 The title of this year's Mads Point conference is Challenging Democracy. In your opinion, is China and the aspirations of China a challenge or maybe even a threat to liberal democracy as we know it? I think it's a challenge. I'm not sure that it's a threat. It's really the only non-democratic system out there that has really mastered capitalism and technology and other elements of modernity. It's produced very fast economic growth and it seems to have produced a kind of legitimacy for itself because of its track record. So the real question is, is this a sustainable system and over the next generation is it going to continue to perform the way it has? What do we know about China's aspirations when it comes to world dominance? Is China interested in exporting cultural and political values at all? Well, I think it's fundamentally different from the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century because I think the rulers in China are basically interested in stability and getting rich. China's relations with other countries are usually driven by commercial motives. I don't think that they are particularly interested in exporting their model. I don't think they think that anyone can duplicate their model anywhere else. But that doesn't mean that it's not a challenge for international relations because anytime you get the emergence of a really big new player, it upsets existing power relationships and it's potentially destabilizing. So I think that it's probably the biggest challenge that the international system faces right now. But is China happy about just buying up the rest of the world because that is almost what's happening, isn't it? Well, I think the rest of the world is quite happy to sell to China in that relationship. I think one problem is that there's not just one China. There's evidence in the last couple of years particularly that the Chinese military in a sense regards itself as the guardian of Chinese nationalism. It doesn't obviously have exactly the same agenda as the civilian leadership within the Communist Party. So you've had several incidents where they seem to be pushing the envelope in terms of being aggressive over the South China Sea and over various territorial disputes with neighbors and that that's driven more by the military than by the Party itself. How does the example and success of China fit into your theory about liberal democracy being the end point of history? Well, I think the question going forward is what the Chinese system represents is high quality authoritarian government without checks and balances. And in some sense that kind of a system under good leadership can actually outperform a democracy in the short run because they can make decisions quickly if they're competent, if they've got good technocrats in charge, they can really push forward investment and do things that a democracy can't do. So that I think is a challenge and right now the United States is in many ways at the opposite extreme where it's paralyzed, it's got a highly polarized political system, unable to make basic decisions about its long-term physical health. So I think the challenge is really which of these systems going forward, not in the next two or three years, but in the next generation is going to generate better results. And I still think that an accountable system with checks and balances still is going to be the superior system because the Chinese have had this one problem that they describe as the bad emperor problem that they've never really been able to solve, meaning if you've got a good authoritarian government, you're really doing well, but there's absolutely nothing to guarantee that you'll have a constant supply of good leaders and that's really the problem I think they have yet to solve. One thing is then what the political elite wants. What about the aspirations of the Chinese people? How do you see that? What do they want? Do they want to be like us in the West? I don't think that they're so different really. I think that they get angry when the government fails to respect their dignity, takes away their property, all of these things. I think however that the memory of being poor and insecure is very recent. The Cultural Revolution really ended only in the 1970s and the transformation of China has been a near miracle in terms of people's finding employment, having rising living standards. And I think for many Chinese that's a very welcome change and it was brought about by the existing regime and so I'm not sure that they're that eager to destabilize it or to move to something leap into the unknown where something like democracy where they really don't know what's going to happen at the other end. On the other hand you also talked about the universality of the wish to live in a society that recognizes human dignity. Do you think that most Chinese feel that their inherent dignity is recognized by the regime? That's a complicated question. I think in some measure the demand for dignity rises with rising income and education. If you're very poor, if you're a Chinese peasant that's all of a sudden moved to a city, you've got a job, now you can send money back to your family, you tend not to worry about whether you can participate in politics or whether you can demonstrate or protest your conditions. On the other hand, if you are a college educated young person you have high expectations and the system isn't meeting that and you're on the internet and you talk to your friends and you have a basic security in life I think that kind of individual is potentially much more dangerous to a regime and so when you say the Chinese people I think you really need to distinguish and I think the leading edge of most revolutions is caused by middle class, better educated people that really don't have a place in the system. Right now they do but in another generation they may not. Do you think then that we could see at some time a revolution or insurgents in China like we've seen in the Middle East now? Well I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon because China is just doing too well at this point. I think that the question you have to ask is in a few years if the economic model falters and it has to falter. I mean no country this large can continue to grow at 10% indefinitely so that's going to slow down and the job machine will slow down and at that point if they have a really big economic setback or even a Japanese style landing where they have very sluggish growth for an extended period of time I think that's the point at which you have to look for signs of social instability. But it's actually somewhat of a danger to the regime that they are educating so many people that the education standard is so high in China? Yeah well that's right. I mean in many respects that's where they're doing well because they've got all the engineers and managers that can actually run a modern economy but it's very easy for that to get out of kilter and right now there's strong demand for low-skill labor but there's not sufficient demand for the college educated and that's a politically potentially dangerous situation. Let's view this challenge from China from another perspective. An autocratic political system like China makes it easier to make complex and unpopular decisions. My question is if we in the West want to stay competitive in a globalized world could we be sort of forced to compromise some of our political ideals to simply follow up with China? I seriously doubt that we're going to change the institutional rules of our democracies to make ourselves look more like China. I just can't really conceive of that happening. I think the real question is in the context of well institutionalized democracy are we going to be able to achieve political consensus on the painful steps necessary to keep the society sustainable? I think every western democracy, in fact it's not just every western democracy, every developed country faces a need to renegotiate many elements of its existing social contract because the existing welfare states were created in a time when people didn't live as long, when birth rates were higher and therefore the ability to actually sustain these entitlements going ahead into the future is going to be very great and then you get further problems related to immigration. You need immigration in order to sustain populations but then that produces political backlash and so I think really the question is in the context of a democratic system are you going to be able to overcome conflicts created by these painful decisions that will lie in the future? That's really the challenge and I think oftentimes the track record of democracy isn't that great. A lot of times it really requires an external shock or a big crisis to finally convince people to make these decisions and at that point the decision is more costly and more painful and so forth. You talked about the necessity of a new social contract. What should that new social contract be like? What's the content of it? It differs in every country because every country's fiscal situation is different. Japan of all developed countries is the first to experience this because it has the largest public debt. It has the most rapidly aging population and what it means is that many fewer workers are going to support many more retired people in the near future and so that means some combination of higher taxes, reduced benefits and the like and something that the United States will face and it's something that most European countries will face because of the same demographic pressure. Talking about the educational system it seems to me that at least in Denmark a lot of politicians and educational researchers they look to China and Singapore and countries like that to see what they are doing there so maybe not to emulate their system but to see what are they doing right. What does that tell you about the sort of educational, cultural impact of China on the West? Well, I'm not so sure that these countries are the best ones to emulate in terms of education because they tend to do well in math and science and obviously that's important but what you really need in order to compete in the contemporary world is innovation and creativity and that's something that I don't think any of these Asian systems have really been able to crack. I mean this willingness to challenge authority, to be able to think for yourself, to come up with new paradigms that's something that really is not prized in Asian educational systems rather it's deference to authority you just learn by the book and some things you can learn that way but other things I think require greater independence of mind. One thing that is not clear to me is I don't think the Chinese have actually created anything new in terms of technology, basic science. They're getting up to the point, they're catching up and they're getting up to the point where they're going to need to do that and it's a real question whether their educational system is preparing people that can make that next leap into the future so we'll have to see. I'm not saying that I know that it's not going to happen but it's not demonstrated to me yet that their educational system can really accomplish this. Do you think in the future that we will become more like the Chinese or will the Chinese become more like us? If I had to guess, I really suspect that the Chinese are going to become more like us because I do think that higher levels of education and contact with the outside world does produce certain convergence in culture and in the way people think and I think in things like the willingness to question authority and the like I really cannot see Westerners adopting Chinese attitudes towards authority that somehow we're going to go back to this highly deferential, very hierarchical kind of system. I can, however, see a lot of Chinese young people getting their education in the West and actually adopting a lot of Western practices even as they realize that their system has got a lot of strengths that need to be protected. So you don't think that in 2050 there will be a Chinese way of life that we will all be trying to emulate here in the West? I think that there will be aspects of China. For example, in the United States there's a book by Amy Chu that was published about Chinese mothers and the way that they force their kids to work and study and so forth and I think probably there's a lot of American mothers that are now emulating that kind of practice but as a whole I don't think that the overall Chinese way of life particularly in the realm of politics is something that Westerners are ever likely to emulate because I think there's just too much individualism and belief in the autonomy of the individual in Western civilization for that to be the case. Thanks.