let's say when will china become let's say the most influential country in the world uh i don't i i'd find that very difficult to uh in two senses one there's a conceptual argument about what that means and secondly um then placing a date on that would be uh equally if not more uh difficult i would put it like this that china is already uh more or less on a par with the united states economically but uh it depends how you measure it but i think probably it's actually already in terms of its size and reach has already overtaken the united states certainly by primary purchasing power definition of gdp um which i think in this context is definitely the more important measure and by 2030 china is likely to be um something like up probably pushing twice the size of the united states um uh and that's not so far off that's only you know less than a decade away we can all see as well now whereas when my book came out people didn't really know how to think about this didn't weren't even thinking in this way but we can also see how china's influence in the world in all sorts of ways is growing and the i think that it it helps to think of this in a slightly bifurcated way uh in the developing world china's influence has grown at pace uh and we should always remember that the developing world accounts for 85 percent of the world's population so most of the world lives in the developing world and china rightly still regards itself as primarily a developing country although parts of it of course are already of developed status in the developing world china has already overtaken of the united states i think in terms of its certainly its economic influence i think but also in terms of certain aspects of political and cultural influence i mean you know china's whole rise has been predicated on the importance of development this is this is their word you don't get this word used in the west really but the chinese emphasize the importance of development and that's in a way what it what its offer has been to the developing world development and so uh if you look at the figures around the world in terms of pew statistics and so on then africa for example china is uh is ahead of the united states in terms of its influence in east asia apart from japan and south korea uh and perhaps taiwan basically china is i mean in asian countries the ten southeast asian countries but china's much more important in most respects than the united states and that's home to what is it about 700 million people for example um and if you look at the belton road which is their great sort of development project um for eurasia uh this already has i think over 100 countries signed up for it uh and this is a you know the project to transform the infrastructure of a large part of humanity so in all these senses i think china is already already has surpassed the united states in terms of its influence um now in the developed world i don't think the situation's different uh by the developed world here i'm essentially referring to what we think i've always usually described as of course clearly china's influence there is much more limited and there are a variety of reasons for this i mean first of all china's still compared with the west has got much poorer living standards so it's not an exemplar because people don't you know people people think oh i'll go you know if i it's not like going to america you're going to america used to go to america for opportunity but this is not really the case in relationship to china as far as the developed world is concerned so uh and there's another problem in western attitudes towards the china and that is the west has dominated the world for a very long time and especially in the recent past say let's say around about 2015-16 trump's uh elected in 2016. the west especially the united states has come to see the rise of china as a threat so uh and there's a great deal of you know cynophobia hostility towards china now in the west as a result of this if we if we put it into historic context how big is the rise of china because obviously there's been a passing of the baton amongst the great powers since forever you can think of the rise of the united states after the 1860s you can think of the the rise of of japan and germany at the beginning of the 20th century the ebbing of the british empire what was the analogue here should we think of the rise of china like the rise of the netherlands in the 16th century the rise of the british in the 18th 19th century the rise of america or is it bigger than all of these potentially well obviously you know the characteristic it shares with these countries is that they rose to some form of prominence of power regional or global um and china is doing exactly the same but china's on a totally different scale i mean the nearest comparison is the rise of the united states uh in the 19th century up until you know the maybe the middle of the the 20th century uh but but it's real dynamism in a way was the period up until uh the well you could argue about this but let's say 1939 for the sake of argument now china is on you know a hugely different scale i mean you know its population is four times that of the united states so just by virtue of demographic uh weight uh the rise of china is far more dramatic and far bigger than the american phenomenon i would describe the rise of china uh as the most important and remarkable economic development in human history is that already the case or is that if by 2030 it's twice the size of the us or do you think that that's already been accomplished this is the most important economic development ever already in 2020 it's already the case i mean no we've never seen a country grow with the speed of china uh say from 1978 with deng xiaoping's when things have things reform started um until uh for 40 yeah 35 years it grew at 10 a year that is phenomenal it means the size of the economy and we're talking about 1.3 when there are now 1.4 billion people it means the economy doubling in size every seven years i mean that is an extraordinary transformation you know even in the even in the peak of american growth uh in the second half of the 19th century it never grew at about more than four percent a year on average so and that was for a much smaller population so so that's why china's rise is having and will have and it is a huge impact on the rest of the world a huge impact on the global economy because this is the rise of a people who you know although historically have been very important and innovative and so on um you know were basically in all sorts of ways partly as a result of poverty outside the system or marginal to the system and suddenly they become the subject of change they become the new subject of the global economy in a very short space of time i mean we're talking about 1978 you know at night it starts when the chinese economy was about five percent of the size of the american economy to say to 2014 is when according to the uh world bank china overtook the size of the american economy just to clarify for our audience i mean there are two measures of gdp because they might look at the you know wikipedia and they'll see nominal gdp and they say well china's still is doing very well but it's not the united states but there's two measures here there's ppp and there's nominal gdp nominal gdp china's probably going to overtake the u.s some point in the next 10 years but we're talking here about ppp aren't we which is which is a different measure and that's the measure you're referring to when you say it will be twice the size of the us potentially by 2030 exactly and that's the measure used by the imf and the world bank um uh china is certainly still smaller in terms of dollar exchange rates but it probably will overtake the united states you can't be sure depends you know the difficulty with exchange rate measures is it depends on what happens to your currency so let's say the dollar drops by 20 well china's would be bigger so uh um so it depends it depends but yeah that it's important that those two different measures people are familiar with and the thing you say about you know 10 growth is obviously hugely impressive but a number of countries have seen 10 percent growth you know at one point or another but he says that compounding aspect for decades i mean i only realized this researching this show over the last couple of weeks that um china's economy's basically tripled in size since the beijing olympics yeah more or less which doesn't feel like that long ago and you know and you think well if that proceeds for another 13 years we we live in a very different world and so for you that really explains the enmity coming from the united states in particular since 2014-15 i think that um there are two fundamental causes of western hostility towards china one is um political stroke cultural which uh which is which is that china is obviously has a very different system and in the recent period the focus has been on communist party chinese communist party you know the the uh sort of implication or often stated actually ah this is like the soviet communist party and all that kind of thing okay so that's a kind of retreat back into cold war categories so that's one source of hostility but the other will i'm sure we'll come back to that but the other source of uh hostility really but it's low lower key and less familiar to people is that china is very different from the west i mean china's never going to be a western star society it comes from a completely different history um i as we will talk about later i'm sure china's not even primarily a nation state in my view it's a civilizations well it's part civilization state park uh uh nation state so china's never going to be western and the west finds this impossible to believe or understand because it's whole notion has been a universalistic notion that the world will will become and should be like us we are the template we are the model and they're finding this extraordinary difficult to understand as a result the level of understanding in the west about china including not least the elites is abysmal if you're enjoying this interview and would like to see more like it go to navarami.com forward slash support we only exist thanks to generosity of our supporters you can make a one-off payment or you can become an ongoing supporter either is fine and we are incredibly grateful to everybody who helps us keep going it's only thanks to your kindness that navarro media even exists now on with the interview and so that that category of nation state and civilization state can you just kind of explain that a little bit what's the difference between the two i mean the net the phenomenon of the nation state is relatively recent i mean it still sort of starts with the treaty of uh west failure in uh in the 17th century but it really the rise of nation states was primarily a 19th century phenomenon it's when empires like the austro-hungarian empire and so on uh broke up and intonation states and uh and the nation states had very clear borders uh and it they were it was an essentially a system which rested on um uh a a dominant race a dominant ethnic group and and and so uh they were there was a kind of intolerance if you like that went with the emergence of the nation state that people don't talk about but it was empires in empires you know you had many different peoples with many different languages different religions different races living alongside each other that came to an end with the nation state now china's history has been very china has a very very long history um i mean it's as a modern polity um it's certainly existed since 221 bc when uh the qin uh dynasty succeeded in uniting what became uh uh uh china if you like uh modern day eventually modern-day china and the but china's actually existed a lot longer than 2 000 years because its civilization is so old and has had a sort of remarkable coherence given ones going back so long in history and the chinese think i mean the chinese did eventually were required to be think of themselves as a nation-state that was at the end of the 19th century because they were this was the century of humiliation china was very weak in the world being carved up by europe and western and united states and so on and it was a force in that situation to accept the kind of european template as it was of the international system so you know it started having embassies around the world trying to draw some borders and so on right but actually if you look at what the way the chinese think about themselves and what matters about china and what is distinct about china the relationship between state very distinctive relationship between state and society um uh conf the importance of confucian values if you look at the language if you look at the net the nature of the chinese family all of these things date back way before the end of the night of the 19th century they they date back you know over 2 000 years or more in many respects so china the modern china has grown out of chinese civilization whereas you wouldn't really say that of western countries any of the western countries in the same way and western countries their sense of identity is about national identity that's not really true for china the primary source is chinese civilization so to understand china i think you've got to you've got to think of it in a very very different way you know you've got to rethink history history has always been the history of the west sorry that's over you cannot think of the world in the same way and of course in the west we are so ill-equipped with none hardly anyone's ever studied in china at all so they don't know anything about its history and they easily you know it is so easy to say you know or communist party you know because we know about that cold war oh yeah well i remember that so let's think of china in those steps yeah i'm sorry you just can't make sense of china like that this is just a kind of chauvinist chauvinistic ignorance yeah i mean it's um it's interesting you say that because i'm i'm reading a lot about as well um uh what happened in the western hemisphere after the late 15th century you know effectively a genocide of the indigenous people there some people say conscious unconscious whatever it was clearly a bit of both i mean you don't need to talk about intentionality with the numbers involved you're looking at maybe 100 million people died and i i didn't know this but you know um the island of hispaniola you're looking at a population of between 100 000 and 8 million is the top top number the capital of you know the the most powerful empire there tonichletan had a population of apparently five times bigger than seville and actually at the same time as all that's happening something very similar is that you know is existing in in china so you have zheng he these giant ships far bigger than the ships that christopher columbus had uh discovering discovering uh the americas and yet like you say that's completely absent in western education let's stick with that for a second i want to come back to the civilization state thing do you think that's going to have to become now necessarily a part of kind of the western curriculum to talk about chinese history the history of the western hemisphere non-european histories do you think that's inevitable if we want to remain relatively well-informed world citizens or do you think that will be foreclosed by this this chauvinism as you call it well i think the um reality i mean look the location of power the sheer importance of china and the and increasingly other developing countries like india and so on will force uh in the west a requirement to know uh about uh about in this instance about china i think this this will be irresistible uh in the long run uh but it's going to be very very difficult because there's this kind of chauvinism you know i mean we don't even want to look at our own history if you listen to boris johnson you know everything's frozen uh in time you know this is part of our history as if actually history's never frozen because history always lives in a in a dialectical relationship with the present so your history is always changing the way we study history now is different from the way we'll study in 20 years time it's not frozen at all it's a living organism and i think you say about because you're not just talking about china you're also talking about the asean countries which is this group of countries including you know south korea taiwan vietnam thailand and i think often in the conversation about china that group of countries is also ignored because indonesia philippines you're looking at a huge market in the 21st century you know you're looking at a huge gdp between them you're looking at massive natural resources and so on and for all of them china is the biggest trading partner you know it's not the united states it's it's china in that conversation of asian do you think that there's a little bit more of an informed conversation going on or do you think it's just as ignorant as when they talk about china uh i think it it's still very ignorant because it's a long way away and we don't have that much to do with these countries british trade and it's not very important for uh the uk so uh and we don't know if you asked people well what's asean um they probably wouldn't really be able to tell you the most they'll be able to say is oh it's it's ten countries well yeah yeah but what is asean what is the nature of asia you can probably tell me something about the european union but can you tell me how asean is similar to and different from the european union and i think very few people will be able to give you an answer to that i mean there are obviously people who study it or diplomats or academics and so on but but even them if you listen to them sometimes they're quite ignorant about it i mean asean you're right is a very in in my view asking is extremely important because actually you know modern chinese diplomacy post dong started with asean in my view it was it was they made a cr the chinese made a crucial uh approach to asean uh which was very in many ways very unchinese which was to say basically look let's have a relationship and we'll do it on your terms we'll use your template and that was the beginning of asean plus one and then then japan and south korea came on board a bit later asean plus three and the new rce p agreement of 18 countries is you know the template for that is asian asean asean has been the driver of it uh more than china although of course china is absolutely critical to it so there's a very special relationship between asean uh and china which is very very very important and interesting you see japan and south korea in northeast asia have been are involved with it but not like china yeah it's just it's a huge you know these are trillions of dollars worth of economic value there and i think it's just again you know we're talking about china like you say because the cold war kind of motifs but then the rest of east asia northeast north east asia southeast asia kind of gets ignored go and make the civilization state sorry you know when you say emphasize the importance of east asia by which we mean here i think china and uh um asean and japan and uh south korea and taiwan okay now this is now the largest region in the world economically it's bigger than europe it's it's bigger than uh north america this is the driver of the economic driver of the future and uh so the whole region is in motion and you know so you've got to understand the rise of china in these regional terms not just as china but in the regional terms and china as you mentioned earlier the biggest trading partner of all of these countries including japan and south korea is china not the united states is less and less important the united states has been an extraordinary rapid decline economically in the most important economic region in the world that more or less tells you all you need to know about what the future is going to be like yeah i mean vietnam i think is a population around 100 million thailand i think 70 80 million we're talking about lots of people philippines philippines 108 million yeah uh huge numbers of people i mean bigger than any european country indonesia 260 million um so i mean it's a massive thing going back to the civilization state aspect i mean i suppose the council argument would be uh uh would be martin civilization state that sounds remarkably similar to samuel huntington the clash of civilizations are you not essentializing chinese culture are you you know is that fundamentally odds with an idea of human rights and i suppose you said the point about empire and actually i do agree with you i don't think it's talked about nearly enough you know the ottoman empire was more progressive than what what came after it for instance uh the austro habsburg empire was very progressive in many ways in terms of multicultural toleration and so on but then equally i suppose people say well look at the british empire look at the french empire the dutch empire uh this was a relationship of subordination uh so so why is the british empire not a civilization state but china is well i mean the british empire were you know stretched around the world i mean it came to account for um uh uh about a quarter of the world's population and a quarter of the world's landmass um but we're talking about a tiny island uh off the northwest coast of europe so uh its relationship with these countries uh was based on you know on well and it was made possible by the nature of the times of course was based on one of uh subordination and uh i mean you know britain basically you know conquered these territories sometimes with a lot of force sometimes not with not much force and required them to be you know based on the british model in varying degrees you know not always exactly the same but that was the notion and the queen or the king was the king a queen of of great britain um so that was a very different relationship to you know the growth of the austro-hungarian empire or the german confederation or uh even the even the russian um you know the russia were kind of it the the russian of the azarist empire and so on so i i think that they the problem with the uh the british empire of course the other thing that's very important to emphasize is race in the context of the british empire because it was based on white supremacy on white superiority it was it was conquering uh lands that were not white i mean today europe's population is only about 10 percent of the world but and that time is about 20 percent but all the all the countries of uh of the empire were originally not white the united america north america was not white north america had its native population likewise canada likewise australia and so on so i think one of the most you know one of the worst features of empire and it wasn't just uh the britain that did it but we're talking about britain for the moment was the way in which the native populations of these countries were by a combination of um extermination and disease uh were essentially uh well it was a supreme act of genocide wasn't it i mean people going about genocide now so let's start with the creation of the united states uh let's talk about australia you know i mean they they i think that the barbarism involved in europe's expansion across the world the british empire the french empire the dutch empire and so on you know is something that we have we are still to confront in the west yeah yeah i mean it's uh that's for another show but yeah some some of the stories you know from the tasmanian genocide you know the first kind of documented genocide that we know of for instance is just you read some of the stories about it you know the reduction of an entire population effectively down to two people in the end you know um really really sad uh and like you said the worst thing of all is yes it's history but it's not been confronted by us and uh as europeans particularly but you said the british empire's premised on an idea of white supremacy i think that's inarguable but again the council argument would be well this this civilizations that you're talking about from china that itself is based upon us a form of racial supremacy han supremacy you know the the middle kingdom the the chinese nation being effectively elevated above all others is that a fair analog or do you think people are kind of mischaracterizing any similarities no i don't think it is a fair affair i think it's much more complex what happens i mean first of all you're talking about a continent you're not talking about you're another continent i mean we talk about the british empire you know the india you know the british india um the united states they were traveling you know crossing across oceans the expansion of europe was a global expansion it wasn't uh it wasn't an expansion simply within the european context which would have been true for example of the austro uh hungarian empire so this is fundamental difference and i would underline this very strongly that that actually um china unlike europe did not seek to expand across the world it had a it had international system a relationship the tributary system but it was neither it was neither uh military political uh it was primarily economic and to some extent cultural in terms of confusion values and so on um but it was very different whereas you i mean european universally ism required the conquest you know involved the expansion of europe across the world and the imposition of its values it the soup the notion of white superiority the importance of christianity the convert the missionary spirit and so on that's very very different from what happened in china the second point is this about race uh the the evolution of the han is a very complex question which you see uh as an interesting writer wong wei a chinese writer says really in the confucian way and confucius was the most important single thinker in chinese history i think um the the notion of um of uh of uh chinese values did not lay its emphasis on race but on culture this is very different actually very very different so it was about you know what sort of culture that china would have and so on and this was this this became this is if you want to see the unifying bond of china this is the unifying bond of china a notion of cultural uh coh identity and coherence based on ultimately are based on confucian values that's the cement that holds china uh together it's not about race not primarily about race so what does what about the hand well actually the the phrase han only started to be used as far as i recall in the late 19th century probably partly because of well partly because of um uh western intervention and carving up of china and partly because during that period as china went down the qing the qing dynasty started to become more and more popular and of course the qing dynasty was not a chinese dynasty in the traditional sense it was a manchu dynasty it came from manchuria and interestingly in this context of the two of the three last dynasties in china were not had they were their first they were the yuan which was essentially mongolian then you had the ming dynasty which people have probably heard of which was chinese or whatever you want to call it and then you had uh the um the qing dynasty which eventually fell in 1911. so you've got an extraordinary mix complex very different from the european or western traditions taking place here so today we come to today so who are the han well actually not about 93 of chinese call themselves han now of course that as a as a racial category is meaningless because you know china comes from countless different races but oh the historical process of the creation of modern china very complicated to understand it or may you know come to really come to terms with it is a process of the way in which the chinese acquired an identity the vast majority of them acquired a denture an identity called han now there is a part of china which is not does not regard itself as japan and that above all of the western regions now the western regions we're talking here about uh ching hai and especially western audiences you know tibet and xinjiang province now these were later additions to china they constitute pushing half the geographical air of china but they only account for six percent of the population so if you draw a line down the middle of china you know the central and east of china is where the vast majority of chinese live and where and to the west is of the western regions and they were conquered basically in a series of wars not just involving china but by the qing dynasty in the late uh 17th early 18th century now in the most clearest example i think is uh xinjiang and tibet which are clearly apart from the hand populations that live there which are let's say about half the population the other half are not han they don't think of themselves as ham they're not they're not part of the hand religion so uh so the the uygha for example are a turkic turkic minority and uh and and a lot which well they they speak chinese but a lot don't you know a fair number don't really speak chinese uh and likewise the situation in tibet so the this is this is a different part you know one thing you should never do is generalize from xinjiang to try and understand the rest of china because it doesn't work because historically that's not the way that china grew and developed and these were these were added later very distinctive extremely i mean extremely under underpopulated area remember xinjiang accounts for one sixth of the physical size of china but only 20 million people in a population of 1.4 billion and only half of that 20 million are uygha so it's a very very small group rather in a really small group um so you ask you probably are going to ask the question now well to what extent is racism uh a player in the attitudes towards the uyghur and so on um uh the way i would put it and i think china has had serious problems uh with both tibet and xinjiang uh is that they've been much less developed i mean historically over a long historical period than the rest of china even in when china was poor and i think that the chinese mentality um i you know the vast majority of the chinese in this context towards these areas is well let's modernize them let's you know let you know they're essentially pastoral um they they need to speak chinese because they're part of china and if they don't if they don't speak chinese how can they do well you know um they need it needs to be urbanized so i think there is a quite a strong kind of instrumentalist attitude amongst the chinese to the modernization of xinjiang and tibet to what extent do you think that would constitute colonialism um and obviously again we think of colonialism as something which is overseas and this is a contiguous landmass but like you say it's a relatively new addition to the chinese polity different religions buddhism uh islam different language in the case of xinjiang like you say i mean that that does sound a more powerful uh a more powerful cultural linguistic group wanting to develop you know assist raise up the other that does sound a lot to it to a european ear like colonialism is that an unfair characterization i don't think i'd use the term colonial but i certainly think that sort of sense of um you know i think there's a patronizing attitude that you find towards these regions because they're much less developed i mean it's not that these regions have been economically neglected xinjiang has been one of the top growing regions of china over the last 10 years for example um uh so by the way i i'd be i wouldn't include that i wouldn't say you've got to remember there are a lot of muslims in china um the uyghur constitute only quite a small minority of the muslims in china so muslim faiths have been muslim the muslim beliefs that have been um you know present in china for a very long time a period of time i mean remember zhang ha you mentioned earlier on you know there's great voyages uh uh zhang was a muslim so there's a long you know there there's a there's a long tradition amongst sections of the chinese population in the east central and eastern china uh of the muslim religion no one that no one normally talks about that yeah and in terms of xinjiang i mean the word genocide has been used quite frequently to counter to counter balance that you've got people in the state department saying terrible things are happening but we don't think that's the correct label um and then you've got the economist saying something quite similar now the economist has got these things wrong before so it's not necessarily a good a a good a good authority on these matters but it does seem that in xinjiang in particular you do have a repression of um a particular religious group do you think that's again do you think that's a mischaracterization for instance the bulldozing of mosques or or simply the changing of their outward appearance um there are claims that with forced labor camps and so on to a significant extent china took a lead from the us and europe with the war on terror there was also you know you could argue domestic instances of a similar phenomenon uh going on in western china do you do do you again see that as an unfair analogue or is it that correct and so much as the racialization of muslims in china it's actually quite similar to something we see in europe and north america obviously it's being dealt with more viciously and aggressively or do you think again that's not quite right uh well some interesting thoughts i mean i think that um i have been to actually the capital of xinjiang um the i think that uh it it's very difficult to really to be honest with you to know what's happening uh in xinjiang in the granular detail that one really needs to know about these things of course so you know uh and there's no question at all uh well there's no question at all mine that this has been a huge operation to uh uh damn the reputation of china uh funded you know coming from the top in the united states i mean i think that you know the the cia the whole thing has been you know what why suddenly all this i mean because actually there's been problems in xinjiang over a long historical period it's not a new problem it goes back much you know it's gone by a long time you got back to the 1930s in relation to difficulties in xinjiang and and uh uh uh and china um i what i i don't i think the term genocide to be quite frank is precious little evidence for it i mean you know the people ban this term around now and they're now cheapening the you know genocide does mean something it meant something in the 1930s it meant something in north america with the extermination of the native population there likewise what happened to the original aboriginals in australia uh likewise what happened in rwanda um but these were on a huge scale do i really think that's happening in china in xinjiang no i don't i don't think it's we're talking about genocide and then people say well cultural genocide well that's we shouldn't use the term genocide for cultural discrimination because genocide should be granted historically a very special meaning because it is so um it's so um dreadful if you like uh in its consequences and its intent so i don't i i just don't i i i think this is a cold war operation started in earnest under the trump government but which all sorts of people have rode in on and one of the things that also i alarms me is the the stance of human rights groups i mean i to be honest with you i think that uh human rights watch and so on outfits like this they do some good work not denying that but they get dragged they become an arm of american foreign policy in these situations i'm afraid and i think that's what's happened uh in relationship uh to this now what what do i what do i what do i actually think well i think that first of all let's go through first of all there is a problem uh in xinjiang and has been over a long period because a section of the uyghur do not want to be part of china it's a small group but it's an active group it's a militant group and it has got a terrorist component to it and i think that so the chinese now that there's no way the chinese are going to accept separatist movement i mean that is not what's happened with china so they'll be you know they even you know look at look at the emphasis they have on the returning uh the return of the lost territories like hong kong uh and taiwan so so that's the first problem that there is is that second problem linked to that is there's clearly a difficulty in the relationship between part of the hand population in xinjiang and the uyghur population you know there were the pogroms when over 200 people to i think were han were murdered by a uyghur uyghur gangs because and it was an expression of very powerful racial resentment like happened in 1969 in malaysia when the malays had you know killed a lot of ordinary malays killed a lot of ordinary chinese who were a substantial minority of the population so i think that's a a a a another component of the problem now the third the third problem is that um is that the question of a different religion different ethnicity uh different language and a feeling on the part of the uyghurs that they are not properly respected um and i think there is i've always thought there is some uh foundation to this problem indeed huyabang who was general secretary of the communist party uh under uh deng xiaoping he died uh just before tiananmen square um and he said to uh the tibetans it was in this case but i think the same problem more or less is a parallel problem exists as the xinjiang uh up to a point there's no terrorist problem in uh oil separatist problem in tibet um that uh we we have granted your culture and we have granted your religion insufficient respect and insufficient rights i think that's probably true of xinjiang today that's still i mean when i was in ramshi there was so many mosques i mean you know there are many many many mosques in in in in even more in kashgar and so on you know which is can i make one of the point from my own experience please do yeah i went to a ramsey in a few years ago i can't remember what year but let's say it's about 2015 something like that and i when i was walking around arumchi i mean one thing that really struck me which did indicate a significant security problem was that you know you've got walk around it's a very modern city um and uh you know glass and steel chinese modern chinese city um but if you go go around a corner uh and you'll suddenly see you you see very few please and then you go go around the corner yeah i mean you never see any policemen in most of china ever but you go around the corner and there is a what we would call like an armed vehicle an armed personnel vehicle in most countries it's the police but it's an armed police in china and i saw this several times walking around uh it might be in a shopping area for example and what struck what what it reminded me of was my visits to belfast uh in in the 1970s in other words that speaks to us there is a serious problem and there is a terrorist problem there's clearly there is a terrorist problem there's a lot there's a problem with law and there's a terrorist problem now goodbye using the word terrorist i don't want to deny the wiga you know i don't want to say old wiga are terrorists because that's nonsense they're not but and terrorist groups uh you know they as as in ireland had you know a legitimacy and uh and so um but i that that was a that was a really graphic um illustration for me that there is an underlying problem of security and order and stability uh in uh in xinjiang sticking with ireland though i mean i suppose the counterpoint is well in ireland there was ultimately a political solution and there's the good friday agreement and if if one day people in ireland want to unify the north of the south that there's a process for that and you know i'm the first to criticize britain or all countries in europe north america you know big w western values but the right self-determination is something that is generally observed you know the exception of catalonia but you know for instance scotland had a referendum more on independence in 2014. it does feel like again you know the idea of self-determination is odds with quote-unquote confusion values and so it it can feel this it can tend towards quite an authoritarian kind of politics identity subjectivity um do you see what i mean you've got 1.4 billion people and there isn't necessarily a right to self-determination or even there isn't a political vehicle for even just greater autonomy i mean isn't that isn't that quite dangerous it depends how it's interpreted i mean of cour you know over i mean this has been true over a very long historical period i mean china's the extraordinary thing about china is that uh you know it's this huge continent of a country and it's existed basically in more or less this shape sometimes bigger sometimes smaller for 2 000 years so there's some there's there are very powerful centripetal forces that hold china uh together uh which are very uh which i can't think of another country in the world where you can really say this um and this has been through thick and thin i mean the bad times you know like the 19th century then china did there were very powerful centrifugal forces and parts of china were chipped off i mean taiwan hong kong that's when they went uh as a result of um foreign invasion japanese in the in the instance of taiwan and the british in the instance of hong kong but one way or another you know china does exist uh in this very basically given its size extraordinary cohesive and centripetal form despite its size and i think that speaks to i think that's something we in the west is very very difficult for us to understand because it goes against so much of our own historical grain and it's not been achieved simply through authoritarian you know despotism etc if that's not that's not true let's stick with that let's stick with that for a second you know the focus is often on dissent i mean we just talked about descent in xinjiang and tibet but there's also a great deal of consent as you've just talked about there for the chinese state pew research you talk about this in your book it's old data now from 2010 but it's more or less it's if anything it's actually intensified in the intervening period chinese are generally very happy with their government they're genuine generally very optimistic in terms of their economic prospects for the future and actually that puts them really at odds with europe and america now i suppose on the one hand pew research is very credible but then you get other people who say well it's china it's a repressive authoritarian country what else are people going to say of course they're going to say the government's doing doing a fabulous job you've obviously looked at a great deal of data you've been in the country for many years spoken to many people do you think that generally on average the average person in china is more in favor of their economic system than government then is the case in the united states and or in britain now i don't mean support for the government as in people people support the government they don't overthrow the government but they feel like the government is doing a good job at solving the problems which affect their everyday lives i think there's absolutely no question that the that is far more true of china than it is of any western country uh because well who wouldn't i mean basically it's been growing you know until recently uh a few years ago at 10 a year and then now my my like six percent a year and living stands have been growing at the same speed you know which western government wouldn't dive for those kind of figures um you know i mean this has been the greatest period in chinese history for the people uh you know i mean they've you know they've been it's an absolutely amazing transformation so you know is it surprising that the pew survey figures or the harvard stuff say you know over 90 percent of the population is very very happy with you know you know it's very happy with the government very satisfied with the government that doesn't mean they like everything about it but broadly speaking they're far more supportive and enthusiastic about their government than is the true in the united states or the uk or france or germany and so on and this you know we've got to come to terms with this you see we think that unless these countries like china have a multi-party system and universal suffrage then they can't be democratic and the people therefore can't be happy and i'm sorry just open your eyes you know i mean they are this is they are very happy with the country they are very pleased that doesn't mean they don't have their gripes it doesn't mean that there's things they don't like of course that is true everywhere but this has been an extraordinary successful project an economic project a political project a cultural project and the sooner we you know that's why the west doesn't understand china because it somehow thinks and you know the papers on the left like the guardian for example the observer are just as bad as the right wing press i can't you know i can't put really put a piece of paper between them i mean you know they just think that unless they're like us less they're like western liberal system then they can't they can't be happy they must be that the only reason they're they still have this system is because they're oppressed and they're denied their rights and so on well i mean the other thing is by the way also when it comes to personal freedom and rights i mean the chinese people have experienced a huge expansion of their personal freedoms and rights since deng xiaoping i mean absolute huge i mean you know they can travel anywhere i mean we're not talking about the soviet union they can travel everywhere anywhere and everywhere and do um and their educational opportunities and their work opportunities and so on have been transformed absolutely transform you only got to go on the streets of shanghai or beijing etc and you can feel it and enjoy it you know i mean this is this is the people that is not only very pleased with what's happened but are hugely optimistic about the future unlike the west but this is very true the the thing about as well about you know in order to be in order to be a polity which serves the interests of the public which historically we would talk about as a republic which in britain sadly is misrepresented because of course republic just means not being a monarchy but historically republic was about serving the public interest over the people's interest on the one hand you know yes i mean i i think all the data you you point to in the book and you just mentioned that harvard and pew it's all correct but i suppose on the other hand you know what are the what are the mechanisms by which ordinary people can can stop tyrannical government now that's a conversation we've had in the west preceding liberal democracy you know it's there in in hobbs or in loch or in jumbo da and we've talked about these or even you know in antiquity people talk about these ideas but in terms of an authoritarian overreaching government i wonder you know at least yes this system we have here isn't perfect but it it can stop that but then on the other hand you know my colleague ash sarkar made a great point yes america is a democracy but there's never been a political party in the 20th century at the 21st century too on the ballot offering universal socialized healthcare in the united states does that mean it's a democracy there's never been a major party in britain offering you know a republic does that mean it's a democracy clearly there are there are costs of entry into participation and barriers to entry and so on so i i i kind of i agree with you but i'm also not quite sure and i do feel that if we jettison a certain idea of popular government you know do you know do you not feel that could have potential downsides like you know tiananmen square for instance yes on the one hand you know the chinese government's done an extraordinary job of increasing people's living standards and in many ways also just civil rights since the late 1970s but on the other hand that that can get very ugly if people for whatever reason no longer want to continue down that path yeah um well then the question is to what extent what how does political change takes place if things start going wrong i mean this is a very precise list and there was a situation like this in china and it wasn't i mean tiananmen square was a big moment for them but not a huge moment the huge moment was at the end of march 1976 because the chinese economy was not really i mean the chinese economy didn't do badly under marriage did better slightly better than the indian economy about the same over that historical period but it was falling behind other east asian countries uh like japan and south korea and taiwan you know the early asian tigers and uh and and you know beyond a point the system wasn't really working you know with this heavy central planning uh and so on and so deng xiaoping comes along and he basically goes in a completely different very different direction dangchaoping says you know look come on china's got to do much better than this and so he makes two fundamental reforms one he redefines chinese socialism as not just the state and the plan but also the market and secondly he said until then china being pretty ortarkick china should be part of the world should integrate itself and this was very different of course from the long chinese tradition so these were act two absolutely fundamental chips and he said you know the future lies you know we've got to you know people have got to think for themselves in the marrow system it was much more um uh you know group identity and uh top top down group i'd you know identity whereas with dung you know dung says you know and dung himself was like this you know you've got to you've got to um you've got to everyone's got to think for yourself we we've got to change society and the only way you can change society is you each of you no don't take think for yourself do it and this was the beginning of the great revolution in a way in china which is that this transformation of china has been done by the people i mean by a brilliant government leadership i think i would say that perhaps sure certainty but the people have done it and once you've got once you have an economy and a society changing as quickly as china's then the people become they are they they're they're empowered by it but they all they are also the initiators they are the the agency of those changes look if you're if your living standards are doubling every seven years everyone is subject to extraordinary change in their lives in every aspect of their child the way the city changes the way where they live changes the way they travel changes their relationships in the family the gap between different generations you know it's huge in china where once the vast majority people came from the countryside now uh you know it's a relatively small proportion of the population so what i'm trying to say here is that that was a huge change a bigger change than any western country has undertaken over the last well i i it's a bigger change than happened between keynesianism and neoliberalism uh at the end of the you know around 1980 with sacha and reagan so the capacity no there is an argument in the west which i i'm going to deal with in my new book which i've dealt with i've written this bit um which is that the problem with a one-party system i think we've got to be open-minded about these questions okay so because because we're so used to thinking well about the problems of one-party system but we it becomes a kind of it becomes a um a mantra the question is the criticism of one party system is you need another party in order to provide a choice which creates the opportunity for change now is that really true or to what extent is that true maybe it's true in a liberal democracy but is that true in a much more important sense in a global context not just looking at the uh the western tradition and i think that that if you look at china over time it not just the communist period but a much much longer period including the whole of the imperial period china's obviously been extraordinarily good at recreating and reinventing itself i mean you know britain has had one era when in the sun which was from the industrial revolution until let's say 1945 or something like that it's not true now um will it ever be like that again will it ever have that position in the world extremely unlikely i mean it got lucky and used a bit of genius uh for a very small island at a certain historical moment when that was possible the united states is clearly in decline will it survive will america survive i'm not convinced that as america as we know it we'll survive uh territorially i mean you know um so now look at china most countries then have maybe one two periods of global eminency or even preeminence china china you have the hand part of the hand period then you have the tang period then in some respects the the song dynasty period then you have the ming period and a bit of a ching china's had at least five periods in its history where it has been the most advanced or one of the most advanced civilizations in the world and we are seeing a sixth period now which is happening under uh the chinese communist party so china as a culture is very capable of reinventing itself now why that's i'm not going to go into that now but this is this is a very important and interesting historical question but the west and westerners don't think like this we have such a short-term mentality we think you know democracy is an issue for now i know we're talking about the capacity of a political leadership in a country to steer a country successfully over a long historical period or the institutional framework and the culture which enables that so china has great strength we should we should probably leave on that note because i think it's again it's a very counter-intuitive point but i think you know it's pretty compelling the way you said actually rather than china being incapable of adaptation we're seeing it being perhaps one of the most adaptable countries in the world in recent decades but also looking back over the broader sweep of history martin will leave it there you you mentioned briefly a new book when do you hope to have that published uh i should think it would be probably 2023 because 2023 but it's a big book because i like the last one like the last one but probably a bit longer wow well we'll get you one in 2023 for that thank you okay well thanks for joining us martin have a good day thank you aaron thank you thanks bye i've enjoyed our chat very much yeah it was great fun [Music] you

Channel: Martin Jacques

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Length: 69min 35sec (4175 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021