 Hi, I'm Professor Michael W. Charney with CISD here at SOAS. Welcome to the Continuing the Conversation series at SOAS. SOAS will be hosting more virtual events like this in the upcoming weeks. Today's event will be recorded and shared. Please use the following hashtags discussed or follow this event. Today's event will be a year on how COVID is changing China and how it engages the world. With SOAS Professor Steve Tsang, the Director of the China Institute. Steve will give a talk for 20 minutes, followed by a Q&A session. Please submit your questions in the chat box. Some questions are in the chat box. Some questions will be submitted for Steve to discuss. We'd like to welcome now Steve to give your talk. Well, thank you very much, Mike. I have put my stock watch on, so I will keep myself to 20 minutes. The subject is how COVID is changing China and how it engages with the world. I would say that I'm really focusing on the politics of the world. I would say that I'm really focusing on the politics and the diplomacy, not so much on the society side of the changes that COVID-19 would have brought about to China. So first of all, how China is changed. I think if I may, I would just remind people that if we go back a year, back to February 2020, then China was in a very different position than it is today. Today, China looks very, very strong, handling COVID very, very well, very effectively compared to the Western democracies. But in February 2020, China was much more in a kind of near crisis point. That was the time when even the credibility of Xi Jinping was looking a bit potentially dodgy, or the first time since he became leader in 2012, or indeed in particular, since he became paramount leader at the 19-party congress in 2017. A year ago, we were hearing reports of intellectuals within the Chinese party, the establishment referring to Xi Jinping as a clang with no clothes, thinking that he was the emperor, pushing to an extreme the metaphor with the emperor's new clothes. We were hearing people talking about what the COVID-19 be the Communist Party or Xi Jinping's Chernobyl moment, that it would be the beginning of the end of the Communist Party rule in China. Now, a year on, all these are gone. Or indeed, even by the summer of 2020, the picture had changed dramatically. It changed dramatically because China was able to contain the virus within its borders, and the Western democracies by and large has not managed to do so. Now, I want to sort of underline that we are not talking about all democracies having failed to do so. They are clear examples of democracies that have handled COVID-19 very, very well. All through 2020. You have Taiwan, you have New Zealand, you have a couple of other examples that have handled it very well. But overall, the big major, what usually will be seen as the leading democracies, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom had handled it very, very poorly. And that put China in a very different light from really early summer of 2020. And this gave the Chinese government and the Chinese people tremendous amount of confidence. It's a confidence that the Communist Party under Xi Jinping would focus on the system. It was the Chinese system that enabled China to handle it so well. And of course, by referring to the Chinese system, they really are talking about the Communist Party system. That is the key issue. It was a comparison with the democracies which were fumbling. The Chinese system under the Communist Party being able to act decisively, responsibly and effectively showing therefore the system is actually superior. And the system not only was superior in containing the virus, the system was superior in being able to produce the PPEs that the rest of the world were desperate for. The China had faced a bit of a shortage of PPE to begin with, and then managed to mobilize his incredible industrial capacity to deal with that shortage. The PPEs were being used as a leverage for Chinese diplomacy to project the success of the Chinese government, and also to win friends in particular in particular in countries which simply cannot get PPEs from practically anywhere. So you may also remember when all that was going on. There were a lot of stories or enough stories going around about PPEs being provided by China, which were substandard and not safe, which of course caused a fair bit of negative feelings in Europe and in North America. But the thing about it this way, if you were living in other parts of the world, perhaps in certain other parts of Asia and in Africa, where you simply cannot get PPE or so ever. The substandard Chinese PPEs looks pretty good. And the fact that you could get them at all from the Chinese government or the Chinese side was not something that did not go down well there. So I think we, we did see a certain kind of positive sides to it. So we have in terms of Chinese foreign policy, some kind of a projection of one could now perhaps call PPE diplomacy, which would later transform and developed into a vaccine diplomacy, again, even though the Chinese vaccines have not yet been approved through the normal process of review, the fact that Chinese government is making their vaccines available to countries in Africa and other parts of the world, when they cannot get supplied from the leading Western suppliers is something which is quite positive and helpful to Chinese diplomacy and Chinese foreign policy. And this confidence that the Chinese authorities have secured as a result of their abilities to contain COVID-19 gives them huge amount of confidence in terms of how they want to project Chinese positioned globally. And this is a development which we perhaps some of us will now know it as the wolf warrior diplomacy of China. The Chinese government's assertiveness to put it politely, to put it impolitely, the Chinese government's aggressive aggressive approach to diplomacy in going out and asserting the Chinese government's narrative and positioned practically coming out and say that COVID-19. Well, it didn't start in China. It started in Italy. It started in America. It was the United States Army that introduced them to China. It came from cold, cold chain storage, food imported from the West. Not us. Don't blame us. We are the good guys. We managed to contain it. Now, that sort of very aggressive diplomacy, I think was very counterproductive in the Western democracies, whether we're talking about Europe, the UK, or the United States, or Canada, or Australia. I think by and large, people react quite negatively to it, knowing full well that even though we don't know exactly how COVID-19 started. Oh, by the way, we don't know how COVID-19 started because the Chinese government will not cooperate with any outside body government or WHO to allow a fully independent study into how the pandemic, or at least the virus started in the world. And so, yes, we do react negatively to it. We do respond very critically to the way how the Chinese government do it. And yet, they were still projecting this kind of very aggressive foreign policy. They are, if you like, practically lying through their teeth about the COVID-19. They are trying to change the narrative. They're trying to control the narrative. And that is all being articulated by government, which is committed to promote and project soft power. The Chinese government is very, very clear they want to build up and project soft power. And they were taking an approach which is as counterproductive as it can be in the building up of soft power. So why would they do that? They would do that because Xi Jinping and the Chinese political system created the incentive for Chinese diplomats and officials to take such an approach. It is not because Chinese diplomats are unprofessional. It is not because Chinese diplomats are fools. They are not. You have been dealing with Chinese diplomats in the course of the last 20, 30 years. You will have noticed that the quality of Chinese diplomats have really clearly improved significantly in that period. They're much more professional. They really often understand what they're dealing with. But why then would they be doing something that is so counterproductive? Xi Jinping had famously asked Chinese diplomats and Chinese officials, party members, all of them, to have the courage to stand up to the foreigners. In his words, to unsheath the soul, to show the soul and not back away from anything that anyone in anywhere where taking a negative view of China must be contested. Now Xi Jinping never ever mentioned the term wolf warrior diplomacy. It's a term that we now use because of a Chinese theme called the wolf warrior, a kind of Chinese ramble theme. And it's because of that particular approach, ramble approach to diplomacy that we now call it wolf warrior diplomacy. They do it because they are not really so worried about how the whole country's response to that particular approach. They are doing it because they have an audience of one. They are there to show Xi Jinping and reassure Xi Jinping that these are all patriotic Chinese diplomats and others standing up for the important image of China and therefore it is important for them to say whatever necessary and do whatever it takes to defend the dignity of China in quotation marks or the feelings of the Chinese people again in quotation marks. And of course, the very wolf warrior approach of Chinese diplomacy change very significantly public opinions in the Western democracies towards China. And it was in the course of 2020 that we saw a significant shift in opinions, particularly in the UK or Europe. The US was in a much more difficult situation because I think American public opinion was hardening towards China. In the course of the of the Trump administration anyway, but Europe and UK were not. They had to change mainly in response to the Chinese approach to handling the publicity about the COVID-19. And then you have the other main news that were catching people's attention and focus in ways that they probably would not have without that shift in opinions to start with. And referring to the stories coming out from China of the repression of the weaker people in Xinjiang. And then talking about the introduction of the national security law in Hong Kong, which clearly and unmistakably marks the end of Hong Kong's one country to system model, which was meant to be guaranteed by the International Treaty, known as the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, an international treaty registered to the United Nations. All those have happened before COVID-19. They would have a negative effect on Chinese image and Chinese foreign policy, but probably nowhere compares to how it unfolded in 2020 when public opinion had turned against China. Now, what is the prospect? What do we see Chinese foreign policy going? Now, we see Chinese foreign policy going in a way that Xi Jinping will not stick to the old idea that Deng Xiaoping put forward and became the norm in the previous 30 years or so. When Deng Xiaoping became leader of China in 1978-79, he came up with a formula, which was that China should hide its capabilities and fight for time in order to reassure the rest of the world and get the support of the rest of the world for China to modernize and build up its capabilities. And this is just something China should continue to do for a very long time. Deng Xiaoping never laid down a time limit as to when that phrase needs to be stopped and be replaced by a new approach. But inherently in Deng Xiaoping's formula was the idea that there will be a time when China is ready, China will assert itself, that fighting for time was not meant to be indefinite. The difference here is that Xi Jinping has decided, the moment is nigh, and China now openly requests and requires the rest of the world to pay it due respect. And this therefore underlies the general direction of Chinese foreign policy moving forward. And he will continue to engage with the world. The Chinese government is not at the moment ready to have a full scale decoupling with the West, the democracies or other parts of the world. The Chinese government is still committed to engaging with the rest of the world, including the capitalist democratic states, because the Chinese government still need that economic links and technological knowledge from outside of China for China's development and development. So they will only be interested in a limited smart decoupling with us, something which Xi Jinping introduced a year, well in fact less than a year after he became leader of China. He became leader in October November 2012, and less than a year later in 2013, he issued a document called document number nine, which started by saying that China must spend Western ideas like constitutionalism, like democracy, like rule of law, like a free press, like a liberal economic order, all those were to be banned anywhere in China, you are not even allowed to talk about them on university campuses. So yes, there was something started. It was reinforced by the make in China 2025 policy again introduced 2013 to enable China to live forward in its innovative capacity so that Chinese government China as a whole will not be dependent on other countries for the most innovative advanced technologies. But make in China 2025 has not yet deliver all the goals that were being set. So China will continue to do that. But as it does so, it will be taking a much more assertive approach and will not accept being lectured by any government and any attempt to get the Chinese government to improve on his human rights situation, or his policy on Hong Kong or Xinjiang, or anything else really would be seen by the Chinese government as being hostile. And they will stand up for it. This is something which I think we can expect a post COVID China to be in how it engages in how it engages with the rest of the world. I will stop here and hand it back to you, Michael. Thank you, thank you Steve for that very interesting talk and connecting back to, as I understand you did this talk earlier, a different talk related to this topic a year ago so probably a lot of changes, but, but certainly a great deal of impact is going to resonate in the future obviously. We have a couple of questions and I have one of my own read like to begin with this Yannick has asked two questions. I'll give you both these questions because they might be interrelated. Yannick asked, can you expand on the people's Republic of China's relationship with international non government organizations, such as the World Trade Organization World Health Organization, and also about the continuity of food measures for for frozen food. Right. Very good questions. Now, the Chinese government. I think Xi Jinping has a very clear policy was the international NGOs, well the international organizations really what they're just the international NGOs, because the UN organizations are the main ones which are as stick here the WHO is a very good example of the Chinese government working very, very hard to try to make sure that institutions like it will come to the right conclusions and take the right approach as it deals with China and China's interest. It is difficult to say for sure whether the WHO has largely acted in a way which are very much in favor of China's interest. It is also pretty hard to find evidence to show that the WHO was being very robust in pushing the Chinese government to cooperate in establishing how the pandemic started, how the virus started. To ask the Chinese questions, the Chinese have not been very cooperative. They've been formally very cooperative, but they're not in realities being cooperative in terms of giving full access and monitored by the Chinese officials. The WHO teams in China was very, very closely monitored in terms of who they could talk to and what they could actually talk about. I think what we need to bear in mind is not only about institutions like the WHO, we should also think about the UN Human Rights Council. The UN Human Rights Council illustrates even more clearly the Chinese government's approach. It wasn't that long ago. If you go back say 20 years and before China was often a subject of conversation was subject of interest for the UN Commissioned on Human Rights before it was reformed to become the Human Rights Council. The Chinese human rights were problematic back then. But if you look objectively at the human rights situations in China as a whole, 20, 30 years ago with the situations today, I think it's really not that difficult to conclude that the current human rights situations, particularly taking into account what happens to the weaker people in Xinjiang is much, much worse than it was 30 years ago. When China was a main target of the UN Human Rights Enquiry. Now China is not much of a subject of conversation for the Human Rights Council. Because the Chinese government had taken full advantage of the UN changes over the human rights establishment and effectively managed to get its own people to become the first members of the Human Rights Council and then make sure that other friendly states are happily represented, stays friendly to China, happily represented on the Human Rights Council. They are so they are very effective in actively involving in those UN organizations and working there. In terms of the second question about the continuity of food security. Now food security is something which the Chinese government has always been very, very concerned about perhaps slightly less today than it was before, but still it is a major consideration for the Chinese government. Now food security is important, because if you cannot provide food security, you raise questions about the credibility and legitimacy of the regime itself. For a government that simply claims its legitimacy on the basis of its revolutionary heritage and its ability to deliver a better tomorrow, it will have to provide food security. And that partly account for why the Chinese government are encouraging, indeed supporting investments not only in China for food production, but for food production elsewhere to supply China is a big deal for them. I'm going to combine two questions that may or may not be completely related. Despite the PRC is more assertive diplomacy and successful control the virus. It is lost support among most developed countries, according to the Pew research in October 2020. How do you reconcile that. And, given that the Chinese government will act aggressively to the West preaching about human rights where the Uighurs are concerned, what strategies should the West take. Okay, very good questions. In terms of the Pew Center survey result. I think that is the basis for what I was saying earlier in the presentation that the Chinese government created a situation that it incentivize Chinese diplomats to pledge to the gallery of one back home in China to the approval of Xi Jinping. And since every one of those wolf warrior diplomats, Chinese ambassadors to different countries have not been punished by the Chinese government because the host countries to which they are accredited have turned against China. And often we are looking at not only public opinion in those country, turning unfriendly to China or critical of China or suspicious of Chinese intentions. We are seeing the political class changing. And in some cases, government policy, clearly hardening, even in the UK, we have seen that happening in China research group of the Conservative Party, didn't exist before 2020. Now does it worry the Chinese government. Well, it kind of, it does and it doesn't. It's because of Chinese diplomats who are concerned about it. They don't really, they don't, they do understand what's going on. They don't, they don't like it. But are they going to come out and oppose it. Well, they can't because if they did, they are opposing Xi Jinping, and therefore there's a bit of a problem. The question of how we should respond to China, how Western democracies should respond to China. I think we have to stand up to our own core values. And I think we have to coordinate and work together in our response to China. And I think it's also important that when we do so, we do not simply do it as a coalition of the Anglo-Saxon democracies, the so-called Five-Eyed Alliance. It's so much easier for the Chinese to say that it is the old imperialists previously led by the Brits and now led by the Americans, all working together and trying to get back at us because we are being so good. And they just can't stand losing their leading positions and they're coming up with all these hostile ideas about us and they, when there was still the Trump administration, it's very easy for the Chinese to say that, look, this is not a government with any credibility. You can't trust what they say. And it's a very easy sell for them. But if we genuinely stand up to our core values on rights and on democratic principles and we coordinate together, I think they will have to listen to us much more seriously. Would you mind elaborating on the role that COVID-19 has played specifically in the China-Hong Kong relationship? New old taking requirements have been set for Hong Kong public officials this week. How does this sit with the handover agreement signed with Britain 1984 and that came into force in 1997? And how will this affect the already existing identity crisis in Hong Kong? How do you foresee COVID's influence on Hong Kong's political future? Well, COVID-19 and Hong Kong will show that for the Chinese government anyway. The Chinese approach is more effective than the Hong Kong government's approach. Even the Hong Kong government has done rather well in continuing to COVID-19, but not quite as well as the Chinese government. And because of the challenges of the pandemic and the availability of vaccines, Hong Kong is and will be required to rely primarily on Chinese vaccine. It's a matter of nationalism. It will not do for Hong Kong to reject Chinese vaccines. Here you get to a bit of a problem locally in Hong Kong, because most people in Hong Kong would much prefer one of those certified, one of those vaccines that have been certified by credible governments through a transparent process, which happens to be democratic governments like the UK or the US or the EU. But the Hong Kong special administrative region government really doesn't have a choice. The big change in Hong Kong is not a result of COVID-19. The big change in Hong Kong was the protests of 2019, which resulted in the Chinese government under Xi Jinping taking some drastic steps in response. I'm using my words very carefully here. I'm not saying that it was the protests in Hong Kong in 2019, which caused the Chinese government to take a hotline on Hong Kong. The Chinese government under Xi Jinping started taking a hotline on Hong Kong in 2012, and it was that hotline which eventually resulted in the protests in Hong Kong in 2019. But with that protest, the Chinese government went out of its way to ignore the agreed settlement for Hong Kong and the Sino-British John Declaration and Hong Kong's basic law in introducing a national security law to Hong Kong at the end of June 2020. Now, under Hong Kong's basic law, which is Hong Kong's constitution, Hong Kong would be required to pass some kind of national security law anyway, that is under the Article 23 of Hong Kong's basic law. But that law will have to be introduced by Hong Kong's own legislature, the Legislative Council of Hong Kong. What the Chinese government did is that they have the National People's Congress Standing Committee to legislate on behalf of Hong Kong, completely bypassing the Hong Kong process, to the extent that the law was not even known to the chief executive of the contents of the law was not known to the chief executive of Hong Kong and upon year of the Chinese government until a few hours before it became effective. Nobody in Hong Kong was consulted. Nobody knew what it was. And when it was introduced, it's extremely precondition. That law effectively outlawed all the protest attempts that were made in 2019. If you now speak up in Hong Kong and say, I oppose the Communist Party, I want Hong Kong people to have a right to decide on their own future. You will have violated the national security law of Hong Kong. And that's how the whole protest movement was being effectively put to an end in Hong Kong. COVID-19 just kind of became easier for the government repressions against the democratic aspirations of people in Hong Kong, easier to be enforced. We have a couple of questions on what the successful handling of the COVID will mean for China's bilateral external relationships with other countries. After the 2008 financial crisis and the Chinese economy appeared on scratch, this encouraged other countries to pursue closer relations with PRC. And now with the better handling apparently of the pandemic and the PRC, will that improve those two related questions are should the West respect or fear China in 2021. And in 2019 that you shifted the view of Chinese being a systematic competitor. So can the decoupling of supply chains be soft and limited. Okay, I'll deal with the decoupling of the supply chain first. The decoupling of the supply chain was something which Donald Trump asked of American companies and wanted other Western companies to follow. It was mainly 2019 step it came up. And effectively, hardly anybody responded in its meaningfully significant way in practice to the core that Donald Trump made. Most American companies and other European and Western companies wanted to continue to trade with China. So the early problems of 2020 when China itself was in lockdown. And the supply chain was broken. It has far more of an effect on how some of those Western and American companies look at the security of the supply chain with China. And much more than COVID-19 make them realize that the old model of globalization and just in time supply chain was creating vulnerability to their business model that is getting them to respond more to it than the political tension between the United States and China under Trump. I don't think we can see that the decoupling continue unless companies do see problems to their security of supply operations. Sorry, Mike, what was the first question again? The first question was should the West fear or like the China in the current atmosphere after COVID? Now, should the West fear China? I think that's probably, I wouldn't put it quite in those terms. I think what we need is to understand fully what we are dealing with. In favor of is engaging with China, China is now so fully integrated globally that the idea of containing China doesn't work. It cannot actually work. And we also have to work with China's to deal with some of the biggest challenges we are facing at the moment, whether we're talking about climate change or eventually hopefully COVID-19, we can't do those without China working with us. But having said that, we have to be aware that the Chinese Communist Party system is fundamentally anti-democratic. It's not undemocratic. It is anti-democratic. The Chinese foreign policy under the Communist Party has a strong element of making the world safe for authoritarianism. Now this predates Xi Jinping. Even before Xi Jinping came into power, the Chinese government was already committed to do this. Xi Jinping was just not very assertive in pushing for it. And it's under Xi Jinping that he is pushing very strongly for that openly and clearly. Where I think we also need to bear in mind is that under Xi Jinping, things have changed significantly in China. And there's always something about China eventually wanting to claim its rightful place in the world. Now, how you define the rightful place in the world is a very delicate and tricky matter. And not all leaders of the Communist Party of China have the same view on it. Xi Jinping has the most expensive view on what the rightful place of China is. Xi Jinping is not a leader who is intended to be compared to Deng Xiaoping, the great reformer of the Communist Party. Xi Jinping compares himself in terms of history to Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic of China, the man who was going to make China great. And he also compares himself to the first emperor of China, the man who fundamentally changed history in China. So we are looking at a leader, if he continues to be in power for the next 20, 30 years, and can steer China in the direction he wants it to, then it is going to be a China that eventually will expect us all to pay homage. But we're talking about at least 30 years away, the target time for Xi Jinping as he laid out in his 19-party congress speech was 2050. That's when they expect China to be rich, beautiful, powerful, and effectively second to none. Will China continue to go in the current trajectory for the next 30 years? That's a big question. So I don't think we should simply assume what Xi Jinping would like China to be like in 30 years' time is the China that we are dealing with today. There are two questions which are different, but I think the answer may run on the same court. So one question is, how would you compare the Chinese distribution of government contracts during the Russia PPVE and the apparent cronyism with how contracts are handed by the UK government through the same period? And given the poor human rights record of Britain and the USA and Western nations continued support for regimes with gross violations of human rights around the world, what more authority do these nations have to do the necessary work of standing up to China's human rights abuses? Okay. Let me do the PPVE questions first. I think the issue of cronyism is a common point in both sides. But probably we're dealing with fairly strict forward cronyism in the UK in the procurement of PPVE. Well, at least it looks that way that friends of ministers or the prime ministers gets the contracts whereas companies that have record of being able to deal with PPVEs did not get the contract. Now in the Chinese case, it is a bit more complicated because we are dealing with the distribution of PPVE globally through a kind of parallel process. We are dealing with on the one hand, PPEs that have been channeled through the Chinese authorities, where the government can control and where the issue of PPVE diplomacy came into play. And that distribution is partly to serve political purposes of the Chinese government. Even there it doesn't always work because one of the things which came out fairly early on in late spring 2020 was that the Chinese were incredibly ungrateful about PPE. Because in January, February 2020 when China was in serious trouble and huge shortage of PPE, European and other countries, democratic countries mostly were taking from their own stock of PPEs to supply China in a crisis with a hope that it will still stermed the spread of COVID-19. And when that table was turned by March, April, and all those countries were desperately short of PPEs, the Chinese would not reciprocate and provide PPE back to them for free. They would be selling them expensively. But that's one side of the story. You have in parallel the other side of the story is that a lot of Chinese business people saw an enormous opportunity in providing PPEs to Western countries desperate to procure them. And that is where you have huge amount of substandard PPEs being produced and so and distributed. Some of them were just pure opportunism. Others you might have some element of cronyism in terms of how they were able to get support of some government agencies or introductions. But a lot of them really were just sheer opportunism and irresponsible corporate behavior. As to the authority on the human rights issues with China. What we have to bear in mind is that what is happening in Xinjiang is quite extraordinary. If we use the kind of definitions the United Nations has adopted. It is not illegitimate for ones to ask whether what happens to listen to the weaker people in Xinjiang may amount to a genocide. I'm not saying that it does. I'm saying that it is not an illegitimate question to ask. And it's probably fairly legitimate to say that what happens to the weaker people in Xinjiang meets the definition of crimes against humanity. So we are talking about really serious extreme type of abuse that after the Second World War, the United Nations are committed to not allowed to happen again. The reality is that crimes against humanities have been committed since the Second World War, arguably genocide have been committed since the end of the Second World War as well. In other words, the not quickly cleaned records of some of the Western democracies be a good reason for us to not act on something which potentially a crime against humanity. What we want to be doing should be that we want to be engaging with Chinese to investigate what happens in Xinjiang to establish for sure whether it means the definition of either of those. And that's not too much to ask, is it? There are a couple of questions that deal with the Chinese reaction or what the impact will be on China's population relative to its feeling of the government. One on if they keep the borders closed, how they able to convince their citizens once a pandemic passes of the soundness of their approach. Another on the call for freedom of speech after the as a legacy of COVID whistleblower Dr. Lee Wen Liang. Would this gather momentum for a change from within with the help of social media or will the government react with more suppression of speech? Very good questions. The majority of China has a monopoly of history. With all due respect to you, Mike, as a historian, we don't have a monopoly of history, they do. They also have a monopoly of the truth. What they say must be the truth, the whole truth. And anybody who challenges that is anti-Chinese or hostile to China. People in China are not stupid. I mean, people in China are by and large, very bright and clever. They do know that they are being fed a very limited diet of information. They do know that the stories they hear is distorted, but they don't have access. Mostly they do not have access. There are few people who manage to gain access, but by and large they don't have access to free information to be able to make the judgment as to what the real situation was. And so it's very difficult for them to challenge the narrative of the government, even if they say the comments narrative is problematic. We think that in the case of Dr. Li Wenliang, it was so blatant, so obvious, how can it actually be true? Let's just not forget that 30 years or so ago, there was a massive massacre in Beijing around Tiananmen Square. Which we all, or at least people of our generation might remember that from the footage we saw on live TV news. How can anybody forget? If you talk to people who were born and raised in China in the last 30, 35 years, they will tell you it never happened. They really do not know it ever happened. It's all made up by some anti-Chinese elements because that is what they have been educated from the cradle. So most people buy into that. So I will not underestimate the capacity of the Chinese government to do that, particularly with the enhanced capacity of digital control that they now have. So I think they can control the narrative pretty well unless we get into a situation where COVID-19 returns to China and somehow we managed to contain COVID-19 because we are more effective in distributing the vaccines. But again, at the moment the Chinese government power ties providing vaccines to other countries in order to protect Chinese soft power. But if there is a need for them to redirect Chinese vaccines to Chinese citizens in order to protect the legitimacy of the Communist Party, they will do it just like that. There will be a movement that they will import. It doesn't matter whether it's Oxford, AstraZeneca or Moderna or Pfizer. They will buy up every single vaccine available and make them available to the Chinese citizens in order to make sure the Communist Party will not face that kind of a crisis of legitimacy. Would you like to take one more question? Sure. Okay. How is this going to impact the relationship between the PRC and Taiwan? Now that's a really big question and I think a very serious question. And I am a pessimist on that question. Xi Jinping, if he will be able to continue to stay in power for the next 20 or 25 years, Xi Jinping will do whatever it takes to take Taiwan. Speaking of Taiwan is part of the China dream of national rejuvenation. Put forward by Xi Jinping just after he became leader in 2012. It is also necessary for the Chinese Communist Party to secure his so-called the second centenary goal. The second centenary goal is the goal for making China practically the greatest power on earth by the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. That was 2049 and that cannot be achieved until Taiwan is part of China by the will and the maneuver of the Communist Party. Whether that cannot be achieved will depend a lot to how the US government will respond. If the Americans end with Taiwan, then we are looking at potentially a conflict that puts China against the United States. I hope that they never come. Well, thank you very much. Would you like to do your roundup and we're at the end of our time? I don't think there's really a huge amount for me to add to the very, very good questions that were being put. All I want to say is that I think China is a very important player in the world is going to be an even more important player moving forward. I think it's important that we continue to engage with China, but we must do so with full knowledge of what we are engaging with. What we would like to see may not be what we are going to get, and if we are not prepared to deal with what we are going to get, we put ourselves in a very difficult situation. It also therefore means that for universities like SOWAS and other universities, we really need to be committing much more to promote the study of China. And I would simply say that if anybody has the capacity to help with that, please and talk to us. Those words, thank you very much. Professor Steve Stong on COVID one year on with China. Thank you for all for attending and I'm sorry we had many more questions than we had time. So we weren't able to answer everything. Please follow the series in the future using hashtag SOAS, hashtag SOAS alumni. This recording will be posted on the SOAS website and social media pages. So I'd like to thank you again, Professor, and thank you everybody for attending and good night. Thank you, Mike. Thank you.