Understanding the rise of China | Martin Jacques

2,401,560 views ・ 2011-01-24

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00:15
The world is changing
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with really remarkable speed.
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If you look at the chart at the top here,
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you'll see that in 2025,
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these Goldman Sachs projections
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suggest that the Chinese economy
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will be almost the same size as the American economy.
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And if you look at the chart
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for 2050,
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it's projected that the Chinese economy
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will be twice the size of the American economy,
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and the Indian economy will be almost the same size
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as the American economy.
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And we should bear in mind here
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that these projections were drawn up
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before the Western financial crisis.
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A couple of weeks ago,
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I was looking at the latest projection
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by BNP Paribas
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for when China
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will have a larger economy
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than the United States.
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Goldman Sachs projected 2027.
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The post-crisis projection
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is 2020.
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That's just a decade away.
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China is going to change the world
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in two fundamental respects.
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First of all,
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it's a huge developing country
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with a population of 1.3 billion people,
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which has been growing for over 30 years
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at around 10 percent a year.
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And within a decade,
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it will have the largest economy in the world.
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Never before in the modern era
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has the largest economy in the world
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been that of a developing country,
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rather than a developed country.
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Secondly,
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for the first time in the modern era,
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the dominant country in the world --
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which I think is what China will become --
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will be not from the West
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and from very, very different civilizational roots.
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Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West
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that as countries modernize,
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they also westernize.
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This is an illusion.
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It's an assumption that modernity
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is a product simply of competition, markets and technology.
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It is not. It is also shaped equally
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by history and culture.
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China is not like the West,
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and it will not become like the West.
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It will remain in very fundamental respects
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very different.
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Now the big question here is obviously,
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how do we make sense of China?
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How do we try to understand what China is?
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And the problem we have in the West at the moment, by and large,
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is that the conventional approach
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is that we understand it really in Western terms,
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using Western ideas.
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We can't.
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Now I want to offer you
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three building blocks
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for trying to understand what China is like,
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just as a beginning.
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The first is this:
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that China is not really a nation-state.
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Okay, it's called itself a nation-state
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for the last hundred years,
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but everyone who knows anything about China
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knows it's a lot older than this.
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This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty
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in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring-state period --
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the birth of modern China.
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And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China.
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Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty,
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still 2,000 years ago.
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And you can see already it occupies
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most of what we now know as Eastern China,
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which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then
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and live now.
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Now what is extraordinary about this
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is, what gives China its sense of being China,
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what gives the Chinese
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the sense of what it is to be Chinese,
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comes not from the last hundred years,
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not from the nation-state period,
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which is what happened in the West,
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but from the period, if you like,
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of the civilization-state.
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I'm thinking here, for example,
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of customs like ancestral worship,
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of a very distinctive notion of the state,
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likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family,
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social relationships like guanxi,
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Confucian values and so on.
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These are all things that come
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from the period of the civilization-state.
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In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world,
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is shaped by its sense of civilization,
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its existence as a civilization-state,
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rather than as a nation-state.
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And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this:
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Of course we know China's big, huge,
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demographically and geographically,
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with a population of 1.3 billion people.
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What we often aren't really aware of
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is the fact
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that China is extremely diverse
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and very pluralistic,
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and in many ways very decentralized.
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You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing,
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even though we think this to be the case.
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It's never been the case.
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So this is China, a civilization-state,
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rather than a nation-state.
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And what does it mean?
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Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications.
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I'll give you two quick ones.
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The first is that
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the most important political value for the Chinese
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is unity,
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is the maintenance
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of Chinese civilization.
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You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe:
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breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire.
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It divided, and it's remained divided ever since.
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China, over the same time period,
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went in exactly the opposite direction,
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very painfully holding this huge civilization,
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civilization-state, together.
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The second
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is maybe more prosaic,
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which is Hong Kong.
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Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong
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by Britain to China in 1997?
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You may remember
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what the Chinese constitutional proposition was.
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One country, two systems.
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And I'll lay a wager
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that barely anyone in the West believed them.
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"Window dressing.
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When China gets its hands on Hong Kong,
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that won't be the case."
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Thirteen years on,
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the political and legal system in Hong Kong
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is as different now as it was in 1997.
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We were wrong. Why were we wrong?
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We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough,
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in nation-state ways.
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Think of German unification, 1990.
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What happened?
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Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West.
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One nation, one system.
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That is the nation-state mentality.
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But you can't run a country like China,
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a civilization-state,
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on the basis of one civilization, one system.
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It doesn't work.
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So actually the response of China
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to the question of Hong Kong --
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as it will be to the question of Taiwan --
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was a natural response:
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one civilization, many systems.
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Let me offer you another building block
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to try and understand China --
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maybe not sort of a comfortable one.
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The Chinese have a very, very different
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conception of race
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to most other countries.
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Do you know,
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of the 1.3 billion Chinese,
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over 90 percent of them
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think they belong to the same race,
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the Han?
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Now, this is completely different
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from the world's [other] most populous countries.
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India, the United States,
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Indonesia, Brazil --
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all of them are multiracial.
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The Chinese don't feel like that.
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China is only multiracial
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really at the margins.
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So the question is, why?
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Well the reason, I think, essentially
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is, again, back to the civilization-state.
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A history of at least 2,000 years,
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a history of conquest, occupation,
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absorption, assimilation and so on,
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led to the process by which,
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over time, this notion of the Han emerged --
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of course, nurtured
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by a growing and very powerful sense
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of cultural identity.
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Now the great advantage of this historical experience
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has been that, without the Han,
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China could never have held together.
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The Han identity has been the cement
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which has held this country together.
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The great disadvantage of it
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is that the Han have a very weak conception
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of cultural difference.
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They really believe
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in their own superiority,
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and they are disrespectful
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of those who are not.
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Hence their attitude, for example,
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to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.
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Or let me give you my third building block,
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the Chinese state.
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Now the relationship
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between the state and society in China
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is very different from that in the West.
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Now we in the West
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overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least --
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that the authority and legitimacy of the state
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is a function of democracy.
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The problem with this proposition
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is that the Chinese state
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enjoys more legitimacy
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and more authority
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amongst the Chinese
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than is true
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with any Western state.
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And the reason for this
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is because --
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well, there are two reasons, I think.
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And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy,
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because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy.
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And the reason for this is,
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firstly, because the state in China
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is given a very special --
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it enjoys a very special significance
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as the representative,
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the embodiment and the guardian
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of Chinese civilization,
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of the civilization-state.
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This is as close as China gets
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to a kind of spiritual role.
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And the second reason is because,
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whereas in Europe
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and North America,
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the state's power is continuously challenged --
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I mean in the European tradition,
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historically against the church,
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against other sectors of the aristocracy,
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against merchants and so on --
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for 1,000 years,
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the power of the Chinese state
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has not been challenged.
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It's had no serious rivals.
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So you can see
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that the way in which power has been constructed in China
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is very different from our experience
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in Western history.
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The result, by the way,
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is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state.
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Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder,
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a stranger,
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certainly an organ
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whose powers need to be limited
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or defined and constrained,
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the Chinese don't see the state like that at all.
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The Chinese view the state
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as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually,
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as a member of the family --
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not just in fact as a member of the family,
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but as the head of the family,
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the patriarch of the family.
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This is the Chinese view of the state --
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very, very different to ours.
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It's embedded in society in a different kind of way
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to what is the case
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in the West.
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And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here,
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in the Chinese context,
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is a new kind of paradigm,
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which is different from anything
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we've had to think about in the past.
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Know that China believes in the market and the state.
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I mean, Adam Smith,
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already writing in the late 18th century, said,
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"The Chinese market is larger and more developed
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and more sophisticated
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than anything in Europe."
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And, apart from the Mao period,
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that has remained more or less the case ever since.
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But this is combined
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with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state.
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The state is everywhere in China.
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I mean, it's leading firms --
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many of them are still publicly owned.
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Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo,
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depend in many ways on state patronage.
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Targets for the economy and so on
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are set by the state.
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And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas --
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as we are familiar with --
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with something like the one-child policy.
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Moreover, this is a very old state tradition,
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a very old tradition of statecraft.
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I mean, if you want an illustration of this,
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the Great Wall is one.
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But this is another, this is the Grand Canal,
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which was constructed in the first instance
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in the fifth century B.C.
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and was finally completed
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in the seventh century A.D.
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It went for 1,114 miles,
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linking Beijing
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with Hangzhou and Shanghai.
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So there's a long history
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of extraordinary state infrastructural projects
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in China,
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which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today,
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which is something like the Three Gorges Dam
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and many other expressions
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of state competence
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within China.
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So there we have three building blocks
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for trying to understand the difference that is China --
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the civilization-state,
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the notion of race
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and the nature of the state
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and its relationship to society.
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And yet we still insist, by and large,
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in thinking that we can understand China
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by simply drawing on Western experience,
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looking at it through Western eyes,
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using Western concepts.
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If you want to know why
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we unerringly seem to get China wrong --
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our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect --
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this is the reason.
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Unfortunately, I think,
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I have to say that I think
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attitude towards China
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is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality.
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It's kind of arrogant.
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It's arrogant in the sense
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that we think that we are best,
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and therefore we have the universal measure.
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And secondly, it's ignorant.
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We refuse to really address
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the issue of difference.
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You know, there's a very interesting passage
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in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian.
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And Paul Cohen argues
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that the West thinks of itself
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as probably the most cosmopolitan
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of all cultures.
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But it's not.
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In many ways,
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it's the most parochial,
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because for 200 years,
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the West has been so dominant in the world
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that it's not really needed
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to understand other cultures,
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other civilizations.
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Because, at the end of the day,
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it could, if necessary by force,
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get its own way.
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Whereas those cultures --
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virtually the rest of the world, in fact,
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which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West --
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have been thereby forced to understand the West,
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because of the West's presence in those societies.
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And therefore, they are, as a result,
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more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.
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I mean, take the question of East Asia.
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East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. --
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a third of the world's population lives there.
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Now the largest economic region in the world.
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And I'll tell you now,
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that East Asianers, people from East Asia,
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are far more knowledgeable
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about the West
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than the West is about East Asia.
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Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid,
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to the present.
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Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning,
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the Goldman Sachs chart.
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What is happening
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is that, very rapidly in historical terms,
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the world is being driven
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and shaped,
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not by the old developed countries,
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but by the developing world.
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We've seen this
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in terms of the G20
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usurping very rapidly the position of the G7,
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or the G8.
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And there are two consequences of this.
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First, the West
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is rapidly losing
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its influence in the world.
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There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago --
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Copenhagen, climate change conference.
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Europe was not at the final negotiating table.
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When did that last happen?
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I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago.
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And that is what is going to happen in the future.
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And the second implication
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is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence,
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become increasingly unfamiliar to us,
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because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories
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that we are not really familiar with,
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or conversant with.
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And at last, I'm afraid -- take Europe;
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America is slightly different --
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but Europeans by and large, I have to say,
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are ignorant,
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are unaware
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about the way the world is changing.
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Some people -- I've got an English friend in China,
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and he said, "The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion."
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Well, maybe that's true,
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maybe that's an exaggeration.
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But there's another problem which goes along with this --
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that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world --
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and that is a sort of
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loss of a sense of the future.
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I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future
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in its confidence.
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Take the 19th century, for example.
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But this, alas, is no longer true.
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If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future,
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try China -- there's old Confucius.
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18:16
This is a railway station
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the likes of which you've never seen before.
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It doesn't even look like a railway station.
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This is the new [Wuhan] railway station
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for the high-speed trains.
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China already has a bigger network
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than any other country in the world
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and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together.
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Or take this: now this is an idea,
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but it's an idea to be tried out shortly
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in a suburb of Beijing.
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18:41
Here you have a megabus,
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on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people.
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18:47
It travels on rails
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down a suburban road,
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18:51
and the cars travel underneath it.
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18:54
And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour.
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Now this is the way things are going to move,
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because China has a very specific problem,
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which is different from Europe
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19:04
and different from the United States:
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China has huge numbers of people and no space.
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So this is a solution to a situation
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where China's going to have
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many, many, many cities
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over 20 million people.
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Okay, so how would I like to finish?
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Well, what should our attitude be
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towards this world
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that we see
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very rapidly developing
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before us?
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19:33
I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it.
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But I want to argue, above all,
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a big-picture positive for this world.
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For 200 years,
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the world was essentially governed
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by a fragment of the human population.
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19:55
That's what Europe and North America represented.
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The arrival of countries
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like China and India --
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between them 38 percent of the world's population --
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and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on,
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represent the most important single act
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of democratization
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in the last 200 years.
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20:18
Civilizations and cultures,
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which had been ignored, which had no voice,
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which were not listened to, which were not known about,
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will have a different sort
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of representation in this world.
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As humanists, we must welcome, surely,
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this transformation,
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and we will have to learn
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about these civilizations.
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20:38
This big ship here
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was the one sailed in by Zheng He
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in the early 15th century
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on his great voyages
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around the South China Sea, the East China Sea
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and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa.
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The little boat in front of it
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was the one in which, 80 years later,
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Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic.
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(Laughter)
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Or, look carefully
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at this silk scroll
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made by ZhuZhou
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in 1368.
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I think they're playing golf.
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Christ, the Chinese even invented golf.
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Welcome to the future. Thank you.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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