 It seems you're doing really interesting things here with your expanding interest in China and that's always Always really exciting to hear so I wish you good luck with that I think you're going in the right direction, and I don't just say that because I'm a Synologist So I'll talk for a few minutes, and if we have time I'll Show a nine minute video, and then I guess we'll do a Q&A. Yes, and let's see if everything is working It is great So this is a book cover. This is my shameless self-promotion on sale now Now what is curious about the book is that it's about the future about Futurology, and this is actually a big departure from my previous two books, which are also on sale Because in my previous two books I looked at how China's past shapes the present either It's a recent past. It's hundred fifty year history of national humiliation and how that shapes Contemporary foreign policy in this book China or is a world which I co-edited with a colleague that goes even farther back and looks It's sort of classical confusion and you know Chinese civilization how that frames certain issues Now the current book Is about how not it's about the future per se because I can't predict the future I'm not a futurologist, but it's about how Chinese people are thinking about the future and how Their thoughts and discussions and writings about the future are actually telling us about China in the present day Now China dreams became important as the director mentioned Last November because the new General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping mentioned it in his First major public appearance He went to the Chinese Museum of History. He looked at the history of national humiliation whereby the West and Japan abused China and He came out and says wow I have a China dream my China dream is the Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation or rejuvenation of the Chinese race depending on how you translate it and So a lot of people have been talking about the China dream as you surely know for the past Eight or nine months, but a lot of people treat this as if it's a new thing But actually there's a backstory That in my book I look at what we now call the backstory of the China dream and see how people have been talking about the China dream and similar ideas of the China model the China path the China way for the past five six years more or less and There's this big discussion. It's not just defining the China dream people are arguing over what it means and what the China model means and It comes out of a couple of peculiar circumstances one is a leadership transition that We've known for the past two or three years that there was going to be a big group leadership transition in 2012 and then 2013 and whenever there's a transition There's a lame duck effect that people say okay. Well, who's in tow the previous president? People who gave him ideas. They're sort of fading from power Who who's going to provide the new ideas? So a lot of public intellectuals in China started giving new ideas To directly or indirectly influence the new leadership and some of them were successful and you know, they picked or Xi Jinping picked them and their ideas such as the China dream The other context is a more general one in China they've gone through 30 years of very spectacular economic growth and a lot of social change and we hear a lot of the negatives of this in terms of the environment in particular but there's also been a sense of a values crisis in China that People have been talking about the problems that China faces because it doesn't have a new ideology There's been a shift or that socialism is no longer the main ideology. What's coming next or what kind of socialism? Is China going to have so they're criticizing this shift from political to economic values and they a lot of them are saying that China now has a money worshiping society and What is interesting about this to me is that? It shows that people across the political spectrum whether you're in the new left Whether you're a liberal or whether you're kind of a military scholar All of them are saying geez we have a crisis and it's a crisis of values and we need to get some values So some of them are going to socialism for values some of them are going to Confucianism some of them are going to liberalism and other sources But to me the main thing that's interesting is that there's this Intellectual crisis going on in the midst of a transition So these two things coming together meant that there's been a huge amount of discussion in China over what China is and where it should go one of the Things that people talk about a lot is what direction China should take or what path China should take So everybody Especially in in Beijing and Shanghai and Guangzhou They're all involved in what I call pop futurology. Everybody's talking about the future There have been dozens and dozens of articles and books with titles like China in 2025 or 2030 China that kind of thing China in 2049 So what my book has been doing is Looking at what this group of people we can call them public intellectuals I call them citizen intellectuals because there's work slightly differently in China because they have a still have a strong censorship regime But my point is not that these people are censored But that actually there's a lot of new space for people to talk about things There's a lot of leeway to discuss things in China that's often not appreciated and that's spawn this new group of citizen intellectuals who are not necessarily dissidents They're people who are interested in Advising the government they're interested in influencing the direction that China is going to go in So they're not officials, but they're not dissidents. They're somewhere in between. They're a liminal group It's sort of ambiguous They're neither insiders nor outsiders. Sometimes they're inside outsiders. Sometimes they're outside insiders there's this and nobody's really quite sure of The connections that that they're involved in even though It's pretty clear that these people are influential and nobody's really been including me has been able to trace How they're influential so rather than trying to trace kind of how policy is made in China What I do in the book is think about How new ideas percolate up and how new ideas appear in China and how they're debated Quite vociferously often on the web So that's what I'm doing is looking at these citizen intellectuals who you know in previous generations They would have done everything behind closed doors and tried to get an appointment with the party leadership now. They're Yelling and screaming in public space. They're yelling and screaming on blogs and other internet and new media for and As I say on there the goal is to influence public policy But through public public opinion rather than just through kind of back channels which is the normal way of making policy in China and As I was telling people at lunch, I've been writing an essay on the artist I way way And in doing that I was looking at I was reading his father's poems. His father's a very famous communist poet And in 1941 at the Yan'an Revolutionary base in northern China I Ching was there and he wrote a poem called Mao Zedong. So it's he's being a court poet It's very interesting how he's a court poet and in in his poem. He's the poem ends with The new slogan determines the new direction and I thought wow That's what's going on is that this new slogan the China dream is Determining the new direction and what the citizen intellectuals are trying to do is to be a part of A writing of framing the new slogan, okay, so What I do in the book is Is Go through various China dreamers about 20 25 of them And I'll just give you a taste of it. These are people. This is the way people were talking about it before It became official policies. That's why I say pre-official Very popular China dream was a military dream of a strong nation in the strong military and this was this came out in a book by a Colonel in the People's Liberation Army who published a book the China dream in 2010 and His argument is that China can't just be an economic power like Japan China has to be a military power So he needs to he wants to convert China's economic influence into military and political power He came out with the second edition of his book about six months ago after it became official and it's even more you know robust and Xi Jinping went to talk to the military last December and said that his China dream is for a strong military to so he whether Xi Jinping read this book or not. I don't think matters, but he's he's saying he likes that dream That's part of the official China dream The new left the new left is this New left in China is a little different from the new left in Europe, but that's what they call themselves. They're people who want to Have I guess left-wing values, but they're not necessarily Maoist They're China dream especially because there's a bunch of Developmentally economists who are new left people who are thinking about how to organize Chinese economy and how to make it Have socialist modernization rather than capitalist modernization Socialist globalization rather than capitalist globalization So some of them especially who on gong he's been saying that we need to have more state-centric Developments kind of shift away from pro-reform because reform usually means opening up liberalization of markets He's Arguing that China should go in the opposite direction And he's he's quite successful He's one of the people who actually writes China's five-year economic plans a new one came out last year And he was one of the authors so it's I think very important to see how this State-centric quasi socialist view of the economy is still powerful in China There's also a Confucian China dream Also called the world dream There's a philosopher named Xiao Ting Yang who is you know a rather unassuming guy, but he's become very Influential because he's been able to talk about how Chinese ideas can inform The international system and how the Chinese idea of all under heaven or Tianxia Is an alternative to the current world order which he sees is a very bad American US centric world order As I said, he's a philosopher, but people in international relations and diplomacy have really been picked up On his ideas and are using them not just in academic papers, but in policy statements So that's the kind of Confucian dream is this this giant Sino-centric world order There are also some liberals who are talking about the China dream, which is most people find strange usually you think of this as an official party slogan But liberals have been talking about it for the past four or five years as well there's this Newspaper group called Southern Weekend Which actually gives out China dreamer awards every July so every July gives about it picks about a dozen Chinese people and gives them a China dreamer award and it picks out a range of people but The first year it did it was in 2010 and the person that they gave it to and who gave the keynote speech in Beijing was A writer she was a writer at that time Lunging Tai and she wrote about the power of civility and she tried she talked about the China dream in Very different ways the dream of civility of people treating each other nicely rather than dream of a strong state and a military state So she she kind of gave a different span on it now. She's actually the Minister of Culture in Taiwan which shows how these people Start out. I mean When I started studying them She was a citizen intellectual she was a writer based at Hong Kong University But as I was finishing up the book she was appointed the you know Minister of Culture And this also shows us this interplay this movement between Categories the categories out of use of officials distance and citizen intellectuals So it's a very fluid system Okay So Some trends so the pre-official the trends if I want to conclude In the book first, I should say there's a lot of variety amongst the 20 to 25 people that I I Survey and analyze in the book, but there are some general trends And the trends are not just recent trends as they're part of a general shift from the 1970s They did things one way 1990s did things in another way and now in the 2010s. It's a third way So the first shift is in terms of method so first was In 1970 it was scientific socialism everything was had to be understood in terms of Marxist categories and Maoist slogans that shifted in the 1990s to Social science that you have to be scientific so it's sort of a familiar you could say a Western way of understanding Chinese society But now there's been a shift from this social science method to see Problems in China as moral issues and as cultural issues. So it's kind of going from this international or universalistic way of understanding problems to a very Particularistic or exceptionalistic way of understanding problems in China The second trend is for identity People talked about this a lot that In the 1970s the main identity was with Either communism or with the Chinese state in the 1990s that shifted to nationalism So we had books call like with titles like China's new nationalism, which do a good job of describing how Things shifted in the 80s and 90s. I think there's another shift going on right now From nationalism to oh Actually to statism. Sorry. I said that wrong to statism. So the values are not Civilizational but their status that there we can get back to this that people are not necessarily talking about Chinese particular Chinese values as such but Hierarchy stability and unity Again for a strong state The third trend is From revolutionary internationalism in the 1970s to focus on national interest in the 1990s And now what I find is That there was a shift from national interest to see things in terms of these much broader categories The Chinese way and Chinese exceptionalism not just within China But to inform how we understand the Asian region and how we understand the world at large This is all part of what a Historian colleague of mine has called the collective right turn of China's left-wing intellectuals Into from from the left into statism because a collective. Yeah, so a turn to the right When we talk about China, it's always hard to know How to use categories like left right and center so he's playing with that But his his argument is that even though there seemed to be have these progressive values They're actually pushing for a very conservative notion of state power So the trend I think in China It's perhaps not a happy one that Even though officially China is promoting very positive things and talks about win-win relationships with all countries What I see going on in discussions between citizen intellectuals and officials is a very stark sense of power politics and zero-sum politics that there is this sense especially in the past few months of a cold war type battle between two social systems And there's been a lot of talk in Chinese press and online About the China dream not just as you know a Chinese way of doing things or Chinese goals But the China dream versus the American dream Where the China dream is good and the American dream is bad that sort of thing How am I doing on time? So I could See maybe I'll skip to Comparing the China dream and the American dream because I also have a Short video Anyway, this slide I will talk about but there's this interesting dynamic between the China dream and what they call the world dream That the world dream is a China dream and the China dream is a world dream We can come back to that later if you want And China dream of the American dream as I said, there's a lot of talk about this lately and As a battle between those sort of a clash of civilizations type framework and this is coming mostly from the Chinese side And they see it as the China dream is a national dream where the American dream is a dream of individuals that The China dream is about order leading to prosperity whereas the American dream is about freedom leading to prosperity And first I think we need to do a Good comparative Analysis of the two dreams we were talking about this at lunch that we think we understand things like the American dream But actually we don't because usually the American dream now just is sort of crass materialism a big house and big car but if you look at how The idea of the American dream has developed over the past century. It's actually more about Qualities and and values and not just about shallow materialism that it's more nuanced in the sense that Originally it was about religious freedom and this is the story of the pilgrims coming to America In the 20th century it was a dream of equality and freedoms and not just freedom And Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech which he gave 50 years ago last week It's actually a very good example of how the American dream is used not just to say hey great What a what a great country we are but the American dream has been used as a critical tool to To show what's wrong with society as well as what is right with society and This is what I'm thinking of this is what I see going on in China as well that The China dream didn't work that well the China dream is also used as a critical tool There's this concept of Johan. It's the classical Chinese concept, which is very popular in the past past century, but the past decade especially it means worrying. This is a job of intellectuals in China is to worry about their country worry about the fate of their country to solve their country's problems and It's curious because this is a literary term and you expect Philosophers and poets to use it but even military intellectuals a bunch of very prominent very right-wing Hard-core military intellectuals are also using this concept of patriotic worrying and one of them The person who wrote the book the China dream He said that actually China needs to be more self-critical that There's this there's a book in English called The China collapse and how China is going to collapse Socially and economically and such and it's regularly criticized in China as being anti-China and China threat This Colonel Colonel Leo He actually said that we need to have more of these China collapse theories and it shouldn't just be Westerners talking about China's collapse. It has to be Chinese people thinking about how China might collapse And he says Americans talk on and on about the decline of America but and they've talked about it's Eight or nine times since World War two and he he concludes that America actually has not declined America keeps bouncing back or Growing so he says well, maybe there's a relation that between these this ability to Use things like the China dream as a critical tool And to stop a decline so to stop it He argues that the reason that America has not declined is because it talks about decline So therefore if China doesn't want to decline it has to talk more about declining now, I'm not sure if the logic is is Is valid, but this is how people in China are thinking about things and it's quite encouraging so even amongst the very right-wing people there is an interest in a broader and more critical discussion of what's going on in China and this actually started happening on January 1st of this year that the southern weekend Group that I talked about That gives out the China Dreamer Awards One of their flagship newspapers published its New Year's editorial saying that the China dream is the dream of Constitutionalism that we want to have equality and dignity and human rights and And it's in the Constitution. So it's ours So it's a very interesting way of them taking Xi Jinping's new slogan which at that point was about you know, 35 days old and Using it to their own ends and what this has actually led to is this huge discussion about the role of the Constitution in Chinese society and constitutionalism as a As a value that's still going on today. I mean there's been a lot of very harsh pushback against constitutionalism, but just because they're still talking about it. I think is quite encouraging The other thing that happens with slogans in China is that they become Satir the site of resistance, but a satirical resistance And that's what this picture is An example of so this you can't see it very well, but it's maybe a thousand people looking at a guy sleeping a naked guy sleeping and This was explained as a study session on the China Dream model So rather than going to a village to see the new model whether it's sort of Maoist communes or Dengist Reform you have to look at a fat middle-aged naked guy dreaming So this is one way of commenting on it Someone else said that what happens with these Slogans often is that they become zombie concepts so a zombie concept is Something like harmony in China. So harmony is everywhere. We have harmonious trains. We have harmonious food We have harmonious everything But so like a zombie harmony is everywhere, but it's completely empty of meaning And that's I think it was probably what's going to happen to the China Dream is that it's going to become a zombie concept in the next year or so Because it's just so easy to say and it sounds good, but the The leadership has found out that they Are having a very hard time controlling the meaning of the China Dream. They thought that they they had it But because dreams are something that each person has it's very easy to people to Discuss their own China Dream and what the China Dream means to them in ways that are quite different from the official view