 You're all very welcome. My name is Paulie Murphy. Could I urge you for a start to follow me and switch your poems to seven? I should tell you also that you are free to tweet on the handle s-i-i-e-a. That means I don't know. We're very fortunate today to have Professor Terry Brown with us. He has been here previously twice at least, which is one reason why we wanted him back, because we value his expertise. He's going to talk about the world according to Xi Jinping. We were talking before we came up about the change in the atmosphere in relation to Chinese relations with the West that I think we have all registered over the last five years, but especially over the last three years. I very well remember because Terry Brown remembers Nixon visited China in 1968, but after the change in China with Deng Xiaoping, Robert Zellick in 2005 spoke about having China as a responsible partner in the international system. I think things have moved on since then. Only March this year, the Commission of the European Union pronounced that the EU and China were systemic rivals as far as what they call governance is concerned. And somebody was mentioning downstairs a comment earlier this week by Martin Wolf, who talked about the problems posed by setting confrontation with China as the governing principle of our relations with China. This is, I think, certainly true. One of the problems is the extreme size of the Chinese phenomenon on the world scene. And at the center of it is Xi Jinping, of course, who has multiplied offices, not only Secretary-General of the Communist Party. He has also removed any time limits on his period in office and what is even more striking. He has brought it about that Xi Jinping thought has been assumed into the Chinese Constitution. This is the reason why we are particularly grateful to have Kerry Brown, who is director of the Lao Chi Chinese Institute in King's College London. He will speak about the world according to precisely Xi Jinping. Thank you. Great. I'll probably stand up. OK. Great. Thank you very much. It's good to be back here. How many of you have actually been to China? OK, so I'm talking to a group of people who probably know more than me, so I shall be brief then. So basically, I'll talk for about 20 minutes, and then it'll be good to hear your perspectives. So I'm going to do this because it's a huge subject. As the chair sort of said, China kind of factors into all sorts of things now. So I will sort of do this on a kind of very simple sort of model of 1, 2, 3, 4. And I will navigate through the issues I'm going to talk about for the next 20 or so minutes with that very simple kind of framework. It's always good to sort of think about China by starting from within. I mean, like anywhere, domestic politics are really important. And if you kind of think of what is the principal task of the Xi Jinping administration since 2012, 2013, what is the one thing that they have to achieve? Well, I think it's pretty simple. It is to make one party rule sustainable. And that is an amazingly important thing because it hasn't really happened elsewhere. The communist system in the USSR I think lasted for 74 years. You could argue that the DPRK North Korea is also making one party rule sustainable. But I mean, that's really one family rule. And so the system in China is really of a corporate party trying to make its rule perpetual, that it will not ever go away, that it would be a part of the sort of political reality of China forever. And so I think that's sort of the real core thing that you see in every word that Chinese leaders from Xi Jinping down say to make one party rule sustainable. It is the kind of heart of everything else, domestic and international policy. And when you kind of take these things and put them within a party rubric, they sort of make sense. So this is an extraordinary organization with 90 million members. And it has a sort of very distinctive ideology. Everything is with Chinese characteristics. It is really sort of indigenized, kind of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Xi Jinping thought, which has just been added a couple of years ago to the state constitution, all these iterations. But they are tools to make this organization, this institution, the Communist Party sustainable. And that has not been done anywhere else. So what is the number two, the two things that are kind of important to the party? So the Communist Party of China has a story. We're living in the ear of storytellers, politicians, I believe, principally are storytellers. And stories capture people's imaginations. They capture people's emotions. And everyone seems to be telling a story now. Although you could, and I promise I won't say this by name, you could say the story we're telling ourselves in the UK does involve a lot of sort of pigs flying. But that's a totally different thing. The story in China, I think there's two things that are really, really important about this story. There are two millennial, centennial goals. 2021, which is the time when the Communist Party of China celebrates its centenary. And then 2049, when the People's Republic of China celebrates its centenary. And these structure history, and they, I think, betray the fact that the party has firstly an idea of history which is of perpetual progress. And this philosophy of history is that it's always about tomorrow being better than today. It is always optimistic. Deng Xiaoping, I believe in the 1980s said, as a communist, he was always optimistic. And I think this optimism is shown by the fact that China believes that history is going to have a good outcome. And that these two centennial goals are the sort of big, big moments in which they can celebrate modernity with Chinese characteristics. Which means that China has come through a sort of terrifying modern history in which it has suffered very badly under colonization. It has suffered terribly in the Sino-Japanese War. And now it is finally on the cusp of grasping this great historic renaissance. And when you go around China, you can see these kind of characters that talk about the kind of great renaissance of the Chinese nation. So this is a sort of extraordinary resurrection, a national resurrection. And it's not remotely in the future, it's not a thousand years time, or 100 years time, it is two years time. It's kind of the 2021, the first goal. And so these are incredibly mobilizing. And so when people say, do Chinese people really believe in Marxism, Lenism, kind of these things? Well, probably not, but they certainly believe in that historic mission. And they believe that the party as a tool to deliver that is really, really kind of has use. And so I think that's what we really have to remember when we think of how often politically we've become this party of China, seems very alien. Why is it that Chinese people might be supportive of it? Well, the fact that it has kind of got China so close, or that's its sort of narratives, its story is that it's got China so close to this great moment, I think is very powerful. And that's why most people I believe do believe in that mission and that kind of sort of great national renaissance, whatever they might think ideologically. So these two goals really kind of give a structure to history and they kind of manifest the sort of positive idea of historic progress. But the second thing they do, which I think is important for the outside world to understand is they also show that this historical kind of vision is a moral one. That China's renaissance is something it is morally owed, that it was victimized and betrayed and bullied and pushed around in modern history and kind of treated unfairly. And that it is its moral right to have these sort of kind of moments of renaissance. And the 2021 and 2049 are part of a moral history, a sort of moral process. And therefore, in kind of contesting them or trying to stop them, the outside world is also kind of getting involved in these arguments of whether it kind of, in regards to China, is not allowed to have this moment of kind of moral renaissance. And so I think it kind of is a very complicated thing when we look at Chinese leaders talking about the renaissance of China, kind of this idea that it is morally owed these moments and that it feels that this is really a kind of great rectification after. It's very, very tragic and difficult history from the middle of the 19th century onwards in the Sino-Japanese War. In the middle of the last century. So that's the sort of two. Now the three, I suppose, that I'm going to talk about are structural issues because the rise of China involves profound structural readjustments to the world in which we live. And I think that there are three dimensions of those that everyone needs to really pay attention to. And they involve not just China but the way we look at China outside of the country. The first is that in modern history, until now we've never had to deal with a strong China. A strong China is a new phenomena. We are intensely, and I say that as Europeans or Americans, Australians, the outside world, its mindset is intensely used to and comfortable with a marginalized, largely victimized, largely remote China, which sort of inhabited a particular space and didn't really kind of have much global impact or reach. And the China we see today under Xi Jinping, particularly since 2012, is a strong-sounding China. And in fact, it is strong. I mean, its military expenditure is huge. Its economic imprint in the world, as we all know, is massive. It's the world's biggest exporter. It's the world's second biggest importer. It's most kind of economic indicator show that it is incredibly important. It is something like a fifth of the world's economy now, and it is likely sometime in the next decade and maybe even before to become the world's biggest economy. And so these are huge signs of China's strength. But one really has to wonder whether the world is actually used to thinking of China as a sort of strong power. I think our mindsets are still that this is gonna fail, that at some point it's gonna hit the skids that it's not going to really ever be kind of a truly strong modern nation. But as of today, you have to say that the likelihood is that it is becoming a powerful strong nation and it is fulfilling its dream of being kind of powerful and strong. So strong China is part of our geopolitical reality now and we need to kind of build it into our understanding of international affairs. The second is really about how China manifests its power. In modern history until recently, we have never had to deal with the naval China. And I mean in the very early period of the Ming dynasty with the Unicad, we had a kind of very brief period about 15 years and 1400s when China had a navy that reached the sort of eastern side of Africa and kind of archeologists have found parts, kind of of the goods that these navies sort of carried down to Indonesia, but that disappeared. And you would say that really in modern times until the 1980s China did not have any naval capacity at all. And suddenly under a general then Liu Huaching, China built kind of this navy, which is now in terms of vessels, the world's biggest. I mean, technologically still far behind the United States, but it has something like 500 different kinds of vessels. And so these are tangible manifestations of China's power. I mean, you can see them, you can see them in the high seas last week in Sydney Harbor, you know, three I think Chinese warships appeared. I mean, obviously as part of a planned visit, well, that's what the Prime Minister of Australia said, a part of an unexpected planned visit. I think that was his words, very strange. He's obviously still recovering from his unexpected victory in the election. So we'll grant him that little bit of verbal looseness. But I mean, you know, it's extraordinary. We had also a frigate come, I think to the UK last year from China. And so this is really new. And I guess the thing that the outside world has to work out really quickly is what does this mean? What does this manifestation of China's power mean? Is it really likely that the wars of the future are going to be fought on the high seas? I mean, is it just a distraction? I mean, some people would interpret this as a big, big distraction. This is a power which since 1979 has not had any conflict at all. I mean, it had a very brief conflict with Vietnam. Then it hasn't really had any international combat experience since the 1950s, really, in the Korean War. And so despite the fact that China has a big military, it's sort of not used it. It's not really kind of gone on the offensive. So is it that we are being haunted by a kind of manifestation of China's power that is actually not really where the action is? And that really where China's had most potency is in the virtual realm, where I mean, it's been incredibly effective, according to most analysis. It's kind of virtual ability to penetrate virtual space has been incredibly effective, very, very powerful. And therefore, as a sort of French analyst and writer about China said, China's power haunts, it doesn't act. It has a ghostly sort of presence, but it's not really easy to pin it down. And while we're kind of all busy staring at the kind of naval assets of these really where the things are going to happen. So a naval China and how we interpret that as a manifestation of China's power now is a really, really important and big thing. But the third aspect of these structural changes is the big one. It's the big, big, big one. And I'm afraid I'm going to have to use the V word, values. No one in Beijing or anywhere in the world knows what a world run according to Chinese values looks like. We are kind of finding out a little bit through the Belt and Road and other ideas, but we still really don't know what a world with this set of values is like. What are Chinese values? Well, we can get into very, very long and complicated conversations. The only two things I can say are Chinese leaders clearly believe that is such a thing as Chinese values. Xi Jinping has asserted the importance of observing these values and the importance of resisting Western values. So as a leader with a hugely influential position, he has taken that position. Just because of that, we have to somehow work out what he is resisting and what he is asserting. But I suppose secondly, we can understand this question that's been on the minds of Westerners really for 400 years since the Jesuits went to China really in the 16th and 17th century and what do Chinese people believe? And the answer to that has always been a very hybrid answer. Chinese values are hybrid. They are diverse. They're not easily encapsulated. They are the kind of three great teachings of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. And now they accommodate Marxism, Lenism, they accommodate Xi Jinping's thought, they accommodate capitalism. All of these things have got the little attachment with Chinese characteristics. And I think what that means is that this is a very hybrid and flexible worldview. And I guess that is really the heart of the problem. The West, with the Enlightenment values it has, are often kind of deeply wedded to the idea of the universal, the idea of these values morally and otherwise philosophically being universal and having a kind of principle of generality. And I think China contests that. It's the great dissenter. And because of the scale, because of the fact that it's in the position it's now in, we have to take this seriously. There is no evidence whatsoever that China is going to embrace Western political and other kinds of values. There are plenty of people in China who do find Western values very attractive, but I think they're in an open relationship with them. They don't really demand, they don't really give these values a lot of faithfulness and fidelity. They think that they're useful sometimes, but they're certainly particularly flexible in kind of embracing other sorts of values. And I think that is a very significant kind of different worldview. And I think it's one that America in particular is finding difficult to embrace and deal with. And I think that's really underneath all of the discussion of tariffs and sort of trade issues, the bedrock of the problems between the United States and China at the moment are about values. And it's very hard to find a easy policy language to talk about these because this is the realm of philosophers and cultural theorists and they're not really often involved in politics. And so alas, we have now kind of this whole discussion being led by more trade sort of interested political figures like Trump and others, but really what they're talking about is code for these profound philosophical differences. And those are not gonna be easy to deal with because they deal with identity and issues of who people are and why they are. And you can't really kind of negotiate those away. This is something we all know in Europe very well too. So this sort of issue of values, the third of this kind of trilogy of big structural changes is a really, really huge one. I think it's gonna take most of our effort and time for the next considerable period of time to work out. And I will come back to that right at the end when I have just dealt with the kind of, what does China think of the world internationally? How does it see the world internationally? So that's the four that I've come to. So the four basically are, that China I think has a sort of very structured view of the world, almost like a hierarchical view of the world. When you go to Beijing, it has these ring roads around it. I think there's six now, the sort of old ring roads, which used to be where the city walls are. And then there's kind of another set of ring roads. And then it goes right out to the sort of six set of ring road where you can kind of race your Ferrari at the weekend if you're so inclined and because it's usually pretty empty. And they're probably building a seventh ring road now somewhere in China. So these kind of ring roads. So I think China's diplomacy has six ring roads. The first ring road, of course, the most important one, the closest is the United States for all sorts of reasons. For trade, for the number of bilateral kind of discussions it has, military reasons, China has tried to craft a narrative about the United States for the last 40, 45 years since rapprochement really formally started in 1972. So this relationship is invested a lot in. And I think what it wants from this relationship is parity. It wants equality. It does not want contestation. It knows militarily that America is still supremely powerful. But it wants strategic space around it in its region. So that's why I think the South and East China see issues important. They carve out strategic space. And it wants some kind of equality. And so the story that Xi Jinping is the chief storyteller in China at the moment is saying is to the United States, he said this since 2013 when he went to Sunnylands to talk to Obama a new model of major power relations. And I think that just means that China and the US are those major powers and they have to have a kind of equality. And they have different kinds of space where they're going for sort of primacy. China doesn't want the military space so much but it wants an economic space and it wants a kind of strategic space, regional dominance maybe because that's the most important for it. But it does want to have equality in these spaces and it does want to have a sort of, kind of a recognition from the United States that its claims on this equality are legitimate. The second ring road is the Belt and Road. And the Belt and Road is China's story to its region. Now the region that it lives in is a tough neighborhood. It has 14 borders with really, really difficult countries North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, kind of India. And these are really, really complicated sets of relationships. And so the Belt and Road broadly is to create an area of economic commonality where everyone is invited to think of the benefits that come to them from engaging with the Chinese economy and all the sort of growth that can come from that. It is also an area in which China is trying to export its technology, high-speed trains and things like that. And it is also an area in which China is trying to create more knowledge about it and more sympathy towards it. So there is a propaganda purpose, of course. Why not? I mean, everyone's kind of up to sort of trying to message and get favorable press. So China is also doing that. It is trying to create all sorts of linkages and connectivities in this region. This Belt and Road region, though, I think is a kind of story of what China means to its immediate geographical neighborhood. Although, of course, everyone at the moment talks to themselves being on the Belt and Road. I think the real key partners are in the China, geography that China inhabits. What is the final thing that the Belt and Road is? It is a vision of a world without the United States. The United States is not there. The United States does not attend the big jamborees in Beijing about the Belt and Road. The United States and Japan are kind of, by their own choice, excluded. They're not members of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank that China initiated. The international bank that it set up, America is not there. So this is China's vision of a world where kind of America disappears. But of course, America doesn't disappear. And it's not easy to exclude America in the way that China wants. But I think that's what it's trying to do. The third ring road is Europe. Why does Europe matter to China? So it's a huge market, for sure. It's a huge economic power. That's true. But I think Europe really matters because Xi Jinping sort of figured this when he came to Brussels and made a speech in 2014. It is an intellectual superpower. It has enormous technological assets. And it has been the biggest transfer of technology to China, apart from Japan in the last 40 years. So you could say that without technology transfer from German and other companies and British and other companies without that, China would not be in the position it's in today. And so that kind of technological relationship is hugely important. And that's why Xi Jinping's story about Europe is that it is a civilizational partner. That's the word he uses. So it's obviously not state-to-state relationship. It's more complicated than that. But this really sort of kind of explains why Europe and China have similarities. They are civilizations. China sees itself often as a civilization rather than a country. So they have that kind of in common. What is strategically Europe's sort of opportunity having had this kind of relationship with China over the last 40 years? We are moving into the era now in which it is no longer a sort of technology surplus on the side of Europe. China is now becoming an authentic innovator in many areas. And so I suppose the question for Europe is, are we now going to get the same kinds of benefits that have accrued from all the investment we put technologically into China coming back to us? Are we going to be able to kind of, you know, call on the favors and the sort of political capital that we built up? Because of course none of this is spelled out in any agreements by now becoming technology partners of China that get things back. So that's a big, big question. And I suppose that's behind some of the strategic documents that the EU has been issuing more recently, a more fair deal in getting back some of that kind of technological largesse that we once gave to China because now we are the ones that are probably more increasingly in need of help. And then the fourth region beyond that, that's the rest of the world. China is the global power. This is an era in which China is in the Arctic Circle. It sits on the Arctic Council as an observer. It is an era in which China has five research stations in the Antarctic. It's an era in which China has massive relations with Africa, maybe a million Chinese working and living in Africa. It's an era in which China is active in Latin America. It's active in the Pacific Islands. It's active everywhere. So the era of global China is truly here. So the fourth ring road is really the rest of the planet. So just sort of finally, I guess I'm going to kind of conclude having dealt with 1234, the one that's sort of the political sustainability of the party, the two millennial goals, the three sort of big structural issues that we're having to think about China's strength, its navy, and values, and then the four ring roads around China. So kind of a conclusion, I suppose, is, well, where are we heading? So I believe you had your visitor from Washington here yesterday, and I saw the splendid kind of inflatable dull of him kind of floating above the sort of streets of Dublin with the protesters yesterday. I mean, so what does this all mean? Well, I think we're moving into a kind of bipolar world, and it's already kind of here. What I mean by that is that we no longer kind of sit in comfortable neutrality. Our kind of principal security partner, as Europeans, America is going to come, and it's coming more and more to say, if you kind of do these things with China, you will have consequences. And it's going to be impossible to walk away from America's security blanket. But it's also going to be impossible to walk away from the enormous benefits that might come to us from dealing with China's economic kind of economic, the gains of dealing with China economically. And this sort of conundrum is one that I was in Australia for three and a half years before coming here. I mean, it's very sort of common there to kind of try and figure out how do you balance your biggest trading partnership with one power that has such different values, but your kind of, you know, most important security relationship is completely elsewhere. You are now totally divided. The happy moment when economics and security are all with one partner is pretty much over. China is now the largest trading partner of 125 countries. So the unipolar world is gone. So bipolar world, what does it look like? It is one in which we are perpetually balancing. It is one in which we have to be very, very flexible. It is one in which we will have to, at some point, make pretty hard choices about companies like Huawei and others, as we sort of are told on the one hand, by one partner, not having to do with them. On the other, to say, look, we have to kind of have something to do with them because it's so important to it. This bipolar world means that there are kind of no universal common values. We kind of have to accept that one power, which is a fifth, sixth fifth of humanity, does not subscribe to that vision. That power, however, is not saying to us that it wants us to change to its world view. It is saying it's fine for us to have our enlightenment values. It's fine for us to kind of have, you know, a particular view of the world, but it doesn't subscribe to it. So it's kind of validating our universalism for ourselves. But of course, universalism, which is local, is somewhat paradoxical. More positively beyond, you know, kind of moving into this bipolar world with all of the very, very big sort of strategic quandaries it's kind of presented us with is also probably quite liberating. We are now, you know, kind of having a whole sort of view of the world, which is profoundly different to the one that has prevailed, I suppose, in the last four to 500 years. And so that's kind of actually quite exciting. But of course, it's also terribly unsettling. So China is not going to, you know, it's not about, I mean, it's very finely, this is not about the guy Xi Jinping. It's not about the political structure in China. It's not about particularly, you know, anything kind of really about China as a country. It is this brute fact that a fifth of humanity cannot be told to go away. They're not going to magically disappear. We can slap tariffs left, right, and center on this group. But, you know, the ones who are really in charge of this story are at the moment the 300, 400 million rising middle class in China, but they are probably going to rise to about 700 million as China grows richer in the next few years. And this group are going to be the ones that write this story. This group are going to be the ones that come into our environment as tourists, as business people, and students in our schools, but also as partners in all sorts of different areas. This is an incredibly complicated new era, and one in which we will, I think, have enormous opportunities, but also some pretty stark strategic choices in the words of Joseph Heller in Catch-22. Relax, it's hopeless. Thank you.