 Well thank you Ruri and thanks to IEA and all of you for coming out today. I am as Ruri said a virus extraction although I haven't been here since 1970 so I'm thrilled to be back. My son is in his second semester at Trinity and lives just down the road in Kavanaugh court so I had an easy walk over this morning. My father is a daily from West Meath and my mother's a McCarthy from Galway and then it's all O'Connor's and O'Hearn's and everything all the way back. My wife is Chinese however so we've stopped just marrying other Irish Americans. I was recalling this morning in 1991 when I was a diplomat at the Embassy American Embassy in Beijing. I went to a St. Patrick's Day party at the Irish Embassy which was right around the corner and I actually hesitate to tell this story because it involves people who some of you doubtless know but I'll tell it anyway. I was at the St. Patrick's Day party and the at the time Irish Ambassador's daughter was visiting and I thought she was quite lovely and I invited her to go with me the next morning to the Great Wall and she said yes so I set up with my a good friend of mine who was a Chinese driver at the American Embassy to get the van you know to drive us out to the wall to have a day up on the wall to have a hike and I thought to have a date and so the next morning I went to pick her up and she was there waiting to go to the Great Wall with me and her boyfriend who was also in town and so I was sort of I swallowed and was gracious and said nice to meet you and we had a very nice day on the wall and when I got back to work on Monday morning our driver had spread this story among our entire Chinese staff and I was the laughing stock of the Chinese Embassy because he realized precisely what had happened and so that was my first foray into US-Irish Chinese relations this is my second and I enter it just a little bit of trepidation because of that prior experience. The background to this topic is of course China's fantastic rise over the past 40 years and because much of what I'm saying today is going to have a cautionary character I want to begin by stating the obvious that that China's rise is in the main a great and historic human good which has involved the lifting out of poverty of 800 million people and has been conducive to human flourishing within China and around the world that is the background of a number of geostrategic concerns but I think that we have to remind ourselves continually especially in the United States that this comes about because of a primarily positive story within China to which the United States has made a significant contribution of which we should be proud we often lose track of that the relationship has shifted we saw this in 2017 when President Trump's first national security strategy said that China together with Russia but China primarily is now our greatest long-term security challenge so it is a greater threat if that word has to be used than threats from non-state actors and from terrorism that's quite a striking statement we then heard about two months later when then secretary of defense Jim Mattis rolled out the national defense strategy which was there's a national security strategy which is supposed to identify threats the national defense strategy says well here's what we're going to do about it now obviously one of the problems with the dynamic is that it tends to shape our responses to threats primarily in military terms be that as it may the secretary of defense Mattis in outlining his defensive plans made I thought a striking statement especially for a secretary of defense he said there's no ironclad rule that the United States has to prevail in this competition but we must prevail the secretary of defense a marine mad dog Mattis said we must prevail if the values of the enlightenment are to endure it's an interesting phrase from a military man but it does put the a focus on the fact that there is an ideology an ideological values component to this relationship and I gather you'll correct me if I'm wrong that this is these sets of concerns were what lay behind the 2019 European declaration that China was among other things a systemic rival and that I think is a recognition of the same fact that as China has grown more powerful it has done what you would expect the world's most populous richest nation which is also an ancient civilization and really sort of an empire on its own terms has done it's it's sought greater influence and we find as China influences the peoples of the rest of the world that it doesn't always treat them using different values than those which inform its treatment of its own people and that's a problem for us so that's where we find ourselves now in the United States there is a debate about how to frame this competition with China we see and I think that I think that Beijing and Washington agree on this although Beijing's diplomatic discourse is more traditional and sort of less bombastic than that of the United States but we agree that the United States and China are involved in a very long term decades long global competition that includes both polls outer space and cyberspace to have a leading influence on I don't think either believes it can be a sole superpower in the way that the United States was briefly after the cold war but to be the leading shaper of security architectures trade and investment regimes very importantly the development marketization and regulation of new technologies but also norms and practices and value systems worldwide that's the nature of the competition the debate in the United States is between those who think that our policy should aim at managing this competition as well as we possibly can or winning it those are those are broadly speaking the two schools the people who advocate for management and cards on the table I am one such believe in managing this competition as well as possible in what is basically a play for time which recognizes that China is a complex space place which is still evolving still changing Xi Jinping like most political leaders speaks with great certainty about where he's going to take China and why but in fact like Deng Xiaoping he's still crossing the river by feeling for the stones they're they're making this up as they go along but the managers say let's manage the relationship as well as we can in a play for time the growing number of voices who may be a majority now there's certainly the loudest in Washington say no we have to win this competition it cannot be a play for time because we're out of time engagement was a suckers game in which we aided and abetted enabled small tiger which is now a grown tiger a peer competitor an enemy and we have to win this is why you will hear more and more people like Steve Bannon or senators like Ben Sass of Nebraska or Marco Rubio of Florida describing China as an existential threat this term has gained a lot of currency over the past year I'm in a I think now probably minority group that will reject this term in part because the word threat remains perfectly serviceable and completely alarming it means something that we need to attend to study prepare for existential threat means pass the ammunition and reload I don't think we're quite there yet but we hear this senator cotton of Arkansas has called China harkening back to Reagan the evil empire this kind of rhetoric is on the rise so just quickly you know what does if we look at the policy proposals of people who advocate for prevailing for winning in this competition defeating China in this competition you know what what does that mean well it means the decoupling of vital industries there's a question about whether that is possible it is certainly very costly it entails something like industrial policy the embrace of industrial policy for the United States with relation to things like rare earths and other industries it would certainly entail sending the Chinese students home essentially the United States telling the world's largest talent pool that it is a despised class within the United States it is hard to imagine sending the Chinese students home without an attendant racist backlash in the United States frankly against Chinese Americans but I think this would have to be a piece of it if we think back to the cold war and the way that you know the Soviet students at the time weren't welcome there playing to win would involve a diplomacy United States diplomacy based on insisting that all of our partners in other nations choose sides between the United States and China we talked about this a little bit at lunch this is a development that no nation welcomes Europe in Africa in southeast Asia both China and the United States have been doing a good deal of cajoling and pressure sometimes even many nations feel bullied behind screens requesting that that they take sides and they understandably do not wish to do this trying to win would also involve I think a spread of this notion of China as an an evil empire perhaps there are very real values and ideological issues at play here but they need to be contextualized more broadly than the evil empire kind of discourse makes them that is nevertheless on the rise and of course China in part is responsible for making this possible those of us who remain in a more moderate camp of wanting to manage relations when you make these defenses in the United States China does not help you when you advocate for moderation you get Hong Kong you get Xinjiang you get Xi Jinping politicizing the universities which of all was politicized but further politicizing China's universities and media and the creative class and locking up citizen journalists all of the increasingly repressive moves that Xi Jinping has making make it much easier to make the evil empire claim and more difficult to make a more nuanced gradualist long-term claim and then perhaps most worrisomely when we speak of winning rather than managing this competition we're talking about a new arms race which comprises not only nuclear arms but also cyber weapons and outer space weapons neither of which we understand very well and I'm afraid that Washington is very close to a re-embrace of something like a mutual assured destruction doctrine we're not quite there yet but this is where the momentum goes and I know that there are similar concerns we see them in Europe and Europe obviously has a different set of equities for reasons that you're more familiar with than I am but I would suggest if you look back at the past five year or so history of growing concern about China in these in various ways Europe has tended to get in a somewhat more moderate nuanced place it's tended to agree with some of the United States concerns on a lag time of about two or three years I see a broad pattern along those directions I don't know whether you would agree so I think these issues despite being an advocate for managing the relationship the concerns about China are very real but I think that they have been wrongly framed and that's what I'd like to focus on in the remainder of the time they tend to ignore a few extremely important factors which should shape our approach to China's rise even our approach to China's power and which certainly should inform our approach to international relations my first worry is about our assimilating capacity what I mean by that is that the rise of China I think is the single most important geostrategic phenomenon in the world today it's transformative it requires a rethink across the board of all of our assumptions and all of our strategies I believe that that is true but China's of course the rise of China is not the only geostrategic not the only transformative challenge that humankind faces there's the rise of China and other nations as well but of course at the same time we're facing the challenge of global warming and the loss of biodiversity which is perhaps more alarming and is also transformative and we shape transformative shifts of globalization not only the globalization of supply chains but the globalization of pathogens of crime the globalization of information ideas media and entertainment the globalization of rich poor disparities which is attended things like mass migration and add to that another transformative dynamic which is the emergence and confluence of new forms of technology the impact and importance of which I don't think we've even begun to understand yet so if that's right if we're really facing all of these truly transformative challenges at once it's a little bit as though we experienced sort of to pick historical parallels the rise of the united states the little ice age and disappearance of the dinosaurs woodblock printing in the Gutenberg bible the gilded age and the great depression the black death and the industrial revolution and the discovery of the germ theory of disease worldwide within a 50 year period so an exaggeration to make a point that we face a lot of transformative issues at the same time and what i take from this working in us china is we need to constantly remind ourselves in the united states and worldwide that while china may be the greatest geostrategic challenge we face it may well be the case that our greatest geostrategic challenge is not our greatest challenge overall and that it needs to be contextualized in the light of others another issue that we miss in the united states with an over focus on china as for example an existential threat is that china is constrained the rise of china is new sudden especially in the united states you don't have this problem here it threatens our own sense of self and our sense of preeminence and that you know certain kinds of fears about american decline clearly shade in part our response to china beijing's propagandist would say that all of the american response to china is a hegemonic paranoid response fear of american decline that is is untrue but it would be also untrue to claim that it's not a factor china is constrained it's not 10 feet tall it it is not a monolith moving inexorably and unopposed in one direction it's constrained geographically it has 14 land neighbors only russia has as many four of which are nuclear one of which is north korea one of which india it has major land disputes with just its 14 land bordering nations combined have greater military strength economic wealth and population in china a difficult neighborhood especially when you compare it to the united states and that's before you add add in china's maritime neighborhood and the constraints that it sees there not only with the malacca dilemma and the fact that they're sort of bottled in in the western pacific but america's alliance systems and the presence of the united states military still in the western pacific and many of these nations are of course strong these are not these are not weak nations so china is constrained by geography it is constrained on its own periphery china speaks as though it is now able based on the success of its economic development to exercise governance around the world this is part of the shijin ping claim beijing has a model beijing wants to lead on global governance but china is having a real difficulty in governance on its own periphery it has had 25 years to convince the people of hong kong that it is in their interest to be part of the prc no sale it's going the other direction it has had 70 years to convince the people of shinjiang and tibet and taiwan that they should want to be part of this chinese communist party led family 70 years a stunning failure of policy in all three of these areas which are in different ways on the chinese periphery it's going in the other direction so again china is constrained it is constrained to by its unequal economic development this i think not the united states this is what shijin ping worries about first thing in the morning this is what he has identified as the great outstanding contradiction is rising expectations in china in an area in which there's uneven development and i think that from shijin ping's own point of view he's correct about that and this is really what he deals with most of the time and there's a great deal of uncertainty for him here what else could sort of end the party in china and have it stuck in some sort of middle income trap swamp in which it can't move forward easily corruption shijin ping's greatest admission remains an enormous problem within china debt the debt bomb especially among local government could slow things down or bring development gdp growth it to a halt in china demographics the fruits of the one china policy getting old before you get rich with no good social safety net this is an enormous policy problem just on the horizon for china and it knows it that's going to require expenditures and sacrifices which slow down china's growth pollution you all know about this you've read about air pollution in china that one's relatively easily dealt with water less easily dealt with nobody knows how to handle 80 percent of your lakes and rivers being technically dead and even worse than that is soil pollution unprecedented in human history overuse of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers which a toxicity of the soil that can't be undone and that could again end all of this as could china's water shortage in the north and as could china's sclerotic politics the fact that you're still stuck with a revolutionary leninist model that was applied to a desperately poor agricultural state and that's no description of china today which is dynamic and entrepreneurial and innovative and internationalist and forward looking how do you reconcile that um and then lastly i think that uh we have tended to overstate the china threat in a number of ways um we worry a lot uh in the united states as does a good deal of europe as does australia and much of the rest of the world about china's influence its ability to push its illiberalism beyond its own borders um and i tell this story a lot but it it's struck me deeply i think it remains the right question my son who's now a sophomore here at trinity around the corner who i'm here visiting a few years ago we were out back doing yard work and we were talking about us-china relations said dad you know i hear you talk about this stuff all the time it's one of the reasons he's enjoying us here today he's kind of heard enough of his dad um he said can you talk about chinese influence he said what do you mean we're mulching the gardens then we're going to go watch avengers infinity war then we're going to get pizza then we're going to come home and we're going to play cribbage uh and drink jameson's and listen to bob dillon and china interferes in none of this so what is this about i think that you know in america here other countries there's got to be some version of this question you're looming china is going to take over everything you walk outside and you say well what does this mean we we've overstated it um but i think the best way at least for americans to understand the chain that the threat from china is to say okay there is a challenge um that's my preferred term but threat if you like or quibble over that uh but what is the nature of that threat what list in any nation ireland here ireland united states what are the greatest issues that you're facing and then ask yourself how many of them are china's fault the loss of jobs to automation not china's fault in the united states the fact that we have let anger become the very engine of our politics and of and are more deeply divided than we've been since the civil war not china's fault that's on us the fact that ceo's now makes 700 times the wage of a factory floor worker did china do that to us no that's on us the fact that we incarcerate a higher percentage of and more of our people than any other country in the world and most of them are poor people of color not china's fault that's on us you can go right down the list the fact that whatever threat huawei represents i think it does represent a threat the fact that the united states does not have a competitor for huawei is not huawei's fault when we have americans who say all chinese students and we should send them home the fact that there are not americans prepared to take their position in all of these phd programs in stem china didn't do that that's on us so i think that most americans whatever their idiosyncratic list of problems would be if you went down you say how many of these can be laid at china's door how many of these sins uh the answer is not very many so the united states hasn't really framed this issue correctly yet we're still flailing between uh raising the alarm about china sometimes just through a sort of a brutal name calling and responding coherently uh with sustainable policies um that would actually work for the united states now having said that i do think that there are major issues entailed in china's rise uh which are not in the and letting china have its head is not in the interest of the west of the e you of the united states there there are real differences in interests i think we have to face and sort of so too with reference to the united states which i think have echoes for europe first is that we do not want china to have dominance in the western pacific the united states can't seek dominance either we can't exercise that anymore but chinese dominance in the western pacific which china certainly seeks is not in our interest it would entail giving up on our alliance system in the western pacific which would almost certainly result in a new nuclear arms race in northeast asia uh japan have taken out of the american nuclear umbrella would itself have to go nuclear at which point south korea would go nuclear taiwan can go nuclear very quickly and then if we've got a nuclear north korea south korea china russia india pakistan japan taiwan the lesson is that big nations go nuclear so maybe add indonesia to this list as well it doesn't become a pretty picture ceding western pacific to chinese dominance would also entail giving up on the defense of international law for the united states so our policy should aim to allow for china's growing influence because china has legitimate interests in in in the area uh but avoiding through real forms of confrontation if need be china's dominance while not seeking it ourselves and obviously different versions of that formula might apply in different parts of the world and then secondly we have a very strong interest in avoiding the spread of chinese illiberalism beyond china's borders china likes to say that its foreign policy is non ideological it doesn't seek to convert other countries and it doesn't care what kinds of political systems those countries have and in the first instance there's a fair amount of truth in that china is not seeking labors realms is not the third rike this is not the soviet union that wants that kind of domination and i think that china genuinely doesn't care if the united states or ireland democratic again in the first instance however the record that we see from china over the past 20 years strongly suggests that countries which china see as receiving its largesse especially in the form of infrastructure lending not only infrastructure lending but other other areas as well if you receive chinese largesse it turns out although china generally doesn't ask questions about your political system when it issues those loans it also doesn't necessarily ask if you can repay them but that's a different issue you can talk about if you wish it turns out that if you get chinese largesse that you don't get to have an opinion about the Uyghurs or the south china sea or whatever else it may be the communist party doesn't really brook obstacles this is the goal i would say of chinese foreign policy it is not world domination it is not spreading of chinese ideology dependent deference through dependence broadly speaking is the formula again not dominance but deference through dependence leveraging china's wealth to get other nations to be at least complicit silent in not placing any obstacles in the way of china's goals or its self-image and we see this in numerous occasions you know laus and cambodiaris essentially bought such that they prevent any consensus within azean greece whose port of pareas is now being very ably run by the chinese is upsetting eu and other apple carts in opposing any sort of criticism of china italy maybe that's not going so well we'll see how it's embrace of china's uh overseas infrastructure lending goes but certainly through the 17 plus one this is part of the game uh and we need to fight that and the way this works is if you're if you are a nation that that takes certain kinds of chinese low lending or other kinds of largesse and if you have a free press then you have to silence it and if you have a vibrant civil society it too can't criticize china and so what this means is that while china doesn't care about exporting ideology directly indirectly the terms of chinese deep economic involvement have the effect of silencing free press and civil society and therefore over time have the effect of an export of ideology or the spread of illiberalism and i think that we do need to fight against that now last remark as i said america hasn't decided there's a struggle between those who think we can manage the should manage the relationship in what's essentially a play for time time for china to change but time for the united states to change as well then there are those who think that we need to win or predominate i'm worried that that decision will not be made through a normal policy or political process i worry because america is so strongly divided now and because our political discourse is so demeaned and because washington is way out ahead of the american people and it's concern about these issues i worry that our china policy will be set again not by a strategy the kinds of strategic thinking that we'd hope would go into it but by crisis we're very prone to have the the decision made by crisis and there are crises of several sorts any of which could swing this there's a sputnik crisis china's doing something which helps america to realize that it's falling behind and that it needs to improve its own game strengthen america and compete sputnik crisis might not be a bad thing that there's a suez crisis from london's point of view a sudden crisis which forces all americans to confront the fact that we're no longer the indispensable nation and that some of our powers of persuasion or our ability to shape the external environment to our to beat our desires maybe we can't do that anymore maybe something like a suez crisis forces us to confront that then there's the tiananmen crisis something which puts the evil china narrative first and foremost such that that gets broadly socialized until it's over into a cold war and there are number of places where you could have something like a tiananmen crisis there some of them are playing out before us right now especially in shinjiang and then perhaps most likely the 9-11 crisis 9-11 in this case with reference to china meaning a crisis which puts all of our attention and resources and energies into what is in fact a secondary geo strategic concern and has us taking our eye off the ball in china and we almost look with the assassination a few months ago it looked like we might be going down this kind of rabbit hole vis a vis Iran it's certainly not off the table yet then the fifth kind of crisis would be something like a collapse in china i don't foresee this i don't predict this there are those who do i think it's unlikely but all the constraints that i mentioned any of those could precipitate something like a china crisis which takes this issue off the table for a while and then lastly to end on an optimistic note although i'm not predicting this one either there's a crisis of a different sort which something like a pandemic could be which reminds us that in fact we have a great deal of common concerns and we really need to cooperate and therefore contextualize our growing animosity within the context of the joint need to solve common problems not putting my money on that one either anyway i will stop there i very much want to hear your own views and any comments criticisms are most welcome i'm here mostly to sort of hear your views and to challenge the american narratives many of which aren't leading us in a positive direction thank you