 Hynny, do bruniau. Cyfnodd y gallu a oedd yDIFYrch yn fflynedd ac gwybod? Dwi'n gallu o'n meddwl. Rhyw companyd dron Davieshire. Rhaid i'n arddangos hynny eich llaw mewn cy發. Mae rhaid i'n byw rhaid i'r barhau, allan yw ein dros eu teulu ar ei ddweithenedol. Mae'n gweld, mae hynny'n gymhwynd, yddw i'r llaw'r llwydd yn archwilio. Mae'n ddim llwyddo gyda'r hynny. Mae'r cyfwain yn y gweithgwyd yn gyfathod eich gweithio, mae'n ddod i'r llyfr iddyn ni'n 4 oes, rwy'n meddwl mewn meddwl o'r cyflwynt yn meddwl. Yn gyfathor, Hylpe yn i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, nid oes yn cyfathor mewn gwirionedd, nid oes yn cyfathor mewn gwirionedd, maen nhw'n cael ei wneud yn cerddwydol ar y cyfweld. Mae'n ddoddoddolos. Mae'n ddoddoddolos 25. Mae'n ddoddoddolos. Mae'n ddoddoddolos yn y Prifysgol yn y Llyfrgeidigol. Mae'n ddoddoddolos yn y Llyfrgeidigol. Mae oedd yn ffaut yn gweithio ymlaen, mae'n ddoddoddolos y Llyfrgeidigol, a dyna fathbarn ddechrau ddim yn gymgyrch yn dd hacodol'i sgwr beiddo yng Nghymru ac efo'r cysylltiad yr unig oherwydd ddych chi'n bwysig ein rhoth badiom. Rhaid i ddweud y tle bwysig i fynd ei wneud i chi'n amgylchedd y Chyno a'r Chyno. Mae'n dod e'n fyddo meddwl yn ymygu, A dywedd yn mynd i'n credu, y byddwn i sgolwg sy'n meddwl am gynnwys i Wain, onod mae ar hyn o hyd wedi bod yn llwyll, y byddwn i'n credu chynllwys i Wain. .. yn cymhwytais y byddwn eich wybod hwn, yn wych ar y maes ym 40 yma. Mae'r cwmhysgau a'r cyffredin o'r Chynnw i'r Chynniadau, sy'n ddiddordeb mwy o'r cyffredin o'r cyffredin i'r cyffredin o'r cyffredin i'r cyffredin ond mae'n fath o'r cyffredin. Mae ymddwch yn gwneud o'r 25 gyrs, ac i'n gweithio'r Unedig, sy'n gweithio'r llyfiadau i'r cyffredin, ond mae'n meddwl o'r USA, mae gennym ddim yn dweud. As evidenced by the fact that in my writings I still occasionally bang my shins up against some aspect of the national psyche that I didn't even know was there. And I still can't understand why people think that peanut butter goes with jam. Eight years ago I marveled at the confidence with which American bureaucrats, military staff officers, businessmen and think tank whiz kids breezed into Iraq, declaring that they would remake that ancient nation into a modern liberal democracy. If I, after all these years in America, still can't pronounce the word schedule correctly, what chance did George W. Bush's pro-consuls have of effecting social transformation in a country they'd only just learnt to locate on a map? I think subsequent events have justified my scepticism. We've transformed Iraq all right, but we've transformed it into a client state of Iran, which is not what was intended. So what chance do I have? What chance does any Westerner have of understanding China and the Chinese, led alone of transmitting any understanding to you in 30 minutes? Modern commentators on China also have before them the dreadful example of the three-week sinologist. This was a phenomenon back in the early 1970s, when China was a very closed society. Mao Tsai Tung's great proletarian cultural revolution was still well underway. And there was a desire among thoughtful Westerners to know what the heck was going on. Unfortunately China had closed herself off in the early 1970s. It was very difficult to get in, even for scholars, and once you were in it was very difficult to move around. I was living in Hong Kong at that time. We knew that momentous things were happening in the Chinese interior. For just one clue, there were the great matted rafts of decomposing corpses that occasionally floated down the Pearl River past the colony. Well now and then the Chinese authorities would allow some Western celebrity or politician to go in for a visit. The foreigner would spend three very closely supervised weeks in China being escorted around a model farm, a model factory, inspecting some institute of arts and sciences, sitting through a performance by the Dongxiang National Minority Folk Dance Troop and so on. And then the foreigner would go home and write a book or produce a documentary movie explaining all about China to the news consuming Western public. The premier example of a three week sinologist, these were the three week sinologists. The premier example of a three week sinologist was the movie actress Shirley MacLean who on her return from China brought out a very silly movie. But there were many others. My own old boss, the late William F Buckley Jr, who had gone to China in Richard Nixon's baggage train in 1972, showed some tendencies towards marketing himself as a three week sinologist, but I'm glad to say he soon realised his error. Well I was, as I said, living in Hong Kong at that time and hanging out with local expats including professional China watchers. Some of them were scholars. Others had grown up like Jared Taylor, who I'm very sorry isn't with us this weekend, in missionary families or mercantile families on the China coast. They all spoke two or three dialects fluently and by way of investigative journalism they would hitch a ride on a Hong Kong coast guard boat and go looking for swimmers in Deepwater Bay. At that time in the Cultural Revolution teenage kids from the mainland would try to escape by swimming to Hong Kong. It's a long swim through shark infested waters, it's very bold of them and if the Chinese coast guard spotted them they would get machine gun. So these China watchers, these friends of mine who are professional China watchers would go out, they'd be on the deck of some coast guard boat and there'd be some teenage kids sitting there on the deck soaking wet wrapped in a blanket. And they'd be interrogating him, you know, how are things down on the commune. That was their investigative journalism and that was as much as they could do. You can imagine though the scorn that these old China hands felt for the three week sinologists. China as one of those old China hands explained to me is a very big country and quote, the edges are a long way from the middle. Jasper Becker in his book about the Mao Tse Tung famines of the late 1950s tells of a reporter in China in the 1920s responding to a request from his editor for the bottom facts. He cabled back, there is no bottom in China and there are no facts. Anyone who is engaged with this vast ancient nation will return a hearty amen to that. If you'd like a more up to date illustration of this central truth about understanding China, I refer you to Richard McGregor's fine book The Party which came out last year. Page 199 quote, in September 2005, CLSA, the emerging markets brokerage based in Hong Kong, produced a thick report about how entrepreneurs had taken over as the motor of economic growth in China. They said, the private sector now contributes more than 70% of GDP and employs 75% of the workforce. A week later, a rival and equally respected China research unit at UBS, the Swiss bank, put out a rejoinder saying the private sector quote, accounts for no more than 30% of the economy, whichever indicator you use. So does private enterprise account for 70% of China's economy or 30%? Don't ask me. There is no bottom in China and no facts. As big as China is in space and population, she's even bigger in time. Alone among substantial nations, China has a culture going back continuously, the same language, same customs, same core religious and philosophical concepts, all the way to the Bronze Age. I have heard working class Chinese parents send their kids off to bed with the phrase, go look for the Duke of Joe. The Duke of Joe lived in the 11th century BC, about the time of the Trojan War. Confucius, who lived 500 years later, revered him as a model public servant. And when Confucius felt himself a little short on inspiration, he'd say that he hadn't dreamed of the Duke of Joe for a while. So he had no inspiration. To a Chinese person of today, even a working class Chinese kid being sent to bed, Confucius and the Duke of Joe are not foreign in any way. They didn't speak a different language or lived by a different calendar. They didn't mentally organise the world in radically different ways or deploy different table manners when sitting down to different meals, as would be the case for us with their Western equivalents, Socrates and Odysseus perhaps. I can't resist here my favourite description of the ancient Greek diet. Given by Alfred Zimmer quote, the usual attic dinner consisted of two courses. The first a kind of porridge and the second a kind of porridge. Well that wouldn't do for the Chinese at all. When Westerners first started scrutinising that enormous span of Chinese history, it struck them as being very static, as lacking in forward movement. Here's a characteristic quote. This is from Dmitrius Bolger, who wrote a history of China back in the 1880s. Bolger is telling us about the fortunes of the imperial family in the Ming dynasty, the later Ming dynasty which is the middle of the 16th century. And then quite abruptly, uncharacteristically for Bolger, he seems to get tired of telling us about court intrigues and barbarian affronts. And he breaks off from his main storyline with this curious little editorial aside. Quote, and this is from the 1880s please recall. It might be more instructive to trace the growth of thought among the masses or to indicate the progress of civil and political freedom. Yet not only do the materials not exist for such a task, but those we possess all tend to show that there has been no growth to describe, no progress to be indicated during these comparatively recent centuries. It is the peculiar and distinguishing characteristic of Chinese history that the people and their institutions have remained practically unchanged and the same from a very early period. Even the introduction of a foreign element has not tended to disturb the established order of things. The supreme ruler possesses the same attributes and discharges the same functions. The governing classes are chosen in the same manner. The people are bound in the same state of servitude and enjoy the same practical liberty. All is now as it was. Neither under the towns nor the songs, under the yens nor the means was there any change in national character or in political institutions to be noted or chronicled. The history of the empire has always been the fortunes of the dynasty, which has depended in the first place on the passive content of the subjects and in the second on the success or failure of its external and internal wars. This condition of things may be disappointing to those who pride themselves on tracing the origin of a constitution and the growth of civil rights and also would have a history of China, a history of the Chinese people. Although the fact is undoubted that there is no history of the Chinese people apart from that of their country to be recorded. The national institutions and character were formed and had attained in all essentials their present state more than 2,000 years ago or before the destruction of all trustworthy materials for the task by the burning of the ancient literature and chronicles of China. Without them we must feign content ourselves with the history of the country and the empire. Having thus unbwsund himself of an editorial opinion, Bolger then goes back to telling us about the border policy of the Shuzong Emperor. Nobody familiar with historiography will be surprised to hear that the 20th century brought forth a revisionist school of Chinese historians, in fact more than one. Keen to prove that, contrary to Bolger and every other 19th century historian, Chinese history did so exhibit some progress. The revisionists have made some good points. Professor Joseph Needham in particular, the author of the magisterial work Science and Civilisation in China, Professor Needham has shown us that there was a sort of creeping but steady progress in technology across the centuries and the apparatus of imperial administration showed itself capable of some modest evolution too. But first impressions usually get us a good big bite of the truth. And while Bolger's view of utter stasis needs some qualifying, I don't think even the keenest of the revisionist historians would claim that Imperial China was a progressive civilisation. The very first book I ever read on Chinese philosophy was the one by Ji Choo, popular in the 1970s, popular as books about Chinese philosophy ever get. Professor Ji takes you through all the main schools of ancient Chinese philosophy, the Taoists, the Confucians, the Legalists, the Moists. And then the book ends. And you're still in the third century BC. There's a closing chapter, which I'm working from memory, I don't have the book anymore. There's a closing chapter about 10 pages long called something like subsequent developments. But the main narrative of Chinese philosophy ended around about the time of the First Punic War. This stasis is a remarkable thing. It's also a very sad thing because for most of history, China was actually superior, at least in technology and administration, to the West. They were a thousand years ahead of us in metalworking well into the Middle Ages. The first great imperial dynasty, the Han Dynasty, was much better administered than the Roman Empire that it was contemporary with, at least until the last few decades of the dynasty. It wasn't until the beginning of the modern period the voyages of discovery and the reformation that the West definitely pulled ahead. If you look at the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the early fifth century, and this is a pretty good place to look at it from, and compare it with the fall of the Han Dynasty 200 years previously, you have to think that the Chinese imperial system got lucky. In the dark age that followed the fall of the Han, there were some barbarian incursions, to be sure, and there were even some barbarian dynasties in those dark ages, some petty dynasties of Turkic or Siberian origins. The steppe and the tundra of Northern Asia, however, don't support the same population densities as the forests of Northern Europe. So the barbarian numbers were small, and the core Chinese ethny remained intact. And so did the imperial apparatus, which was much more closely bonded in to the literary and economic culture than Rome's was, and which even claimed some supernatural sanctions. Roman administration survived only in the church, whose mission was, by definition, unworldly. The Chinese even got lucky with epidemiology. The dreadful plagues that wracked the Western world through the sixth and seventh centuries had no counterpart in China for reasons to do with hygiene, superior public works, and different species of livestock. So the outcome of the dark ages in the West was, in the words used by historian Sam Adshed, the outcome of the dark ages in the West was a victory for society over the state. Society here means independent power centres, guilds, universities, chartered towns, the church. In China, to the contrary, the state was able to make a comeback. Bringing with it the slogan of all imperial despotisms, including the Roman one, in all times and places, there can only be one sun in the sky. In the town that I lived in, in northeast China, in the early 1980s, there was not a single organised body of any kind independent of the state apparatus, which is to say of the Communist Party, not a church, not a drama group, not a soccer team, not a lady's knitting circle. There's a sort of a parallel here, a non-trivial one in my opinion, between the survival of the imperial system in the early Middle Ages and recent Chinese political history. The great miracle of China in the last quarter century has not been a wirtschaftswunder, it's not been the economic take-off which any full country could have done with a billion people and starting from a low base. The real miracle has been what I call a statskunstwunder, a miracle of statecraft. The survival of the Communist Party's monopoly on power and the survival of its administrative apparatus. This could not have been predicted. And at the time of the Tiananmen disturbances in 1989, pretty much everybody, including me, was predicting the opposite thing. We all thought the Communist system was done for. By 12 years later I'd wised up. I spent the summer of 2001 in China with my family and when I came back, National Review asked me to record my impressions. Well, here is something I wrote in the magazine. This is September 17th, 2001. I cannot see any reason why the Communists should not go on ruling China and her imperial possessions indefinitely. I think the Communists may well ride out present dangers and maintain sufficient public support, or at least indifference, to see them safely through WTO accession, China's accession to the World Trade Organization was very much in the air, and forward to a triumphant and well-organised Olympic spectacular, which took place. That will further cement their hold on the nation. I'm still quoting myself here. A few greater pleasures in life than quoting myself. Prognostications about China are always hazardous and risk making one look a fool in five or ten years' time. But I see no great changes in China's near future. As a lover of liberty, justice and truth, I say this sadly in frustration, but also thinking of my Chinese friends and relatives with much sympathetic understanding. Well, that was me in the summer of 2001. It so happens that also in the summer of 2001, Gordon Chang, who does a lot of the financial journalism centring on far Eastern topics, Gordon Chang, that same summer, published a book with the title The Coming Collapse of China. Gordon didn't think the communist system would make it through the decade. In fact, he thought it most likely it would last no more than five more years, that is, until 2006. So I predicted the indefinite durability of the communist system and Gordon predicted its imminent downfall. Ten years later, Gordon is in fact still beating the same drum. Although, like the fellow who told us that the world would end last weekend, he's hacked, like that gadget in my wife's car, the GPS gadget that tells her where to go when she's made a wrong turn. Gordon is recalculating, but of course what I really want to know is, since I was right and he was wrong, why are his speaking fees so much higher than mine? Is there any prospect for an open and civil society in China, a society that might be hospitable to the kinds of ideas that we're addressing at this conference? My answer to that would be, it depends what you mean by China. In the first place, a people who have long been accustomed to despotic government certainly can advance quickly into law and constitutionalism. We are at this moment standing on the soil of a nation that did exactly that. The Ottoman Empire lasted 600 years and it was as despotic as you please. But then it gave birth to a constitutional republic, which still looks pretty robust 90 years later. I'm not going to encroach on Professor Stone's territory here. He may have other things to say about that. And if you want to tell me that Turkey's constitutionalism was sometimes honoured more in the breach than in the observance, I won't argue with you. But an empire it was, a republic it became, and a republic it still is. Turkey's transition from empire to republic was of course by no means painless and encompassed many well advertised horrors. One precondition for it was that the Turks first had to lose their non-Turkish territories. Does this have any application to China? Unfortunately it does. Present day China is not an ethno state. Mao Tseitong's greatest achievement in fact was to recreate the old Manchu empire, minus outer Mongolia. And in fact the loss of outer Mongolia rankled with Mao. When Nikita Khrushcheff visited China in 1954, Mao's first remark to him, according to Khrushcheff, and presumably after some friendly formalities, Mao's first remark was a demand for the return of outer Mongolia, which was at that point a Soviet satellite. Of the territory of the present day Chinese people's republic, less than half has a base population of ethnic Chinese. One quarter is Tibetan, and that's much bigger than the Tibet Autonomous Region that you see on maps by the way. One sixth is Turkic, one tenth is Mongolia. The communists have made strenuous efforts to colonise these regions, but only in a Mongolia does their presence look truly irreversible to me. Both Tibet and eastern Turkestan maintain strong ethno-nationalist aspirations. Both of them have governments in exile. And yes, I know governments in exile are a bit of a joke, but you shouldn't laugh too easily. I can remember in London in the mid-1980s at some sort of official function encountering the head of the government of Lithuania in exile. A little frail, courteous fellow whose presence everyone found a little bit embarrassing. I mean, you know, Lithuanian government in exile, really. There hadn't been an independent Lithuania for 40 years, and nobody thought there ever would be. Ten years later, Lithuania was independent again. You may have a gentleman from Estonia who has been in exile again. You may have a gentleman from Estonia here today. Do we not? Oh, good. Like everything else nowadays, it seems, this comes down at last to demographics. It's all very well to speak of colonisation, but for colonisation you need some surplus population. We, China Watchers, are just chewing over the results of last year's census in China. The figures aren't yet complete, and they're Chinese figures, which, well, we have to take what we can get. But the figures we have suggest a total fertility rate in China of 1.4, perhaps 1.3. That's children per woman per female lifetime. That's not quite as bad as Japan and Korea, which are down in the 1.2 or 1.1 zone, but it's bad enough, and it's been going on long enough that China's population will go over the hump into numerical decline sometime in the next five to eight years. China's working age population has almost certainly already gone over the hump and is now declining. For holding on by force to vast inhospitable regions far from your civilisational centre, this does not make for a good prognosis. So if you meet a member of the Chinese or East Turkestan government in exile, be very polite. We know that Chinese people are capable of an open and critical society under rational modern government. We know that because they already have one in Taiwan. If the mainland Chinese retreat to their ethnic homeland, as the Turks did 90 years ago, if they get out of the empire business, I believe they will shake off their ancient attachment to bureaucratic despotism as quickly and decisively as the Turks did. I only hope for the sake of my country in law that they will do so with less bloodshed. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.