Wang Huiyao in Dialogue with Kishore Mahbubani, Kent E. Calder and Kerry Brown
January 18 , 2022
【English】
【Chinese】
The past few decades have witnessed the rise of Asian countries, with increasing interaction and integration within the region taking place. With RCEP becoming effective at the start of 2022, the world’s largest trading bloc in history has been formed among a great number of Southeast Asian and Asia-Pacific nations, marking a milestone in the story of a returned Asia.
The relationships between great powers like China, the US and Europe in an increasingly multipolar world have resulted in complex power dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region. How can we put the US-China rivalry in the region into perspective? As the variants of COVID-19 continue to spread and climate change poses an urgent threat to humanity, can China, the US and Europe find common ground in reviving multilateralism to tackle their common challenges?8
On January 18th, CCG hosted a dialogue between four distinguished guests from Asia, the US, Europe, and China to offer their views – distinguished scholar and diplomat Prof. Kishore Mahbubani, who recently published The Asian 21st Century; a leading Asian expert from Johns Hopkins University, SAIS, Prof. Kent E. Calder; Prof. Kerry Brown, Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, and CCG President Dr. Wang Huiyao.
The Asian 21st Century
Author: Kishore Mahbubani
Series Editors: Huiyao Wang, Lu Miao
Published in January, 2022
ISBN: 978-981-16-6813-5
Publisher: Springer Nature Publishing Group
Series Editors: Huiyao Wang Lu Miao
Publisher: Springer Nature Publishing Group
Topics discussed revolved around the path that led to the rise of Asia and China, and the challenges facing global governance. Prof. Mahbubani suggested that the return of Asia being “a natural development”, should be celebrated by the West; Prof. Calder talked about the transformation of Eurasia and China’s in the region; Prof. Brown stressed that “a more adequate narrative” is urgently needed for China on the international stage; and Prof. Wang pointed out that infrastructure is currently the largest common denominator that could pool efforts in international cooperation.
Please see the full transcript below:
Wang Huiyao: Good evening, good morning, and good afternoon, depending on where you are. This is Henry Huiyao Wang. I’m the Founder and President of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG). I’m very pleased and honored to host CCG Global Dialogue tonight here in Beijing at our head office in the central business district. We are live here from the CCG Beijing office. We are very pleased to invite the very distinguished speakers to our dialogue tonight. We have Professor Kishore Mahbubani, Professor Kerry Brown, and Professor Kent Calder. We are going to talk about the rise of Asia and its implications for an increasingly multipolar world.
But I would like to start with a book. Recently we had the launch of a new book that’s called The Asian 21st Century, written by Professor Kishore Mahbubani, and was published by Springer Nature. It was only published about 2 weeks and we already have 44,000 downloads worldwide. We’re going to talk from that book but we’re going to have a wide range of topics on issues of Asia development and also the impact on the world. Let’s take a quick look at the video of this book.
We actually had a book launch event a week ago. I’m very glad that today we are going to have a more focused dialogue on topics rising from that, but we will also cover a wide range of topics regarding Asia and the multi-polar world.
I’d like to introduce the 3 prominent scholars, one from Singapore, one from the USA and one from the UK and of course I’m from China. First, let me introduce Professor Kishore Mahbubani. He’s a distinguished fellow at the Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, the founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and also served as the Singapore’s former ambassador to the United Nations. But also you are a prominent voice in world affairs, especially in regard to issues in Asia, US-China relations, and global governance. We’re going to have you to start and give us some introduction about this new book that has just been published. How is the return of Asia going to impact China, the US, EU, and of course the rest of the world? So perhaps I’ll start with Professor Kishore Mahbubani.
Both Asia and the West should celebrate the Asian 21st Century
Kishore Mahbubani: Thank you very much Henry for organizing this event and I’m really glad that you managed to get two very distinguished scholars, Professor Kerry Brown and Professor Kent Calder to join us for this event. It shows how much pulling power you have. I’m very impressed to get in such a distinguished panel.
I’m going to be very brief and speak for only 5 minutes to give the listeners a kind of a preview of the book. I’ll make three points to explain the book, about the 21st Asian century. The first point I’m going to make which may sound a bit paradoxical is that all of Asia should send a thank you note to the West for creating the Asian 21st century. And I say that quite honestly, genuinely, and sincerely because if the West hadn’t succeeded first, if the West hadn’t created this magnificent scientific revolution, if the West hadn’t launched the industrial revolution, if the West hadn’t come up with this sort of breakthrough ideas on how to transform society, like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and free-market economics. All these ideas that in a sense propelled the West and made them the strongest and most dominant civilization in the world for 200 years in the 19th and 20th centuries are now the same ideas that are actually propelling Asia forward in the world today. The Asians are very intellectually honest. They would admit that if the West hadn’t made these major intellectual breakthroughs, maybe we would still be agricultural and feudal societies today. But it’s the West that transformed the world and it’s the West that’s transformed Asia. As I said we should also mention that we should also thank Japan for being the first Asian country to modernize and transform itself, because the Japanese transformation also inspired many other countries, the four Tigers then subsequently the ASEAN countries and then China and then India. All of Asia opened up. So you can see what a tremendous job the West had done in creating this Asian 21st century. This brings me to my second point, which is that at the time when this Asian century launched by the West is taking off, the West should be celebrating the success of Western ideas in Asia. Instead, sadly the West is doing the exact opposite, both intellectually and politically refusing to accept the fact that the 21st century will be the Asian century.
Also, I want to, as historical aside, mention that the return of Asia was always a natural development, because from the year one to the year 1820, the two largest economies of the world were China and India, and as you know, I document that in some essays in the book Asian 21st Century. The return of Asia was always going to come anyway. This is an inevitable return and the West should accept it gracefully, but unfortunately, there is, to my surprise, a tremendous amount of resistance to accepting this. Intellectually you still have Americans saying that the 21st century will remain the American century which I find rather strange. And in the political side, they also have a deep reluctance to give up privileged positions that the West has enjoyed in the world order. Exhibit A is the fact that even till today, despite pronouncements to the contrary, the United States insists that the head of the World Bank must be an American and the Europeans insist that the head of the IMF must be European. I can tell you in 2009 at the G20 meeting during the global financial crisis, the West said, ‘this is all going to stop, we’re going to select leaders of the World Bank and IMF on the basis of merit and no longer the basis of geography’. But nothing changed. Twelve years have gone by, and we still have the heads of the IMF coming from Europe and the heads of the World Bank coming from the United States. This is just one example of the reluctance of the West to accept the fact that this is a different world.
All this brings me to my third point which is that there actually is a wiser, more intelligent approach for the West to take in the 21st century and that’s why you’ll notice in my book The Asian 21st Century, the concluding section is on multilateralism. You mentioned that I’d been the ambassador to the UN. I’ve been ambassador to the UN for over 10 years and I still am a passionate lover of the United Nations. And the paradox here is that the United Nations and its ideas and the UN charter were essentially created by Western thinkers. It’s western ideas and western concepts, yet the UN General Assembly was conceived to be the Parliament of men representing the views of the whole world. So if you want to create a more balanced world order to reflect the new world, we don’t have to re-invent the world. We can just take the 1945 rules-based order that the West created and work with it. We know that in the population of 7.8 billion people in the world, only 12% live in the West and 88% live outside the West. If you want to know how and what the 88% are thinking, you don’t have to go very far, go to the UN General Assembly and use the UN General Assembly as a parliament of man to listen to what exactly the world wants. The good news is that most countries in the world, especially in Asia want to cooperate with this rule space order that the West had created and actually want to have a more stable world order. China has become the biggest beneficiary of the 1945 rule space order therefore it’s in China’s national interest to preserve these rules space order rather than to disrupt it as many fear would happen. So actually if you do want to create a peaceful and safe Asian century, we don’t have to go far. Let’s go back to the 1945 rule space order. And that’s the concluding argument of my book Asian 21st Century. Thank you very much Henry, I’m looking forward very much to the dialogue of this very distinguished panel that you established, thank you.
Wang Huiyao: Thank you, Kishore, for the point that you just made. Absolutely, we are now in the 21st century, and Asia has been developed precisely as you said. For the last 76 years after the Second World War, we had this new Bretton Woods system, and China actually embrace that. Of course, now after 76 years, the system needs to be upgraded of course, and China has outgrown from a very backward economy to the second-largest economy. China’s leader just gave a speech last night at the Davos World Economic Forum. Basically, China’s leader stressed on multilateralism and wants to support globalization again, and China wants to play an active role in that. So I think this book probably can arouse a lot of discussion and re-thinking of what you said. We don’t have to re-invent the world. We just have to work together on the same system that was designed by the US. So how can we do that?
I would like to introduce Professor Kent Calder, who is also a good friend of mine. I haven’t seen you during the pandemic but I still remember your time coming to CCG and to our conference and we visited you in your office in D.C. Professor Kent is the Interim Vice Dean for Education and Academic Affairs and also Director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Prior to SAIS, Professor Kent also served as a special advisor to the US ambassador to Japan and also the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and also as professor at the Princeton.
Professor you have done a lot of study on Asia. You’ve lived in Asia. You have written books about Eurasia, and also you have spent a lot of time in China. What’s your take on Asia’s return to the main global economic scene and political as well? And what do you see of the US? This system was largely designed by the U.S. But can the US now, like China’s leader said, “the world is big enough and the Pacific is big enough”, can we really accommodate the two biggest Pacific countries. And also when you include the EU, can we all live peacefully in this world? Connectivity is probably the next biggest move in the global economy. What’s your point on that?
Kent Calder: I certainly agree with the point which Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani has just made. And I’ve looked through the book. I certainly recommend the book to viewers. I myself for years agreed very much that we have a global transformation underway. The first book that I did while I was together with Roy Hofheinz at Harvard University back in 1982, The East Asia Edge. We were talking also about a global transformation. About the revival once again of the world that exactly as he mentioned. Asia had been at the center historically and that world after the important and creative interlude of the industrial revolution and many of the difficulties since. We are returning to an earlier era. Of course, I do believe that there’s a key role for the United States. It’s a key power today and it will continue. I believe there are fundamental strengths like America’s technology, food supply, energy supply and creativity. There are many enduring strengths that will continue to give it a role, but the world that we will live in certainly has many characteristics of the world that Ambassador Mahbubani is laying out in his book. I can remember visiting Shenzhen in 1978 and coming out of the station and there was virtually nothing there. And then just before the pandemic, I was back in Shenzhen again. And then it was the home of much of China’s great technology and skyscrapers. It’s already a huge city. I could hardly believe the transformation. I see this time and time again as I moved to the cities of Asia. I’ve seen really when I was a boy in Hong Kong when I was eight, and then going back and seeing how different they have been. And Singapore, of course, you haven’t mentioned Singapore in detail but certainly it’s an extraordinary place as well. I’ve written about that.
I was glad to see Kishore mentioning in his discussion of the rise of Asia, and Japan in the remarkable story of Japan’s transformation of going back to Meiji. Of course there were dimensions that the world regrets and Japan regrets as well, the militarism and all that. Certainly, the important, potentially constructive role that Japan can play in this major transformation in world affairs. We keep drawing the dichotomy of Asia and the West, fundamentally in the sense that Kishore has talked about that, talking about the huge share of mankind, which is outside the West. This is certainly the case. I do think a piece of this transformation – and I’m sure Professor Brown will come back to this also, – the important transformations across the continent of Eurasia. China’s rise to me is really a remarkable thing that shows it is right at the heart of this global transformation. But no doubt it’s also been magnified by the collapse in the early 1990s of the Soviet Union. The transformation more broadly of the continent at the end of the Cold War created a different Europe and the extension of the European Union and others like NATO and so on, considerably to the East and deepening ties in the last decade across the continent between particularly China and Germany, but with the AIIB and so on, at an important point with Britain. There are certainly complexities. But the transformation of many parts of the world, not only Asia also have to do with this significant global transformation that’s underway.
I do hope as we move to the future. I think that it means exactly, what Ambassador Mahbubani has pointed out. It means a world which certainly is not unipolar and the bipolar dimensions, the United States and China certainly together have important roles, but there’s tremendous instability as we have recently seen in that dynamic. I certainly hope for a world in which China and the United States can have a more stable and constructive relationship. But I think that is in the context of exactly what Professor Mahbubani mentioned, namely, of a broader multilateralism that recognizes the role of other major global powers. Also the transnational dimension, entities beyond nation-states and states that understand the broader system exactly like Singapore and certainly others states, understand the system as a whole and don’t have a stake in some form of hegemony. I think all of those things are going to be crucial to the future, and I look forward to our discussion today.
“A more adequate narrative” for China is urgently needed
Wang Huiyao: Thank you Kent, I think you’ve been outlining all those witnesses of what has been happening in Asia, China, Singapore, and Japan. You are the expert on Asia in the US and you have been actually witnessing all that. This has been the big development out of Asia in the last several decades, but how does the world view it? How can we mix that together with the world development and then peacefully accept each other? It does not seem to be a big challenge since China and the US had these trade fixtures in the last number of years and now we are still having this bipolar world taking shape.
So perhaps I’ll have Professor Kerry Brown come in as well. I would like to introduce Professor Kerry Brown, he’s a Professor of Chinese studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London and also he’s a former diplomat and also worked in the China section of the Foreign Commonwealth Office and also worked here in the UK Embassy in Beijing. You have lived in China and in Mongolia for two years, too. You have written many books. Your new book, China through European Eyes is coming out in May and we’re really looking forward to that. After hearing to what Kishore and Kent has just said, what’s your take about this important growing relation of Asia and how the world can get along Including China. What’s your view on those issues?
Kerry Brown: Thank you very much. I am great privileged to be here with two distinguished speakers, colleagues and experts. In the United Kingdom at the moment, we’re mostly obsessed by whether our esteemed Prime Minister partied much last year or not. I am afraid that lifting our heads to look at bigger issues is a bit of a luxury, because I mean this is an important issue. I’ve got two comments. The first is really about what the outcome might be, and the second is how did we get to where we are now.
Professor Mahbubani talked about the Asian Century. It’s kind of like an equilibrium. It would be good if we had a century where everyone felt they were the winner, a human century as it were. In a recent book on existential problems facing humanity, an Oxford-based futurologist Toby Ord didn’t mention China once. He mentioned climate change, nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence, pandemics, and meteors clashing into the earth, which is somewhat unlikely, but he didn’t mention China. Yet we have got to the situation where China almost obsesses a large number of our political elite in Europe and particularly in America and where even saying that we need to have dialogue has become a difficult thing sometimes, and that seems a strange situation to end up in as Professor Calder has said. It’s not like we have just arrived at a moment when China is prominent. This has been happening for 40 years. Despite all of the evidence and the economic indicators and all of the accumulation of different very strong signs that China is becoming much more significant, suddenly there’s this extraordinary panic. I find that puzzling. An example is the very odd story of a lady of Chinese heritage in the UK who has been accused of trying to influence politicians here from our domestic security MI5. If one looks at this story, it’s very hard to work out what the story is. People try to influence politicians, sometimes politicians try to be influenced. If we have a problem, it’s the funding of politics and political parties, particularly in the UK, probably in America, and that seems to be more important than whether a particular person is trying to have influence. Because in this case, I wouldn’t say it was a very successful outcome.
When we look at the really strange, panicky, and weird situation at the moment. I do remember about 13 years ago during the great economic crisis when Chinese investments sort of first really started to appear in London, and there was a lot of discussion in the media about how China was going to buy up the world. Of course that didn’t happen. What I do remember at that time were many people who were interviewed about “should we be worried about Chinese investment” saying very strongly that this was not an issue because we set the rules in our own environments. About 13 years ago, Chinese investment first started to appear in Europe and I remember at the time that the position was that we should not be worried about this because our rules and regulations were strong enough to deal with this new phenomena. That confidence seems to have gone, particularly here and in America and in Australia. There is this odd story of how China is a very strong threat to our values, our systems. It seems to go a long way beyond the evidence. It seems to make China into a problem which is a different kind of problem to what it might be. This is not about Asia. Particularly it’s about China.
I suppose the final thing that I have to say is that what really puzzles me in this situation we’re in now is for Europeans, China and Asia are not new. We have been interacting for 500 or 600 years. We have a long history. Henry just referred to a book coming out this year. It’s actually not my book. It’s a collection of the key documents by major European figures over the last 500 years about China. These are not China experts. They are major intellectual figures, Leibniz, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Marx, Hegel, Max Weber, Bertrand Russell, Roland Butt, very significant figures who wrote about China. The pattern that you get over that 500 years is broadly two narratives, two stories. On the one hand, to idealize China, and the other to be fearful and demonize it. Leibniz and Voltaire, I suppose represents the idolization. They regarded China with its Confucian meritocratic system as a valid alternative for what Europeans were doing at the time in the enlightenment. That has continued down to the present day. The other hand, figures like Montesquieu wrote of China as being an oriental despotic place that we shouldn’t copy. In the narratives that we have available, at least in Europe, and it seems to be place in America and Australia too, I don’t see that fundamental structure has changed. It’s either to idealize to look at China as some enormous trade and economic opportunity, or to regard it as a huge political and geopolitical threat.
There are two problem with that to conclude. The first is if you regard China in particular, another partner in Asia too, as such major problems, how are we going to have a global system to confront the existential problems I talked about earlier, which don’t recognize and respect country boundaries. Secondly, with these very extreme narratives, we don’t have the tools in our media, in our politics, in our public discourse and debate to deal with what is clearly a very complicated situation. We are trying to use pre-Newtonian physics to deal with a quantum era. This is very disastrous. Finally, we’ve had the kind of introduction of relativity into physics, we certainly need it into geopolitics. I don’t see why we are still haunted by storylines that were put in place 500 years ago, that have not been radically contested. And I think that that is an urgent job. It’s a job we have to do together to create a more adequate story and a more adequate narrative for clearly an enormously challenging period that we’re all moving into. Thank you.
Wang Huiyao: Thank you Kerry. That’s a fascinating discussion. You’ve been discussing all those historical views on China but also your personal observations about this dichotomy and contradictory that we are in. On the one hand Asia and China are rising, but on the other hand, the world particularly Western countries do not accept that. So there’s quite a bit of contradiction there. What I think is that Asia for the last half a century has been economically taking off. Japan and the four Tigers, and then China. ASEAN is also a marvelous success story like Kishore Mahbubani has written in 2017 on ASEAN Miracle. I remember we had that book’s publication event in the Beijing University. I was there together with you. But politically China, probably some ASEAN countries as well, are not really accepted by the West. So what do you think? Asia economically is doing well. We will continue to do well and we will probably become the economic center of the world in the next half a century, yet politically and also ideologically as Kerry mentioned – how we can really find a good narrative to describe them? I think that the Asian 21st century is a great start, but how can we really reconcile the differences between the East and the West and how we can accept each other. That really is the key. So Kishore, do you have any response to that?
“The imperative to cooperate has become very strong and very powerful.”
Kishore Mahbubani: Thank you. First of all, thank both Ken Calder and Kerry Brown for their excellent presentations. I think they’ve added a lot to the discussion. I think your question gets to the heart of the issue that we have to deal with which in some ways also Kerry Brown touched upon. We live in a world in which there are many immediate pressing global challenges. I’m glad that Kerry Brown mentioned this Oxford professor who was listing the problems in the world, that China was not on the list of the problems. It was climate change, pandemics, and we can name all of them. The challenge we have is that there are two imperatives coming to clash in the 21st century.
So the first imperative, which I think is the dominant imperative is that the world has shrunk. All of us, 7.8 billion people, in the past when we live in 193 separate countries was like living in 193 separate boats with captains and crews of each boat. Now the world has shrunk, and the 7.8 billion people are now living in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. And if you are in cabins on the same boat, there’s no point taking care of your cabin if the boat is going to sink because of climate change, or pandemics and so on. The imperative to cooperate has become very strong and very powerful. Logically if human beings were the most intelligent species on planet earth. That’s what they should be doing. But unfortunately the 21st century, another imperative is coming to play, which is the 2,000 year rule of geopolitics, an iron law of geopolitics, which states that whenever the world’s number one emerging power, which today is China, is about to overtake the world’s number one power, which today is the United States, the world’s number one power always pushes down the world’s number one emerging power. That’s what my book Has China Won? is all about. That’s also the book that you kindly arranged the translation in Beijing, China.
These are the two conflicting narratives that are hitting humanity. There’s one imperative pushing us to cooperate. There’s one imperative pushing the two great powers to engage in a major contest. In my book I devoted a chapter to what I call the 6 Billion People, because out of the 7. 8 billion people, 1. 4 billion people live in China, and 330 million people live in the US. There are still 6 billion people outside. The solution is that it’s very important for the 6 billion people outside to try and persuade the US and China to press the pause button on the geopolitical contest, and focus on the common global challenges. So I hope that the more voices like the one that Professor Kerry Brown referred to this professor from Oxford, saying, ‘Hey, humanity has got much, much more pressing challenges to deal with, and that’s what we should focus on.’
You mentioned ASEAN. If you could talk privately and secretly to the ASEAN leaders, and ASEAN make up 650 million people by the way. It’s a significant group. Their wish is for the United States and China to really stop this contest and help them deal with the more pressing challenges that they face which is COVID-19, climate change, poverty, the need for development and so on and so forth. So I hope that there’ll be more voices like the one that Professor Kerry Brown referred to, speaking out and saying that let’s press the pause button and everything else. Let’s focus on global cooperation.
Wang Huiyao: Thank you Kishore, you really outlined this well. In the past 70 years the Western countries has taken the lead and now the Eastern countries has really caught up. The two imperatives as you said got into a crossroad and then confront each other. We are in some kind of trade war, tech war, decoupling and all those things. So how can we solve that?
Professor Kent Calder, you live in the US you see this happen. This year actually marks 50 years of Nixon’s visit to China. The China-US joint communique was issued 50 years ago. Now we have seen this tide situation across strait with Taiwan for example. The United States has actually sanctioned over 600 Chinese companies already. China has actually sanctioned on back for the US. As Professor Mahbubani said, the number one power really wants to push down the number one rising power. There is conflict somehow there.
But do we have a chance to work together now? Because of this pandemic, we lost such a golden opportunity to work together. Also, the US is talking about the “Build Back Better World”, the B3W, and China has the BRI as you are a BRI expert too. Infrastructure has become the biggest common denominator of the world. Everybody recognized that the infrastructure is crumbling in some countries and is largely needed in the developing countries. EU announced the €300 Billion European Gateways. Can we really work together so that we can really set aside these differences?
Kent Calder: You made very important points. I think the first thing that I would say is that we need to be realistic. There are some areas of deepening conflict, for example, in electronics technology, the civilian sectors, and defense related sectors actually, technologically in areas like artificial intelligence for example, possibly 5G and so on. They are coming technologically closer together and so there are some natural tensions that arise for that reason.
That said, I think the implication of that is that there needs to be negotiations. There needs to be more dialogue to deal with that particular dimension. Additionally, I think that there is a danger in this kind of an era of transition in some ways. There were even some parallels in the earlier transition from the height of the British Empire to an era of a larger and stronger American role in the world, misperceptions by Richard Neustadt – paranoid and misperceptions and so on. And professor Mahbubani also talked about this at times. This is easy to happen in a period of transition. I think more dialogue and even some formal negotiations are needed. I think we could be headed into eras just as the US and the Soviet Union had in an earlier age. Strategic dialogue between China and the United States, there are those dimensions, but let me put those aside for a moment because I think the more important one flowing from our discussion here is as Professor Brown put it this should be a human century. This should be an era as Professor Mahbubani said also of globalization. China’s leader of course was mentioning these things in Davos in his earlier speech which I thought was eloquent in Davos two or three years ago on a related things. This is a global era. There are reasons to think, if we look to the intermediate and long-term future, to be more optimistic. Demography has not been mentioned here. The West has grayed over time and the broad and non-Western World of course, has a much younger population, particularly places like Africa and South Asia and so on. Even China, certainly Japan already, and Korea is beginning that there will be a time, 20 years hence or 15 years hence, when the demographic of China change. The larger role of senior citizens in society will become more important, which points to one thing, which I as a faculty member of Johns Hopkins University, which is very much in the health care and the medical area, that I can’t help thinking about. We’ve been significant as well in the Coronavirus Resource Center and trying to understand this Pandemic, which is before us.
I think healthcare is really a key area, especially if we look to a 10-year or 20-year time frame. Those that have gone before can certainly have lessons for those coming. Japan in that sense, has some things to say for the West, possibly for China, for other countries. Regarding the problems and challenges of healthcare and what to do. We need cooperative research. It seems to me as a tragedy that we have so much of the world population which is not yet vaccinated against COVID-19. China has certainly played an important role with the vaccines. The United States has developed some, which I think it’s fair to say, impressive vaccines as well. And then there’s a European dimension to this. There’s a lot more we can do on the Covid issue, potentially cooperatively. This is in the interest of all of our nations because as we’ve already seen with the Omicron variant coming out of South Africa or the Delta variant coming from India that the whole world can be threatened potentially by the variants in COVID-19. We need better cooperation in that area as well as other parts of Healthcare.
Let me say just a word about infrastructure because you mentioned it and I know that we agree on this point. In my supercontinent book, which I’m gratified and it will be published soon in China. I talk about the infrastructure needs of the whole continent in detail. And of course, China has played a pioneering role. There’s no question for China, the belt and road initiative is an astute grand strategy. It also has broader global implications that I think on the whole are positive. I develop an idea, distributive globalism. Essentially, rather than thinking about zero sum conflictual regulatory ties, you do this we don’t do this on say trade policy, it’s far more constructive to distribute resources. Of course, every problem cannot be solved that way, I believe there are certain areas where we have to be realistic, but infrastructure is not a zero-sum area, it’s a plus-sum area. Many of the initiatives that China has made are important. You mentioned Build Back Better, also European Gateway. I think the major parts of the world understand very well. Singapore also played a significant role in relating to infrastructure. Even thinking we have the AIIB of course. We have the development finance bank in the United States. There are a lot of new institutions. Would it make sense, and I think you have spoken about this also to think about a global infrastructure fund or global institutions, as well as healthcare promotion institutions from a broad multilateral point of view? I think we need to be thinking outside the box in terms of some of the new cooperative institutions in the area of healthcare and infrastructure.
Wang Huiyao: Thank you Kent. I think your idea of distributive globalism is also a very interesting idea and actually now the world is badly in need of infrastructure. I just talked to your colleague, also a good friend of mine, David Lampton not too long ago. He wrote a book Rivers of Iron. It’s about this China-Laos railway that just recently opened last month. China is starting to connect the ASEAN countries already by railway now. I think we have to find big things to work on and big hope to head for, otherwise we’re going to lose confidence of build up the relations, and that is really bad. So we have to work in climate change, infrastructure, and pandemic particularly, which is an urgent issue for China, the US, and the EU. And the whole world needs to work together.
Now I’d like to turn to Kerry again. We’ve had quite a few dialogues on China. We see these two narratives. For example the US is emphasizing the American style democracy and we see China is also holding democracy forums. Actually, the rise of Asia and China economically is fine. It’s only the ideology and also the government style, particularly the value that the West seems to have problems, particularly on China. So how do you think we can reconcile this? Because we see some challenging problems on the western democracy too. Like what happened on the Capitol Hill on January 6th. But democracy system works in China. We have meritocracy. We have consultative democracy. We have consistency that we’ve been working from one 5-year-plan to another 5-year-plan, with all the modern decision-making supporting system. The system can be as effective as Western democracy or even more, just compare the KPI of all the performance of countries.
So what do you think? How can we really make peace with these two narratives or maybe how to accept each other, particularly for the West to accept China on this value and ideological issues, which you are very familiar with?
The same kind of challenges lie ahead for all the countries and fighting over ideology doesn’t help
Kerry Brown: Thank you. That’s a tough question. If I were to be extremely flippant. I would just leave this question for the next generation, or two to three generations. I think, a bit like Deng Xiaoping said about certain political issues like Taiwan, he said, just leave it for the next generation or the generation after that. Because if you were to have someone arrive on this planet from Mars, who knew nothing but could communicate with humans, I think they would work out pretty quickly that there’s one group broadly around the United States is the most powerful, that has one view. There’s another group broadly around China who is the biggest economy, but not necessarily very politically aligned with China. These groups don’t agree. That’s all you could say. They don’t get on and they don’t agree. And they don’t need to try to pretend they get on. I think it’s important to stop trying to pretend.
Because we’ve got enough issues that dictate how we are going to behave. Climate change doesn’t care about values. Pandemics don’t really care about values. Government responses to the pandemic have not really varied massively whether they were democracies or non-democracies, whatever system. Everyone has struggled. They’ve taken very different routes. China’s route has been one. The European route has been another. They’ve all had some challenges and they’ve had some successes finding the vaccine, for instance, in different places. It was obviously an important thing. So no one really wins in this. No one loses. No one wins. We all are kind of on a flat earth here and I think that’s really important that we give up on this idea of there being a conclusive debate about which values are preferential. There are things that work and that don’t work, and big issues now are going to dictate what we need to do. We are wasting a lot of time at the moment arguing about these unresolvable values issues. When we clearly have evidence every year of our climate being a problem, and Europe and Germany last year had floods that killed many people. China had floods. It also led to the fatality. So this is very obvious and the same problem.
I think COP26 last October is a good example, because beyond all of the arguments about who attended and who didn’t attend, actually, the end result could not, and did not solve the problem, but it gave a good basis. I think it’s really good to look at COP26 and say it is much better to have an agreement like that, even though it’s not perfect and it’s got many problems, but it gives us at least something to work on. And without that, what would we do? And although there’s going to be many arguments about how to get rid of fossil fuels, I think personally, it’s likely that China will move more quickly, but it clearly doesn’t want to sign up to binding agreements at the moment before it knows what’s going to happen. But it’s in China’s interest as it’s in the interests of Europe and America to urgently do something about this problem. We’re all pretty rational.
I wonder if we were just to pause. We should have a week when we don’t have social media, when we don’t have media at all. We just have a week of silence, global silence. And we kind of work out what really matters in that time. I respect the views of others here too. It doesn’t matter if you’re in China or Europe or America because you want a good climate, clean air, clean water, and prosperity. Finally, the very strange thing about domestic politics in Europe, in America, and in China at the moment is actually that they are quite similar. Britain is struggling with inequality and leveling up. America obviously is very big issues of the impact of the pandemic on different groups and how unequal that is. Common prosperity in China, as I understand it, is also about trying to level up, because there has been big inequalities during the reform period with some people gaining and some people losing. So there’s a very similar agenda here.
Finally, if we look at the kinds of economic challenges that the pandemic and other things are bringing, it’s going to be a challenging time for everyone. Growth is going to be really challenged. There’s no one that’s going to come out of this very easily. So I am interested in how politicians in particular, Europe, are going to be able to sort of maintain this strong conviction. That we are in such a luxurious and strong position that we can completely ignore our economic interests and say we’re not going to deal with anyone who doesn’t agree with us. When in fact, economically, we’re going to urgently need to find new partners and sources for growth. And in the UK in particular, because of Brexit, we have obviously complicated our relations with our prime economic partners in Europe. The whole idea was, that I thought, to have a global Britain narrative where we had stronger relations with China in particular. It’s the world’s second biggest economy. And yet in fact, we see this complete ambiguity where we know that we need to have this stronger economic relationship because China is not a big investor in the UK and not our biggest trading partner by a long way. On the other hand, politically we still think we have the luxury of having bigger arguments about issues which our politicians mostly don’t really have much knowledge to deal with. Not many of them. And Secondly wouldn’t really be able to resolve if they were given 10, 20 or 30 years. This is a real odd priority.
So I think we have to really be honest with ourselves in this. I think that’s the most important thing for policymakers to stop giving themselves the illusion of choice or many things we can’t dictate what we can do. We can just understand how we’re standing and what we’re planning to do a bit better, but I don’t think that we can give ourselves such ambitious ideas as to try and change the views of others about their values, that clearly isn’t feasible and it certainly hasn’t worked so far. I don’t see any reason why it will work in the future. Thank you.
Wang Huiyao: Exactly, so you don’t think this changing value can help or maybe influence each other. But why China was constantly pressured on all those issues like human right or issues of democracy and things like that? Because the Western countries were persistent on China to change some of those positions. You’re right, those are difficult. As Professor Mahbubani mentioned in his book, from year one to the 18th Century, China was dominant among Asian civilizations. It had the largest GDP in the world. But for the last 200 years, China has been falling behind. Now we’re talking about the rise and return of Asia and China. Can the world accept that? How can the world accept that? What are the things that both sides need to do?
I am going to ask the same questions to Kishore now. What can we do about this rightful rise of Asia and China? Even though they have different values in different countries, even in Asia. Asia as a whole does not have a unified value itself either. It’ a diversified group. But at least economically there is integration. We have RCEP, getting effective this year on January 1st. It’s the largest free trade agreement in the world now. And we have CPTPP, which also has Asian countries in it. We hope that China will be busy building up all those economic alliances where China has also confronted by those military alliances and secure alliances like AUKUS or QUAD and things like that. What can be done?
Also, Kerry mentioned climate change and the climate change doesn’t care about values. But China on this front actually developed the most advanced technology on the clean energy vehicle, automobile. China is now the largest solar power producer, the largest wind power producer, the largest hydro power producer. China is really doing fast on those fronts as well. And it can benefit the whole world if we really recognize each other’s rightful existence. How can we do that? Perhaps Professor Mahbubani can give some further thoughts on that.
Kishore Mahbubani: Thank you Henry. As usual, you raised very good challenging questions. When this session began, I was asking myself that “what will be the outcome of this discussion among the three of us”. We have one scholar from United Kingdom, one scholar from United States, and you in China, and me here. We could have ended up frankly this discussion with very divergent points of views. But I have so far noticed in most of the points that have been made, a great convergence of use. For example, when Kent Calder says that the infrastructure is not a zero-sum game, but a positive-sum game. Frankly if America builds a road, it boosts economic productivity, when China builds a road, it boosts economic productivity. It’s a positive-sum game, so both sides should build more roads, and not see this as a zero-sum game at all. And similarly I think the key point that Kerry Brown is emphasizing is about the pressing global challenges that we face and those are actually much more important and we should all be coming together to deal with that. So if people were listening to this discussion, they would end up saying that “hey, we can feel more optimistic about the future of the world”.
But as you know also there are voices that are discordant and that’s why I’m looking forward to seeing very much the book by Kerry Brown on traditional European voices on China, that those which idealized China and those who demonized China. That is actually a very strong powerful constituency, especially in the United States, who are demonizing China today. Let’s be very clear about that. It’s a very powerful constituency, and unfortunately there’s a bipartisan consensus of it in Washington D.C. It has a very strong element of it in the media also, and the net result of it all is that, sadly, even though it is the West that created the whole idea of trying to arrive at understanding through reasoning and scientific analysis, reasoning and scientific analysis has been thrown out of the window when it comes to trying to understand China in today’s political context. Especially in the United States, but I think as Kerry Brown is also hinting to some extent, in UK and Australia, too. And the tragedy here is that there’s absolutely no reason for that to be a clash, even on values between China and the West, or China and America, because China is not exporting its values to the West. The West can keep its values. You can remain democratic. You can preserve human rights. China is not trying to change any western society at all. And China as we know in Southeast Asia has actually stopped exporting communism from the time Deng Xiaoping came to Southeast Asia and met with Mr. Lee Kuan Yew and they agreed that Southeast Asian nations would choose their own political systems. And at the end of the day, the best thing that the western societies could do is to say that “ok, let history decide which are the best political systems” and time will tell.
In my book, I say that if this really is a black and white contest between democracy in America and authoritarian systems in China, then the West can relax, it’s going to win. But if you look functionally at American society, American democracy as I document in great detail, has become a plutocracy. And that’s why there’s so much unhappiness among the bottom 50% in America. And Chinese societies become a meritocracy, and the Chinese Communist Party is banished to really get remarkably the best minds in China to serve in the Chinese Communist Party, and it produces very intelligent public policy solutions including on climate change. So how you define the debate is also very important. So the best thing you can do, frankly, let’s just press the pause button on all these disputes and focus on what’s really important today. I think this is what Kent Calder was emphasizing, and this is what Kerry Brown was emphasizing. Issues of climate change are standing at us in our face. Every year that we waste is very dangerous, and we should be focusing on common human challenges and I’ll be very happy to call it the human century if you all agree. We come together 7.8 billion human beings. Let’s forget our American identity, our European identity or Asian identity. Just remember that, we are all an endangered species on planet Earth, that would be a fantastic outcome from this discussion.
“The multilateral context together with an attention to economic shared prosperity and issues where we do have common views like infrastructure, and healthcare are quite crucial.”
Wang Huiyao: Yes, thank you, Kishore. Actually when those tycoons of Tesla or Amazon, flew into outer space – when they looked down on Earth, they would feel that in the whole global village, we’re all human beings. We have no differences at all.
You talked about plutocracy which reminds me that U.S. is now governed by the 1%, and for the 1%. It’s true that the middle class for the last 30 years as you stated in the book has not gone up anywhere in its income, whereas China has been very careful on that. After China’s current leader came up, for the last 10 years, he tackled the last 100 million extreme poverty, the most difficult part, and totally eliminated that. That’s really a big achievement. And now they are calling for the common prosperity, which basically is now looking at the 300 million migrant workers in the cities, like fast delivery boys or DiDi drivers and things like that. But now in the US, as you said, the bottom 50% hasn’t really gone up. I notice that the 1% of Wall Street, also the top 10 tycoon of the Wall Street. Their wealth has hugely increased even during the pandemic. Yet the American multinational businesses, the making-business-worldwide are not benefiting probably much of the Rust Belt and Midwest, and things like that. So as I was talking to Martin Wolf, he said that global and politics become local. They keep voting anti-globalization politicians into the Congress in Washington, and bashing China and scapegoating China is the only successful surviving strategy for politicians. So how we can really turn that? China is trying to help. China already provided two billion doses of vaccine to the developing world and yet China is blamed in the West very often. So as you said there’s a group of people demonizing China. How can we change that? Professor Calder, you are living in the US, and how can we do on both sides? Probably China also has to get better on its narratives and get better explanations, but this economic globalization has really created such a big challenge. China is taking a lot of blame now for that. The trade war would be an example.
So I think understanding a vision for the kind of world that we need is important. In that vision, some appreciation and increased information about the important things that China has done. Some attention to the issue of dialogue with the middle class. Increasing the understanding of our working class, which I think is politically somewhat pivotal in the United States. Even though their actual direct conflicts with China are far less than is often thought. So it’s a complex question of improving relations. But I think the multilateral context together with an attention to economic shared prosperity and issues where we do have common views like infrastructure, and healthcare are quite crucial.
Wang Huiyao: Thank you, Kent, you mentioned Angus Deaton, the Nobel Laureate from Princeton. I had a dialogue with him a few months ago and he impressed me very much with his very solid research that he actually studied America. For example, the life expectancy of the US is dropping one year or two now than before whereas China’s life expectancy is only a year or two apart from the US. There is a lot of things that make his work very impressive.
Kerry Brown: The integrated review which was produced by the United Kingdom as a foreign policy document last April tried to look at all of our foreign policy issues and spell out a bit what the global Britain kind of story was. I think it’s a good document. It’s probably one of the best ones that this government has produced, and you know there sort of spells out this idea of a relationship specifically about China being collaborative, competitive, and then adversarial. That’s the same structure as the United States. I think Anthony Blinken used the same kind of division in his speech last year. And it’s the same in European Union documents.
Wang Huiyao: Thank you, there is always economic corporate and integration, but the difference will remain.
Finally we have about 6 minutes left before we conclude. I think we had a very fascinating and stimulating discussion. We talked about the Asian 21st century, the return and the rise of Asia and China. But now the final question I’d like to ask the three of you, because Kent just said the next 10 years is going to be very challenging. What do you think of when would we reach a new equilibrium, an equilibrium that we can peacefully co-exist? We won’t bash each other so much. And finally the West would accept China as a grown up and treats it as equal. I talked to Joseph Nye and he said maybe by 2035, we will see another new world that is mutually acceptable. So Kishore what do you think? We talked about the return of Asia and the rise of China. When would the world accept this reality? How long do you think it’s going to take? Maybe five years, ten years, fifteen years, or twenty years. That would be really interesting to know those issues. Kishore, probably you could start. We will have two minutes for each of you.
Kishore Mahbubani: Since we only have 6 minutes. I’ll give a 1 or 2 minutes response. First I want to completely agree with Kent Calder when he said that let’s be realistic. The thesis in my book Has China Won? is that the next 10 years there will be very rough relations between China and the United States. and I take that as a given. But at the same time, I think after you come out of the storm. There will be a big storm. There will be a realization that China’s rise cannot be stopped. The return of Asia cannot be stopped. And at the end of the day if you asked me what is going to decide everything? That would be data.
So if the IMF shows that China’s GNP is now number one and United States’ GNP is number two, that’ll change the whole picture dramatically. The profound changes happening in the world in terms of economic weight and power just end with 2 statistics. In the year 2009, China’s retail goods market was $1.8 trillion. United States was $4 trillion, more than doubled than that of China. By 2019, China had grown to $6 trillion with the United States at $5.5 trillion, smaller than China. So this is what is going to move the markets and then going to move the world.
I’ll give you another piece of data that everyone should also know. In the year 2000, Japan’s economy was 8 times the size of ASEAN. Today, Japan’s economy is only 1.5 times the size of ASEAN. By 2030, the ASEAN economy will be bigger than Japan’s. You can see how the world is being changed by these incredible economic shifts of power. By 2030, the data will show very clearly that power has shifted to Asia and I think that’s when people will say that “ok, let’s start making pragmatic realistic adjustments”. I want to emphasize that neither China nor Asia wants to dominate the world. They want to work with the rest of the world.
Kent Calder: As always, I find Professor Mahbubani’s work stimulating. He’s been one of the most important commentators on this transition that we have now. I like his new book as I like everything else more or less that he’s done. I very rarely disagree with him, but there’s just one small cautionary note that I think we should introduce here, namely, demography is at work. I was a Japan specialist, I’m particularly sensitive to this, but we should be aware of straight-line projections. I have no doubt that we are coming into a new era where the non-Western world, once again, will move to preeminence similarly to what was historically true. There will be a different balance within the non-Western world. And demography will play a role in this. I have thought for many years that the grand strategy of China is a student that many of the initiatives that have been done have been right for the present and the future. But the demography is going to play a role in balancing. Japan has declined economically. European growth slowed down. American growth slowed down. At some point, within the non-Western World, China certainly will be the largest and the most significant but China’s growth is going to slow also. And I think actually that will help to produce what we’re all projecting of the decade, hence greater stability in international relations. Asia will be preeminent, but there will be a different balance within Asia than we have seen in the past. That too, I think is in the end will turn out to be a positive thing. It takes us back where we have been saying all along, cooperative projects, to make it easier in the short run infrastructure and health. And to negotiate and have China better understood during this period of difficulty that we’re in now.
Kerry Brown: I think the work that you’re doing, Professor Mahbubani, is important. Because I think in Europe and America people have not quite got it, this fundamental change that’s been happening for a long time, but it’s now really real. I think we should be less sensitive with ourselves. We have this big kind of worry when we hear that there might be a different kind of power, but it’s not the sort of power that we fear it to be. There are other challenges. But I think the ones that we’re worrying about are not the ones that are worth worrying about. It’s something very different. It’s a world of complexity that we’re moving into. The complexity is the problem, not the idea of a new power coming and dictating what everyone’s going to do. That would be easier to deal with. But we’re looking at a lot of complexity. So I think the messages of your books are ones that are obviously challenging for people to listen to in Europe and America. But we have to listen to them. Otherwise, events will simply overtake us and that in the last couple of years has sometimes been what’s look like it’s going to happen. So we have to make sure that we get on top of things again, particularly somewhat worried and anxious feelings and so I do appreciate the work that you’ve done and the dialogue we’ve had today. It’s very important. Thank you.
Wang Huiyao: Thank you to all three distinguished guests very much. I think we are almost coming to the end, but I think we had a fascinating discussion. We talk about this new Book The Asian 21st century, and also the return of Asia and then the future of Asia. Also its implications for the world.
Actually two weeks from now, we will have a Beijing Winter Olympics. Fourteen years later, after the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing become the only city that hosts both winter and Summer Olympics. In 2008 we see China initially embraced globalization. China initially takes part on the global stage and then embrace globalization. China actually emerged from the world scene and then that is kind of a welcome by the international community. Then we see the 2008 financial crisis which really symbolized the rise of Asia and China probably in the last 14 years.
Again, the Winter Olympics is another occasion that China is coming to embrace the world. So we hope that this winter Olympics will still serve as a great reunion of the world. There are so many athletes and country representatives who will come to China, even during the pandemic. So we hope that we will still have a lot of dialogue. We still have a lot of exchanges, a lot of sportsmanship. I really like the new motto for the Olympics this year since they actually used it at the Tokyo Olympics: Faster, higher stronger, and together. Together is really important. We felt really thankful for all of you taking the time to talk to us and my staff was telling me there are 150,000 people watching us online. It’s really fascinating. We will continue to dialogue. Will bring down the differences. We hope the next ten, twenty, and thirty years will be a peaceful time, and let’s all work together. So thank you very much and thank all our audiences and thank our staff. Thank you, goodbye.
Note: The above text is transcribed from an audio recording and only serves as a reference for the discussion.
