 Well, John, welcome to the Lowy Institute. Thanks for coming. Thank you, Sam. I'd like to start just by talking about your six years in Beijing. In that time, you've witnessed the widespread and rapid modernization of China in many respects, but not in all respects. In fact, there are experts who argue that in the media sphere, for example, China's actually becoming more repressive and more sensorious. Tell us what you saw from the inside. And would you say it's gotten harder or easier over the six years you were there to report sensitive stories? Look, it's a really complicated situation because the answer is both harder and easier. Easier and I think the easier overcomes the harder because the easier part about it is China is just a much more pluralistic place than it was six years ago. There's much more people with things to say. There's many more ways to access that information. There's whole online revolution that we're seeing. Even a more diversified commercial media, even though it's mainly owned by the Communist Party in one form or another, it is more diverse than it used to be. And that's balanced against the counterfact that the party's censorship orders are becoming more regular, more draconian. And if anything, there's probably more abuses against journalists in China than there was when I started six years ago. But I think the sum of all of that is it's still an easier place to report than it was six years ago because so many more people have things to say than they used to. You talked just now about the online revolution in China. When Chinese visitors come here to the Lowy Institute, they'll often talk about that. And sometimes it's in a slightly self-congratulatory way about the way that Weibo, for instance, the Chinese Twitter equivalent, has revolutionised Chinese politics and has opened up the space for public commentary. Do you agree? I do with some caveats. I think it is a revolutionary technological advance. It means that people in China are part of a virtual network of virtual civil society, which just wasn't there at least to that extent six years ago. People realise or they see their own interests now aligned with a whole network of people across the country. That is revolutionary. It is a way of a medium of feedback for sure. And there are countless episodes where the government has been forced to respond. That said, it can also be overstated and it is often overstated and used by Chinese policy makers, particularly diplomats and outward-facing kind of talking heads. The causation chain has often put Chinese public demand, China do such and such and therefore we are actually holding the line and being more conservative. But I think that is usually way overstated, particularly in the foreign policy and the military space. And of course, it is an open debate in the West about whether the Internet has actually been a force for liberalisation and strong arguments for that in the case of the Arab Spring. Others such as an American-based critic Yevgeny Morozov who argues very strongly that the Internet can also be very much a tool of repression. Do you see evidence of that in China as well? Look, it is overwhelmingly a democratic force for democratisation in China without question. It is the difference between what Twitter and the likes have met in Australia. They have changed the way debates are held, they have sped up the news cycle. All sorts of things but essentially the news is still packaged and mediated through journalists as much as they always have, just through different mediums. In China, there was no such kind of foundation and so the way board revolution you talked about, the online strata of information is coming in place of nothing that was there before. It has actually created space for debate and information exchange that just didn't exist. It has, through no active doing of the government, it has greatly liberalised the space for debate in China and created a realm of transparency that didn't exist before. You are writing a book about the princelings. Can you just briefly talk to us about who they are, who are the princelings and why do they matter? It has been fascinating to me over the years. There have been several people, dozens actually, where I have bumped into them and I thought, you have got something really interesting to say and you have somehow got a licence to say how does that happen or you have done something which is amazing and often it turns out to be because your father in some cases your mother was somebody very important. Even Ai Weiwei, the artist, how did he get away with saying what he did for so long because his father was the leading poet of the communist revolution. Countless examples like that of not top-tier princelings but people who have background, so to speak. And then that kind of crystallised in around about 2009, 2010 with Bo Xilai, a very well-known princeling, as he began to kind of carve out his own fiefdom in Chongqing and really reshaped the national agenda. And it became clear that nobody without that lineage, who wasn't the son of one of the eight immortals, could have done what he did. And that catalyzed a whole bunch of other princelings in the Chinese system, children of top leaders of the revolution, who were able to act and organise and speak their minds that others weren't. And so it is not that these guys are any smarter than anybody else, it's just that they have a special licence, a special privilege to organise and speak that others don't. And that's what makes them such pivotal actors in the Chinese scene today. And of course Xi Jinping, the top leader, is himself a princeling. And this raises actually the last question I wanted to ask you about, which is that the way these princelings behave indicate that China is by no means a country of laws. The rule of law is a very shaky concept in China. Now you broke the Stern Hu story, of course, which I think was very evocative for Australians in giving the impression that China is not a place where, as we do here, we rely on the rule of law to come to sort of fair, independent outcomes on disputes. Can you give us a sense of the direction of movement in China, the rule of law? Look, this is, I think, if you're going to try and define one key question, this is probably it. Because if there's one thing that almost everybody agrees with in China, it is that China has to have a more credible legal system, a more credible way of arbitrating disputes, even with the elite. Even people that don't at all like Borsi Lai or what he did disagree with him being purged because there is no transparent process for this. Why him and not somebody else? And there's no question that the legal apparatus itself, the official apparatus has gone backwards in the time that I've been there. Politics has been re-emphasised as explicitly overpowering law, so to speak. Politics is in command. But at the same time, the expectations of rule of law have risen. So we've seen an extraordinary class of lawyers who are even more professional and courageous than there were six years ago, even though the system hasn't adapted with them. And there are very few senior Chinese officials who wouldn't agree that China needs to evolve to a more rule-based system. But that essentially is the great battle underway. Because how do people who are in power agree to give it up, to be subject to anybody else's scrutiny? John, thanks for your time. Great pleasure. Thank you.