Why We Need to Know All About China

[Music] i'm very happy to welcome martin shaknow martin chuck is an economist by training but he's a lot more than that he's a historian a political analyst a best-selling author and a very very good speaker his ted address had more than 4 million views i'm excited to see how many views we get today martin told me a while ago that he is busy busy writing a new book now and on average it takes him six years to write a book i think he has two more years to go in the meantime until his new book is ready i can recommend this one it's a very very good book it's a book where you have a lot of aha experience you suddenly understand how things are the way they are and it is also very well written pretty easy to read so if you're interested in china and not only in china but also the world it is one of these books which i would very much recommend one of martin's thesis is that we in the western world often think that when societies when economies develop they would converge into our western model that is however not always true and it's particularly not true when we talk about china martin we are all pretty excited to hear your arguments why this is not true the floor is your mutton well thank you very much sir yeah i'd like to start with what i'll call the big picture of china of course we all know it's got a huge population nearly one-fifth of the world's population 1.4 billion people still the largest country slightly larger than india secondly it's has an enormous uh physical area it's actually the fourth largest physically uh in the world thirdly it's the longest continuously existing polity or if you like political unit in the world it is over 2 000 years old no other country in the world can compare with this extraordinary long period but of course in another sense china is much much older than this uh chinese civilization uh dates back at least four or five thousand years now there's something else which is extraordinarily important about china and that is it has on at least four arguably five periods of history being the most advanced country or maybe one of the most advanced countries because we're going back a long time it starts uh with the han dynasty which is over two years ago then a few hundred years later the tang dynasty and then the song dynasty and then the ming dynasty and then fifthly part of the qing dynasty now please bear in mind that there is no other country like this in the world usually actually what happens is that countries rise and fall of course now you think of the of ancient greece you think of the roman empire um you might think of the british empire but each of these rose and fall never to rise again china is different china has had argued before all five periods where it has been the most important country in the world or the most important area in the world before the area of the era of countries as nation states and so on and again remember that we are on the eve now of a fifth period or sixth period in chinese history where it will be the most important country in the world because it seems to me that there's absolutely no question that china will soon replace the united states as the most important and influential country in the world so this is a remarkable civilization which seems to me has no obvious parallel uh or peer in human uh history but there's a problem or at least the west has a problem a very serious one we don't understand china we don't get it and the reason we don't get it is that we try and understand china in our own terms in western terms but you can't understand china in western terms of course china has affinities and commonalities with us but fundamentally china is very different from the west it always has been it still is and it always will be the problem is i suppose the western mentality you see for 200 years starting with europe and then later the united states and so on the west has dominated and effectively controlled the world so that we think of modernity as western modernity eternity there is only one form of modernity that is western modernity but this is simply not true we have chinese modernity evolving rapidly now we've had japanese modernity for example and we'll see and are seeing many others it is simply not true that there is only one form of modernity a western modernity there will and there are already many modernities in the world so in this context the idea that everyone must be like us everyone should be like us is wrong in other words we have to understand china in its own terms we cannot understand china in western terms and this is the great challenge and this by the way our mentality is why we don't understand china this is why we get china wrong i mean i remember vividly in the late 20th century as china began to grow and i'll come back to this of course as china began to grow very quickly under with the impact of deng xiaoping's reforms from 1978 you know this was largely those exaggerating the figures the statistics aren't true it'll never be possible to sustain this we were wrong we were hugely wrong we didn't understand china another proposition was that unless china has a political system like as a western-style democracy china's extraordinary transformation will not continue it will be unsustainable well here we are now in 2020 uh over 30 years after the great reforms started in china and the chinese political system remains as different now as it was before but bear in mind here by the way of francis fukuyama the american writer the american theorist and writer he argues that one that china uh has a more than any other country in the world has has enjoyed a powerful continuity in its governing system for well over 2 000 years in other words in the emperor period and now in the communist period what is striking is not the differences but the lines of continuity so please don't expect to china politically to be like the west because it's not going to be like the west we have to respect china for what it is we have to understand it in its own terms we have to be curious not dismissive we have to have an open not a closed mind if we want to make sense of this extraordinary civilization now very reasonably you might say well okay why is it so different why is china so distinct from our tradition in the west well i would make there are many points that could be made here but i will just make three points the first is that china is not even primarily a nation-state you know we think and the western tradition very much of nation states and china in the late 19th century when it was very weak when it was in the process of being partially colonized by the wet by the europeans and so on uh china did begin to take on some of the characteristics of a nation state but i don't think it even now is primarily a nation so i don't think you really understand china in these terms and think of china two thousand years of a continuously existing polity four or five thousand years of chinese civilization so what where do the primary characteristics come from in chi for china i don't think from its uh relatively limited encounter with nation statehood i don't think it comes from that because we're only talking what 120 130 years china's at least 2 000 years old no we're talking about and this is very different from the west we're talking about an inheritance which above all is a function is a product of chinese civilization not china as a nation state so really the key characteristics of china are a function of china's civilizational history let me give you some examples well probably one of the most important is undoubtedly uh confucian values i mean confucius great philosophy a philosopher living two and a half thousand years ago with a a a a a a number of other key figures uh in that era and confucius um talked about the fundamental importance of the family that the emperor should model himself on the father uh that the importance of meritocracy the importance of good governance the importance of a strong state the importance of the relationship between government and the individual these were very distinctive ideas and even today they remain very distinctive ideas and they influence not only china by the way but they also influence what we might call the confucian states the confucian states japan in some degree south korea vietnam taiwan and so on these are all very heavily influenced by confucian uh thinking or the relationship between state and society the relation is state and society very different in china or the notion of the family the nature of the family again very distinctive in china so there are a set of guanxi very important that guanxi is could best be translated i suppose as as relationships and the way in which relationships work and so on it's like a tissue of connectivity uh in china very important to understanding the nature of chinese society and uh and chinese culture or for that matter we could add you know the nature of uh of the chinese language language which is a common written script but there are actually many languages spoken in china which sometimes they're called dialects but it doesn't matter it's the same thing in effect uh here or chinese food you know many great cuisines across china uh so uh this is all a product of china as a civilization not china as a nation state now this is very very different from europe and the united states and so on i mean uh the countries like the united states of australia which were a product of uh uh uh colonization in the first instance before they uh gained independence are really only a product of of of being a nation state in effect uh european societies go back further but by and large european nation states the past is very distant and uh and so they are fundamentally shaped by the experience of being a nation-state so you can see here how different uh uh china is uh from the western tradition and i if i would say this is the most fundamental point that china is a product of civilization rather than uh being a nation state my second point is about the state and society and again of course this is closely uh linked to the civilizational history of china uh but um the the nature of the relationship between the state and society is very very different from the western tradition people now in in rather ill-informed and ignorant political debates you know they think it's all about mao or communism or something like that forget it that is not the primary a historical thing the primary historical link is this long tradition that runs back to be well before confucius but which confucius heavily influenced which was a very very close intimate relationship between the state and society at the heart of confucius thinking was the state and the importance of the relationship between the state and the individual and as i mentioned that the emperor should model himself on the father in other words a familial conception of the state this is very important a familial conception of the state in chinese thinking and practice and you'll see this in all sorts of ways if you look uh closely and of course meritocracy i mean you know this was the confucius emphasis on the importance of meritocracy there's no question at all in my view that especially given it's a developing country that china has the most competent and sophisticated form of governance in the world that's why that's the key to understanding i think uh uh some of china's achievements uh in uh recent years and by the way i mean make you know people we think in the west understandably uh that you know legitimacy is a function of elections um and as i suppose the thinking would be then well as china doesn't have uh universal suffrage then uh the regime the state does not enjoy legitimacy this is quite wrong actually quite wrong if you look at the pew surveys and so on uh china's uh government enjoys more legitimacy more support than any western country i mean this is extraordinary but we have to understand we have to think with different logics when it comes to china and and this is very important uh uh to our understanding of the country now the third point i want to make about uh this um you know how china is different to the west i'm using the west as my comparator here uh is that um china has never been an expansionist power uh this is i mean i mean it it it certainly had a universalist view of itself in other words that china was the highest form of civilization just like europe had a universalist view of itself but europe's interpretation of its universalism was that it should civilize the world which of course is exactly what happened with uh colonial empires and so on um and that tradition in some way or other continues to this day you know european western western values are superior should be adopted institutions government systems and so on the chinese have never had that tradition uh the chinese attitude is yes we are the insofar as they thought in these terms yes we are the most uh advanced form of civilization and so on um but we are the middle kingdom and you know we don't really want we don't want to expand abroad because to other countries and so on uh because uh uh we you know that would be a step down uh in comparison with chinese history and chinese civilization and so really there's no tradition in china of expansionism i mean they certainly had a global system or rather of course in those days only a regional system because there was no such thing if you go back far enough as a global system but uh china was not you know was not didn't militarily occupy these countries uh it didn't expand in that way i tell you how it expanded it expanded partly economically and partly and very importantly culturally in fact if you want to know the two things that really matter the chinese one is economic and the other is culture this is very very different from the western tradition you know the european tradition and the american tradition uh where uh military expansion and political influence have been uh extremely important now i hope that this gives you uh some idea of how what how challenging for us certainly in the west understanding china is because it's so different now we can either just dismiss it because we're you know we're the top dogs who've been the top dogs and always going to be the top dogs we are certainly not and we are living in the era where that is coming to an end or we can think this is really interesting i this challenges many of the ways i've thought in the past and i need to understand it and i think this is um the mindset uh that in this era and in the future we need to have in our attitude towards and our relationship uh with china now for a long time of course we didn't really need to understand china did we because uh from uh when from the early 19th century china went into decline and um that process continued for the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th century and i suppose that era finally began to come to an end in the middle of the 20th century basically for various reasons china missed out on the industrial revolution and then it was a victim of uh western superiority not least partial colonization by european powers japan and also in a very small way the united states so for that period of western as it were expansion triumph uh china uh was in a hell of a mess um and uh sank into great poverty so china became invisible and people didn't think about it but this began to change i think the revolution in 1949 was very important even though maura made some very serious mistakes he sort of got the country together again in a way that had just not been together it was ineffectively reunified he got rid of the foreign foreign invaders of china it brought the colonisation of parts of china to an end and so on and there was a modest economic growth but the real economic turning point and why we're all taking notice of china now because it's irresistible starts in 1978 and the economic reforms introduced by deng xiaoping you know in 1978 the chinese economy was one twentieth of the size of the american economy 5 about 80 of the population lived in abject poverty and then there was what i suppose you could reasonably be described although it's an overworked term there was a miracle china for the next 35 years grew on average at 10 a year as a result 800 million people have been taken out of poverty that accounts for two thirds of the reduction in global poverty over the period from 1978 till the present i mean what an extraordinary achievement that has been by 2040 the chart according to the world bank international comparison program china overtook the united states as the largest economy in the world as measured by gdp primary purchasing power it has not yet overtaken uh the united states uh in measured by foreign currency measured by the dollar but that is that is very very close now uh historically uh speaking i would say that i can't think of another candidate that can shine a light to china that this period of economic transformation is the most remarkable one there has historically uh ever been and of course this process is continuing i mean it's not growing as quickly as it did before uh it's growing around about six or a bit over six percent a year except this year we'll come back to that but uh covered and so on um and the projection well the pred there are projections about the future remember their projections uh you know because no one knows the future uh but uh the projections about china have been uh quite quite accurate actually generally broadly speaking the projection is that by 2030 now this is measuring different countries gdp by ppp primary purchasing power that the chinese economy will account for one third of the global economy it will be twice as large as the american economy and it will be larger than the american and the european union economies put together so with the future like that we need to understand uh china um we might have been able to ignore it um when it was invisible but its transformation means that we have to take note of china and understand it and have a good relationship with it a constructive relationship with it by what i would call force mayor china has arrived big time on the global stage do you think the west can come to terms with this i mean i think the developing world is in the process and it certainly will come to terms with it can the west come to terms with it can the west learn from elsewhere and not think that it has the answers that it's a sort of universal yardstick i think this is going to be this is a big question and the answer i think is unclear you know there was a period uh i think in early this century when uh there was a cure real curiosity about china uh its growth rates were phenomenal um the reduction in poverty was greatly admired it was seen as an opportunity but then then i think the mood in the west changed it was something of course to do with trump but it's only not only trump uh i think that in america you know china became seen as a threat a threat a threat to america's status as the number one power in the world well look let's be realistic about this china's not the united states is not going to be number one in the world forever it's not going to be number in the world for very long now but so what i mean countries rise and fall that's been universal in history i mean just as china has risen four or five times it's also gone down uh four or five times and china you know if it's the top dog which you certainly will be it's going to stay there forever you know history is history is full of this kind of thing so but for the for this period for the next century or so i would say certainly china is going to be extraordinarily important uh in the world and much more important by the way i think but in a different way than the united states probably ever has been now can we come to terms with this and i think that one of the problems with this kind of there's been a a kind of uh frosting over of the atmosphere a negativity crept in in relationship uh to china you know china's a threat you can't trust it and so on actually when i look and listen to people talking like this i realize they don't know the first thing about china by not you know they talk about mao the return to they talk about the chinese communist party oh we know all about that remember the soviet communist party remember the cold war and so on listen these people don't know the first thing about china it is true that the chinese communist party has the same two words as the soviet communist party communist party but i can tell you now that those two organizations have historically very very little in common the chinese communist party is chinese chinese chinese you cannot understand this phenomenon without understanding chinese history it is a product of and is rooted in chinese history and any understanding of china can't start off with the cold war can't start off with 1949 but must understand what i've been talking about which is the nature of chinese history the difference that is chinese history and culture and the importance of chinese civilization so uh we shouldn't deal with cardboard cutouts we shouldn't deal with cliches we shouldn't deal in a very limited western mentality that everyone should be like us because it's not true it never it there has been a historical period when the west has been extraordinarily important but it before that it wasn't and it is it is less and less important now so we have to open our eyes we have to listen we mustn't deal in cliches and cardboard cutouts we mustn't celebrate our own provincialism and ignorance about difference on the contrary we must be open-minded and we must embrace and learn about a culture as important a civilization as important as china i think what i want to do uh in conclusion is something rather different to what i've been doing which is i just want to talk about one issue because i think it tells us quite a lot in good ways and bad ways and that is covered 19 now we know or we think we know we don't really know but uh our first assumption still first assumption is that kobe started off in china or became important in china that might have come from anywhere we don't know uh and uh during the course of january the chinese were struggling to understand it and so on and china was subject to a barrage of abusive publicity in this period which ran into february march even now you can hear it um that the chinese efforts to deal with it were characterized by secrecy and cover-up and false statistics and so on and when i look back now on the period of this year i think this was disgraceful i mean there was china on its own trying to deal with something that was entirely new which it was utterly unfamiliar with from which people were dying in large numbers and we can now see that china's efforts to contain kobe 19 were extraordinarily successful do you know they're only less than 4 50 people in china died from covet 19. basically the chinese were successful in containing the virus to wuhan and hubei province which is where wuhan is situated it didn't spread in any serious way across china beijing has had about seven deaths shanghai has had i think it's five or six deaths in other words very very little there have been no recent cases of covet 19 in china the country is returning now to relative normality the economy is growing again china will be the only country this year to show any economic growth every other country in the world will be subject to varying degrees of contraction now compare this with what's happening in the west what a mess look at america look at my own country the uk look at europe varying degrees the nordic countries have done quite well germany has done it sort of okay but nothing as good as china and by the way we're not just talking about china here we're also talking about the other confucian countries japan south korea taiwan hong kong they have all also done very well they are in the same if you like league as china in relationship to kovid 19. so we have to draw i think or we have we have to draw some clues or rather we have to ask a question why why has china and these countries as well done so well because remember they're not all communist regimes they vary in terms of the government why have they all done so well and why has the west done so bad this is a very important question because i i would guess that this is far from the last pandemic we're going to suffer in coming decades and i think the reason is twofold to put it simply the first is that chinese governance is extremely effective now i don't mean effective because it's authoritarian that's a western term but i wouldn't use that term myself not for none of these countries it is to do with the confucian roots of china and these countries and those roots mean two things first extremely effective governance and i said earlier and i will repeat now the chinese government is an extremely effective institution i mean you know this extraordinary economic transformation is not just because of markets markets markets no at the heart of china's transformation and the strategy has been the chinese government and that is how it has handled kovid 19. i mean you know excuse my language but i look at my own country and it's been such a bloody mess on covet 19. it doesn't know what it's doing it doesn't where it's going the chinese and the japanese and these other countries from the word go their attitude was first and foremost we must get rid of kovitz 19. we're not going to live with it we're going to eliminate it and by and large that's exactly what they've done the western societies can't make up their mind what they're doing actually they have made up their mind by and large they're going to live with it and you know the consequences economically and so on are going to be very bad you can see this already because we're getting a second wave and what's going to happen is it's going to go on like this you know and the second point which is as as important as my first point the first point being about the quality of central governance the second point is the attitude of the people the way the people think the way the people interpret society you see we pride ourselves in the west on a sort of notion of individualism and everywhere including my own country you know the rules and regulations being introduced to deal with kobe 19 are being challenged you know we need our liberties we want our limitants on now that by and large has not been the pattern at all in these countries they understand people understand the importance of society it's not just you it's not just me it's the impact of me on you my behavior affects you my behavior may imperil your future your life and so there's a much greater awareness of the importance of society of social solidarity observing rules and so on my son at the moment is living in seoul uh uh he's a student and i just finished at stanford university and uh he he makes the point to me that every single person in seoul outdoors wears a mask everyone so um i think this probably brings uh my uh remarks uh to a conclusion uh you know china is a most extraordinary country rather than thinking of it as a threat we should learn about it be inquisitive and enjoy it because it's not only going to become very important extremely important already becoming extremely important everywhere but it's also fascinating and it's a rich treasure trove for us to draw up to understand human history and the future of humanity thank you very much martin it's very easy to understand how your ted talk got so many views very great entertainment and very interesting views a lot to think about also for us yet bus we probably need to prepare our next china summit very soon thank you so much martin was great

Channel: Martin Jacques

Views: 219,054

Rating: 4.8234506 out of 5

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Id: LRewnxIjo8w

Length: 41min 37sec (2497 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

anglos b liek: lets try to push all labor onto a country to make all the things, cuz its cheap. What could POSSIBLY happen?

40 years later: O GOD O FUCK we reallllly gotta understand and maybe be nice to them O FUCK

[u/Turbulent_Friend1551]

Martin Jacques is a good author, or so I've heard; I should read his latest book sometime.