 Thank you very much. I have to say that was the last time that Professor Edel and I were together. We were having this conversation over dumplings and it is fun to look out here in a very beautiful place and see some familiar faces here and I have to say Charlie mentioned the fact that I embedded with a With a Chinese tour group and it is true You know I had spent some time working in Iraq and I was embedded with marines in Anbar province, but Embedding with a Chinese tour group in Europe. I wondered what might be a more hazardous assignment But no fortunately it turned out to be a wonderful wonderful experience and they were incredibly welcoming and if anybody's interested I'll be happy to talk about that and what I learned about their sense of emerging into the world through that Today I'm going to talk about this period that I've come to call the age of ambition and Just to give you a sense of Before I get going here actually what I want to do is First I want to set this timer so that I don't Put you all to sleep It helps to understand a little bit about What it feels like to write in China, which on some level is our subject here Is our subject here today and there was a line From one of the great China scholars in the United States John King Fairbank who said Once that China is a journalist's dream and a statisticians nightmare Because he said it has more human drama and fewer verifiable facts than anywhere else in the world and He said that in 1947 and in some ways Things have actually gotten better in terms of being able to understand what's going on on the ground being able to verify What's going on on the ground? We're able to get around the country more easily because of transportation because of technology But at the same time there are new ways of obfuscating there are new ways that facts can be obscured And it's become in its own way also a new a new and challenging period to try to get our arms around what's happening in China Most of all though of course we have many more questions of China. What is its What are its intentions in the world? What are the fundamental contradictions and how important are they and ultimately? What do they mean for us here in the United States? I want to Read one paragraph From the beginning of my book because I think it sets the frame for our discussion and the way that I look at the country Whenever a new idea sweeps across China a new fashion of philosophy a way of life The Chinese describe it as a fever in The first years after the country opened to the world people contracted Western business suit fever and John Paul Sartre fever and private telephone fever It was difficult to predict when or where a fever would ignite or what it would leave behind In the village of Xia Jia population 1564 There was a fever for the American cop show Hunter Better known in China as expert detective hung to When the show appeared on Chinese television in 1990 the villagers of Xia Jia started to gather to watch Detective Rick Hunter of the Los Angeles Police Department go undercover with his partner detective DD McCall and The villagers of Xia Jia came to expect that detective Rick Hunter would always find at least two occasions to utter his trademark phrase Works for me Though in Chinese he came across as a religious man because works for me was mistranslated as whatever God wants The fever passed from one person to the next and it affected each in a different way Some months later when the police in Xia Jia tried to search the home of a local farmer He told them to come back when they had a warrant a word that he had learned from expert detective hung to so why do I begin a discussion of contemporary China with a single village 25 years ago because For me, it's really about a way of seeing the place a way of looking at it and a way of deciding what matters I Tend to focus on the intimate the perceptual changes in people's lives the things that frankly don't often generate a lot of headlines but are Absolutely essential if you want to understand the things that people care about most of all And I call this period this period that I'm describing the age of ambition for two very specific reasons I'm just I'm referring to something to something very specific one is The collective national ambition Which is the thing in some ways that is easiest I think easiest for us to see from far away It's the collective ambition to want to return China to a more glorious place in the world the place that it after all had for most of human history The other kind of ambition is the force of 1.4 billion people with each in their own way a different kind of aspiration it's defined by their own idiosyncratic combination of tastes and risk-taking and Desire and in many ways This is a kind of aspiration that was impossible until the last generation and it's having a powerful effect on the country And I think if you begin to understand those kinds of ambitions and what they are doing to China It helps us understand some of the choices that the country makes and Also the tensions that those are creating both inside China and then also in its relationship with the rest of the world Our discussion today is actually more timely than I think we even knew it would be when we came up with this idea Some months ago and that's because of what's been happening in Hong Kong and let's see if We can make this happen. So The city of Hong Kong as you know in the last two months has been in the midst of a rare moment of political unrest Protesters in September came out. They blocked roads. They surrounded government buildings They brought this business friendly city of seven million people to a halt What they were calling for was for Beijing to loosen its grip fundamentally on Hong Kong's political affairs The police responded in some cases with pepper spray tear gas But the protesters remained in fact when there was this moment of escalation from the police side It drew more people into the streets not not less This week the Hong Kong government's taken its first moves to clear Hong Kong to clear the streets the protesters have for the moment allowed that to happen. They've sort of decided to declare a Some kind of victory in the on this on this stage of it I think it's reasonable to expect that the underlying issues still endure. We haven't seen the end of this But the impact of the last few weeks has been notable because what it has shown us is that this is the first major Act of civil disobedience in Hong Kong since the former I should say the largest act rather than the first the largest act of civil disobedience since the former British colony returned to Chinese control in 1997 a lot of these events caught people by surprise those of us in the China watching community did not I think with the a few exceptions did not expect that Hong Kong would become this Hotbed of unrest and the question is why why did this happen? Why did we miss it? Why did it happen and ultimately? What does it tell us about not just the future of Hong Kong, but really the future of China more generally I? Think it is worth saying at the outset that Hong Kong and China are not exactly the same thing What happens in a city of 7 million people is not the same as what happens in a country of 1.4 billion They have different political histories. They have different economic profiles But Hong Kong has always been a window into China into its social political and economic dynamics And if we want to understand what is going on in China it makes sense for us to understand what is going in Hong Kong? I think it will help us Point ourselves towards the future and what will be some of the defining elements in the years ahead When we talk about China today, let's remind ourselves where it's coming from the path that it has followed over the last generation 20 years ago It was actually this year 20 years ago in 1994. I went into a class on contemporary China I was an undergrad at Harvard had no background in the place And was electrified by it. I mean it was just this incredible drama of revolution and civil war and the rise of Chairman Mao after all all of it packed in to the last 60 years and then After Chairman Mao and who led China in many ways though He was able to improve some elements literacy public health in the end his period was a period of such economic dysfunction and political turmoil that by the end of his His tenure China had a lower per capita income in North Korea China by the end of the late 1970s had a per capita Income roughly one-third the level in Sub-Saharan Africa and that created the opportunity for the rise of Deng Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping led China out of seclusion back into the world And then of course just five years before when I got interested in China five years earlier We'd had the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square Now though those demonstrations are known best in the West for having ended in tragedy having ended in bloodshed and That was in June of 1989 I Think like a lot of people I was fascinated by what was happening in Tiananmen Square Partly because these were people who were barely older than I was but also because what you saw was this very clear and visible Contradiction this was a country that was trying to come to terms with what it meant to be both Chinese and At home in the world you saw these young people who would they had in some cases They would hold up placards that had the words of Patrick Henry give me liberty or give me death But then when it was time for them to Deliver their demands to the party they did it in the traditional style down on their knees in a formal petition And they gave it to these Older party members who were still buttoned up in their mousets in some cases and what you saw was a country in clear view of the world trying to figure out how they would how they would live as As a more modern place and what they also were was at the at the very beginning of a much more demanding era This was a period in which people Chinese young people particularly had not grown up with the kind of deprivation that their parents had gone through And they were expecting much more of the state. They were expecting much more of society They had higher aspirations for themselves There was a comment that a student protester said to a journalist during that period which stayed with me He said I don't know exactly what we want, but we want more of it And in a sense that was the defining ethic of the time. That was the dominant mood in the air I flew to Beijing in 1996 to start studying Chinese. It was a very different place. Obviously than it is today Chinese economy back then was smaller than the Italian economy More than that up close the city was not really what I had expected it to be from television cameras I had this image of a place That was in any event that what I came to with a city that I sort of found when I got there was much closer in Certainly in geography and in spirit really to to Mongolia than to Hong Kong, you know China in 1996 Beijing in 1996 was still a place that was It's you know if you went to Beijing and I think there are people in this room who were there It smelled like coal and steel and and garlic and and I loved it frankly Absolutely loved the sense of this country that was just unfolding itself and you were beginning to see what was going to be possible Just to put it in perspective In 96 this was where you went the Jengua hotel was where you went when you really wanted a night out when you wanted to just cut Loose you'd go and you'd get a hamburger at the Jengua hotel and the architect later described it very proudly Described it as a perfect replica of a holiday in that he had seen in Palo Alto, California Today the Jengua hotel looks like a guard shack, you know Beijing today is I should say China generally is home to about 30% of the skyscrapers under construction in the world in The last two decades China's story has been defined above all by growth I mean the Chinese people today no longer want for food in various You know some basic terms your average Chinese citizen eats about six times as much meat as he or she did in 1976 But this is also a ravenous period of a different kind in the way that people are now Seeking out new ideas. They want respect in a way that was difficult for them to demand before they want new Sensations that's what leads them to Europe and allows a Western journalist to tag along China is the world's largest consumer of you can go down the list beer platinum Louis Vuitton They recently surpassed the French in the consumption of red wine, which sent the French into a tailspin For most of the Chinese people the boomers has not created vast fortune It has allowed people to take the very first steps out of poverty In 1978 your average person made about $200 a year today. They make about $6,000 a year but this has created a vast gap in Income as you know But to put it in very specific terms the difference between China's poorest places and its and its richest places today is the difference between Ghana and New York City and this is a very acute Sensation in a country that is after all ruled by the Chinese Communist Party It's the People's Republic of China and that is a kind of daily Contradiction that is very hard for people to overlook So what are China's national ambitions? What is it that this country really aspires to in the world today and who are the people that are leading the country? What do they want? Well, the current generation came to power in November 2012 I was living in Beijing and I got a Invitation to go to the Great Hall of the people and to see the unveiling of the new Standing Committee of the Politburo Up until that moment nobody in China knows who's going to be running the country for the next five years Basically the top two guys are on it for ten the rest of them run it for five and then there's a new a new transition to power And then they come out on stage always in exactly the same Arrangements always in front of the the same painting of the great of the great of the the Great Wall And you'll notice by the way, there's a couple things that always strike me about this photo. They were virtually identical dark suits Identical red ties with the exception of one who is wearing a blue tie and I'm happy to talk about that if anybody's interested when we get to Q&A To those who are watching this at home the message is very clear This had been a season of political turmoil you'll remember there had been a major Chinese figure who had been arrested for corruption boy see lie and The message here was we have pulled together as one things are quiet. They're placid. We have a Central and we have a consensus view of what it is not consensus leadership necessarily But we have a consensus view of the kind of China We're trying to promote and there are no internal divisions. That's what they wanted people to feel President Xi Jinping, he's the fourth one from the left steps forward to give his first remarks to the nation and what he said was actually quite striking What he said was that he was dedicating himself above all to what he called the great renewal of the Chinese Nation and over the weeks that followed that concept of the great renewal of the Chinese nation Became the central animating idea of his new administration. He turned it into a slogan the Chinese dream all of a sudden the Chinese dream is on Television advertisements bus shelters. It was on the front page of the People's Daily 24 times in the first couple of weeks So what is the Chinese dream referred to? Well to Chinese listeners it carries both domestic and an international component and they're both important for us part of this is about Continuing and reinvigorating China's developmental progress China's building as you know more airports high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined Last year it landed a spacecraft on the moon. It's considering a mission to Mars It's another mission to the deepest reaches of the ocean China today loans more money to the developing world than does the world Bank and in some sense the Chinese dream is about continuing that possibility of China assuming a greater leadership role in the world But it's also about something deeper. It's also about Unity it's about the Chinese dream is a call on people to pull together under the leadership of the Communist Party and To reinvigorate this objective, which is after all to return China to the status that it once enjoyed You know, this is the China that people Have of their own image of their history This is a civilization that was so advanced that it was printing books 400 years before Gutenberg, this is a country after all that controlled one-third of the world's wealth as recently as the 18th century But as this grows and as China returns to this sense of its of its own natural place in the world That's putting new pressures on its relationship with other countries for years Chinese leaders believe that the best way for the country to conduct its foreign affairs was under a principle that Deng Xiaoping called Hide your strength and bide your time which meant in effect gradually return to the family of nations without upsetting What was one of the only superpowers what he really was talking about was not upsetting the United States but a country that is on The path towards a great renewal a country that is pursuing the Chinese dream is less comfortable hiding its strength and Biding its time than it used to be And you've seen that in recent years China has staked out a more expansive Role in its dealings with other countries it has pursued very vigorously its Territorial claims in the South China Sea the East China Sea there are people here who can tell us a lot more about that than I can They've done this in the face of opposition from Japan the Philippines Vietnam And we're going to see a lot more of that in the years ahead How far does this global ambition extend? I think this is one of the questions a lot of us have on some underlying level Do the Chinese today see themselves as supplanting the United States as the leading power in the world I? Think for Americans It's easy to feel that way particularly when you live as I do in Washington DC And you see the kind of political paralysis that we're confronting the sense of our economy still struggling its way out of Recession I think there are also reasons to believe that for all of the tensions that we do see China today may not be as prepared as we might imagine to Want to catapult itself into the leading position in the world and that's partly because They recognize that being the preeminent power comes with significant costs associated with it the costs of global peacekeeping for instance I was in I was gonna say also responding to crises like like the Ebola crisis I was in West Africa 22 days ago in fact And It is something to see when I was in Liberia, and I flew up with We went on a couple of Ospreys up to like northern Liberia to see what the United States was able to stand up over the course of a few weeks and it is an awesome potential that we have and The Chinese at that point there was a Chinese cargo flight that it just landed on the runway and I was running around like a chicken with his heads cut off trying to get the photograph of the Osprey and the Chinese cargo plane Just perfectly to get the metaphor just right, but it was a really amazing thing to see We are able to do things as a country that the Chinese would would tell you they're not yet capable of doing and And they know that One little telling detail I've always thought is kind of a useful thing to remember recently you may have seen some of these reports that the Chinese economy by one measure Is now larger than that of the United States on the basis of purchasing power You would have thought that a country that is on the path of a great renewal the Chinese dream would put this on the front page They trumpet this news but when it first came out actually the instructions from the Central Propaganda Department were to bury it Put it inside the paper Don't put it on the front page and that's because the Chinese in a sense They know that when you announce yourself as being the world's leading power and you and you own that distinction economically that it will come with a lot of a lot of unanticipated consequences So I think rather than see the Chinese is putting themselves immediately ahead of the United States in the world They see themselves as a rising power return to a great power In a multipolar world, but not in the end catapulting past the United States overnight So if we know now a sense of what it is that China wants on this national level What are the what are the national ambitions? I think the question we should be asking is whether the Chinese people share the same dream with their leadership What is it that Chinese people on an individual level actually want out of life? to answer that We have to understand. What is this enormous force this enormous sense of energy and possibility and also I think tension And that is the awakening of aspiration over the course of the last Generation it's useful to remember when I'm talking about individual aspiration in China This is a subject that frankly didn't deserve a whole lot of attention until recently Historically in China the individual was not the dominant unit of measure It was really about how that person was situated within these broader forces of the family the village the military unit The factory everything you were always understood you were the sibling you were the you were Your role in the village was very clearly defined People's lives were always understood to be situated that way you actually saw it in politics in society You saw it in the art even this is a useful way to visualize it This is one of China's most famous classical paintings. This is from the 11th century. It's by an artist named Fon Quan it's called Travelers Among Mountains and streams and If you look at this, of course, it's impossible to do it justice, but the only Human being in here is right here. It's a horse driver who is pushing a Mule train through the through the mountains and the image was was very was as clear to the viewers in the 11th century Is that picture the Standing Committee was that we saw a minute ago? That's where the individual figured into the cosmos That's how much you mattered you were always understood to be part of this broader system and then you compare that to Arguably the most famous classical picture in the West a full-frame portrait the art you know this is probably the first selfie and It was a fundamentally different conception of where the individual figured into the world And you saw this on the level of the law as well in China In Imperial China if you were accused of a crime for instance It wasn't just the defendant who could be put on trial. It was also community leaders neighbors family members people who were Understood to be in a sense inseparable from the person who was accused When it came time for punishment same thing punishment was collective in many cases people would also be held responsible for those For the crimes of those who were close to them Historically even the word ambition the word that attaches that I put so much emphasis on had a very negative connotation The word one of the ways you say ambition in Chinese is yes In which is a wild heart literally a wild heart and if you were said to have a wild heart That was a very negative thing was a pejorative It meant that you put yourself in front of others. It was a kind of wolfish ambition There's a collection of advice to rulers an ancient collection of advice called the hui nanzi and the hui nanzi includes The following warning it said keep power out of the hands of the ambitious Just as you would keep sharp tools out of the hands of the foolish I Live in Washington DC and I've thought of this once or twice. I have to admit That principle extended Beyond imperial China into the heyday of socialism. It was a kind of congenial concept to carry over under Chairman Mao When after all the dominant fact of life was the pressure to conform You know the dominant fact of life was to pull together for collective sacrifices and gains the state newspapers under in the sort of heyday of socialism the state newspapers used to remind people that their highest calling was to be as they put it a Rustless screw in the revolutionary machine The pressure to conform reached its most intense manifestation during the Cultural Revolution That was when any deviation from orthodoxy was dangerous that would put you in your family at great risk There was a physician who suffered terribly during the Cultural Revolution He was sent out to the far Western reaches of the desert his wife committed suicide and the great Anthropologist Arthur Kleinman later asked him he said what did you learn from this experience? What did you learn about what it means to be Chinese as a result of your experience and the physician said this he said to survive in China? You must reveal nothing to others or it can be used against you let your public self be like rice in a dinner bland and inconspicuous I have to tell you though in the China that I have lived in for the last decade that Framework is less and less helpful for understanding what's going on there And if we're going to truly understand what's happening. We have to be able to look in a new direction and understand exactly how people are changing their conception of themselves The change began at a lot of moments, but if we're going to identify one of them it would obviously be 1978 the moment when Deng Xiaoping Began to bring China back into the world by a series of free market reforms they made the sort of fateful decision to open China to the world and Year by year as they began to unravel the collective farms and the and the factories All of a sudden people had to make a lot more decisions in their lives They had to decide for instance where it was they were going to live where it was they were going to work What it was that they wanted to do with their lives there were limits on all of these things There were household registration, which was a way that would control where people could go They could live in the countryside or they could live in the city, but it's very hard to go back and forth But the effect was so profound for the people who were caught up in this that one of the words that they used in Chinese to describe the Feeling of leaving those collective farms and factories was songbong in Chinese songbong means to unfetter And it's the unfettering that you usually use to refer to a prisoner or an animal That's how profound it was the economic change and the personal change in people's lives When the free market reforms began just to put it in perspective in 1979 80% of the Chinese population worked on a farm by 1994 that figure had dropped below 50% and by 2009 so basically the 30th anniversary of the reforms about 200 million people had left Their farms to move to the cities the largest migration in human history And as they were songbong they began to do all kinds of things they hadn't been able to do before they began To moonlight you saw a busy a boom in the business of Printing business cards nobody needed business cards before because he didn't really need to announce who you were all of a sudden Business cards were a great business the newspapers. They stopped telling people to be a rustless screw in the revolutionary machine There was a state paper that carried the following headline which I put aside which was you must rely on yourself blaze your own path and Fight and you began to hear this turning up in the language in all kinds of very interesting ways Even the old word for ambition yes in wild heart Gradually began to lose its negative connotation It became a kind of neutral word and then it sort of gradually began edging into positive territory And if you go on to Amazon dot CN today, you'll find books like this Which is how to arouse a wild heart in your child There's also on there how to have a wild heart in your 20s The parenting section is full of things about wild hearts Advertisers picked up on this concept and they began to talk about Me and my the China mobile which is the big Mobile phone company began selling phones to particularly to young people with the message my turf my decision You might think this is a purely urban phenomenon oftentimes these things feel like okay This might be happening in the center of Beijing like a lot of things in China It begins in the cities and it bleeds out into the countryside if you go to a school In a rural area in the Yangtze River Delta today You'll see that the kids there begin every morning by reciting the following pledge Ever since God created all things on earth. There has not been one person like me My eyes and my ears my brain and my soul all are exceptional Nobody speaks or behaves like me no one before me and no one will after me I am the biggest miracle of nature So in China today what you're seeing is that people are asking themselves in one form or another What do I want? What do I want and what do I want for myself and for my country? And what am I going to do to get myself there? I'm going to give you an example of what this looks like up close and what it feels like to the people who are caught up in it About ten years ago. I got to know a graduate student named Gong Haiyan. She was born in the mid 70s Had a fairly typical sort of family story. She was born in A rural area born at the foot of a mountain in Hunan province her parents could not read or write they farmed and But but Gong Haiyan was growing up in this period of the first period of peace and prosperity in China in a long time She's got a great education. She went to Beijing went to Shanghai Got her graduate degree in Shanghai And then at that point her parents said okay now you've done that now It's time to come home and get married that this is the way it has always been and the way it will always be It'll be something like this and she said frankly I don't really want to go back to the village and marry a nice guy that you'll find for me It's worth mentioning that historically in China the way that marriage worked was it wasn't really based Fundamentally on desire that wasn't the most important element It was about matching up two families that made sense together in Chinese the Expression is two families with doors of the same size and that meant either the similar financial profiles or political profiles similar background and Over the years as people have gained control over their lives. They've become a lot less comfortable with these some of the old-fashioned Traditions when the matchmakers are in retreat so I Began collecting because it was an interesting window into how people were living their lives I began collecting these online personals ads that people would place in which they would essentially lay out What it was that they wanted out of life And I want to read you a personals ad by a young woman named Lin Yu. That's not her. That's somebody from the Internet Lin Yu is a graduate student in the city of Wuhan and she's looking For a young man with the following qualities. No previous marriages masters degree or more Not an only child. No smokers. No alcoholics. No gamblers not from Wuhan taller than 172 centimeters ready for at least a year of dating before marriage sporty Parents who are still together annual salary over 50,000 un age between 26 and 32 willing to guarantee eating four dinners at home each week Track record of at least two ex-girlfriends, but no more than four No vergos no Capricorns, so if anybody's interested talk to me afterwards. I'll put you in touch Yeah, exactly. So gong hyan gong hyan who had grown up after all in a village and had gone to the city knew that There were a lot of people like her in her position a lot of people who had this sense that he was up to them to make this Kind of choice so she started a company. She started a company called shu ji jiayuan in Chinese it means beautiful destiny and it's basically the Chinese match calm and It took off when I met her she was finishing graduate school. She lived in a little shoebox of an apartment She started the company it became the most popular dating site in China She took it public on the Nasdaq and made seventy seven million dollars And it all happened so fast It all happened in the span of just about six or eight years that she really didn't even have time to let her own sort Of habits catch up with her life She moved into an apartment in a villa in the suburbs of Beijing a villa sort of like this And I went to go visit her for dinner And I noticed the first thing I saw when I walked in was that the family moped was right there in the front Hall and I said why is it and that's what you do in the village and I said why is it in the front? Hall she says well, I think it's just safer this way. I said, I think you're okay. Your next-door neighbor is the Swiss ambassador I don't think he's gonna be taking it from you, but you know, she but it was her house and She didn't get there by being complacent There is nothing ordinary about somebody like Gong Haiyan You know, she's an extraordinary person the way that entrepreneurs are in a lot of places But in her story, I think we see the dynamics of something Important very briefly what we see is the onset of enormous economic opportunity if you can get it the belief that you are entitled to something better and the expectation of individual choice as I've tracked the ambitions over China of China over the last Over the last generation the awakening of those ambitions. I've come to understand them really as occupying three pursuits There's sort of three buckets of aspirations that are worth thinking about The first is the pursuit of fortune. That's the one. That's the obvious one for us here We see that from far away. You see it when you're in China. You see it in the story of Gong Haiyan What's interesting though is That as people like Gong Haiyan begin to acquire property, they get the villa They get the car They begin to have the things the pursuit of fortune is satisfied for them in these small initial steps What they discover Is that the more that they acquire The less comfortable they feel the less secure they feel all of a sudden they have things they need to protect They realize in a sense that they need to know Who is well, let's put it this way. They need to know for instance It's not just about having the car having the house. They also need to know. Well, am I safe? I mean are my kids safe? For instance, what's going on with the air in China and they begin to ask those questions You know, it's the kind of you satisfy your basic material requirements and then you begin to worry about other things Chinese Citizens today can pick up their smartphones and they can check the aqi the air quality on a given day They can see how it matches up to the world health organizations Standards and what's interesting about it is it's become a status symbol to know Because it implies that you care enough about yourself and that you're urbane enough that you're thinking enough about your cosmopolitan enough To care about the air that you breathe You begin to wonder who is setting the rules in your society and you begin to ask who is breaking the rules in your society And why are they able to break them? All of these are not political questions in their origin, but they have a political expression in a way In effect what's happening is that the Chinese middle class is discovering that the more they acquire The less they can afford to be ill-informed and this creates the second pursuit the second pursuit that I That I think about is the pursuit of truth in effect. It's the pursuit of information It's the sudden awareness that they cannot afford not to have that information If you look at surveys today in china what you discover And it may be hard to read in the back But what you see is that the chinese population today cares less about crime or unemployment What they care about is protecting the value of what they have they're worried about the erosion of the things They've accumulated so they worry about corrupt officials They worry about the gap between rich and poor. They worry about air pollution Finally, the more that they begin to question these kinds of basic facts about their experience in society They are also beginning to ask deeper questions bigger questions the sort of transcendental questions about what does it mean to be a citizen? What does it mean to be a parent? You know you have historically in china When confucianism was an idea that made a lot of sense to people that was very present in their lives That helped you understand some of your roles as a citizen as a as a father as a son Things have gotten mixed up over the last generation and so you see these days a pursuit of faith in a very visible way Anybody who's been in china in the last Ten years probably has had the experience of a friend a chinese friend saying. Oh, you know, I've recently gotten interested in Buddhism or Taoism or christianity There are now roughly as many christians in china as there are members of the communist party This is a period of a kind of great awakening in china that is comparable to the great awakening that we saw In the united states at the end of our own Of our own period of enormous growth. We're in the midst of our own period period of enormous growth And I think as the chinese people are sort of setting off To find what it is that excites them what it is that they want to they want to place their faith in They're beginning to answer those questions for themselves. They're less comfortable in effect Being given a set of values a set of priorities and they're beginning to say well I'm going to choose for myself what I care about And that is not a simple process and it's not one that necessarily guarantees a very Quiet harmonious domestic scene. I'm going to tell you briefly and then I'll be happy to take questions and talk about whatever is on people's minds I just want to tell you briefly about a guy who I came to know a couple of years ago because he's kind of interesting You remember in 2008 the year of the olympics in beijing. There was this outpouring of nationalism in china particularly when The olympic torch began making its way around the world and it encountered protests in a lot of cities people took the torch as a Reflection of the chinese government and in china particularly young people rose up in response and there were these protests in front of Carrefour the french grocery store and other places where people were saying They were they were sort of rising up to defend china's image and in the middle of this there was a video that appeared on the chinese web It was a very angry video it was called china stand up and It was about the messages in this little short sort of youtube clip about five minutes long It was about we must protect ourselves against efforts to encircle and contain china that we are at the beginning of a new cold war perpetrated by the west And it shot up to the number two most popular video in china And um it was kind of an interesting and a little bit of a of a of a rough period I remember at the time i got a western journalist were often the target of a lot of this anger Because they would say well you're not representing china fairly and i got a fax on my machine at the office It said correct your misunderstandings of china or you and your family will wish you were dead And it was not i don't think it was directed personally in me a lot of reporters got it But there was a level of anger there that was interesting to me and i wanted to understand it So i said well let's figure out who made this video and i uh Got in touch with the guy who had made the video and i said can i come see you and he said yeah You can come down and see me i'm in shanghai And before i went i'm a little embarrassed in retrospect, but before i went i sort of said well Told people look if you don't hear for me a couple days i've gone very bravely down to shanghai to Gather the news uh i get to shanghai and the first thing that happens i meet this guy And he tries to pay my taxi fare. He was a graduate student at futon university studying western political philosophy His name is tangjie and he speaks english and german He was studying specifically he was doing his dissertation on Phenomenology and the work of edmund hersel and he said are you familiar with hersel's work on phenomenology? I said of course a very familiar every american is very familiar With hersel's work And what i came to realize for i got to know tangjie uh and what's interesting about him is a couple of things He and his cohort and there were a lot of young guys like him They were the winners right they had gotten to the great university. They were fortunate They were born at a time in which They weren't they weren't subject to famine. They weren't at war. They had very little deprivation in their lives His again his parents couldn't read or write. He was the youngest of four siblings Um But he had grown up in a period in which china was all about every year was a little the gdp was higher Every year was a little bit more opportunity a little bit more openness And what he saw was this image that the west has of china that for him Was so at odds with his image of china and it offended him And in a sense partly because he had grown up In this environment where he was learning about western political philosophy He almost had to be holier than now and he had to reclaim His belief in china and had to reassert his redemonstrate in a way his devotion to the cause And that's what led him to become in many ways A true believer and and and one of the primary spokesmen for a new conception of chinese nationalism And then there's an interesting coda to his story, which is That you remember i mentioned boy see lie the chinese official who was taken down in a In a corruption investigation. Well during that period in 2012 four years after i met him There was a lot of pressure that came on different parts of chinese civil society The government just got very nervous and they wanted to sort of settle things down get a closer A tighter grip on on what people were talking about writing about thinking about on the web Tang Jie had been so successful in his video that he had built a business out of it. He's gotten Angel investors attracted venture capital funding and he started what he called the chinese nationalist youtube Which was a site that was going to promote the ideas that he cared about and it was popular It was a good business. He rented a big beautiful office up in beijing right next to by do which is the chart of chinese google I mean he had a he had a full operation he had a staff and then During this period in 2012 when they needed to when the government got very nervous They went to settle things down. They said Well, let's start looking out what's happening on the web and over the years chinese As the chinese sort of nationalist youtube got a little bigger tang jie got more settled into his job He got a little more ambitious and he began to say well, we're not just going to criticize western journalists We're also going to identify and criticize Chinese officials who are not living up to the standards that the public have set for them and the highest standards of Socialism and the party and the great tradition of chairman malin. We're going to call them out and we're going to criticize them So they sort of had gradually drifted into this more expansive conception of their own capability And so they had these our essays on there that were attacking corruption And somebody in the propaganda department somewhere said looked at the chinese nationalist youtube one day and said What is going on with the chinese nationalist youtube and they shut it down? They blocked it. So all of a sudden this guy who was the truest of true believers Had found himself on the receiving end of censorship and for him that was I think in many ways a reflection of the of the basic collision that we see in china today Which is the collision between the individual aspirations that have been awakened and that have been the greatest source of strength and energy over the last generation And the chinese collective national ambition to try to maintain unity to try to impose and and and and maintain this One central conception of what the state will be and what the country will be and in that collision Is where we see the origins ultimately of Hong Kong because in hong kong you remember this was Started because the chinese government said we're going to help you figure out who it is It's going to run the country instead of having open nominations for your chief executive We're going to identify a slate of reasonable candidates We're going to have a committee that's going to not that's going to vet these candidates And when they did that people went into the streets And they said well hold on we want to have this open nomination process And there were other things going on there was I think you could make a case that there was a pursuit of fortune pursuit of truth And pursuit of faith too because if you talk to the young people in hong kong They would tell you that one of the reasons they were in the streets was because they could not get that Sense of material satisfaction they wanted, you know real estate prices were too high. They couldn't afford to buy an apartment The income gap in china in hong kong has grown since it returned to chinese control And they blame in many ways the What they would call interference from beijing It's about pursuit of truth too because if you ask people on the street in hong kong what it is that they want They'll say well, we don't want them to interfere in our newspapers chinese There's been a lot of pressure on hong kong newspaper editors to be less critical of the Of what happens in beijing and then finally it's about faith in a in an important way because what you really saw In hong kong fundamentally was A choice between two Possible ethics to define china's future One is the nationalist ethic which we've talked about and the other one is the thing that is essential to hong kong Which is the globalist ethic, you know hong kong sees itself as china as as age's original global city And what they were confronting was the possibility of being consumed within this Very chinese nationalist ethic and they basically stood up and said we won't do it So I'll just leave it there and tell you that I think that what what drove these events are also giving us a window into some of the Motivations, I think the imperatives and the underlying dynamics that are going to be important in china in the years ahead And i'll be looking forward to keeping track of them. Thank you very much for listening I'll let you uh fill the questions on your own until I uh see you uh fending That's here here Sure. Yeah, if anybody's got any questions, I'd be happy to answer. Yeah Well said, yeah in the palace museum or is it somewhere else? Thank you very much They Yeah, no, it's a great question. I'm glad you mentioned taiwan at the outset too. I think This is such an interesting and complex moment in the mainland's relationship with taiwan because in some ways It feels like it's getting better And then Or at least getting less hostile it feels this way to from from far away And then you see what happens in hong kong and I think to a lot of people in taiwan. They said We don't want to have anything To do with man. This just this is a this was this set back in many ways I think beijing's attempt to try to build some relationship with taiwan because I think people in hong kong really feared The idea that they would lose the kinds of liberties that are very important to people in taiwan I've had a lot of friends from the mainland who've gone to taiwan for the first time and they always come back With the same reaction, which is wow It is for them in a sense. It's a possibility of what china can be And then it you know It kind of comes up against also the education that they've received and the messages that they receive on a daily basis, which is What happens in taiwan on an island of this size is impossible in china for 1.4 billion people That's what the so oftentimes they will say i love it in taiwan. You know the food is safe It's delicious The air is clean But it's impossible here. This is I hear this over and over again. They say the same thing about new york city But what I think is interesting is that those kinds of received ideas about what it is and is not possible in china Are a little bit more malleable. Some of these issues are Beginning to be debated. There used to be no facility for debating these kinds of things And now even though the internet is very strictly controlled. There are still realms in which people can talk about things um But I you know taiwan still remains the most neuralgic issue for the chinese leadership And so in some ways it's one of the hardest ones It particularly if you're a leader like xijin ping who's trying to consolidate your authority You have a very limited bandwidth and in order In which you can operate with mobility. You have to be very conscious about About reassuring people on your left flank on your right flank and they have to be very careful So I think that constrains them a little bit Yeah, thank you. Hmm. I haven't been actually on a daily basis. Yeah I'll restate the question too in a second. Yeah Yeah, so the question is whether the chinese conception of internet management as it would be known in china Whether that is something that they will be able to sell around the world and Um, what are what are the chances that that'll become something that's more readily adopted in other countries? Two thoughts on that it's not a subject. I know a huge amount about on a technical basis I can tell you though that internet culture as an idea is is essential to everything as you know that everything I've been writing about and thinking about because Without the internet a lot of the dynamics we're talking about would not have come to the fore as as quickly And I think as vividly as they have The chinese censorship system is The most successful form of censorship the largest most expansive censorship system that the world has ever seen It is also in my view utterly incapable Of achieving the task for which it's designed Because it is based on some level on the ability to it's very difficult to scale It's very difficult to respond to crises that pop up that they don't anticipate They there's a tendency in the china watching world, you know to either take one view or the other to say Oh, they've been much more successful than we think or to say it's doomed I think in a funny way, it's very good. It's sort of both. It's able to work on a day-to-day basis But it's brittle and what happens is that when there is a crisis They have to marshal their energy very fast and it's it can be hard to respond You know, they've tried to sell it in other countries. They've succeeded in some places, but I was in Burma I was in Burma about 18 months ago And I was spending a lot of time with Burmese officials and entrepreneurs I'll tell you one thing that came through in my conversations with them, you know as they were sort of tacking towards the west again They said, you know, I said to people are you beginning to use chinese servers? For instance chinese You know and enterprise software, I was just trying to curious Are you putting your information in the cloud and chinese cloud and the answer I got was Would you put your information in the chinese cloud? And that was in Burma and so I thought now that's interesting. So Um, I do think that they have a brand issue that they're working on and that's a big big Kind of reputational deficit that they have to make up Yeah Go back to your photo of the blue tie and Yeah, so the blue tie was the guy on the end Wang Qishan I think the folks here may recognize Wang Qishan. He is in charge of the anti-corruption drive the central commission on discipline and inspection Um, he is the internal affairs department. He's the guy who is in charge of figuring out who's going to get Um, who's going to get rolled up and who is uh, who's going to be taken down and He's always been a bit of an independent thinker But I think this is not accidental because after that blue tie in all of the official portraits of the Of the leadership that went out over the next few weeks. He was always wearing a slightly different get-up So for instance, if they were in sport coats, he was in a windbreaker if they were in windbreakers he was in a sport coat and It was about separating him from the group and saying he is part of this But he is not entirely of the leadership He stands apart which I think was actually very shrewd For for his purposes and also for Xi Jinping's purposes Yeah I'm familiar with uh, you know the phrase everything counts in large amounts and I've seen tons of photos and you had two of them In a presentation where it's just a massive humanity all dressed identically the same and and When you juxtapose that against you know the childhood book Yeah What do you think the nature of the conversation with the kids is that I still want to go But I want to wear a blue jumpsuit or I want to be an individual Where does that come? It's a great question. Actually, I'm glad you asked that that's a really interesting Dynamic and I think what's going on is that people are They allow these two ideas to coexist in their head at the same time and it's imperfect But um in a sense out of deference to your parents, you don't say I want to wear the blue suit I'll wear the red suit. It is partly still about validating You know your conception of what it means to be Chinese and this is partly, you know in some sense People don't acknowledge. I think what's interesting is that people don't always acknowledge this sudden awakening of individual Ethic oftentimes when you first raise this in China people say oh, no, no, no It's not the case And then you begin to sort of unspool the evidence and they'll say well, that's true That's true, too, and I do have that book And I did put my online personal's add-on But it is so much a part of what it means to be Chinese to be conscious of the collective and to be thinking about others first That people will it's a cognitive dissonance that will try to avoid in a sense They will try to avoid actively rubbing up against that traditional Sensibility if they can and what happens is oftentimes it's not when you voluntarily choose to put yourself out of step out of sync with your peers It's when your own desires and what it is that you're trying to accomplish forces you out of sync with your peers You know, I've always always thought that Almost nobody in China chooses to be a dissident and a dissident is the most extreme manifestation of what we're talking about It's the person who puts themselves far out of the mainstream The reason nobody chooses to be a dissident in China is because it's an incredibly dangerous and risky thing to do You know you're putting your entire life at risk You're putting your family at risk and so on and so on and when you ask anybody in china I mean I've interviewed a lot of these guys over the years and you say well, no You know, why did you become a dissident? I'm not a dissident. Oh really? Well, you're under house arrest and you've been fighting with the government for five years Okay, well, but and it's because it's so you know, they don't want to perceive themselves as as doing that they really uh But it's also just a fact on the ground. So forward-looking I would say That the rise of the individual ethic is a force that is not going to change in China That is not going to be rolled back. It's an artifact of our time It's a function of technology the consumer experience You know go down the list of being a part of the global system going to europe Getting on a bus and traveling around europe on your own all of those kinds of things contribute to this And it's really going to be about whether the chinese institutions can adapt themselves And this is the key thing. I think they're more adaptable than we often think they are They will seek to adapt themselves to this change in chinese Um in in I think chinese world view, but you cannot put that back in a bottle Yeah, I think a couple of thoughts on Stability one is that there is a lot more domestic dissent and unrest than oftentimes people see from the outside I think you know anybody who's an area specialist knows that the chinese government Counted about 180 000 acts of unrest mass protests of one kind or another in the most recent accounting that was 2012 I think 180 000 acts in a year that's 500 every day. That's a lot. There's a lot going on Most of them with very few exceptions are successfully pacified and they're put down with a fairly reliable toolbox of police action and education and force and The reason why hong kong was was problematic was you couldn't use any of those Instruments they didn't control the police the same way. They don't have the same education system And they couldn't use force because it was too visible and and it's and it's hong kong Personally, I think that the chances of a of a of a broad-based Active of organized unrest It's hard to envision how it happens at the moment I used to live in egypt and in egypt it was a place that was desperately poor And it really wasn't all that hard to imagine the tinderbox scenario china is a different place I mean the people in uniform are well fed. They've got good material. They've got good uniforms They're literally the people who will be called upon to intervene in the event of an act of political unrest Are responsive I actually think that the chances of something happening in the next few years are fairly high Because of all of the underlying conditions that are there Economic inequality pollution all of these kinds of things But I think one thing we've learned about predicting unrest in the united states Is it's very hard to predict in other countries when it's going to happen Would we have guessed it was going to be a fruit seller in tunisia? No I think in china if you were ranking the risks you would probably say that an environmental crisis that contributes in some way to a broader metastasizing sense of Of political unfairness and injustice. That's a conceivable scenario I think that's one that we put pretty high on our list Yep Is a really wonderful trip actually I mean it was uh, I did this basically because um, a lot of my chinese friends Were beginning to travel And they'd never really had the opportunity before in chinese history generally you could you would migrate You know you'd go to set up a town somewhere You'd move to a china town in another country But to go overseas for leisure was just a kind of privilege people didn't have because it was expensive and and everything else And people began to travel in large numbers A couple of takeaways one, I was on a I'll just tell you the mechanics of the trip where it was 40 people so it was 39 chinese tourists and and me and we were on a bus for 10 days 10 days five countries and we covered a lot of ground I can tell you it is possible to be in europe for 10 days and eat only chinese food And magnificent chinese food, I should add because we was kind of wonderful You go to each one of these cities and we'd be driving past these kind of Gorgeous bistros and everything and then we'd find this one restaurant And it was always delicious actually and it was very kind of anyway the people were incredibly welcoming they tended to be small-town entrepreneurs teachers Accountants, I mean it was a fairly sort of lower middle class cohort And in almost every case it was their first trip out of asia a couple of them had been elsewhere in asia They've been to malaysia or indonesia or taiwan The first thing they commented on and the thing they commented on over and over again was the quality of the clean air This was a powerful fact You know and it was kind of interesting because our conception of chinese Priorities has always been economic development above all and your average person would say Okay, I understand the air is bad But we we've got to put the economy first because otherwise we will fall behind and we'll lose all these opportunities I think you're getting a thicker conception of the good life in china today people are starting to define satisfaction in other ways That would be one the other other piece. I would say is um When we were deciding where to go and where to spend our time we spent about 15 minutes at the home of carl marx where he was born We spent about two hours at louis viton In paris Yeah, right here So first I wonder in the age of ambition how an individual's Trajectory accommodates military service So what that means to the individual in an age of ambition and then generally what public perceptions of its military are That's a good question. I have a couple thoughts and I wish I knew more on it, but I'll tell you a couple things that are notable um You know one of the sort of artifacts of this internet age has been that there is a much greater awareness of corruption in the military And that I think was something that people didn't really see It was very hard to glimpse that historically about a year and a half ago a young woman went online With a lengthy essay about how she had paid The fee that she had been asked to pay to pay by a recruiter in order to get into the military And then was told at the last minute that somebody else had paid a larger fee and she was not going to get in And it what was interesting about that was 10 years ago. She would have gone home and brooded about it today She went online immediately and complained about it And it was a huge embarrassment and people lost their jobs and so on and so on I was once on a flight on my way back from macao Sorry, these are anecdotal, but they're just they tell you something about how this problem got so bad I was on a flight on my way back from macao and the guy seated next to me Was kind of beautifully dressed. Anyway, he spent the whole time working on this new cell phone that he had bought It was a $14,000 cell phone and he was telling me about what he was doing It had a like it had a 24 hour concierge at the other end and he was telling me that he was taking equestrian Lessons and his son was Had a horse and finally after we've been on this flight for 45 minutes I said, sir, what do you do? What is your profession? And he said, oh, I'm career military and I said wow and so You know, I do think that fundamentally the public perception of the military at the people's liberation army is very positive it's still a part of the essential founding narrative of the country and they have Managed to maintain that sense that the military is a part of our lives The big damage of course was 1989 when the military was for the first time since the founding of the nation Turned on the public and it did huge damage to its reputation. It was sort of in its own way limited because You had to be the kind of person who was ideologically open to the idea That what happened in 89 was that that the crackdown in 89 was a bad thing A lot of people in china accepted the conventional narrative Which was it was a it was a painful moment But a necessary moment to continue the march of economic progress For a certain stratum of society thinking people intellectuals of a certain kind They believed it was a tragedy and a and a an avoidable tragedy and Military and you've probably heard this among uh, you know, if you've spent time among with the chinese officer corps They were they were hugely damaged as a result and they felt that they did not want to have that happen again And so there was a kind of a new weariness Um About being called in to do the business of what the civilian leadership would want on the domestic side We have never seen it really tested We don't know exactly what would happen, but I don't think it was a coincidence that in sigin ping's first year in office He made a lot of very visible Visits to military installations to show that he was knowledgeable that he was close and that he had their support um So he he prioritizes that I think very highly At this point, uh, we can just thank evan for a terrific, uh leadoff to this series But uh, you might be on the hook to come back as the