 I am Steve Sankt, I am the director of the Sours China Institute. The first speaker of this series of lecture was Sir John Key, the former prime minister of New Zealand who came here in September last year. This is a series of lecture by distinguished scholars and practitioners whose scholarship or insights based on policy making and international engagement with some of the most important issues in the world is being established at Sours for the simple reasons that Sours is at the cutting edge in the study and promotion of the understanding of some of the most important and pressing issues that we have to confront in the world today. This series of lecture is named after WSD and Dr. Honda. For those of you who do not know WSD stands for the Worldwide Support for Development which is a Japan based non-profit organisation. Dr. Haruhisha Honda is a great philanthropist who is committed to support the disadvantaged people and communities all over the world. Against the leading university and the most progressive one at that in England, Sours obviously stands in the forefront in the promotion of the understanding of the subjects close to the heart of Dr. Honda and the remit of WSD. And for today's distinguished lecture I am delighted to present to you Professor Thomas Christensen. Now Tom is the Professor of Public and International Affairs and the Director of the China and the World Programme at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he housed the William P. Boswell Chair at Princeton University where he spent most of his illusory academic career. He had also previously taught at Cornell and at MIT. From 2006 to 2008 he took a leaf of absence from Princeton to serve as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the George W. Bush Administration. Though I should hasten to add that Tom is a non-partisan scholar diplomat. And after the Bush Administration he continued to serve as a senior advisor to the State Department under the Obama Administration. And indeed he only stood down from that road earlier this year. His most, Tom has published very, very extensively and some absolute classics. But his most recent book is The China Challenge, Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power, which became the editor's choice in the New York book review. And the book I think is also the recipient of the Arthur Ross Book Award, Silver Medal in 2016. And the subject that he is going to take on this afternoon is China's Rise and the Security of East Asia. Over to you Professor Christian. Thanks very much. Can people hear me? That's good. That's good. Okay. Thank you very much for being here. I'm really honored by your presence, especially on a Friday evening. It's quite a turnout. I'm really flattered. I wanted to thank Steve Tsang, who is an old friend, and I've known him in multiple institutions. And I just wanted to say that it's very good of SOAS for the institution to have drawn him here. He's really a great asset for you to have here. And it's a great program that he runs. I also wanted to thank the Honda Foundation for their generosity and for this program. And I'm really honored to be asked to be the second speaker in this series. What I'm going to talk about today is the rise of China and the security challenges for my country, the United States, and its friends and allies and partners in East Asia. And I thought I would open up with a talk of about maybe 35, 40 minutes and then take your questions and comments. And I see two major challenges posed by the rise of China. One is how to dissuade China from settling its many disputes with its neighbors, its sovereignty disputes with its neighbors. The PRC and its many neighbors have sovereignty disputes, especially at C. And how to dissuade China from settling those disputes either through the use of force or the use of coercion. If China were to try to settle all those disputes through force and coercion, it would destabilize a region that's very important to the United States, obviously very important to U.S. friends, allies and partners and neighbors of China in East Asia, and actually important to the entire world, including Europe, because of the importance of East Asia to the globalized economy in the entire world. This challenge I think is often missed by many of my compatriots, commentaries, pundits who believe that the real challenge is one of the two of these following options. One is that China is trying to drive the United States entirely out of East Asia so as to dominate the region at America's expense. The second is that China will soon become a global rival of the United States and its allies projecting power around the world and becoming a peer competitor rival of the United States. I don't think either of these things are the real challenge. I'll focus on those sovereignty disputes in East Asia for a reason. I think that there is a lack of persistent evidence that China is trying to drive the United States out of East Asia entirely. If it were trying to do so, it would be extremely destabilizing and dangerous, but I don't see persistent evidence that that is the case. And I don't think China will have the capacity for decades to come to be a global rival, a peer competitor of the United States around the world. And we can talk about that in the question and answer period. But I don't think China has the economic military and particularly diplomatic wherewithal to pose such a challenge. So I think a lot of Americans exaggerate China's capacities when they make that they raise those concerns as the primary one. But that's where the good news ends from an American perspective. China doesn't need to be a global peer competitor of the United States to pose real challenges to American national security interests in East Asia and obviously to the national security interests of United States friends and partners in East Asia. Not everything has to be symmetrical to be challenging. And China is posing a very strong and increasingly powerful asymmetrical challenge to American forward presence in East Asia, which I believe and many American security analysts believe have been a major source of peace and stability in East Asia since the end of World War II. So that's challenge one. The second challenge is of a different nature and that is how to convince China to actively contribute to global security goals of most of the international community in the form of dissuading certain actors from developing weapons of mass destruction in particular and nuclear weapons. And here I have in mind North Korea and Iran. And the reality here is that China's economic footprint in areas like North Korea and Iran are so great that the rest of the world has real difficulty pressuring those regimes into certain types of behavior and avoiding certain types of behavior without China's active cooperation. And if China obstructs the international efforts, they're extremely difficult to, it's very difficult to make them succeed those international efforts if China actively obstructs. But even if China doesn't contribute, it's a big problem because China is not only institutionally powerful because of its place in the U.N., but it's economically powerful. And I'll describe this toward the end of the talk that China is by far the biggest economic partner, not just of North Korea, but also of Iran. So without China's cooperation, it's very difficult to pressure those countries. Okay, so let's talk about the security in the region first. And I have the map up here. And I think I can, does this show on the screen? Okay, good. That shows on the screen so I can use that as a pointer. China has many points of friction with its neighbors. And those points of friction are growing as China's power grows. This is a natural function of rising power that countries rub up against their neighbors more often and more frequently and sometimes in ways that cause friction and annoyance in other countries. This is not a particular China problem. And I'm not making in my talk any kind of cultural generalities about China as a rising power as opposed to any other rising power. And I wrote an article in 2000 with my colleague Dick Betts at Columbia University. And in it we said, if a rising China handles its rise in its own region as badly as the United States handled its rise in its region in the late 19th century, we're all in big trouble. And you probably know the history. The United States arising in the United States had jingoistic domestic politics and got into a totally unnecessary war with Spain over Cuba and ended up fighting a large counterinsurgency war in the Philippines. So I'm not picking on China when I say China's rise is a challenge to the neighborhood and it's going to cause frictions. And those frictions are going to have to be handled well by the United States and other actors. The reason is that China's traditional military was a military that had two goals. And those goals were basically to deter or defend the Chinese Communist Party against domestic and international foes. So keep that in mind. That was the goal of the People's Liberation Army. To a large degree it's still the stated goal of the People's Liberation Army. It's a party army, not a national army. And its goal is to protect the Chinese Communist Party against foreign and domestic foes. And it did that for decades in the PRC period through two methods. One was to have a very large land army at home. It wasn't very mobile. It didn't project power abroad. And the other was to have a rudimentary nuclear force. According to public reports that traditional Chinese nuclear force was some two dozen long range missiles with nuclear capability that could carry nuclear weapons. And according to public reports those nuclear weapons weren't even attached to the missiles in real time. They had to be attached. The missiles had to be fueled up. They were liquid missiles. And this was a basic minimum deterrent against first the United States in the first half of the Cold War and then against the Soviet Union in the second half of the Cold War when China basically switches sides in the Cold War after the Nixon trip to China. This has all changed. And that's really what causes a lot of the military and security frictions. China now has significant power projection capability off of its shore for the first time. And this process really started in the reform era but it particularly took off in the period after 1999 during Jiang Zemin's presidency in China where China developed navy capabilities, air force capabilities, and rocket force capabilities that allowed China for the first time to project conventional power far off China's shores into these regions here. And that's where the sovereignty disputes are. So I'll talk about the sovereignty disputes now before I talk about the military equipment that was developed. And the first important sovereignty dispute from a U.S. perspective is here above Taiwan in the area that the Japanese call the Senkaku Islands and the Chinese call the Diaoyu Islands. Japan is arguably the most important ally of the United States in East Asia. And Japan claims those islands and so does China. A second sovereignty dispute is a sovereignty dispute over Taiwan. It's a different type of sovereignty dispute than the other ones I will describe. And it really has to do with what the meaning of Taiwan's sovereign identity is in relation to mainland China. And there's a dispute across the Taiwan Strait on that score and there are debates within Taiwan itself on that score but that's basically the nature of the dispute. And Taiwan until 1979, 1980 period during normalization of U.S.-China relations was a U.S. and it has been a security partner of the United States since then. And it's an important actor in the region and if they were fighting across the Taiwan Strait it would destabilize the entire region. And then there's the South China Sea. And China's claim in the South China Sea is something like this and I'll show you the map in a moment. Didn't mean to do that. So we'll go do this again. That's the 9-dash line. And here is the map with the other disputants. Very complicated. There are six disputants including the mainland and Taiwan. Taiwan has the same claims as the mainland because it's the traditional Chinese claims in the South China Sea that go back before the founding of the People's Republic of China. In the modern period certainly 1930s and it was written into the Republic of China 1947 Constitution before the CCP's successful revolution on the mainland. So this goes way back so Taiwan's mainland claims are the same but you can see the other claims. China's claims are very expansive but some other claims are quite expansive. Vietnam's claims are expansive. This blue line, the purplish blue line pretty far off Vietnam's coast and you see Malaysia's claims come up here overlapping them. The Philippines is kind of a rectangle it's actually a little bit tighter now than it shows on this map. This maps a little old but it overlaps various claims as well. And then there's China with this tight little rectangle off of Brunei's coast. So you can see these are overlapping claims. So China has developed the capability to project power into these areas and is now rubbing against its neighbors in new ways. And those capabilities are asymmetric capabilities from a U.S. perspective. They don't provide China the ability to dominate the United States militarily. So I don't want to give you the impression that I'm saying that China is going to be able to dominate the United States militarily. But they pose real challenges for forward deployed U.S. forces. And they pose even bigger challenges for the basing of the United States forces in the region and they cause bigger challenges still for U.S. allies and partners in the region because China is so much bigger than those allies and partners in the region. So it's a real challenge even though I'm not saying China is going to keep those things separate. And those asymmetric capabilities include accurate road, mobile, conventionally tipped ballistic missiles. If public reports are right and the DOD makes these public reports so they're pretty authoritative on this, China has developed the capability to strike moving targets at sea which offsets one of America's great traditional advantages in the Cold War period and the post-Cold War period which is the naval aviation fairly safely into various parts of the world to project air power from ships, aircraft carriers. If you can strike a ship that's moving at sea from land-based conventionally tipped ballistic missile, this is a real challenge to that advantage for the United States. A second is in the Navy's realm in addition to many new surface ships, there are submarines. Lots of new submarines, diesel electric submarines that are relatively hard to track and they carry sophisticated weapons. Sea mines, sophisticated torpedoes and a big challenge for a superior U.S. Navy is sea-launched cruise missiles that can be launched from underneath the surface of the water which can pose a challenge to a superior Navy when it's forward-deployed near China. There are other cruise missiles that can be fired off a surface ship, sometimes small ships like fast boats and those pose a challenge as well. There is advanced aircraft, fourth-generation aircraft that China has developed, often by reverse engineering both Russian and American technologies. And there are air defenses and I think air defenses don't get enough attention because air defenses can cast an umbrella off the Chinese coast that make it difficult for superior aircraft to fly safely in the area around China. Another asymmetric capability that is quite serious from American and allied national security and anti-satellite weapons are also important in China's development because one of the advantages the United States has had in the military sphere is what military experts called C-4ISR. I won't unpack that acronym for you, I'll just tell you. It is the ability to see and control forces in the battle space in real time. It's a very complicated communications and intelligence capability and it relies fairly heavily on satellites and the ability to strike satellites from the surface of the Earth was China demonstrated when I was in the government in January 2007 is considered an asymmetric capability that might be able to offset some of those advantages that the United States has enjoyed. Cyber, everybody talks about cyber, I'll just say something about cyber that the more you know about cyber the less you talk about it. So I won't go into great detail but you've read lots and lots of articles about China's ability about Russia's growing cyber capability. You don't see as many articles about American cyber capability but let's just leave it at that that cyber is a real potential asymmetric tool for a power that's challenging a stronger power in the United States. Finally this nuclear modernization and I want you to pay attention to this. I mentioned that rudimentary nuclear deterrent that China has had for decades, those liquid fuel missiles probably with the warheads not made to fuel road mobile nuclear weapons in order to strengthen its ability to have a retaliatory deterrent against a first strike from potential adversaries. This doesn't give China the ability to take out U.S. nuclear weapons so it's not a first strike capability but it's a much more sophisticated deterrent, much more sophisticated retaliatory capability and it's mounted on land on road mobile nuclear tipped missiles. A second capability that China has developed is nuclear capable submarines that can launch nuclear tipped missiles from submarines. Public reports are right, they've got a couple of these they've got a couple in development so it's a rudimentary force but it's a naval force with submarines and I'll tell you why later in the lecture why that's so important in my calculation. Okay, so none of these capabilities give China the ability to dominate the United States and its allies in the sense of driving the United States out of the region or in the sense of giving China the ability to become a global peer competitor of the United States. It's not domination, it's a desire to deter, dissuade, delay U.S. intervention on issues that China believes it cares about more than the United States and if the United States does intervene to delay dissuade not delay but to dissuade local partners from cooperating with the United States and to encourage and convince the United States to leave the dispute and go back home. So that's the real goal, the strategic goal, that's an important enough goal. It's not a new Cold War I don't believe we're in a new Cold War with China, the Cold War was extremely nasty. I'm glad it's over, I don't know why anyone would be nostalgic for it. I think it's very good that the anti-Soviet forces won the Cold War in world history but this is not a new Cold War but I would say in a sense from a political science perspective and from a diplomat's perspective in terms of course of diplomacy between the United States and China and its United States allies and its partners in China this is more complicated not worse but more complicated than the Cold War in one very important sense. In the second half of the Cold War from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the end of the Cold War there was one incredibly stabilizing factor in international politics, security politics and that was that the two camps the anti-Soviet camp and the Soviet camp knew where the lines were between the two camps and they were largely accepted you knew where the Warsaw Pack ended and where NATO began you knew where NATO ended and where the Warsaw Pack began and what this means is that aggression across the accepted boundaries between the two sides would have been clearly identified by both sides and the reactions probably would have been very harsh because those lines were clear everyone would know what aggression looked like and there was a nuclear world so this led to stable nuclear deterrence because who wanted to be the aggressor when they could potentially unleash nuclear Armageddon as things escalated across clear boundaries and the problem in East Asia is that there are no clear boundaries in these maritime disputes so if I go back to this picture the second picture by this is just an outline of the Senkaku deity so once they go back to that we can do that in the Q&A this is the 9- line in South China Sea the problem is that all the actors there seem to believe that their claims are legitimate and I include the Chinese in this this is important because they all feel like they're on the defensive they're all defending what they believe is justifiably theirs against other claimants why is this important I'm a social scientist I'm a political scientist right most of social science isn't really science but some of it is and this really is this is something called prospect theory it won the Nobel Prize for my colleague at Princeton Daniel Kahneman and his co-author Amos Tversky who unfortunately passed away before the prize you can't get it posthumously and the theory is a simple one for our purposes here and that is that people will take bigger risks and pay higher costs to defend what they believe is theirs then they will to get new stuff this is across gender across culture across age groups and it's been shown in laboratories to be true so that's why I say it's science there are exceptions of course people like Hitler but thank god there are exceptions but most people will take bigger risks and pay higher costs to defend what they believe is really theirs then they will to get new stuff so why does this bother me it bothers me because I've talked to diplomats in different countries in the past except for Brunei for some reason I've never met a diplomat from Brunei and talked about this at the same time and all of them seem to sincerely believe that their claims are real including the Chinese diplomats so what that means is that they're more willing to run risks and pay costs to defend what they believe is rightfully theirs than they otherwise would be and some people say is China revisionist in the South China Sea and some people are surprised when they say I wish in other words if they were making new claims that they hadn't made since the 1930s it would be easier to deter China from using force to enforce those claims than if they really believe it's been there since the 1930s and they finally have the power to do something about it that's going to be a more difficult challenge and the same with Japan I don't know any Japanese citizens on the full spectrum who don't believe the Senkaku islands are Japanese most Chinese I talk to believe the Diaoyu islands the same islands that they call are theirs historically etc that's really dangerous that's much more dangerous than if China was saying oh we never had the Diaoyu islands but let's get them because that would be easier to deter that would be them getting something new and that's what I worry about and that's what makes it more complicated than the Cold War now there's another factor that's more complicated and that is the risk of escalation the main map the United States military since the end of the Cold War has operated with a kind of standard operating procedure or standard strategy which is when it projects power abroad against a potential foe or an actual foe what it does is very early in a conflict it cripples the ability of that foe to reach out and damage and hurt forward deployed US forces and it does that by taking out weapon systems by taking out radars etc the problem in this case is that no American president has ever launched a massive early strike against a nuclear power in a conventional crisis war in a conventional war and China is a nuclear power and a lot of the capabilities that China can use as I described to you in detail for a reason are based on the mainland of China that would be used in a conventional sense to reach out and try to strike forward deployed US forces and what makes things worse and there is a reason I describe the nuclear forces to you in some detail is that China is the first challenger to American military power that has combined in the same types of systems a conventional deterrent and a nuclear deterrent the Soviet Union didn't have conventionally tipped ballistic missiles China does has conventionally tipped nuclear missiles and China has put its nuclear deterrent on submarines when it has based a lot of its naval deterrent against the US forward deployed forces on conventional weapons on submarines what does this mean if conflict were to happen and the United States were to try to protect forward deployed US forces they would probably want to they would probably consider I can't say want to because it's a presidential decision way above my pay grade they would want to consider taking out some of those capabilities either the command and control for those capabilities or the actual weapon systems it might be difficult for a future Chinese leader to know that those types of strikes weren't designed to take away the nuclear deterrent as well and that has real potential escalatory implications for a US China shooting war so I raised all that equipment for a reason now China has a no first use policy but I've written articles elsewhere looking at internal Chinese documents that we're not supposed to see but you can get on the outside world I didn't get them when I was in the US government I would never be able to publish anything like that but you can get them in libraries outside of China that suggests the no first use policy is more of a guideline than a rule so an American president would have to think will it really hold if I use a conventional strike against these assets on the mainland might China respond with a nuclear attack against our allies or against the United States and they'd have to consider that at least in the future another problem for the US is that almost all of the US regional allies and partners are economically dependent on relations with China which will make them reluctant to get into a kind of cold war which is you know I don't want a cold war but it's a reality that the United States has to think hard about who will be with them in a struggle against China with Chinese behavior to a great deal and then there's domestic politics and one of the things that makes domestic politics more complicated in this already complicated mess is that since the financial crisis of 2008 I believe that China the People's Republic of China has been more confident abroad and less confident the Chinese Congress Party has been less confident at home since 2008 now I'm a political scientist so we love two by two tables this is real science for us you have two variables, you have a two by two table the worst cell in the two by two table is a China that is confident abroad and scared at home from a US perspective and from the perspective of US allies because it means they're more likely to assert themselves on these long term claims because they're confident the US shot itself in the foot in the financial crisis China feels stronger and they're more likely to react harshly to the behavior of other disputants and it's not always China that picks the fight but they're more likely to react strongly because of the domestic political realities in China and the need to pose the party as a strong defender of Chinese national honor now it's true that Xi Jinping is much more powerful as an individual as a predecessor, Hu Jintao so maybe this factor is not quite as strong as it was when Hu Jintao was in office but I would say this about Xi Jinping's leadership it has based its leadership on a highly nationalistic set of slogans the China dream and the rejuvenation of this Chinese nation and that creates a political environment in China that makes it very hard to be moderate in these types of disputes one of the things I'm quite concerned about and we can talk about in the Q&A is Taiwan in 2020 when Taiwan has an election again will the mainland remain patient in cross-strait relations or will it become aggressive so it's hard to sustain these slogans national rejuvenation China dream when if you can't defend your map that's a basic problem so it worries me that CCP has moved into this very rhetoric to justify its legitimacy at home in addition to other trends in China that I'm concerned about there are positive features as well so don't get too depressed one is economic interdependence the economic interdependence in East Asia is very deep and it's different than economic interdependence before say World War I which realists often say it's transnational production chains where products are finished in China but they're made from parts around the region Taiwan, South Korea from Japan sometimes from the United States assembled on the mainland of China sent back out to the United States to Europe to Japan to other markets Malaysia is a big contributor to this transnational production chain it's an incredibly productive thing it's produced tremendous poverty reduction wealth you can call it wealth but I'll call it poverty reduction because that's more important hundreds of millions of people have been pulled out of poverty by this phenomenon but it's very fragile you have to have real-time delivery of all these products in multiple directions and a war in the region would be very damaging and I'm of the opinion that this transnational production chain of which China has been an integral part has been a major force for peace in East Asia in the post-Cold War environment I find it hard to imagine that none of these conflicts would have erupted into armed maritime disputes wouldn't have erupted into conflict if you didn't have this economic incentive of cooperation between the actors involved and the problem here really gets back to the financial crisis and China's reaction to it is that China has put in place some domestic development goals and plans that have eroded some of that transnational production chain it's still very strong but China has tried to replace some of the foreign suppliers into that into that transnational production chain if that were to progress further long into the future that would worry me under the same thesis that this has been a hidden source of peace I can't prove it because it's a counterfactual but if it were to go away my fear is it's like oxygen you start to notice it when it's it's depleting when there's not much of it you notice oxygen very much when it's very robust you don't really notice oxygen and that's true across the Pacific as well a major ballast in US-China relations has been the economic relationship and we talk about the decline in the US-China economic relationship in the Q&A it's not a thesis it's not a main core of my current discussion but it's a big problem and both sides have contributed to it strongly in the last 10 years and particularly in the last couple of years okay there's a second set of security issues I'll be briefer on these and that is how to convince China to contribute actively to prevent North Korea or Iran in the future from developing nuclear weapons this has been a challenge for US diplomats for at least the last 15 years if not longer 20 years going back to 1994 actually in the North Korean case 1993-94 and the world is simply more globalized than it's ever been before and even though China is not a peer competitor of the United States its economy is so large and its institutional position in the UN and elsewhere is so strong that if it doesn't actively contribute to solving these problems or if it obstructs worse yet it'll be extremely difficult to solve these problems there's a greater need for all major countries to pull together and China is by far the biggest economic partner of both North Korea and Iran and China's economy is so big that it is able to lend enough support to both the North Korean and Iranian regimes basically on its own even if the rest of the world pressures those regimes and people know that about North Korea not that many people know that about Iran but it is true that China is by far the biggest economic partner of Iran in the international space North Korea, China doesn't support the Chinese organization I believe that I don't believe they want North Korea to have nuclear weapons it's not good for China but China also doesn't want to see the regime in North Korea collapse and there are a range of international and domestic reasons why the Chinese Communist Party does not want the regime in North Korea to collapse and I can talk about those in the Q&A but for the sake of my argument here please accept that so the challenge is that China doesn't want a war on the peninsula because China believes that a war on the peninsula quite rightly will lead to the end of the North Korean regime plus there will be a war in China's neighborhood so that's kind of the worst outcome and China knows that it has tremendous leverage on North Korea you'll hear Chinese scholars and Chinese diplomats say oh we don't have that much leverage over North Korea it's really not true I've seen it when China pressures North Korea North Korea notices the North Koreans know they need China and I've seen it in real time and of course the Chinese diplomats and scholars say that because they don't want the burden of North Korea on their shoulders they don't want the world to blame China for North Korea because North Korea is not China but at the end of the day they do have tremendous leverage but they're uncomfortable being responsible for outcomes in North Korea who would be comfortable being responsible for outcomes in North Korea so it's an embarrassing burden so the United States to get China to pressure North Korea for denuclearization has to do two opposite things both of which are hard to do it has to convince China that if the status quo continues the current trends continue things will be worse for China than if they're reversed and the obvious way to do that and the most dramatic way to do that is to say it will lead to a war and we all know how a war is going to end up it'll be really terrible and the North Korean regime will go down but short of that the United States and its allies can say we are going to do things that you don't like China if North Korea continues down its current path because we have to defend ourselves we're going to strengthen our alliances both between the United States and Japan and the United States and South Korea and we're going to strengthen the alliance perhaps if we can between South Korea and Japan and on some occasions South Korea and Japan have tightened their security relations in recent years because from a Chinese perspective that's like cats and dogs sleeping together the South Koreans and Japanese aren't supposed to get along and China has long tried to avoid a kind of NATO style US-led alliance in its area the alliance has been largely bilateral so only North Korea could really bring these actors together and sometimes North Korea does and that is very disturbing so there's another prospect that can make things look very painful from a Chinese perspective if North Korea continues down its current path it's difficult to threaten war in a credible fashion because war would be so nasty there are on any given day some 250,000 US citizens independence that would need to be evacuated and because of the geography most of the South Korean population from a North Korean perspective is conveniently located really close to the North Korean border so it's easy to attack and that's where most of the Americans are as well so it's very difficult to threaten war that doesn't mean it can't be done but it's very difficult to threaten war and it's very difficult to sustain South Korea and Japanese cooperation so this is a real challenge from the threat part of the equation now there's an assurance part of the equation as well because I remind you that I said North Korean regime to collapse so a second thing the United States has to do in convincing China to pressure North Korea is to say the United States can live peacefully with a denuclearized North Korean regime in my opinion that's harder for the United States to credibly state than to credibly threaten conflict, military conflict the United States has a long record I would call it a bipartisan fetish for regime change it's not a Republican thing I worked in the Bush administration people think of Iraq but it's much more than that it's Libya, it's Ukraine it's President Obama's initial reaction to the civil war in Syria Assad has to go China doesn't like regime change politics China doesn't want the regime to change in North Korea so the United States needs to break from its tradition and traditional diplomacy in negotiating with China over North Korea and to say we're not seeking regime change we're simply seeking denuclearization the same could be said for Iran negotiations I don't have time to go into those but the same could be said for those as well back in the Obama administration days but it's a very difficult thing for the United States to credibly commit to and I would say that until the Singapore summit of June of this year the Trump administration did a very good job of those two things it appeared ready to go to war over the North Korean nuclear and missile programs and many people in East Asia and experts in the United States were quite concerned in late 2017 that there could be a war on the Korean Peninsula despite the heavy costs and I believe the Chinese were worried there was going to be a war on the Korean Peninsula if things didn't change and the second thing the Trump administration has done is it has constantly conveyed that it's not seeking regime change in North Korea very publicly not just the president saying he gets along really well with the North Korean dictator but the State Department and other agencies conveying the idea this is not about regime change it's not our business and I think the Trump administration unlike earlier administrations has more credibility because it has projected this kind of studied indifference to the life of people outside the borders of the United States so it's more credible on that score I'm not saying I support that conveyance of an emotion I'm just saying it's more credible on the score saying it's North Korea, we don't live there we just don't want them to have weapons that threaten us and I think that's why China did pressure North Korea much more than it had in the past because those two things were achieved then I think at the summit we lost a lot of that leverage we lost that leverage in my opinion we lost that leverage in victory prematurely saying we largely solved the problem now we just need to talk to the North Koreans and I told you before that the Chinese government, the officials and to some degree the Chinese academics and Chinese people they feel it's burden that North Korea is a burden well President Trump invited them to take that burden and put it right on America's shoulders now we can talk it out okay you talk it out and lo and behold at the Trump administration Trump administration is right, not unsurprisingly China reduced the economic pressure on North Korea soon thereafter and said oh just reassure them now but that means the United States has less leverage because the United States doesn't have good economic relations with North Korea or Iran so the United States can't pressure Iran or North Korea without China it's impossible I've spoken for too long there is the Iran issue should I say five minutes about Iran I don't know how long I've gone I don't see a clock and I am an academic and I can talk forever so just on the North Korea thing one last sentence which is the Trump administration now says that China has reduced pressure on North Korea because of the trade war I don't think the trade war has helped but I don't think that's the reason I think if there were a trade war and the United States declared victory in Singapore China would have reduced pressure anyway on North Korea but the trade war doesn't help about the trade war in the Q&A if you like but that's not the focus of my talk so Iran and this does worry me and I think this is going to feed into the trade war and that is that China is the biggest economic partner of Iran in the world it was before the JCPOA the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated by the Obama administration and the way that the Obama administration was able to get China to pressure Iran to do what Americans call secondary sanctions they were never leveled against the Chinese but they were out there as a threat and what secondary sanctions are is an American foreign policy tool that says if you country C third country C have good relations with a country we don't like country B we country A will sanction you country C the Chinese and some other countries believe this is illegal under international law to sanction a third party for its relations with a second party that is not harming the sanctioning state itself directly but the United States has done this for a long time in Cuba it's done it in Iran and it's going to do it I think next year when it's disappointed if and when it's disappointed I hope I'm wrong I hope that the Trump administration makes a huge progress in North Korea would be great for the United States would be great for China would be great for the world but I have my doubts and I'm saying if things go bad in North Korea the United States is probably going to go to secondary sanctions on Chinese firms that deal with North Korea but those firms tend to be relatively small and they don't have a big international footprint in Iran these are big Chinese firms they're energy firms they're banks and if the United States starts going after them having unilaterally pulled out of the Iran deal which China helped negotiate why because it was worried that its energy companies that caught up in those secondary sanctions it reduced energy purchases from Iran from 2012 to 2014 avoiding the secondary sanctions but it really helped put the squeeze on Iran that got Iran to the table and then Chinese diplomats I'm told from people involved were very constructive in helping cut a deal now the United States has pulled out of that deal and it's now going to sanction Iran for a whole range of Iranian behaviors which I personally think are quite reprehensible and destabilizing I'm not complaining about the notion that these things are bad behaviors by Iran in the international sphere but it's kind of open-ended from a Chinese perspective and you're going to see the United States I believe in the early part next year sanctioning Chinese companies for dealing with Iran and that's going to feed into the trade war that already exists and that's going to make it worse in my opinion and that's one of the reasons I don't think we're going to get out of this trade war anytime soon and it's a factor that a lot of people haven't taken into account so North Korea to a lesser degree Iran to a major degree we're going to see secondary sanctions I believe from the United States against Chinese entities for their cooperation with these targets of American course of diplomacy I really have spoken for too long I really appreciate your attention again I'm really fine I mean there's even people sitting on the steps I feel bad for you that you have to sit on the steps but it's a Friday evening I'm just incredibly honored to be here in any case but I'm particularly honored that so many people came out and I don't see anyone asleep and again thanks to Steve and way to go so has and way to go University of London for getting Steve saying here you really scored a major win for the university so thank you very much Thank you very much Before I I noticed that there are at least 20 and there's possibly more people sitting on these steps it's a good time for you to get yourself a seat there are plenty of seats in the front and there are also other seats elsewhere so if you like to move feel free to do so now I think if you do that others may well be moving adjustings that enable you to seat comfortably and there are a few seats on this side as well so by all means come over right we have about 36 minutes for discussions let me kickstart this first and then I will open this to the floor Tom I think you have made a lot of very interesting and important observations that I think many people would like to follow up on I myself actually were torn between to ask you about Iran or about North Korea but having noticed that we actually have a very strong representation of expertise in the Middle East in this room as well so I will probably leave the Middle East to others Good Every day I was at the State Department when I had a really bad day I said well I don't work on the Middle East Well here we deal with them all and do with the Middle East on a daily basis perhaps not in the same way that the State Department But let me say one thing Steve just as a side note that my first week on the job as Deputy Assistant Secretary for China, Taiwan and Mongolia the first crisis was in Lebanon July of 2016 and the Northeast Asia Near East Affairs Bureau people were in my office telling me about Lebanon because there had been an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon and Chinese peacekeepers had been killed and there was an evacuation issue and these were at risk along with Americans and I had to deal with that problem as my first thing and it was a real wake-up call like it's not just East Asia it's China it's the whole world So China does have in the diplomatic sphere and the peacekeeping sphere it has a global footprint it's everywhere Absolutely Let me then ask you about North Korea I think what you said about North Korea is very interesting and important but where do you see the next step in North Korea what the Chinese will do and in terms of how the Trump Administration can get things back on track I think you highlighted the importance of how the carrying victories too soon really was a very ill-advised move on the part of Well, everything in this discussion is my opinion not the opinion of anybody else but I do think that declaring victory too early will reduce leverage on North Korea to comply with any commitment that it may have made in those private meetings It seems to me that this week as recently as Thursday the Trump Administration is still declaring major progress I hope they're right I would much rather be wrong intellectually about this issue and have the Trump Administration win major kudos for settling the problem I just don't understand the problem in that way that the United States will continue to keep leverage enough pressure on North Korea to actually make concrete progress which I do believe is possible on denuclearization if the United States says we're doing extremely well and we're making real progress without the concrete progress already being delivered in large part because I think China is such an important player in this and China has been so reluctant to really pressure North Korea and when the United States says things like that China quickly moves back to more normal relations with the country so what would happen if we were to get China to pressure North Korea again there would have to be real disappointment in the United States I don't think that's extremely unlikely and then the United States would have to go back to some of its earlier policies which quite frankly we're scary to a lot of people including our South Korean allies and we're scary to China I don't know if that's going to happen I hope it doesn't have to happen because the Trump administration has the golden key and has unlocked the North but I have my doubts having dealt with this problem in the Six-Party Talks as part of the U.S. delegation I just have my doubts that it's solved or it's basically solved and now it's just a question of the details I doubt it, I hope I'm wrong Thank you The floor is opened if you say in one who you are so that the speaker has a sense of where the question may be coming from it would be helpful yes sir you have your hands up there's a broken microphone that would come to you I'm actually a chartered accountant by profession you're a what by profession an accountant I do have a question it's all about transparency accountability my question is this there's been talk about you know certain European countries trying to get exemptions from secondary sanctions yeah how likely is that going to happen and what would be the optics of it really okay thanks that's a great question I can't speak for the Trump administration I'm not in the Trump administration right so I can't speak for it my guess is that some European countries some U.S. allies will get exemptions from things like the aluminum and steel tariffs I have my doubts that European countries are going to get exemptions from Iran this seems like a core security goal of this administration to weaken Iran to punish Iran to stop change Iran's behavior how many behaviors will be enough I don't know it was cleaner when it was all about nuclear weapons you know you knew what the boundaries of the problem were if it's all Iranian behavior Iran is such a destabilizing actor it could go on for a long time the Trump administration takes it extremely seriously and I would expect them to sanction countries regardless of whether they were allies or not who were dealing with Iran under those circumstances whether that will work or not is an open question and whether it will work with China is an open question yes the lady there please thank you for the fascinating talk I'm a PhD student from Laos Chinese King's College London my daughter studied there so my question is regarding the depth chat diplomacy and the expanding Chinese military power protection capabilities so in terms of the depth chat diplomacy the Bell and Role initiative especially the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the China Export Bank and the China Development Bank has been considered as they are economic institutions however in terms of lending to poor countries to developing countries China is actually taking advantages from those loans given out and so with those countries unable to return we pay the China leases of ports will be signed to China and there have been situations especially in Sri Lanka and Djibouti and Maldives where the ports has become just Chinese Maldives Maldives Maldives well from the Chinese kind of job in he said the Chinese military is aware intention to impose the strain of pro statics and having Chinese military bases overseas so I was just wondering what you were on that it's a great question the BRI is such a broad program it looks to me I studied the 1950s my first book in China where campaign politics in the Chinese Communist Party they would announce a big campaign and everybody would rally around the campaign including a disastrous one the Great Leap Forward the One Belt One Road or the Belt and Road Initiative kind of looks like a campaign the Great Leader has announced that this is the goal of the country and everybody has to find a way to contribute so what it's probably going to do is create a lot of bad loans a lot of bad investments because politically driven economics usually doesn't work out very well and there are different aspects of the One Belt One Road since everything falls under it you have to break it into parts the AIIB the infrastructure bank I think is a very constructive use of Chinese reserves literally constructive it's constructive use of Chinese reserves and I think from a US perspective it should be considered a constructive use of Chinese reserves because the previous was an accountant because it's an international institution with a much higher degree of transparency than the rest of One Belt One Road and it has taken most of its projects to date in cooperation with other long standing international institutions like the Asia Development Bank like the World Bank and even the European Bank of of ah, jammy reconstruction and development wow I used to study the early 40s the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development where a friend of mine works in London and I just visited him today so AIIB has coordinated with these banks which have high degrees of transparency and there's a lot of oversight because a lot of other countries are involved then there's the rest of One Belt One Road which is more bilateral has been encouraged politically to take off so I'd expect a lot of banks to make all sorts of loans to be politically impressive that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be good one of the things I'm concerned about in my country is the discussion of One Belt One Road sometimes is internally illogical if the Chinese make loans that make the Chinese wealthier people worry and they say everybody's benefiting from these loans so China will get political leverage if China makes bad loans people worry because they say it's debt trap diplomacy I don't think the Chinese want to make a bunch of bad loans with 1.3 trillion that's just my guess the accountant probably agrees with me I don't know 1.3 trillion dollars in bad loans is really expensive and it's not clear to me that bad loans will win a lot of China's friends and allies in the future even if you're giving bribery to a small percentage of the population corrupt officials that doesn't win you hearts and minds over the long run so I would hope the international community would encourage China to make good loans that are beneficial to the target for reasons that it's a globalized economy and everyone could benefit from this to discourage bad corrupt loans obviously because they're destabilizing that can lead to instability which could hurt us as well and should encourage things like the AIB which are multilateral rather than the bilateral ones but there's a tendency to be opposed to all of it now you mentioned Sri Lanka you have to address things quickly so you wouldn't go on forever with every answer Sri Lanka is the example that everybody uses it was a loan that Sri Lankans couldn't repay and Sri Lanka gave China a 99 year lease and if you know Chinese history that should set off all sorts of alarm bells in your head a 99 year lease it's pretty ham-fisted diplomacy if you ask me but it is the only real example to date of a port being secured through a bad loan and Sri Lanka was under sanctions from the United States and the EU because of human rights abuses in the Civil War they turned to China Sri Lanka is not a great place to invest apparently I'm not shocked by that and they couldn't repay the loans so Djibouti, China has a navy port in Djibouti it's part of that antipiracy campaign and I've heard Americans say well maybe China will use the port in Djibouti to drive the American American base in Djibouti out I don't see it that way my understanding of the American base in Djibouti is that it's largely for counter-terrorism against al-Shabaab against Boko Haram why does China want to stop the United States from fighting terrorists in Africa when China is investing so much in Africa I don't see I guess I don't instantly see everything as a zero sum game I need to be convinced if it's a zero sum game I don't see this but you know from the Indian perspective unfortunately for India's perspective Sri Lanka is very far from China it's very close to India so they ought to be able to create counters and that's great power politics but I'm a little bit less concerned as I'm conveying and I'm a little bit confused about some of the rhetoric the way you get political power through the use of money is to give deals that are more beneficial to the target than the market would allow that's standard Alfred Hirshman so you don't make friends and you don't gain influence by hurting the target so the language in America is not about predatory loans and all this stuff that's not how China is going to gain influence we should be more concerned if you're worried about a zero sum power struggle if China is making beneficial loans because that's how they'll win friends not predatory loans anyways that's my political science response to your excellent question thank you Tom I have plenty of interest so if we could all keep our questions I will try to keep the answer short I can go on forever as you can tell they let academics into the government but maybe they shouldn't well we're always for academics I have Hassan there first and then I'll go around yes Hassan I was going to thank Steve for ensuring that the neocon interpretation of world politics gets good airing and so something that we don't often get exposed to especially on a Friday night so thank you Steve but I realized really am I a neocon? well I'm going to explain why I think some of your analysis actually is to the right of neocons I'm to the right of neocons especially when it comes to the Middle East and that's what I want to pick up issues with in an earlier in a response to an earlier question you would support the USA imposing sanctions on countries that have bad behavior including allies I want to ask you whether I didn't support it I described it I said that will happen because my understanding is that Trump administration puts great value on its pressuring of Iran and that I don't believe they will give exemptions what I heard was you would support imposing sanctions on countries that behave badly even if they are allies and I was going to ask you to support Saudi Arabia for its bad behavior in imprisoning the Lebanese prime minister last November in Riyadh for its reported gruesome killing of the Saudi dissident Khashoggi although facts are not yet verified but by what we hear coming from the USA it seems he has been murdered in the Saudi embassy or consulate in Istanbul committing war crimes in Yemen would you go as far as supporting introduction of sanctions on a U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia my second question on Iran because these are related Hassan if I may I think we can keep going questions yeah right my main question was on Iran I can answer another question later for me it's fine but I'll answer this one I was asked that question about whether the Trump administration would give allies an exemption on secondary sanctions towards Iran this is a futuristic question because it's really about what would happen in the future and probably early next year and my sense is no it won't right that's my answer it's an intellectual answer I have some issues I could list the issues of U.S. policy problems with managing allies I believe in a global competition not a zero-sum struggle but we're in a competition with China in a competition with China the greatest U.S. asset is our friends and allies we have some 60 plus security partners with signed agreements China has North Korea it has maybe Pakistan as an an allied partner it has Sudan, Zimbabwe a rogues gallery this is the greatest strength so if you mismanage your alliances that's going to cost us a lot and I worry that we're not paying enough attention to that important aspect of U.S. power around the world I object to titles neocon, other things I don't find them very constructive I've never even joined a political party but I certainly don't see myself as having a title so I don't know how to answer a question of a neocon so I'll just skip that piece and I don't know how U.S. pressure or lack thereof on human rights violations in Saudi Arabia touches upon my answer to the question about Iran it's quite possible that the Trump administration will not sanction Saudi Arabia under the theory that Iran is so important to U.S. foreign policy and the pressuring of Iran is so important to U.S. foreign policy that they will choose not to pressure Saudi Arabia on things that run against U.S. values I wouldn't be shocked if that were the case and I don't really think it's my place here I didn't come here to talk about U.S. human rights policy towards the Middle East or U.S. human rights policy towards Saudi Arabia so I don't want to spend time talking about which offense by Saudi officials should or would trigger U.S. sanctions against Saudi Arabia and the U.S. foreign ally of the United States for sure so I'll leave it at that okay I'll take that from this side and then I'll try to get back to Good evening sir I did economics from Cambridge and I'm currently doing Japanese and there is one question that puzzles me why does the states feel so strongly that North Korea is China's nation in your speech wouldn't also be logical to view it as a leftover issue from the Cold War and I mean China is not a regional in Asia unlike U.S. is in her own backyard so I mean you know it's really and you know also China views a country's sovereignty as really the top issue of any sovereign state so I'm just wondering why is the general assumption we should feel so strongly responsible for North Korea's doing okay it's a great question um if you go back to historical legacies I would say if you put it in Chinese it's so if you want to talk about Cold War legacies there was no new China and OPRC there would be no North Korea they wouldn't have survived China saved North Korea China saved North Korea it restored North Korea it supported North Korea and North Korea now exists on its own and it's a big nuisance for China I'm not trying to portray this as you know a close alliance that China loves North Korea and loves everything it does I think China is very frustrated as I said with North Korea but at the end of the day the North Korean regime is entirely dependent on its economic relationship with China both directly and indirectly directly because of the official economic relationship and indirectly through a lot of the many many illegal activities that North Korea does on the international stage to fund itself has to go through somewhere and it's the only logical geographically that would occur through China so it's just the reality it's an unfortunate reality for China it's an embarrassment to a lot of Chinese scholars and elites that I've talked to that they're left with this historical legacy that you're correct historical legacy but it's the only peaceful way to deal with denuclearization of North Korea and my boss Chris Hill when I was in the six party talks had a line that I always remember when he was talking to his Chinese counterparts about North Korean nuclear weapons he said I'd rather see a toddler with a hand grenade than that regime with nuclear weapons and I don't think the Chinese government as I said before wants North Korea to have nuclear weapons but it has this dilemma so is it the responsibility well if you have the leverage and it's a problem that threatens your security directly and indirectly then yeah I think they have the incentive, the interest in trying to help and I think the alternative a secure North Korean nuclear deterrent over the long run and a declared nuclear state in North Korea is going to be a disaster for the region and a disaster for China and then the last piece is yeah there's a principle of non-interference in the sovereignty of affairs but tell that to the South Koreans when they built a missile defense against North Korean missiles and China sanctioned South Korea so it's not always the case that China doesn't push against other countries when they do things that China doesn't like so please push against North Korea more and when you do it produces results they went to Singapore I think the Chinese rightfully deserved a lot of credit for that and the Trump administration gave China a lot of credit for that because China increased the pressure North Korea noticed and they started to negotiate again I'll take a question from the other side first, yes Hi there, my name is I'm a security analyst focusing on East Asia I wanted to ask about Xinjiang we haven't heard much about that yet today there's been a lot in the news about securitization in Xinjiang but not yet much has been spoken from governments particularly in the West I wondered if you see on the one hand it being used for benefit by the US and other countries being subsumed under the narrative of the war on terror in the same way the second Chechen war was partly used and gained support for Russia in that case or whether you see it is used negatively in things like the I don't see this kind of passivity that you're describing and I think the problem I don't know if everyone heard the question is about Xinjiang and I guess the reeducation camps that you're talking about that's something that runs against what the United States is all about based on freedom of religion because a lot of the people that came over from Europe were religious refugees so it runs against American values, what's happening in Xinjiang I don't believe the United States government has been quiet about it then the second part of the question was about whether the war on terror somehow reduces criticism on these scores I don't think so at all because a systematic reeducation campaign of Muslims is a very different thing than targeting terrorism which is a very small minority if it's Islamic fundamentalist terrorism or after it's a very small minority of Muslims around the world who are involved in those activities so that would not be either a smart or legitimate approach to countering that problem to try to reeducate large groups of youth away from Islam so no, I don't think that's been a factor and I can say when I was in the government when the George W. Bush administration was there it wasn't a factor, we raised human rights concerns over Xinjiang even as we did recognize it was important and I have to add this and I was criticized in the United States for raising this that China does have a terrorism problem China has a terrorism problem that doesn't mean everybody is upset about Beijing's policies in Xinjiang is a terrorist but China does have a terrorism but I saw it I think it was real and there are people from China fighting in Syria and there were people in China fighting in Afghanistan so there is an issue with the issue I don't think my country always deals with it right I've been critical of my own country and how we've dealt with it I think this way is really not only wrong-headed from a strategic point of view but it's ethically unsupportable it's totally wrong so it's bad for China I think they're going to end up with a much worse problem if they continue down this path which I take no joy in I don't see our relationship with China what's bad for China is not good for the United States and if this turns out to be very bad for China it will be bad for everybody that's my view thank you I think let me take one from the my right-hand customer there yes sir, yes you and then I'll get somebody from the back Hello I'm a final year student studying Chinese and international relations here at SOAS my question concerns perceptions of China's rise so at the beginning of your talk you referred to China and you mentioned about it being a global rival and how you didn't think this was one of the big issues a peer competitor yeah, I don't think it's a peer, it's not strong enough sure, like there was no evidence to support that and militarily, diplomatically yet there are some academics Keisha Mabubani former Singaporean diplomat being one of them who would claim that some American politicians and academics have a sense of near-sightedness or he calls it America's myopia regarding China's rise I wear glasses he refers to questions such as what happens when America becomes the number two economic power and what happens when the Chinese currency replaces the primary becomes the primary international reserve currency so my question is do you think or are some American politicians and academics guilty of being too complacent about China's rise or is that just an exaggeration okay, it's a great question, so let me take the last part first I hope I didn't sound complacent about the importance of China's rise I think China's rise has global implications through these international institutions and the global pressure campaigns on certain actors like Iran and North Korea and I think China's importance in East Asia which is important to the whole globe makes its current rise quite challenging even though I don't see it as a peer competitor around the world I don't expect U.S. and Chinese naval ships to be fighting at the Straits of Hormuz or anything like that anytime soon and some Americans really believe that China's already risen it's already a peer competitor and it's coming after us all over the world and when it invests in Africa it's part of a Cold War strategy of China against the United States I don't see it that way I can talk about those other aspects like Chinese investment in Africa and Latin America as well I don't see it all as a big Cold War zero sum struggle but I take China's rise extremely seriously but you know I know Kishor Mabawani is an old friend I rarely agree with him on these things but China's economy is likely to be larger and purchase power parity than the United States economy sometime soon but that doesn't make China economically more powerful than the United States and there's a book that maybe goes further than I would I've been reading it I read it on the plane over here by Michael Beckley called Unrivaled about U.S. Power I would encourage you to look at that and there he looks at net economic power which is GDP because it's really GDP where China could surpass the United States just think of it they have 1.3 billion people to feed so even if the GDP is larger it doesn't mean they have projectible economic power like the United States does which has in 2012 terms which is the last time I looked at the PPP equivalent the most generous interpretation of Chinese per capita GNP and the standard one for U.S by 6 times larger that's power projection economic power because you're not consuming at all and then if you look at the environmental problems the banking problems and the banking problems in China are really severe Chinese officials say it I'm not casting aspersions Chinese officials know they need financial reform they're scared to do it they say this right so the idea that the Chinese currency anytime soon is going to become the standard currency around the world I don't see it I don't worry about that I actually worry more that China's banking system will collapse I don't think it will happen but I say to my Chinese colleagues everyone thinks the United States wants to do in China right if China were to collapse internally that would be a huge disaster and I worked in the State Department there's no office for that there's no office for Chinese collapse we wouldn't know what to do proliferation of weapons migration and mass disease control it would be a disaster for everybody so I always say we wish China well but part of wishing China well in my opinion is hoping for economic reform and political reform I don't see why Chinese are different and they don't deserve to have a vote in their government I don't understand that I don't accept it I think it's almost and I hear some Americans say they don't need democracy it sounds racist to me why shouldn't they have a say in their government I have lots of Chinese friends who believe they should have a say in their government so it's not an American fetish thank you we've got about six minutes left I'll try to if possible take inch two I'll take one at the far end there yes please over that's fine I'll do the first I was a second year PhD student from here as I was China Institute and I'm more interested in China's domestic politics as you mentioned before it's like contradictory phenomenon that with China's economic boom and the increasing military might that China is getting more confident about itself but you mentioned that the party is getting less confident so my question the first question is I mean in your opinion how you understand this kind of less security from the party and the second question is how this let's just think of one please it's a good question it's a good enough one on its own promise you since the financial crisis China I think it's manifested itself in various ways and it's a shame because again instability in China is not something that anybody should wish certainly the Chinese Communist Party doesn't like instability but it's hard to explain if the Chinese Communist Party is not concerned about stability at home it's hard to explain a bunch of things this sweep of the anti-corruption drive that Xi Jinping launched under a speech that he made that said if we don't clean up this corruption problem the party will go down so again that's not an American analysis that's the analysis of the top leader of China if we don't clean up corruption we will not survive as a party maybe that's true but that suggests a lot of fragility then there's been more censorship of the internet of academia there's been much more thought control in the last few years than there had been in the period between the mid 1990s and 2008 before the financial crisis and I think that's unfortunate for China I don't think that's a way to innovate I don't think that's a way to maintain stability but that's what the Chinese government has chosen to do there's been a consolidation of power under Xi Jinping's rule I met Xi Jinping when I was in the government in a government meeting I was very impressive, very intelligent he could cover the whole world in a conversation but the idea that all this power is in that one person's hands doesn't seem like a very stable institution to me that's not institutionalization in the Chinese Communist Party for years we're saying yes we're not going to have multi-party democracy but we're going to have institutionalization and one of those great institutional objectives or one of those great institutional achievements was supposedly term limits and age restrictions on leadership and they just revised the Constitution it appears to get rid of that now, did they do that out of confidence or did they do that out of nervousness they may have a reason to have done it but it can't be a good sign for their confidence about domestic politics if they really had a reason to say we can't afford not to give this one individual lifelong power that must say something about their concern about the stability of the institution on a broader level and I don't take joy in that I think it's terrible so that's my response I would like to see stable progress in Chinese domestic politics in a direction where this wasn't necessary where there was a stronger sense of legitimacy where it wasn't necessary for the government more institutionalization and eventually more voice of Chinese people in their own political affairs I don't say that as some kind of Trojan horse to create a revolution I don't want to see a revolution I just like to see change and I said that when I was in the government so the Chinese government if it's watching me on YouTube will not be coming out of my mouth again but it's part of wishing China well as a nation is to say you want them to develop in a positive direction like all the other great powers and then China will be stronger China will be more respected and that will be good for everyone I'm afraid that we have been defeated I have been defeated by the clock I do apologize to those of you who have your hands up and not being able to have a chance to engage in this conversation but less now if the speaker has a round of applause to show our appreciation thank you very much Tom Professor Christensen for giving us the most fantastic second WSD Honda distinguished lecture thank you