 My name is Steve Tseng. I am the director of the Sours China Institute. Before I introduce the subject and the speaker, let me just remind you that if you would like to raise a question or a comment, please use the Q and A box at the bottom. When you do so, it will be very helpful to me if you could give information to identify who you are. But if you would then like to stay anonymous, you can say so, indeed, please say so, and I will respect that and not reveal your identity. But knowing where the question comes from will help me to pick questions to put to the speaker if we have a lot of questions to be put. The subject is a very important one in the current situation, which is on the subject of the great decoupling China, America, and the struggle for technological supremacy as we are still in an era when the Americans and the Chinese are feeling increasingly uncomfortable with each other and they certainly are competing in a whole range of areas, in particular in the most advanced of technologies. And to address this subject, I'm delighted that we have Nigel Engster, who is probably, if not, then at least one of the world's leading authorities on the subject. And indeed, he has just published a book on this very title, which was released, I think, at the end of last year in December 2020. Nigel is a senior advisor on China and cybersecurity at WIWS in London, where he had previously served as director of Future Conflict and Cyber Security. Nigel is, of course, also a research associate at the SOAS China Institute and also a director or other director of Geostrategy and Intelligence and NoteDote Economics. Some of you will know, some may not, that Nigel had served for 31 years in the SIS, the British Intelligence Service, and he retired as assistant chief and director of operations and intelligence in 2006. I think since then he was mostly with the WIWS and has been very generous in sharing his insights and thoughts with various institutions. So over to you, Nigel. Well, Steve, thank you very much and thanks to everybody who's taken time out to come and listen on this one of the hottest days of the summer thus far in London at least. I'd like to start with a small disclaimer, I have stroke apologia in that when I was asked by my publisher to write this book, I had no plans to write it or any other book on China. I'd already written one called China's Cyber Power, which looked at the ways in which China was using its growing technological capabilities for broader geostrategic purposes. And I was wondering whether I would really have anything to add here. But this coincided with a period when Steve mentioned U.S.-China relations were undergoing a sudden and dramatic deterioration. And a lot of things were being said in the west about China that in my view critically lacked any historical or cultural context. And so I thought that even if from the technical perspective I may not be saying too much that's original, it was important to try and write an accessible book that set out the context and sought to explain in a nutshell why China feels driven to behave in the ways that it is doing before then going on to look at China's behavior and what the implications of that are in particular with the United States and viewed very much through the prism of advanced technologies. So one of my main purposes was to address the phenomenon of what Professor Christopher Andrew of the Intelligence Historian of Cambridge University has referred to as historical amnesia. So I have to say in the case of Western policymakers it's less amnesia because that at least implies that you knew something to start with. There's a pretty pervasive lack of understanding where China is concerned. I'm always have in my mind this image of the great historian of Chinese technology and science, Joseph Needham standing in the library of his Cambridge College, Keyes College, reflecting on the fact that the shells were groaning beneath the weight of books about every conceivable aspect of British and European history and yet there was not a single volume about China in that entire collection. Not a lot has changed, I'm afraid. So let's start with the phenomenon of China as a major civilizational power and a major global technology power because for most of recorded history that is what China was. China accounts for probably 50% of pre-industrial revolution inventions. China's own record of knowledge about technology and not really science, but proto-science certainly is very expensive and this is something that I don't think anybody really appreciated until the gentleman I just referred to, Professor Joseph Needham, began to study the subject and produced a multi-volume series looking at all the different things that China had done. And if you look at agriculture, astronomy, civil engineering, mining, hydraulics, China really had developed very significant capabilities and ironically, although China thinks of itself as a land-based rather than a maritime civilization, it was China's maritime discoveries, the compass, the general design of ships that basically enabled the age of exploration that China itself did not engage in and the West did. And the big question that Joseph Needham addressed in this multi-volume series that he produced on China's science and technology was being called different things, the grand question, et cetera, how come China that was in our Middle Ages so technologically advanced, how come China did not make the leap to the knowledge that enabled the industrial revolution? And this was, he made the point that to do this, what you needed was an application of mathematical hypotheses to nature, full understanding in the use of experimental method, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the geometrization of space and acceptance of a mechanical model of reality. For better or worse, the truth is that China had some of this but didn't have all of it and somehow the institutional underpinnings to make that leap towards a truly scientific culture are simply not there. And it remains an issue today. I remember middle of last year listening to a very interesting speech given by a gentleman by the Liu Yadong who is the chief editor of science and technology daily, where he was reflecting on China's technological and scientific prowess and saying essentially not so fast, we need to remember that one thing China never really did was develop its own indigenous scientific tradition. And for better or worse, that is the case. And of course that reality came home to roost when China encountered the more materially advanced civilizations of the industrialized western nations led by the United Kingdom. And this kind of fall from grace. This is the next really thing I want to talk about. I want to talk a little bit about the impact of this sense of a fall from grace is something the impact of which simply cannot be exaggerated in terms of its impact on the kind of collective Chinese psyche. One can argue to the end of time about what China's civilization of history consisted of and whether it was a Chinese civilization or a Chinese civilization or a Chinese civilization, et cetera, et cetera. But the simple fact is that for probably the best part of 4,000 years at least maybe longer, there was a sort of basic sense of a Chinese civilizational state. And for at least 2,000 years, an expression of a Chinese civilization. So one that waxed and waned and underwent all kinds of alterations. But the fact is that there was this very, very strong sense of a Chinese kind of civilizational identity that saw the world as essentially divided between China and the sinusized states like Vietnam, Japan and Korea that were the best of the world, which they sort of knew about, but didn't really care because it was populated with uncouth barbarians like the British and didn't really care about them. But this sense that China was, you know, this term China as the middle kingdom jungle is a very recent neologism. China never really used to refer to itself in that way or conceive of itself in that sense. So the idea that China was the kind of epitome of civilization was very deeply embedded. And to encounter a more materially advanced civilization with guns and steamships and railways, but in China's eyes uncouth and lacking in any sense of ethics was a big shock and set up a massive drive to secure a modern identity, but one that had a distinctly Chinese civilizational character. And I would argue that's essentially what China's been at for the last 150 plus years and still is. This really is a kind of key feature of what China's up to. And then certainly since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, there's been this very sort of strong sense and the Chinese term of art is to catch up with and overtake the west. This was very much what China was looking for. And this precedes the People's Republic, but getting from here to there has been a very difficult process. Initially, the arrival of the west encountered a lot of conservative resistance. For example, trains were seen as unacceptable because these straight steel lines were entirely antithetical to the concepts of feng shui, geomancy. And there was lots of resistance. And it really was a kind of epic struggle between intellectual conservatives and modernizers to move China forward. The situation was further complicated and there was a very difficult set of geopolitical relationships. I'm not going to give you a part of history of China in two minutes, but suffice to say that by the time the People's Republic was established in 1949, China, which had been one of the world's foremost civilizations, accounting probably for about 30% of total global economic activity. And as I said, 50% of pre-industrial revolution inventions was in a pretty battered state. And it got worse thanks to the early administrations of Chairman Mao, who's focused on class struggle as the key link eclipsed any considerations of economic development and led to a series of disasters that greatly forward the cultural revolution, which had the effect of stopping China in its tracks. And science and technology obviously played an important role there because for most of the Maoist era, scientists and engineers were seen as class enemies, members of the bourgeoisie, many Chinese scientists from overseas came back to join the People's Republic and build a new China, only to find that they were subject to investigation, thought reform, and often sent down to the countryside to shovel shit rather than doing anything professionally useful. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, the only Chinese scientists left standing were those involved in China's nuclear and satellite programs, and even many of them were subject to violent abuse leading to their deaths. And the extent to which ideology trumped science and technology can be seen from the struggle against Einstein that took place in the latter phase of the Cultural Revolution and is graphically depicted in the Chinese science fiction classic The Three Body Problem. Einstein was basically the subject of struggle because his concept of relativity was seen as contrary to a Marxist vision of the universe as steady state and infinite, which was of course based on no scientific assessment whatsoever. So anyway, China had been through a very long and difficult process of pursuing a modern identity with distinct Chinese civilizational characteristics, but it was really only in the late 1970s after the Cultural Revolution was put to bed and Deng Xiaoping's pragmatism started to take hold that China really began to develop its potential and advanced technology was from the very early stages seen as critical for this. I first visited China in November 1976, the day after the Cultural Revolution had formally drawn to an end, and it really was to call it backward, didn't begin to describe it. And there was a long way to make up, but from the very outset, China's leaders were seized of the importance of advanced technology to promote China's economic modernization, and this was thanks largely to the writings of one man, Alvin Toffler, an American futurologist whose books Third Wave and Future Shock were selling like hotcakes in China when I was there during the early 1980s, read by the top leadership, and as with all futurologists, a lot of what Toffler said was kind of off the mark and a bit mad, but when it came to assessing how modern information communications technologies would transform human existence, he was absolutely on the money, and China's top leadership, up to and including Deng Xiaoping, bought into that. And even though the visitors were at a time when ordinary phone lines were a rare luxury, the potential of modern communications was very apparent. To start, of course, China had to work out how to leverage US technology expertise. The internet didn't come to China until 1996, at least not for general access, but prior to that a lot of preparatory work was going on because there was recognition of how important the internet would be. And initially, a lot of China's advanced technology success was the product of a close independence between the US and China. China needed the basic US technology, the software, the hardware, the know-how, and the offer that it was able to make in return was, of course, the ability to manufacture, to do low-end manufacture at a scale and cost that no other economy could match. I don't want to be rude about him because in his own way he was a rather special person and not everything he did for China was a disaster under his rule. Some of the very important basics were got right in terms of literacy, education, and public health. So when the opportunities for China arose after the end of the Cold War, as the next phase of globalization took hold, China was particularly well placed to ride that wave and did so very well. But as I said, it was a joint effort with the United States. And the extent of that can be seen from the fact that in the mid-noughties Windows XP was the communication technology of choice and the entire Chinese government ran on it. But it was actually mostly pirated versions of Windows XP that didn't get the technology upgrades. And when, in I think 2014, Windows, Microsoft decided that they were no longer going to support Windows XP they had to make an exception for China because the consequence would have been the result would have been disaster. And they're not done so. But China wasn't just helplessly dependent on US technology what they also were able to do was to leverage a lot of Chinese talent that had gone abroad for education had done, so to speak, apprenticeships at Silicon Valley and then came back to China and were starting to use their particular skills to develop a range of digital goods and services that Chinese consumers were eager to address. And this I think is a sort of key to China's success so far in terms of technology in that it's a combination of relentless succession of top-down deregist planning, the five-year planning cycle. But beneath that the creation of an enabling environment in which private sector corporations could compete in a no-holds-barred in-tooth and claw capitalist competition at the end of which some major national champions emerged whereupon the Chinese party state started to move in and gradually over time exercise greater control. It was a high-risk strategy because China was very much aware that the internet while conferring a lot of economic advantages was also a potential vector for ideas and concepts that would challenge the prevailing narrative of the party state and this was a risk they kind of had to be prepared to take. But they very quickly I think moved to get on top of this through a variety of means were able relatively quickly to get a grip on control of internet content and we saw arising this idea of cyber sovereignty, the right enshrined in international law for states to control the data and information that transited their sovereign cyber space. This has not been accepted yet as a kind of aspect of international law but it's something that China has been very vigorously promoting and it enjoys much resonance particularly in the developing world and so well China very quickly moved to a position of being what Xi Jinping when he came to power called a big cyber power. In other words it was a country that very rapidly acquired a huge user base particularly once smart phones came into being in the mid 2000s and it was a country that was very quick to develop digital economy in ways that were very ingenious and outstripped anything that US competitors were able to do and give you an example eBay. The US thought that they could run China in eBay as just another branch of eBay everything run from America with no account taken of the particular preferences of Chinese consumers Chinese competitors arose like Jack Ma of Alibaba who were very alert to the preferences of Chinese consumers and they were very quick to develop a range of services that far outstripped what eBay was able to do and essentially eBay was run out of time and we've seen this with a number of other things with fintech where companies like Alibaba Tencent another one of the major Chinese digital giants that has emerged over the last few years have provided digital payment service that enabled China to leapfrog the credit card all together and is now already paving the way for China to develop its own digital currency in ways that inter alia will enable it to minimize the impact of US financial sanctions but inevitably as China got bigger and more powerful so its ambitions expanded and in my book I talk a lot about that because I think it's very important to understand what China's kind of long-term vision should be I'll come to that in a minute and as they became technologically more confident so we saw the Chinese party state using its growing technological expertise and reach to shape an international environment that was better suited to the interests of that party state and this is where I think geopolitics and culture come into the mix the US and China never had an easy relationship and it was a relationship that to a very significant degree I think depended upon both sides papering over the cracks and accentuating the positive and not belaboring the very significant differences that existed between them I think this is very important to get this in context because there has I think arisen within the United States in recent years this narrative that US engagement with China has been a failure rather than creating a China that is a benign international presence it is very much a status quo power and one that can be expected over time to converge with international norms that have been dictated by the victorious Western powers after World War II instead engagement has created a kind of Frankenstein's monster that is an ideological hostile state that is revisionist and in the worst imaginings of some of the hawks and the Trump administration aspiring to take over the world and displace the United States as a number one power we can discuss all of that in the Q&A but what I would say is that it's important to remember that the US engagement with China was not by and large built on this sort of Pollyannaish expectation that everybody would join hands and march together towards the sunlit uplands but rather on a more hard headed set of pragmatic calculations that were much less focused on the expectations that China would in inverted commas become more like us that was a relatively late kind of conceit which I think was fed very much by the commercial the US commercial community for its own reasons but the simple fact is that there is you can track the process by which the US and China have experienced the parting of the ways and in the book I highlight three key dates which are firstly 2001 that was the year in which China was admitted to the World Trade Organization on a developing nation basis at the time that seemed like a highly desirable thing and there is no question that China's accession to the WTO turbocharged its economic growth that was a period when we saw year after year high two figure digital GDP growth year in year out but was problematic because well simply because an economy of China's size that was still very much a closed economy has had the effect of bending the whole World Trade Organization mechanism out of shape it was never designed to cope with an economy that big that wasn't prepared to move towards playing by the rules so to speak and I'm happy to pick up on that and talk about it further in Q&A the second key date was 2008 the global financial crisis notwithstanding that China was at least as much responsible for this crisis as the United States for China's leaders this was seen as a moment of epiphany proof if needed that the Washington consensus was a false God proof that the United States could not be relied upon prudently to manage the global economy and I think I had a point there and that if China was to avoid the very deleterious consequences to its own economy of this particular crisis and they were that it would have to strike its own path and then of course the third key date was 2012 a certain gentleman by the name of Xi Jinping was elected Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party replacing Hu Jintao who was a very different personality altogether and I think these three kind of milestones if you will help us to track the beginnings of the dramatic changes that we have seen between the US and China in recent years and in particular I think we the impact of Xi Jinping as a leader cannot be overestimated it's worth saying a couple of words about him because I do touch upon him quite a lot in the book and you know Xi is an interesting character his father Xi Zhongxun was one of the founding fathers of the party but fell fall at Mao Zedong and spent a lot of time in in custody of various forms Xi Jinping himself was rusticated to remote rural Shanxi during the Cultural Revolution and it doesn't get more rural than remote rural Shanxi and yet notwithstanding that rather than seeing notwithstanding the fact that his family was persecuted by Mao notwithstanding this rustication to the countryside rather than his own mind is faith in the Chinese Communist Party it seems to have reinforced it to the point where I think she made 10 unsuccessful applications to join the party before he was finally allowed in and you know Xi and you know I guess you'd have to call him a princeling the sons and daughters of the founding fathers this group of people who are not particularly homogeneous or tight-knit but you know have been brought up in the conviction that the Chinese Communist Party had earned the right to rule China and that they the sons and daughters of the founding fathers have the right to derive benefits from this which my grandmother would have said in many ways Xi Jinping is no better than he should be but compared with many people in the party at the time that he took over is actually relatively puritan in terms of his inclination he took over the party at a time when the the good days you know the high rolling fast growth era had led to a pervasive culture of corruption within the party that he saw as potentially terminal for the party's future if not addressed and he also inherited the chairmanship of the Communist Party at a time when the Chinese economy was in the hands of some very powerful vested groups that put in the way of reform and further necessary modernization so he was appointed with a remit to kind of clean things up but nobody quite expected the Spanish inquisition which was what they got in the form of a very pervasive and continuing anti-corruption campaign that usefully enabled him to mop up major opponents knowing that everybody's hands had been dipped in the blood and also a dramatic reinforcement of party orthodoxy and doctrine and we're seeing and I have lost count of the number of important speeches that Xi Jinping has been made on aspects of party dogma and you know the number of dense and impenetrable books that he has written on the subject but it is absolutely pervasive and kind of all consuming but one of the things that Xi Jinping was very very big on was again grasping the importance of technology because you know the two thousands where China's technology concerned you had seen a dramatic expansion of capabilities but in kind of wild east conditions with very little in the way of effective regulation a focus on content control at the expense of actual technical security so China when Xi took over found itself with a large sprawling very lucrative cyber domain but one that was regulated poorly if at all and was very vulnerable to outside interference and attack to the point where cyber criminals were regularly using China as a springboard for their exploits because it was so easy to get in and Xi took this all in hand and began to set in place meticulously over time a regulatory environment for the cyber domain and for cyber tech technology together with a relentless drive to become what he termed a strong cyber power but also to set out centenary goals which envisaged China becoming the leading global technology power in the world by 2035 and we saw a variety of plans things like Made in China 2025 we saw national telecommunications champion Huawei deployed overseas to develop mobile networks in countries all around the world and to become a leader in fifth generation mobile technology and at the same time we've seen China moving to aspiring to a dominant position in global technology standards in a variety of different technologies starting with but by no means restricted to 5G because China is well aware that if it can get its technological standards accepted as the global norm it can then leverage its unique combination of manufacturing capacity and economic power to really achieve domination globally in these technologies and there's a huge amount to play for and China has also appreciated that it can use its dominant position or its growing dominance in technology to shape global norms, rules in relation to how these technologies are employed so we see China very active in international discussions on cyber governance promoting ideas like cyber sovereignty and we see China very much engaged in global discussions on cyber security again promoting very much its own vision of how things should be and this vision is very broad and all encompassing it's encapsulated in a phrase that seems bland to the point of innocuousness the community of common destiny for mankind who could object to that what curmudgeon, what scrooge figure could object to an idea like that but deconstructed it turns out to be essentially an idea for a Chinese led world order led in a very different way from how the British did it in the 19th century and the Americans in the 20th century had a global order led by China nonetheless so yeah and China's technology has been shaping China internally in many dramatic ways we've seen for example how technology within China has been used for purposes of social control and to enhance national security which under Xi Jinping has become all encompassing there is no facet of human existence in China that does not come under the rubric of national security under Xi Jinping we've seen the emergence of China turning into a kind of techno security state with a variety of surveillance mechanisms in place like Skynet that provide wide-ranging visibility of actions of ordinary citizens got this concept of sorry I've got a mental blank about what it's called after talking for so long but the social credit concept which is often misunderstood and misreported in the West but essentially seeks to use awareness and knowledge of people's digital and offline activities to incentivise good behaviour and sanction bad the Xinjiang turn into a kind of test bed for all these and other surveillance technologies many of which are enabled by Western counterparts so two more points that I want to make and I'll shut up and leave the floor open for questions in the last couple of years we've seen a pushback and that pushback has been quite brutal in its intensity China though very advanced is highly dependent on some key areas of US technology in particular the most advanced advanced logic microchips in a sort of 14 to 5 nanometre range not that those figures really mean very much and essentially the USA has found has been able to deny China access to these most advanced microchips because everywhere that makes them and there are many places thus so using equipment ideas intellectual property that is American so the American government can prevent this from happening and this has really led China a to conclude the United States is determined to constrain China's rise which I think now is a pretty correct and obvious conclusion and the China has to redouble its efforts to detach itself from dependence on US technology whilst at the same time stealing as much of it can lay their hands on or buying it where that possibility still exists but what the USA has done is effectively stop the 5G national champion Huawei in its tracks and it's also cracked the style of a lot of other prominent Chinese companies that have been used by on US technology but it's not that simple because at the moment we see a Biden administration that has maintained in place the various measures imposed by Trump and is trying to orchestrate a more coherent pushback against China than the Trump administration has been able to do but the United States has to contend with two very powerful constituencies in its own country that are opposed to this one is Wall Street the other Silicon Valley and in particular I think Silicon Valley there are those like Eric Schmidt the former chairman of Google who now take the view that the United States is a large stroke threat from China and accept that from a technology perspective some parting of the ways is both inevitable and desirable but I can assure you that the vast majority of opinion in Silicon Valley goes in the other direction and continues to favor the closest possible technology collaboration with China both for financial reasons but also because of philosophical reasons there are still many in Silicon Valley imbued with the ideals of the founding fathers of the internet and we also have to take into account the reality that in all areas of advanced technology which are now the subject of this intense competition between the US and China whether it's artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology all the achievements that have been registered to date have in varying ways been the result of collaboration between the US and China unraveling that is a pretty big task and has very uncertain consequences and this is what I try to address in the final section of the book finally getting to the point in the title, the great decoupling this parting of the ways between the US and China which is beginning to look more fundamental and more critical to how the world will evolve in the coming decades and it's very difficult to say how that will play out and it's very difficult to know who's going to come out on top I'm often asked to draw a comparison between the US and China when it comes to all these technologies and it is very difficult to do but the short answer is that the US enjoys the advantages of incumbency they got there first and have a deeper base and greater strengths much greater strengths in foundational science which is still very much of a weakness where China is concerned and has shown remarkable ingenuity and innovation in the application of existing technologies but it goes beyond that 10 years ago I could have conversations in Silicon Valley or in Wall Street with people who say well we don't need to worry about China because they can copy but they can't innovate well I think people have got the message now because China is showing a capacity to innovate and not just in the lower order technologies but in some of the very much higher order technologies like for example quantum encryption where China is clearly leading the global field under Professor Pan Jianwei a remarkably brilliant man the youngest member of the Academy of Science ever and he definitely deserves to be there but we're also seeing remarkable innovation in lots of other areas and it's certainly no longer the case that the West kind of rules the roost here the United States has its own problems its own education system isn't really producing the educated people that it needs so it has to continue relying on people from outside and it's been able to attract some of the world's best talent but now no longer so much from China because relations have deteriorated to the extent that they have so I mean I can talk a lot more about who's up and who's down in relation to particular technologies if you want me to do so but my sense is that the parting of the ways is starting to happen it's going to be slow, it's going to be uneven it's probably a process that will never be completely it will not be a process that has a clear end point but the implications are probably that everybody will end up losing to some degree because if we end up with more separation, less integration less collaboration I'm pretty sure that translates into less innovation over time and it's also created particularly some very difficult geopolitics and this is where of course Taiwan comes to the fore because Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing corporation has kind of cornered the global market in the production of the most high end advanced logic chips under production, nobody in America makes these well actually that's not true because Intel does but it's fallen behind TSMC in terms of what it can produce most American chip designers have outsourced manufacture for reasons of economic logic China can't make the most advanced microchips, there are several generations behind the USA in both design and production this puts Taiwan in a very very interesting position indeed as the source of the most sought after and most desired microchips on the planet 100 miles away from the coastline of China and the subject of Chinese irredentist claims that could before too long be prosecuted with military means so that I think is kind of emblematic of the sort of challenges that we confront in the 21st century and it is very much a two horse race between China and the USA, it is a contest that is driven by values and ideology as much as by raw power Xi Jinping has said there is a disjunct in China's discourse on this because the diplomats talk about China only wishing to achieve a modus vivendi with the rest of the world Xi Jinping in speeches to the party faithful is saying that the world is in a contest between capitalism and socialism must prevail so there is no doubt that this is a contest from which neither side seems likely to back down advanced technologies are critical to this so I've come in pretty much on the hour I think Steve and I wanted to leave time for questions so I'll end it there. Well thank you very much Nigel for this fantastic and thoughtful talk I wanted to press you a bit on the three key days that you put forward because you put forward the WTO days, the global financial crisis date and above all the date when Xi Jinping became leader it came across to me that of the three days in the narrative the last was the most important one kind of opened the door for China the second one was the date of a weakening but the third was the date when things really changed I agree entirely with that Steve certainly what Xi Jinping was doing when he came to power was a continuation of trends that were already starting to become apparent we saw under Hu Jintao that China had in terms of its international relations moved away from hide and buy this strategy of Deng Xiaoping keep a low profile, don't take a leading position etc, China had moved away from that though it had not formally acknowledged this to be the case and relations with the USA were already under Westmore generally were becoming more tense but I think the arrival of Xi Jinping did kind of crystallize these emerging trends and kind of supercharge them and it's very much I think the case that people often ask me do I think Xi Jinping really is a communist and my reply is actually yes I think he is a true believer I think he believes that communism has got China where it is today and communism will get it to where he wants it to be the realization of the Chinese dream so I think he really whereas under Hu Jintao membership of the Chinese Communist Party was coming to be seen as just another line in the CV the thing that would tip the balance between you and the other guy if you were interviewing for a job that was about it amounted to maybe really took it that seriously but under Xi Jinping we've seen this remarkable transformation in terms of the way in which ideology is at the forefront of everything we have quite a lot of questions so we could tackle them briskly the first question I pick comes from Johan Chakko from how does Xi Jinping's prolaborate defined technology is it largely focused on computing and communications the PLC still has trouble mastering the jet engine is that at the same priority level as the building of their own technological processor I've also heard claims that China has embraced building a space based economy along the lines being drawn up by Gerald O'Neill and pursued by Jeff Bezos do you take them seriously Oh absolutely seriously yes China is aiming for global dominance in every area of scientific achievement I mean I just the other day read a speech that Xi Jinping gave on science and technology to the scientists and engineers of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Engineering and it is a remarkable list of achievements in all areas of technology including aviation industry I know China has been struggling to produce its own indigenous jet engine and that's proven to be one of the more difficult things and its progress towards all of these technologies is going to be uneven because that is in the nature of these technology sometimes what seems like a promising start turns out to be a blind alley and you have to kind of go back to the drawing board other things suddenly leap ahead when you didn't think that they were going to but Xi in this speech makes this an absolutely compelling case for the achievements the very real achievements that China has registered in all areas and it is a very ambitious statement of where China needs to go so the short answer is it goes far beyond just information communication technologies it encompasses every area of advanced technology and I think it is emblematic of the way in which these things are taken seriously and that last year the Politburo devoted two whole days to the study of blockchain I can't think of any other government in the world that would ever do anything like that but blockchain is obviously important to China because they see it as a key to a successful development of a digital currency a way out from under the grip of the US dollar and the message the relentless message from China's leadership is it's foot to the floor in all areas of technological development this is front and center next question comes from somebody who would like to stay anonymous and he thanks for your fantastic talk you spoke about how with China's drive for technological advancement China can increasingly shape global rules and standards on cyber governance security etc this may result in a China-led world order but this world order would be led in a different way compared to how the UK or the US did could you please explain further how China would lead a world order in a different way that's a very fair question I think I can explain it I'm in good company because I just read a lengthy report by the RAND Corporation looking at exactly this problem and the authors of that seem broadly to agree with me which elicited a huge sigh of relief as you can imagine but I think China's looked at how Britain ran the world in the 19th century with colonies expensive and they get up and want independence more trouble than it's worth they've looked at the US model of global hegemony 800 military bases scattered around the world very expensive, very demanding and they've decided very clearly we don't want to go down this road so I think what Beijing sees as the way forward is through primarily economic and technological means and we see this already in how China deals with other countries displease them and you get cut out from access to Chinese markets Australia knows all about that other countries have experienced it to varying ways, play ball and we'll give you some economic benefits and you can have our technology do what you like with it and all we really want you to do in return is not piss us off don't allow anti-Chinese on your soil send us back our dissidents when we ask you to don't allow your newspapers to write rude things about China and we'll get along famously I think in essence is what they envisage I know people talk about the new system and of course there was never anything really called that at least not by the Chinese but something a bit like that where the chairman of the Communist Party sits facing south to use the Daoist analogy and everything works because the world is harmonious and ruled ethically next question comes from China is displaying a superpowers ambition until recently it was believed that China would seek an expanded regional road a reduced U.S. road but would defer to the distant future any global ambitions now however the signs are that China is gearing up to contest America's global leadership and this becoming unmistakable and they are ubiquitous do you agree not all together I think that China's leaders are realistic and their primary concern is to secure effective control of their own backyard China looks at the world in concentric circles and I think what they want to do first and foremost is get America out of their backyard out of the first island chain preferably out of the second island chain if they can or at least with a very much reduced presence and impact that is I think where their immediate priority lies certainly the Chinese leadership have made it clear on multiple occasions that they no longer see the U.S.-led global order as fit for purpose in the 21st century they make the point quite legitimately that it was put together by the USA and its allies in the aftermath of World War II and reflected Western norms and values and failed to take account of other ways of looking at the world or to varying degrees true and what China is and it's been a world order that's been characterised by armed blocks and alliances and what China is proposing is something much more benign much less belligerent and something that takes more account of what they call diversity by which they mean different political and cultural perspective and all these things to varying degrees can be said to be true but there is obviously a downside if you reject universal values which China explicitly does that can be problematic so I think what China wants is as much global influence as possible but it reminds me of a conversation I had with the then state councillor back in 2007 and he was still sort of chanting the mantra of hide and buy China has no ambition status quo power and the state councillor you're requiring global interests and you're just getting more involved in the world generally and you might want to bear in mind that the British didn't set out to paint a quarter of the world pink it all happened as a result of a dynamic with us doing all sorts of things we'd never planned or wanted to do like ruling India and I suspect state councillor that you will find yourself in a similar dynamic and once you do there's no knowing where you end up so I think this is very much the situation where China is in at the moment they have got a strong sense of how far they want their immediate reach to go and if you exercise it it kind of runs away with you You mentioned Taiwan in your answer so I'll pick the question next which is very specific about the Taiwan issue and this comes from Graham Leslie in Cardiff Do you advise that China wants Taiwan not just for political reasons of unification but also for economic reasons to ensure that it can lay its hands on the most advanced microchips as China wished over time to have its own China controlled internet to have its cyber sovereignty as it were Okay well there's more than one question there so I'll break it down I think where Taiwan is concerned for the Chinese state this is a matter of honor and it's also a matter of real politic because the ability of the party state to realize national reunification is an important part of its claim to legitimacy it's got Hong Kong back it's got Macau back but Taiwan still eludes it for them Taiwan's moving in the opposite direction fewer and fewer Taiwanese want any part of the mainland and they certainly no longer believe in one country two systems so it's getting more difficult but said that the drivers of conflict are fear, honor and advantage for us getting miscarriages and that's as true today as it was 2000 whatever it was years ago when the PDDs wrote it and I think fear, honor and advantage are all there in the Taiwan equation both for China and the United States and China's behavior is driven by all of them fear that if they don't get Taiwan back they'll be able to exercise effective control of the waters in their backyard fear also that their credibility could suffer if they don't make good on their commitments but also yes benefit does come into it it's not quite that simple because even if China were able to take over intact the TSMC they would still be able to take over the countries and that's a big if I'm not sure America would countenance it that still doesn't mean that they've got the design skills to actually design the high end chips that TSMC is there to make and much would also depend on the extent to which which if any TSMC skilled to make them and it's not just that either because this is a process that involves enormously complex supply chains silicon the chemicals for the etching and of course the technology for the advanced extreme ultraviolet etching techniques so just getting hold of the TSMC foundries even if all the machinery was intact it wouldn't necessarily be a panacea for China's problems but on the last part of the question you say does China want its own internet well to all intents and purposes it already has one I mean the Chinese internet is in many ways a kind of self-contained phenomenon similar to but in some ways very different from the internet that we in the west are familiar with and I think it can be characterised as very much its own kind of cultural zone with its own more as its own terminology it is already very different and it is largely I think the Chinese party state have achieved technology dominance over the Chinese internet doesn't mean to say that people can't say things they don't want them to but they can sort of stifle unwelcome discussions very quickly if the need arises and if need be they can go and find the people making you know on disobliging remarks and make them an offer they're not going to be able to refuse we got 10 very very good questions so you could give them very quick answers next one comes from Phillip Mead how will the great decoupling impact China's ability to innovate without US collaboration how does China's education system lend itself to the creativity required to innovate and do you think that decoupling affects China's to resort more to covert activities such as cyber hacking, espionage and intellectual piracy in order to fuel the war on that point it is actually quite hard to imagine how much more they could do than what they're doing already but yes most certainly I think it would lead to more of those activities no question about it legitimately in inverted commas it is going to seek to acquire illegitimately also in inverted commas because these things are not straightforward I think there's again this pervasive myth in the west the Chinese education systems all about rote learning and you know the poediers can't think for themselves and it's really not like that at all yes of course the formal exams require a lot of rote learning particularly the ones this year celebrating the centenary of the communist party but Chinese people can of course think for themselves can be innovative, creative and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that so I don't think that all of a sudden this feels like the reverse of the argument the changes he made in the 19th century that if we deprive the barbarians of their rhubarb their intestines will seize up and we'll have them where we want them it's not going to be like that but the point is that innovation benefits most from international collaboration and an international exchange of ideas and where that is reduced innovation will be next question comes from Ham Jan you did say that decoupling will make both US and China lost the question is China had almost a free rise so far in terms of technology transfer, purchase, theft, western universities etc if this free rise stops which looks likely can Chinese develop their own technology really efficiently at reasonable cost and market it credibly if it is not possible will China not be the quicker loser well we can't say for a certain moment another you can't predict the future but I don't think it's necessarily the case in terms of technology around the world China has very significant engagement in both developed and developing countries but particularly in the latter the Chinese technology offered to these countries is something that they find genuinely attractive for all sorts of reasons and when you look at efforts by the USA to impose things like the clean network initiative you find that countries have signed up pay lip service to it but aren't really taking it all that seriously so I mean I think China can and will develop its own technologies and B I think that the way in which it can deploy and market those internationally will be and is already very effective it doesn't mean that everybody is going to flock to Chinese technology everywhere but I think China is in with a fighting chance and I don't think it can automatically be assumed that China will fall behind the USA will search ahead I think I can see a future in which things take the opposite path we've just had four years with a US government that's fundamentally anti-science and is defunded a lot of US original research work you've got a US Congress that seems determined to regulate Silicon Valley through what looks to mean like a lot of the wrong sort of regulation in contrast to China which is regulating its own tech sector through what looks like the right sort of regulation so you know I don't take it for granted that the United States will carry seamlessly on its current trajectory Next question I pick comes from the Facebook feed from Kanchana Despite its technological advancement why does China lag behind in the microchip area and what will it take before it can catch up? That's a very good question and the short answer is nobody knows if they knew that it sorted it out by now but this goes back a long way back in the early 1960s China was probably about where the USA was in terms of semiconductor technology and then the intervention of the cultural revolution basically decimated China's emerging nascent indigenous sector there completely obliterated it and things like that carry a long tail and I think China is in part suffering from that What else Different technologies can be acquired by different means to be put bluntly some are very easy to steal and copy Microchip manufacture is not one of those because manufacturing designing and manufacturing microchips requires what the Germans called fingersmithsgefühl this kind of innate intuitive knowledge that only comes from constant engagement and that's what we're learning by doing so if you're not doing that you're at a disadvantage so I think these are some of the reasons why China is still behind we've seen a lot of efforts by the Chinese state to throw money at the problem and most of this hasn't worked I think it may in time but this is one of the more difficult technologies to get the manual and take it from there Next one I'm combining two sets of questions but they are all related to standards the first one comes from somebody who prefers to stay anonymous and she said that she's always a bit confused by these standards conversations Could you give a couple of examples of standards and the technologies that these applies to and perhaps how they differ between the US and China related to this is a question from a SOAS student Marie Stoke Do the national champions also promote technical standards and norms such as internet sovereignty abroad how resilient is the Chinese private state nexus activities abroad Okay well the answer to the last question is very the state and the private sector have been working together very well but it's less so now because I think that in recent times some of China's big tech entrepreneurs have been brought to heal by the party and reminded who's really in charge and that I think has crimped their confidence somewhat but broadly speaking the Chinese party state is able to get its private sector to do what it needs it to do I don't think that is going to change in terms of standards well I think 5G is the obvious one let's look at one area where standards are going to work and where they don't one is ordinary electrical appliances there are no global standards for electrical appliances when you travel from one part of the world to another a plugs match they're all different and if you're traveling a lot you've got to have these huge adapters and you've got to be able to plug in all sorts of different sectors but on the other hand take information communication technology there is one set of plugs that work for all computers and all smartphones you don't have to carry lots of different ones with you and adapters everywhere you go and that's because there has been effective international agreement on 5G that's not one that particularly affected China because it was a USA that was the nominal factor but let's take 5G where the China's national champion Huawei has been filing patents on 5G like there's no tomorrow has been very heavily involved in all the international negotiations on 5G standards and has therefore been very effective on the standards in ways that reflect its own emerging technologies and capabilities it is just a kind of virtuous circle where Huawei has been concerned in relation to 5G so that is an example of how you can do this okay we have one minute left so one last question from a SOAS PhD student Malaka Robinson is this US-China tech competition primarily an ideological battle rather than a technological or economic conflict I would say yes in a word at the bottom of this it's about technology dominance but what's really at the bottom of it is values and ideology and two sets of values and ideology that are very difficult to reconcile so yes I think that is at the heart of it and in essence technology has simply served as an accelerator and a catalyst for this division that has already been there always been there regrettably I have been defeated by the clock once again so I will have to draw this webinar to a close this is the last webinar we are holding this academic year hopefully with the new academic year we will return to physical seminar at SOAS but we are also planning to have a small number of webinars that will reach out to people who are not based in London so please do keep an eye on our events moving forward let me just thank Nigel Inkster for a really inspiring and knowledgeable and insightful webinar for all of you who have taken part and raised questions I apologise to those of you whose questions have not been able to read out to the speaker but please be sure that your questions will be sent on to him so he will at least know what has been raised by you and goodbye