 Thank you very much, Julian. Thank you very much for the invitation to speak here today. What you've just said reminds me of the two retired journalists who met each other in the street. One said to the other, what are you doing with yourself? And he said, I'm writing a book. And the person said, yeah, neither am I. I said, I was very privileged, indeed, to have been engaged in the opening up of China as an emerging superpower when I was based there between 1995 and 2000. And if you'll bear with me, I'd like to talk a bit about how China achieved this and where China goes from here. Actually, the first time I visited China was in 1989. I was then Moscow correspondent of the Irish Times. I traveled with President Gorbachev for a summit meeting with the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. That coincided with massive pro-democracy and anti-corruption demonstrations that were taking place in Beijing. And I remember just this was about a week before the crackdown. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people marching past the hotel I was in, the Jianguo Hotel. I recall that there was a little orchestra in the foyer of the hotel. And I was playing, it's now or never. And I thought, well, it was very appropriate for what was happening. It turned out it was never. The crackdown that happened and the killing of so many people in Tiananmen Square I think was a key event in the history of both authoritarian communist giants that were represented in Beijing that day. Deng Xiaoping, as we know, he chose repression to ensure the continued rule of the Communist Party. He sent in the tanks. Gorbachev chose reform, which led to Russia abandoning communist ideology and embracing Wild West capitalism. The Chinese leaders were horrified by what they saw happening in Russia. They thought Gorbachev was quite mad. What they knew, Deng Xiaoping knew that economic reform was needed to curtail, to cope with unrest, and to unleash the talents of the Chinese people and to compete with the capitalist West. So in 1992, Deng Xiaoping let it be known to get rich as glorious. Actually, what he said is wealth is glorious, which is quite different, but that's how it's remembered to get rich as glorious. More importantly, and less well remembered, is what he said the following year. A basic contradiction between socialism and market economy does not exist. This set the course for the growth of China and for the emergence of the model pursued by every Chinese leader since up to the current president, Xi Jinping. The Chinese people, I believe, and I experienced this when I was there talking to people in Beijing and in other cities, I think they were spooked by what happened in Tiananmen Square. The spirit of democracy was crushed. It's forbidden to this day to publish or to say anything about Tiananmen Square as commemorations could imply that the government had committed a crime and that would undermine its legitimacy. But the people were told, you can do as you wish, you can set up a business, you can travel abroad, you can buy a car, buy an apartment, get gloriously rich, as long as you do not challenge authority or ideology in any way. So just how underdeveloped was China in those post-Tiananmen days, we tend to forget. Everything was on by the state up to the early 1990s. When I was relocated to Beijing as Asia Correspondent in the mid-1990s, it was still considered a hardship posting by European diplomats. Before I went, I got a list from the Department of Foreign Affairs of unavailable items that Irish expats, like me, should stock up on before going. This document recommended I go to Musgrave's Cashing Harry and Balimon, and stock up on Irish whisky, J-cloth, Brillo pads, wax polish, washing machine powder, dishwashing liquids, disposable nappies, and herbs for making pasta, which gives you some indication of the cuisine of the Irish embassy. Now this list, of course, became redundant very, very rapidly as supermarkets arrived in Beijing, along with five-star hotels, computer stores, ATMs, designer shops, McDonald's, Starbucks, even Starbucks in the Forbidden City. The first Irish pub, Dirty Nellies, opened its doors in 1998, allowing Chinese passers-by to contemplate a picture of Oscar Wilde while drinking a pint of Guinness. In the five years I spent in Beijing, the pace of change became absolutely frenetic. The entrepreneurial energy of the Chinese were unleashed. It became the fastest reforming country in the world. Almost overnight it seemed. Everyone acquired a mobile phone. Outside my office window, the view changed from Old Peking to Manhattan. I can actually tell you the moment when I realized that individual Chinese were indeed becoming gloriously rich. I was invited to a small dinner party in the Irish embassy. I found myself sitting beside a Chinese businessman, very nicely dressed. I asked him what he did. He said, I'm the Ferrari dealer in Beijing. So I asked him what his interest was in Ireland. He said, I have a horse running at the Curran next Tuesday. That's true story. By the way, just to digress, I found there is horse racing in China. And the officially gambling is not allowed. But at Beijing racetrack, I found I could buy a prediction voucher for a horse racing intelligence contest and collect cash awards as high as 20 to 1 at redemption counters. Whatever they were called, I always ended up with a pocket full of beaten dockets. When I first arrived in Beijing, I heard Western diplomats scoff that the Chinese economy was less than that of Denmark's. But who's laughing now? China's economy today is 30 times bigger than Denmark's. It's the world's second largest economy by GDP and the world's largest manufacturing economy. To put this sort of breakneck development into a historical context, it's useful to remember this is a country where life had changed little in the previous 4,000 years. China's social pyramid had survived almost intact over the centuries. Only in China could one interview a bureaucrat charged with civil service reforms who recalled how officials of the Han dynasty dealt with the same problems. Today, because of land privatization, half a billion Chinese peasants have been lifted out of abject poverty. And there's enough rice to feed the population, and that's important because it's a basic requirement in China for government legitimacy. And there's not been a case of living memory. On a trip up the Yangtze just 20 years ago, I found old people who could recall and who took part in acts of cannibalism during the Great Famine of the 1950s. Now, to put China's achievements into perspective, I think it is interesting to compare the progress of China with that of Russia, since both countries abandoned the old-style communist ideology at the end of the 1980s. Both China and Russia are similar today in that they have maintained or reverted to top-down authoritarian rule. The big difference is that China has more successfully invested its wealth to modernize the country and make it a global powerhouse with super cities, exciting modern high buildings, and state-of-the-art transport system. In the decade up to 2011, China built an average of 6,000 kilometers of superhighway every year. Russia did not build a single inter-provincial highway in that time. Today, China has more high-speed rail tracks for bullet trains than the rest of the world combined. The death rate in China has been cut to nearly half of that of Russia. 7,000 per thousand compared to 13 per thousand in Russia. The population of China has been growing since 1989, and that of Russia has been declining. Migration from China is today five times less than that from Russia, and life expectancy in China is greater than in Russia, 75 on average to 70 for Russia. And, of course, we know the growth rate in industrial production is much higher in China than in Russia. China's economic policies have been so successful that it has achieved a staggering growth rate of 10% per annum for the last three decades. The question today, and most pertinent for Irish enterprises who are interested in dealing with or investing in China, is whether this growth can be maintained. I'm not an economist, I'm a journalist, so to find the answer I called an old friend. It's John Anderson, once the IMF representative in Beijing, now a leading China financial analyst based in Shanghai, and I asked him, what does the future hold? He told me that China cannot maintain this level of growth of 10%. He pointed out that this amazing growth rate was based on a succession of unprecedented reforms, and he listed them. The privatization of the agricultural sector, the largest round of mass state enterprise bankruptcy the world has ever seen, the wholesale opening of the export market, a dramatic liberalization of local industries to investment, and a property boom driven by residential development. John Anderson believes that all these have either run their course already, or are peaking today, and there is no silver bullet left to take their place. However, he doesn't believe the wheels are going to come off the Chinese economy as some experts are predicting. Rather, he believes there will be pedestrian growth of 6% or so, and this can be maintained for the next few years. One of the most interesting points he made is that communism in China involves state ownership still of some 100,000 enterprises, but apart from a handful of strategic concerns, they are not subsidized, they are market driven, and if they go bankrupt, they are allowed to go to the wall. I would add myself that there's a demographic problem which China is struggling to resolve and which could also impact growth. The one child policy has meant that in the last 20 years, there have been six boys born for every five girls. The most extreme gender disparity in world history. At the moment, there are nine million more boys than girls in China, which means millions of young men will never get married. On top of that, there are 100 million people in China today over the age of 65. By 2030, that will be 300 million, and many will have only one child or grandchild to contribute to their support. All surveys predict that the gender disparity and the one child policy, along with urbanization, will actually mean substantial falls in the Chinese population which will make economic growth much more difficult to sustain. The United Nations predicts that Chinese population will actually fall from 1.3 billion to less than a billion by the end of this century. Some forecasters predict that in two centuries, it will go down to 500 million. The Chinese government is now proposing to end the one child policy. Well, I actually don't think that will make much difference. It is arguable that the one child policy has a minimal effect on China's population growth. If you look at the birth rates for Thailand, South Korea, Vietnam, or even further afield, Costa Rica, the last three decades' birth rate is much the same as that in China with the one child policy. Another problem that China is struggling with is that of innovation. In my time, I found there was a tendency to imitate and appropriate Western ideas and technology rather than to innovate, which is understandable if you're starting from scratch. I recall that people would drive a Mercedes in Beijing and somebody would point out it was actually built in a factory down the road and the Mercedes logo stuck onto it. And I remember there's an Irish man in Beijing who ran the DHS service and he told me that a colleague once complimented him on opening a new office in Chengdu and he said, did I? And he went to Chengdu and he found an office with the DHS logo and DHS literature and the people running it were just sending the packages by express mail. I bought a garment labeled Irish linen once in the Chinese market and I had it tested by the Ulster linen board out of curiosity and I found it wasn't Irish linen as I expected, but it was very good. It was extremely well made. Now President Xi recognized that the problem of innovation and is currently leading a drive to get Chinese people to think more of developing their own technology. And this has resulted in a plethora of new patents been issued in the last few years, but most are utility patents. That's patents to improve things rather than invention patents. And the fact is, as far as I can see education in China is still based as it was when I was there on learning facts rather than critical skills. China now produces 7 million university graduates a year. The number of universities has doubled in the last year to 2,400, sorry, in the last 10 years. But there's not one Chinese university ranked in the top 100 universities in the world for life sciences or health related research. However, I think this will change over time. The best universities in the rest of the world are full of highly motivated, clever and studious Chinese high achievers who I believe will return home year after year on our returning home and they will help to create an innovation and research driven economy. We all know about Chinese exports. If you live in America and you go into a clothing shop everything is made in China. China's forged ahead with an extraordinary export drive for manufacturing and this has helped it to amass the most enormous financial reserves shall reckon to be around about 3.5 trillion US dollars. China has actually become a rival to the IMF as a source of finance for countries in trouble like Venezuela. It has loaned so much money to the United States that it's become a running joke for American comedians. For example, I saw this the other night, President Obama has offered bailout money to Greece. When Greece thanked him, Obama said, don't mention it to China because it's their money. I also came at this apropos of nothing but I like the one about Fox News view of President Xi's encounter with President Obama. She described as a meeting between the world's most powerful communist and the president of China. It's worth noting, however, that this massive foreign currency reserve is almost balanced by domestic debt and that's another problem for China to cope with in the future. And a bigger problem is the disparity of income. The goal of Mao Zedong was to engineer the most egalitarian society in history. But today China has, that goal has given way to one of the most unequal societies in history. China is currently 843,000 millionaires and 220 billionaires, of whom 80 are members of the National People's Congress. One billionaire, Jack Ma, alone, who heads the e-commerce Alibaba Group, is estimated to be worth $19.5 billion. Top party officials have also become very wealthy and this should be a cause of concern. The family of former Prime Minister Wen Jiaobao is reported to be worth $2.7 billion. How glorious is that? Since the 1980s, the rise of income inequality has been far more dramatic in China than in any other country. The bottom 25% of the Chinese population, peasants and factory workers, own a mere 1% of the wealth. This disparity between the richest and the poorest in China has reached worrying proportions. Now, why do I say worrying? In San Francisco last month, where I was visiting, I met another old pal in China Hand, Mary Kay Magistad, who is writing a book presently on Chinese innovation. She drew my attention to the dangers inherent in China's income distribution. Income equality in any country is measured by what's called the Gini coefficient after an Italian gentleman called Gini who invented it. A reading of zero means that all income is evenly distributed. A reading of 1.0 means one person holds all the wealth. Now, in China, the coefficient for family income has risen to an estimated 0.6, according to studies by several Chinese universities that Mary Kay accessed, and this is one of the highest in the world. The United Nations regards a reading of anything above 0.4 as a predicator of social unrest. Anybody who spends some time in China will know that there are instances of social unrest in different cities and rural areas, mostly to do with corruption, protests against corruption, seizures of land, that sort of thing. The Chinese government only really worries about that if it challenges the legitimacy of the party, and so far it's only happened on a localized basis, but it's worrying for the Chinese leadership, and this has led President Xi and his media predecessors to conduct a very serious campaign against corruption in China, and this has led to the arrest of several high officials in government and the military, and you probably know about the biggest corruption scandal involved a senior party official, Bo Xilai, whose wife was convicted of murdering an Englishman, and that case was a real classic example of corruption destroying a good man. I once interviewed Bo Xilai. He was the reforming mayor of Dalian. He modernized the city. He was a real high flier, and every Irish minister who came out to China at the time made a beeline for Dalian to talk to Bo Xilai. He loved building parks and boulevards. I recall he had a remote control in his office for all the fountains in the city. That's par. Incidentally, another old friend, a Chinese investment banker living in Switzerland, whom I met here at the weekend, told me that the anti-corruption campaign has had unexpected repercussions on the Swiss economy. Corruption in China often involves gifts of very expensive Swiss watches, and sales of Swiss watches to China has fallen dramatically in the last two years, which is an indication of the success of the anti-corruption drive. So, where's China going now? Well, I can only guess, but I have some thoughts on the topic. Just over a year ago, President Xi began to talk about the Chinese dream of a powerful and prosperous country. His dream was to make China a moderately well-off society by 2021, which is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, and to make it a fully-developed nation by 2049, which is the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic. Actually, President Xi has already realized the China dream for himself. According to Bloomberg, his family owns assets worth several millions of dollars. You won't find that on any website in China. Well, I worked in the United States for many years, and I don't know how many times I heard politicians talking about the American dream. As the committee in George Carlin said, it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. The American dream promises life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The missing item in President Xi's China dream is liberty, liberty to organize, to protest, to oppose, to vote for people of one's choice, to express opinions freely. In this respect, the Russian and Chinese models have converged. In both jurisdictions, those who challenge authority risk imprisonment. Judges obey power rather than the law, and Nobel Prize can put you in jail. Defense lawyers and human rights cases are themselves sometimes jailed. China, however, has become so big and powerful that international criticism of its human rights record has become muted. Even Nelson Mandela succumbed to this in the interest of promoting Chinese investment in South Africa. I know this because I was at his press conference in Beijing after he held a summit with Chinese leaders. Despite being asked repeatedly, he refused point blank to make any comment or criticism of human rights in China, the greatest symbol himself of a political prisoner in the 20th century. He said he would not interfere in another country's internal affairs. Though I recall that in London months, he publicly told the government to speak to the IRA. There's another factor inhibiting pressure on China over human rights. The United States, in my experience as a journalist, was always seen as the arbiter of world human rights. The State Department produced reports every year on human rights in every country in the world, and we took that as a standard. Today, Chinese leaders can legitimately raise questions with the US over its use of torture and imprisonment without trial at Guantanamo, which still continues. And we saw in the recent visit by President Michael D. Higgins to China, the communist leadership arguing to him with some justification, that they're providing a basic human right to 1.35 billion people, not to starve, while millions of Europeans suffer from a policy of austerity. I'd like to close now with a few words on an issue close to my reporter's heart, and that is the suppression of the media in China. Being the troublemaker that I am, I got involved in establishing the Foreign Correspondence Club of China in 2000 to agitate for press freedom. The club had been disbanded after Tiananmen Square and when journalists were not allowed to report, to be based in Beijing for a while. This club was first founded a century earlier by among others George Ernest Morrison, the famous Peking correspondent of the Times, who was reportedly killed in the Boxer Rebellion though he survived to read his obituary in his own newspaper. I hold membership card number eight, which is considered a number of good fortune in China. And I suppose it was my good fortune to be there at such an exciting time. But foreign correspondents in China are often given a hard time by officials of the Public Security Bureau. Almost every one of us who's worked there has been detained or harassed at one time or another. I find myself locked up more than once. For example, I was detained one day and held in a cell for trying to talk to a retired professor of philosophy at Beijing University called Ding Ziling. Why? Because she was lobbying for an official apology for the killing of her students on the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Sad to say the situation regarding the media has worsened in recent years. In the syntax of press freedom, reporters without borders today ranks China 175 out of 180 countries. And that's a pretty poor reading. It's way behind Russia, which is about 148. Incidentally, Ireland comes in at 16, ahead of the UK, which is at 33. According to reporters without borders, and I quote, the daily directives to the traditional media from the Department of Propaganda, the constant online censorship, the growing number of arbitrary arrests and the detention of the largest number of journalists and net citizens in the world, including by the way, Nobel Peace laureate Lu Xiaobo, have made China a model of censorship and repression. And sadly, there's also been a dramatic decline in press freedom in Hong Kong. One of my favorite cities. Under the one country two system formula when Hong Kong was reunited with China. Hong Kong was to retain its freedoms for 50 years after unification. However, it has now fallen from number 18 in the index of world freedom in 2009 to 34 in 2010 to 54 in 2011. And it currently stands at 61. My contacts in Hong Kong tell me that those who can foreign and Chinese are thinking of leaving or are starting to leave if they have the means to do so. Last week, the International Federation of Journalists released its report for 2014, and it too makes for depressing reading. It claims that the situation has become deplorable since President Xi Jinping became China's leader in 2013. Several Chinese journalists face criminal charges or were detained or forced to resign after carrying out the reporting duties. All Chinese media today are forbidden to publish quote critical reports on quote without prior approval. Reporters who do so are charged with quote picking quarrels and provoking trouble on quote. Imagine a long fentanyl tool would last in China today. Chinese citizens can no longer access Google, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr or Gmail or the websites of The Guardian or The New York Times or other Western newspapers. Up to a few weeks ago, one of my pals in Beijing told me he could access Gmail on a smartphone but that too has been blocked. Last month, the government began shutting down virtual private networks such as Astral, which enabled internet users to get around this great digital firewall. Cyber Police, and this is more serious in many ways, they've also blocked Google Scholar, which is a search engine that provides links and access to millions of scholarly papers around the world. And this inhibits researchers and fields such as medicine and the sciences from finding out the latest global advances and discoveries. The President Xi states that he aims to make China cyber-par and his strategy is undoubtedly not just to censor information that might undermine communist party's legitimacy but to force China to create its own information and encyclopedia and research sites. But by doing so, I believe the communist party is stifling innovation and productivity rather than encouraging it. So I'll end with the question, can China have it both ways? A vibrant and growing economy that competes on an equal footing with the rest of the world while retaining our will and control over the lives and thoughts of its citizens. I wonder, China needs to make some adjustments to this model. The party promised three months ago to establish the rule of law by 2020, but there's no evidence of this, of any real reform in the legal system yet other than in commercial dealings. I believe that if China shows the same flexibility now as it did in the early 1990s, that the party can actually stay on par for decades. I mentioned at the start that a generation of Chinese was spooked by Tiananmen. I think Chinese leaders themselves were spooked by what happened to the Soviet Union where Gorbachev introduced Glasnost and Perestroika with the results that we all know. What the Chinese leaders, I believe, don't understand is that it was the failure of Perestroika or reconstruction which doomed the Soviet Union. Well, the Chinese have had their Perestroika and it's worked. So it's time now for Glasnost and to fill in the blank pages of China's history. The Chinese people can't handle democracy. They only have to look to Taiwan to see that. So on that note, I'll stop. I'd like to thank you again, Julie, for inviting me here today. I'd like to thank you all for listening to me. I see lots of friendly faces in the audience, so I'm very happy to be here today. Thank you.