 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Barry Robinson, and I'm pleased to welcome you to this timely webinar today at the IEA on a very topical subject. We're delighted to be joined by Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lao China Institute at Kings College London. Professor Brown is a distinguished expert in the field of Chinese studies, and I think will be known to many members of the Institute from his previous appearances at the Institute in person going back as he has mentioned to me to 2008 and the context of the Olympics in Beijing. Today he will reflect on what the world can expect as President Xi Jinping embarks on his third term at the helm of the Chinese Communist Party. He will speak for approximately 15 to 20 minutes or so. And after his remarks, we will move to a Q&A with you, our audience. You'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screen. And I encourage you to send your questions in throughout the session, as they occur to you, and we will come to them once Professor Brown has finished his address. A reminder that today's presentation and question and answer session are both on the record, and please also feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IEA. Professor Brown is, as I said, Professor of Chinese Studies at Things College London. He is an associate of the Asia Pacific Programme at Chatham House. And from 2012 to 2015, he was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the Chinese Study Centre at the University of Sydney in Australia. And he worked at Chatham House from 2006-2012 as a senior fellow and then head of the Asia Programme. He previously graduated from Cambridge University and holds a PhD in Chinese Politics and Language from Leeds University. He's the author of almost 20 books on modern Chinese politics. He's recently been awarded the China Cultural Exchange Person of the Year Award. To his extensive academic accomplishments, Professor Brown is also an experienced foreign policy practitioner in the Southeast Asia region. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing and then as head of the Indonesia, Philippines and East Timor section. Professor Brown, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Barry. It's good to be back with colleagues in Dublin, even though I'm not obviously physically there. So I think I will talk for 15 to 20 minutes on happenings in China after the 20th Congress, which happened last month. With the outcomes of the Congress, I think there weren't any huge surprises in terms of the headline issue, which was the reappointment or reelection or whatever word you wish to use for Xi Jinping for a third term as Party Secretary. There has been described in some comments in the press as unprecedented, but I'm not entirely sure what that means because every change in Chinese leadership in the last 60 years, 50, 60 years. I mean, it has been unprecedented. They've all been quite different. He recently deceased Jiang Zemin. He only did two periods as Party Secretary, but they were actually over quite a long period about 13 years and unusual circumstances because of the uprising in 89. And so, in fact, the only really kind of regular leadership transition was between Hu Jintao Xi Jinping's predecessor and himself in 2012. I suppose we have to be a bit wary of this idea of there being concrete or hard and fast rules in Chinese politics which are then being upended because I don't think the rules were ever there in the first place. It kind of makes the rules up as it goes along and one party systems can do that. Xi Jinping was surrounded by new figures in the Standing Committee, the sort of summit of power in contemporary China. There were seven members of the Standing Committee, like last time, very small group for retired and for came on. The first surprise was the number two in the party hierarchy, a man called Li Chang, who had been part has, in fact, still is Party Secretary of Shanghai, and who was regarded as mishandling the COVID outbreaks there earlier this year and imposing draconian lockdowns. We've seen a lot about that recently. I'll come back to that a bit later. Li Chang is therefore very likely to be the premier of China next March, when the National People's Congress is in sitting. And that usually appoints government ministers, the administrative side, things as it were. What messages do we get from this leadership. It's important who's there, why are they there. What do they bring to the table as it were. One thing you can say about them is that their backgrounds are all political jobs within the party, mostly. In fact, a couple of them, Ding Xuixiang and Wang Huening, for instance, have no real administrative experience at all. They're there because of their party management skills. So two out of seven are actually purely because of party backgrounds. And the other figures, apart from a couple. In fact, Xi Jinping himself, and a figure called Zhao Lerchi, who's one of the few people who continued from the previous leadership group. These two have significant provincial leadership experience as bosses of China's provinces. The rest are also mostly from party backgrounds and a broad description therefore of what they're there for and why they're there is the political trumps the economic or anything else. And I notice that the party is still principally the main entity and issue that everyone is focusing on its coherence, its vitality, its ability to carry China forward in the next five to 10 years, as possibly overtakes the United States become the world's biggest economy and continues its great task of national rejuvenation. And that's important because this is a narrative driven leadership and rejuvenation is I think the key theme. And it's a leadership that still believe that China's time has come to be a globally important power, restored to the center of the world with its historic mission fulfilled its centennial goals as they're called. I mean these are powerful emotional messages, and they really guide everything else. The Xi Jinping political narrative I think the Congress was around broadly for things. One was that it would be people focused. I'll come back to that in a second. So it's policies would be focused on the people this is a factionless party now, and a system which only wants to serve the people. The second is that it would be aimed at rejuvenation so that's the great theme I've just talked about. The third is that it would be into research and development and innovation. Very important things that he mentioned in his long speech on the 16th October, the research and innovation mission to make China a knowledge superpower, and that's dependent on the outside world. The efficiency of administration, the party delivering the party is all about doing things efficiently, and actually saying what it said it doing what it said it would do. It is therefore ironic that within a few weeks. We have the incidents that we've been seeing over the last week in Beijing Chongqing room to in Xinjiang, Shanghai, other centers around China, of people protesting who are extremely frustrated and fed up with the disruption from the lockdowns that have been imposed over the last few months in fact the last three years on and off. China has not had a national lockdown in the way that Britain had and I presume Ireland had, but it certainly had these extremely draconian blitzkrieg like lockdowns on specific areas, and they have been very complete people have not been able to leave their homes have not been able to get food very easily there's been shocking cases of suicides huge disruption economically. It's really started to take a toll on people. China saw the very tragic fire in Xinjiang in a room she where a number of people I think 10 were killed because they've been locked into an apartment block and leave. And that created a lot of anger elsewhere in China, which transcended socioeconomic groups. It went from the highly privileged middle class of Shanghai who are usually given what they want to less privileged groups like those in Xinjiang who've had a really hard time over the last five to six years because of the repression there. So, this is kind of a very strange thing because the protesters were, I think, saying very clearly that the government was not making people the center of its policy, and was being in humane. They were saying it was being extremely inefficient. Maybe one of the triggers was watching the World Cup China is a big football fan. Many people in China love watching the World Cup and seeing people move around without masks with like great freedom of mobility. And maybe this was something that really triggered anger. I think the awareness of the outside world is not suffering, the kind of impact of lockdowns in the way that China is, and probably many, many other things the economics which I come to in a second, have also clearly been getting worse. And that's the really important thing. We, one thing I will say about the protests Western commentary and of course I'm in London I've observed these protests of course I've spoken to some people in China about them and their direct experiences of them. And what I would say is that it's complicated. While we really love seeing protesters shouting about Xi Jinping being felled and getting very excited about this being a new Tiananmen Square. I think we have to recognize the complexity of why people were on the streets. It's an easy way forward in terms of interpreting this sum. I'm sure are deeply deeply antagonistic to the system as it is, and feel its autocracy and repression and everything. Others are very angry at the economic impact others are very angry at the social impact. I think it's hard to categorize why people were protesting. What's clear is that this doesn't seem to me to be second Tiananmen Square 89. There is no elite split that I can see, and that's important in 89 there was an elite split between Deng Xiaoping the paramount leader then, as we call him, and the party secretary child so young. There isn't the international environment with the USSR going through big challenges and the kind of Eastern Europe going through liberation movements if you want to call them that. I mean that and seemed to me to be as clear cut now. The protests in 89 went on for several weeks. They weren't just a flash in the pan. These protests were coming over a few days, they may continue into the future but it seems at the moment they have been calmed down. So I don't think there's any kind of easy liberation narrative to read into this. The issue I suppose different which is different now. And which I say a little bit about is the international environment. I don't think Chinese people are idealistic about the outside world that many of them have contact with the outside world many of them have studied they're not a huge proportion but a significant number of influential people. And they have also way more access in terms of images messages information through the virtual proxies networks and things like this, even though the internet in China is highly regulated and controlled. The outside world has a huge impact on the Xi Jinping leadership both in white is the way he is and going forward. That is because it exists I think for two reasons which are external. There are domestic reasons why it exists with us. But I think the very autocratic solid homogenizing unified nature of Xi's leadership is principally down to two longer term forces the first was the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the failure of political reform there to lead to good outcomes. I think the Chinese do not interpret what happened in the USSR as a good thing. They feel like it was a colossal mistake, and that it has led to awful outcomes in terms of the economic problems in the 90s and now in terms of a very aggressive nationalistic Russian leadership which we see in Ukraine. This is not a good outcome. And the second is that in 2008 they also found that the West were incapable of being particularly good economists, because of the great financial crisis then China today does not have the kinds of residual idealism that it had in the past towards the Chinese models. It broadly thinks that we are salespeople of busted failed models who are all talk and no doom, and who basically are always meddling in other people's affairs like Middle East, and that we are hypocrites. I'm not debating this view. I'm not defending this view. I'm describing it, and even describing it in a Western environment, North America and Europe is sometimes confronting for people. But I think the Chinese leadership particularly, and many Chinese people have that view, even though they may not like many aspects of their own system. They believe that we have anything to teach them about how to get out of their current problems. They have definitely become less enchanted by anything we have to say because of the disarray that they see in Europe and America in the last few years on a whole number of fronts. And I think that is radically changed the whole configuration of Chinese politics. And it means in looking at the Xi Jinping nationalist and popin's leadership. We have to understand that it is driven by messages which are quite powerful for Chinese people to subscribe to, even though they may have quite big issues with the way in which their government delivers things. We've seen that in the last few days. So my big caution is, while we look at the signs of dissatisfaction towards the government, we should not interpret those easily as signs of wanting to have models from the outside world. It's more complicated. So once just finally of where this whole show is going, everything is going to be determined in the next year, and that includes the COVID lockdowns by the economics. This is a strange thing because as I've said, the Xi leadership is a very political leadership, and this mission is a very political mission, and that is to make one party control sustainable. It's key tasks in the next year. I think going to be to deal with a range of quite tricky economic issues. The first of those is flattening growth. The International Monetary Fund says China will have 3.5% growth this year, which is the lowest it's been for many decades actually I think probably 8889 was the last time it had such low growth. You know what that led to. So that's worrying. The second is, of course, the impact of global inflation supply chain issues. These will be antagonized by COVID lockdowns in China. China has the same hunger for energy and other things and is therefore getting some benefits from Russia's attack on Ukraine because Russia's sending more energy to it than it is to the west. However, it's still, you know, kind of experiencing unemployment, inflation, cost of living issues. These are very similar to the things we see in Europe and partly in America. Finally, kind of real pressures on important sectors of the Chinese economy, like the housing market, which is after all 70% of household wealth is wrapped up in property in China, twice as much as in the United States for instance. And that's an enormously important sector, but has been depressed by the kind of lack of demand pressures on developing developer countries, companies, which have been, you know, kind of hit by debt issues. There's a kind of whole host of sort of problems about over the kind of over the sort of rising costs of property and the fact that people just can't afford it. These are very similar issues that we've seen also in the West. In China, though they've been manageable until now, and the government has intervened a number of times, but it looks like these issues that just referred to in combination are not going to be easy to resolve. If we look therefore in the next year, I think, at a political leadership, which has just been assembled and of people very loyal to Xi Jinping and his core message, trying to deal with extremely practical issues of how to create better growth, how to deal with rising unemployment, how to deal with a health care system, which is clearly under enormous strain, and may well not be able to take rising levels of hospitalizations, which a result may be the Omicron variant spreading. And, you know, kind of a lot of uncertainty about whether China is heading into maybe a full recession. At the same time, China is also looking at vexed geopolitical landscape in which its relations with the United States are poor, but they've improved slightly because of the Biden Xi Jinping meeting in the G20 in Indonesia a few weeks ago. And China's relations with Europe are also not great, but there was a message with the meeting with the EU President yesterday, I believe, the day before, which went relatively well. I think it went on for about three hours. And within the region, of course, it's extreme focus on Taiwan and its anxiety about the impact of presidential elections in Taiwan in a couple of years time. And in America, which may well lead to the election of figures who are going to be very adventurous on Taiwanese policy, which is something that China is obliged therefore to respond to. A pretty tough environment and a pretty tough set of issues. And just very finely, there's a sort of longer term issues that China will still be struggling with climate change. It had severe droughts and ferocious hot weather this summer like well other places in Chongqing people's trainers even melted when they were walking on the streets, and that kind of terrifying situation. It has to also look at, you know, continuing to try and reform its economic model with urbanization demographic issues, which of course are not going to go away quickly if at all. All of these things continue. So my conclusion is that China has a leadership which is very very focused on a particular issue. Of course it's good to have a focus leadership, but are they focused on the right issue. And that is a huge gamble because if they are focused on the right issue. I think they can deal with the things that they're going to have to deal with. But if they're pointing the wrong way, they, and we have a problem. Thank you very much.