 Hello everyone. My name is Gloria Davies. I'm an adjunct director of the Australian Centre on China in the world and I also work at Monash University and I'm a long-term collaborator of Jeremy Barme. So let me just declare that that interest right at the start. It gives me great pleasure to say a few words about Jeremy Barme before he delivers the inaugural China in the World Annual Lecture and it also gives me great pleasure to welcome Professor Ian Chubb, the former Vice Chancellor of the Australian National University who's here with us today because he played a very important part in the setting up of the Centre. Now Jeremy clearly needs no introduction to this audience. As I'm sure we are all familiar with some part where the large or small of his very impressive earth of articles, books, commentaries, essays, translations and films. Now Jeremy in my view, a proto-scholarship always also as a work of art and his artistry is plainly evident in the precision and elegance of his prose. His edition in turn is the result of the discipline and rigor that he applies in crafting his interpretations and narratives of the Chinese past and present. In early 2009 Jeremy shared with me and several others his growing desire for a collaborative undertaking that would facilitate the renewal of intellectual and critical inquiry into China. He had in mind a series of interrelated projects in the humanities and social sciences that would not only provide rich insights into Chinese ways of seeing, doing and sense-making, but that would also probe the dangers and limitations of both synocentric and Eurocentric ways of understanding the self and the other. A year before that in 2008 he had written something of a position piece, his essay on new psychology in which he set out his thinking along these lines. Now what he had in mind a year later in 2009 was something really quite audacious. It was an ambitious enterprise that would represent a development out of new psychology. A vast and robustly multidisciplinary venture guided by an open-ended interest in the dynamic and intricate complex of forces shaping the conduct of political, cultural, economic, social and in fact everyday life in the Chinese speaking world. He called this enterprise, which at the time was just the kernel of an idea and certainly an imagined enterprise in 2009, organic China. Now, it was two winters ago in 2009 that a group of us gathered at Jeremy's home in Canberra to engage in a lively debate and discussion about the viability of organic China and more specifically of how we might begin the process of trespassing against conventionally defined disciplines to speak in more organic terms of an evolving China and indeed of a multiplicity of China's and of the patterns and sensibilities that continue to shape the development of these multiple or plural China's. Now what we also shared as our conversations progressed was the common critical intuition that human lives and human pursuits do not and have never accorded with the concepts, paradigms and fields that institutional knowledge would have them classified under. Our camaraderie developed out of our common interest in ensuring that people must never become mere concept fodder. Meanwhile, Jeremy's notions of new psychology and organic China and I must point out that Jeremy had certainly never thought of new psychology and organic China as, you know, grandmaster concepts and certainly not paradigms, but rather he conceived of them as intellectual dispositions or critical dispositions. In any case, new psychology and organic China had become our common property as is the way with all good things and quite happily for us. These dispositions of new psychology and organic China had also quite happily, as I said, come to inspire our former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, to found the Australian Center on China in the World. And again, I would like to acknowledge the enormous role that Professor Yin Chao played in helping to facilitate the process of founding the Center. And now without any further ado, I shall now invite Jeremy to come and speak to you and to infect you with his passions as he has done to those of us who subsequently became his co-conspirators in the Australian Center on China in the World. Jeremy. Thank you so much. And again, I'd like to say also personally how delighted I am that he and Kevin is here who not only helped foster, nurture, protect and throw his considerable institutional weight behind the creation of this Australian Center on China in the World. It's wonderful to have you here. Chief Scientist of Australia now. As you know, there's a microclimate following him everywhere. It was here in the Great Hall of the Australian National University that on the 22nd of April 2010 last year that the then Prime Minister, the Honourable Kevin Rudd, presented the 70th Georgie Morrison lecture. The title of that aeration was Australia and China in the World. Towards the end of this lecture, he announced the establishment at this university of the Australian Center on China in the World itself. Our Center, or CIW for short, initiated informal activity shortly thereafter and over the past six months we have formally begun major work related to research and engagement with both government and the public. This biannual conference of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia provides an ideal opportunity for us to launch the CIW annual aeration. And for this inaugural lecture I would like to address the subject of Australia and China in the world whose literacy. In the open words of his Morrison lecture, Kevin Rudd acknowledged the first Australians on whose land we meet and whose cultures we celebrate as among the oldest continuing cultures in human history. In his aeration, he also recounted the lineage of A&U academics who have contributed to the study of an engagement with China since the university's foundation in 1947 and 1946. It was that year, 1946, that the economist Douglas Copeland was appointed Australian Minister to China. Copeland would later become the first Vice Chancellor of this university. In China he observed the decline of nationalist or Guomindang rule along with its moral authority. He became an early advocate of establishing relations with the newly created People's Republic of China. He also revived the Morrison lectures which had been halted in 1941 during the Pacific War and gave him a new home in the new A&U. In 1948 Copeland himself presented the inaugural A&U Morrison lecture under the title The Chinese Social Structure. Copeland also invited C.P. Fitzgerald to Australia to establish the university's work on China while laying the foundation for our library's important collection of China-related materials, something that many people come to Canberra to use and enjoy. In May this year another diplomat, the outgoing Australian Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, Dr. Jeff Rabie, addressed a meeting of the Australian Institute of Company Directors in Beijing. The topic of the Ambassador's talk was an interrogation. It asked, What does it mean to be China literate? Drawing its lessons from years of experience in China. It was also in part Dr. Rabie's envoir to his service in the diplomatic corps. The Ambassador said in Duralia, The good news for those of us who struggle with the language is that speaking Chinese is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being China literate. To be sure it is an immensely valuable asset when dealing with the Chinese, but to say that to work effectively with China and the Chinese one needs to speak the language is to set the bar too high it runs the risk of deterring serious engagement. In many ways of course Dr. Rabie is right. Australia has had a strong trading relationship with the People's Republic that itself predates formal diplomatic recognition in 1972. Many of the most incisive engagements of China over the past decades have been managed by canny business people, politicians and assiduous diplomats with scant or no background in China or Chinese studies. In a front page article the indefatigable Sydney Morning Herald correspondent in Beijing, John Gano, detected a clear dig at Dr. Rabie's boss, the now foreign minister Kevin Rudd when the Ambassador Amar further on in his speech and I quote, To speak Chinese is not to know China. Many examples can be found of people who speak Mandarin to a high level but who do not understand how China works. They may have learned their Chinese shut up in their study reading the analytics. The converse is also true. People can and do develop a deep and sophisticated understanding of contemporary China by being here on the ground meeting people and building relationships. One would note that Kevin Rudd first encountered the analytics here at the ANU under Pierre Rickmans, a sinologist whose many accomplishments include an acclaimed translation of that text. Journalists in the Australian newspaper pursued the theme of Gano's article. Colleagues here today will appreciate that a grounding in the Confucian analytics may not be quite the quaintly esoteric knowledge implied by the Ambassador's remarks. After all in 2011 the first sign of political discord at the heart of the Chinese polity came when a newly refurbished National Museum of Chinese History in February came when a statue of Confucius appeared on the eastern flank of Tiananmen Square outside the newly refurbished National Museum of Chinese History in February only to be spirited away suddenly in late April. Those with even the most rudimentary awareness of the tides and eddies of Chinese history appreciate how powerfully Confucius, his works and his reputation have featured in that nation's life and politics over the past century including as a core element within China's much-vaunted soft power initiatives recently. Confucius's sudden appearance on Tiananmen and equally sudden disappearance was a clear sign that something was stirring in the Chinese capital. Whatever the reading or misreading of Dr. Rabie's speech by local commentators its salient points are worth revisiting here. These are that for success in conducting business in China one, you don't need Chinese. Two, you need on-the-ground experience. Three, you should know Beijing. And four, you should be Anglo-Australian. I've been told that, like me, some members of the business audience perceived within these four basic principles for China's literacy less are sniping at our analect's literate foreign minister than a personal pitch for a post-embassadorial career in the corporate sector. It's interesting that only a month later, this time addressing business leaders in Perth the ambassador emphasized the great importance of Chinese language training. As it was reported in the Australian, Dr. Rabie, and I quote, lamented the lack of interest in China in local corporate and political circles. He questioned the failure of schools to teach Mandarin and noted that Australia had not opened a new diplomatic office in China for 20 years. Two long-term and key advocates, not to mention practical activists for China literacy who worked here at the ANU. One is Professor Stephen Fitzgerald, formerly an ANU historian, later this country's first ambassador to the People's Republic and subsequently a prominent business consultant and educator. Another is the leading economist, Ross Gano, also formerly a professor here and also an Australian ambassador to the People's Republic. The broad-based teaching of the languages of Asia, including along with Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and the languages of India, as well as the literatures and histories that are entwined in and expressed through those languages have in many senses fallen into dismayity. Not here at the ANU, of course. For all the efforts of people like professors Fitzgerald and Gano as well as former Vice-Chancellor Copeland and our own recent Vice-Chancellor and other Vice-Chancellor here at the university, we are confronted with what in 2002 Stephen Fitzgerald called a lost debate. Steve then was Chairman of the Asia-Australia Institute at the University of New South Wales when he made a speech about this lost debate. His observations are as pertinent today as they were nine years ago. He asked with regard to this lost debate, what did we lose? He said not everything, of course. And I quote, we have the trade and the tourism and the students and the other things for which we campaigned. But we lost the debate about the way. About the way Australia and Australia at the level of policy and foreign relations between states and business and university relations discovered, engaged, enmeshed, became part with, of, in or about Asia. It was about not replacing the Western, never about replacing the Western, but about making a place alongside it for Asia by broadening the cultural horizons and changing the intellectual universe of Australians. At the time, Michael Wesley, now Head of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, worked with Steve at the Asia-Australia Institute. In his recent book, There Goes the Neighborhood, Michael discusses Australia's prosperous age in this trans-millennial, he calls the trans-millennial decades, that is the 1990s to 2010s, that has been, has been fed by the Asian economic boom. In one of the most powerful statements in that book, Wesley reiterates the sentiments expressed by Professor Fitzgerald when he speaks of what Wesley calls the great paradox of modern Australia, and I quote, Never has there been a greater gap between Australian societies enmeshment with the world and its levels of interest in the world beyond its shores. A country that is aware as never before that the rise of Asia holds the key to its future for good and ill has been steadily divesting in its capacity to understand and influence its regional environment. A nation that has become profoundly cosmopolitan and well-travelled over the space of two decades has, at the same time, become more belligerently self-assertive and inflexible in the face of a globalised world's challenges. When you look around at the great convergence and the coming geometries and psychology of power occurring just off Australia's northern coast, the last role you would cruise to take up would be that of an insular nation, but that's exactly what we have chosen to be in the early 21st century. Now there is something notable in the arguments about Australia's role in Asia that run both through Michael Wesley's book and in the September 2010 quarterly essay by my ANU colleague Hugh White, entitled Power Shift Australia's Future Between Washington and Beijing. Both authors concentrate on issues to do with strategic positioning and beneficial alliances, yet the human dimension, including broader questions of cultural and other kinds of enmeshment with the countries, in particular the boom nations of Asia, are sidestepped. It would appear that Stephen Fitzgerald's lament lost debate now finds only a dim echo. Programs supporting Asian studies and the study of Asian languages in particular were central to educational initiatives in this country in the 1980s and 90s, but beginning with the advent of the Liberal coalition government in the mid-1990s, they've suffered from the narrowing of national vision that has unforgivably continued under Labour governments since 2007. This is true despite the constant, if plaintive refrain of concerned people in government, business and education, that there is a pressing need for greater emphasis on Asian language and cultural literacy education in our schools. Now, of course, most of you in this audience will have spent your professional lives engaged with, to use a glib shorthand, the pursuit of understanding China. You know the expression, Dong, Zhongguo. We're all familiar with the fact that Chinese friends and foes alike speak of whether one does or does not understand China. Whether one shows some cynical insight into contemporary Chinese reality or accepts the role of complicity as a friend of China who can least is the way to success, one is praised as being a Zhongguo Tong, or old China hand. Although I would note that for many years I've also heard such people being referred to by a more down low Beijing gutter expression, yang hunda, or yang hundu, that is somebody who is a, and the word player, a foreign player, PLAYA, a foreign player who has game. When I first studied politics, literature, history and philosophy, as well as political economics, as determined by Marxist Leninism, in the People's Republic in 1974 onwards, we were told to our faces that our status was that of foreign friend, weiguo pangyou. With it behind your back, you are being more likely spoken of as being a foreign spy. Weiguo jendie, part of the western-led cabal of capitalist conspiracy, set on undermining China's revolution and frustrating its global ambitions. China literacy, not a au courant term back then of course, meant in effect that you should toe the ever-shifting line of cultural revolution politics. You soon became enured to finger-wagging xenophobes and to adjust your attitude. Duanzheng taidu, so that you could achieve the blessed state of having an objective, khe guan, an accurate, zheng que, understanding of China, its revolution and its people. After the collapse of the high Maoist worldview, during the extraordinary era of post-culture revolution, rehabilitations and revivals, I lived and worked in Beijing and Hong Kong and set about figuring out how to understand China, Dongzhenguo in my own way. And I did so by studying Chinese writers and thinkers of the 20th century. My guides, forgive me for listing a few of them, my guides included Caiyuan Pei, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Feng Zekai, Zhu Ziqing, Zhou Zoran, Lin Yutang, Yu Pingbo, Fei Ming, many names of which you'll be familiar with. These writers and thinkers defined their own cultural literacy outside of party politics, whether it be nationalist or communist politics, beyond their ideological struggles and even apart from the imperial burden of the past. Some found fellowship with non-Chinese writers and thinkers globally, as well as cultural exemplars of the late Ming dynasty, the Xiong, the Tang, and earlier, including the Wei Jin period and among the Pre-Qin philosophers. They created a particular genealogy of the Chinese modernity that drew inspiration both from what the world had to offer as well as drawing from the wellsprings of China's own humanist tradition. I was aided in my quest for literacy in their tradition by men and women whom I met during the Renaissance years that followed the Cultural Revolution. They included the translator Yang Xianyi, the artist Huang Yongyu, the critic Yu Feng, the calligrapher Huang Miaozi, the playwright Wu Ziguang, the publisher Fan Yong, the editor Pan Zhijun and the literary figures Qian Rongshu and Yang Jiang. These individuals who profoundly literate in their country's culture, politics and realities. However, at various points in their lives, all of them had become China illiterates. They had failed to understand China. As progressive and urban as they were, they could or would not always keep up with the ever-changing demands of the party and they paid a heavy toll for it. But if they were sometimes or even often on the wrong side of the party, they remain on the right side of history. Along with the oral historians Sang Ye, the historian journalist Dai Qing, academics like Lei Yi and Xu Jilin outspoken irritants like Lu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei and many other well-known or unknown men and women unknown to you, they have all taught me much about the complex realities and certain underappreciated forms of China literacy. On November the 9th, 1989, five months after the bloody event of the 3rd and 4th of June, Stephen Fitzgerald presented the 50th George Morrison lecture here at the ANU. His topic was Australia's China. In it, he focused on the illusion, so recently shattered that there had been something unique, something even special in the Australia-China relationship. Even taking into account a certain widespread antipodean naivete, Steve said, and I quote, this still doesn't explain why people all over the world seem to take leave of their senses over China. And I can't explain it altogether. I've debated it with many people over the past couple of decades and there are many explanations for this cyanophilia. It's certainly the case that since Marco Polo, Westerners at least, have been fascinated and seduced by China. Perhaps, Steve said, it was the gustatory or central infatuation or due to the nature of Chinese language, its architecture and art. It also, he said, had to do with what he called the living fossil fantasy. And I quote, we see the continuity of Chinese civilization and imagine today's Chinese to have participated in the building of the Great War or the invention of printing or an ignorant Chinese peasant to be some kind of confusion intellectual. But the living fossil fantasy is also carefully fostered, particularly by Chinese in official positions. Chinese have innate skills and genius, Steve said, at persuading foreigners how different China is and verbally and fulsomely rewarding them for small steps in understanding. But part of the Chinese psychology is that also foreigners can never understand China. And Steve goes on to say, I have known sinologists of 60 years experience and great wisdom to be told by Chinese officials, ah but you don't understand China. A statement delivered with a finality clearly believed to confound all further argument from foreigners. Foreigners, particularly Westerners, are thereby drawn to know more fully to know more to fully understand. And with all the wilds and wisdom of an experienced seductress, Chinese play upon the mystery upon a theme about the alleged attributes of all Chinese. The inscrutability brackets which is all just good acting. The delusion that all Chinese are infinitely patient brackets which is untrue, never lose their temper which is wrong. Our culturally superior brackets, often the pretensions of the ignorant, are experienced wise and temperate in matters of government brackets witnessed in force. There is still no adequate analysis of this phenomenon which for the time being we must take as a given documented but not explained the syndrome of Marco Polo. Soon afterwards, the Chinese party state began elucidating the requirements for the achievement of an objective and accurate understanding of China, specifically what it called its Guoqing that is its unique national conditions. A nationwide campaign was launched after June 4 to re-educate rebellious students and citizens alike. Then it set about re-educating the world. We were told collectively that you simply don't understand China's unique national conditions. This is a line that today, as you all know, is still chimed with certainty and stridentcy by average citizens, justice leaders of the party state, when addressing foreigners. Unless you appreciate and accept unequivocally China's unique national conditions you betray yourself as lacking insight into and empathy with the mysteries of that country's tortured history and complex present realities. It's important to understand this officially engineered Chinese worldview. Justice we need to be mindful of how the guided Chinese media from print to electronic and educational practice have created what I have elsewhere called China's birth. As people engaged intellectually with China we particularly need to understand both the official discourse and its historical and ideological underpinnings. It is significant that today's Australian business people and even the media refer fluently to the Chinese government's 12th 5-year plan. It's now widely recognized that the success of economic interaction with China can benefit directly from just such selective literacy. But to get grip on larger Chinese realities, possibilities, uncertainties and insights into how the past and the present will sculpt the future I believe it's necessary to go well beyond simply developing an ability to grasp party state programs and formulations. During this opening address to the 2011 China update here at ANU on the 12th of July just a few days ago Sir Rodrick or Rod Eddington a man with decades of experience in East Asia remarked that he felt that while business with China has seen a boom over the last 15 years an extraordinary remarkable boom in terms of a deeper engagement and awareness that little had changed from the 1990s when he came back to work in Australia for a period. He even felt that in many ways such things as the teaching of Asian languages ideas and culture had and I quote, stalled. Sir Rod suggested that an inward bound Chinese investment that as inward bound Chinese investment increases in Australia people will have to deal with many complex and potentially confounding issues ill-informed but entrenched attitudes and beliefs have the potential to generate serious friction. We had a preview of this in the media hysteria in mid-2009 both here and in China over Chinalko's failed bid for Rio Tinto the detention and trial of Stern Hu who should hay and the participation in the Melbourne Film Festival of the Uyghur activist Rubir Kadir. More recently we have seen a similar tendency in the public discussion of the purchase of agricultural land in the Hunter Valley by Chinese concerns. More recently still we have been faced with the prescriptive pronouncements on Australian governance and the mining tax by Chinese embassy official Ouyang Cheng and representatives of Sino Steel warning of the deterrence that lay in the path of Chinese inward bound investment in Australia. These are all challenging issues requiring a sophisticated, informed and dare I say China literate response. Sir Rodsberg of how debates in Australia easily become tinged with xenophobia he did not comment on the fact that the same holds true in China where the moment the opportunity presents itself, political commercial media outlets eagerly evoke the shadow of the white Australia policy the specter of Pauline Hansen or other skeletal remains in our historical closet. Sir Rods stated his belief that as we become more enmeshed in Asia and with China businessmen and women will need to participate in the public debate in a way that is engaged and well informed educated. I would venture that these things will not be helped in the process if people rely too heavily or too readily on what elsewhere I have called a translated China that is a version of China's story as told, interpreted and translated exclusively by the party and its organs. Chinese businesses, its party state and citizens will also have to work on their Australia literacy. Wealth and power are all very well and good but they are not the sole requirements for living and prospering in a pluralistic world. At a recent event organised for the Sydney Writers Festival by our centre on China in the world Linda Javen, gave the Morrison an act to the other day, offered her view of Jeff Rabie's Beijing speech and I quote it because I think it covers a lot of important ground talking about translated China as Linda said, Jeff is a friend of mine and I wouldn't presume to know what's best for business but I'm afraid that on the subject of China literacy he's only half right. It's true that fluency in the Chinese language sorry I'm channeling you the fluency in the Chinese language is not a sufficient condition for China literacy but I would argue it is a necessary one. Chinese culture politics, language and society are part of an integrated whole gaining fluency in Chinese is hard it's slow, it takes decades of dedicated time and time dedication and time in this time poor distraction rich world we live in however we tend to resile from things that take dedication and time isn't there an app for that we have I fear become like the housewives of the 50s and 60s mesmerized by time saving conveniences like TV dinners and electric can openers Google translate anyone at least an electric can opener opens a can the inescapable fact is to become more literate as a nation more of us need to put in those hard yards and learn to speak, read and write Chinese says Linda otherwise our understanding of China will always be structured and filtered by the agendas, the biases and the errors of translators and other mediators. Linda's remarks chime with what for some time I have termed new psychology when I first spoke about new psychology in 2005 in the newsletter to this Chinese studies association I was evoking a tradition of intellectual engagement and scholastic practice that dates from the Wanli reign period of the Ming dynasty in the late 16th century it involves understanding of civilization is more than merely a geopolitical territory or a particular government entity, governmental entity such a psychology and yes I know that for some people in China studies, psychology is a very dirty word anyway, such a psychology is a concatenation of practices that have evolved over four centuries, two imperial dynasties, the years of the Republic of China and into the present era of a 62 year old People's Republic. New psychology reflects and advances previous endeavors by individuals and broader communities of scholars to understand the complex living heritage of China's past, its constant presence and its relationship to humanity in general it articulates a generous academic approach to China and is duly aware of disciplinary boundaries and practices in the academy it is ever mindful of the importance of the conditions of historical conciliation, that is this new found and extraordinary rapprochement between the dynastic the republic and the people's republic eras of China in China itself the goal of a new psychology is to understand, study and appreciate China through locating itself inside the Chinese world in order to communicate what animates and inspires this world it is attentive to the kind of detail that enables the shadows the legacies, ligatures burdens, possibilities and constraints and constants of China's contended pasts to come to light as China in recent decades became a stronger and more economically confident country, as parts of the Chinese world have been able to recuperate their traditions of thought, the cultural practices, the vast corpus of literature and history as part of the articulation of a modern selfhood, with a level of anonymity not experienced since the decline of the Qing dynasty, does it not behove us also to incorporate these new trends and understandings in our study of and teaching about the Chinese world? To do so with a renewed critical clarity and thoughtfulness is part of the enterprise that I call new psychology Crucially, new psychology is an approach grounded in a broad empathy that aims to bridge the gap between the accumulation of the cultural knowledge of the insider and the practice of principled intellectual engagement. This approach, empathetic yet critically independent is in my view vital to our studies and to this country's ability to engage with China as well. It is in essence China literacy. In April 2008 the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd caused something of a stir when in addressing a peaking university audience in Chinese he voiced concerns about China's human rights record and the situation in Tibet, even while affirming the numerous positive dimensions of the bilateral relationship. He couched his comments in terms of being what he called a djungyo of China as he put it, the gloss on the term djungyo being a partner who sees beyond immediate benefit to the broader and firm basis for continuing profound and sincere friendship. Those who rely for their literacy of China on the translated whose interests are confined to that which is relevant or useful but in the short term whether it be in the sphere of business or diplomacy need to appreciate the fact that whatever their Chinese contacts might say to their face about their ability to understand China, perhaps even calling them a djungyo of China, in the end they'll be considered at best a simple-minded, even malleable friend. As long as things go well everybody muddles through together but when they don't there's no substitute for the ability to think about, engage with and contend with a China that is itself a world of complexity. It is the environment of the university where contending ideas are expressed, discussed and debated that properly provides a free forum in which received beliefs and attitudes are subjected to rational analysis and discussion. Without the several pursuit of ideas the healthy clash of views, paradigms and approaches. The world of the mind is but a barren landscape. I would suggest that the natural and of course ideal disposition of the university belongs to that of the djungyo. An empathetic and engaged friend who can disagree a trusted interlocutor a principal partner in understanding. Our relationships with colleagues, with students with the various intellectual traditions of which we are custodians and to which we are contributors is in its essence often that of a djungyo. We expect to be challenged. It is integral to learning and to the cultivation of the engaged scholastic mind. Monolithic or monolinear narratives may well suit governments ours as well as others but as engaged, informed and China literate thinkers and educators we have the responsibility to contribute and debate around China to help society as a whole become China literate. All in all, the foreign editor of the Australian newspaper, Greg Sheridan has not been an unalloyed fan of A&U academics or of its China specialists and you will know that. But he got a pretty right though, I'm astounded he got a pretty much right when he wrote about Australia's present China strategy in June this year just last month. And I quote he said, many commentators regard Kevin Rudd's statements on human rights abuses in China as a mistake or frivolous yet they are fundamental to Australian self-respect fundamental to maintaining civilized international order and they are immensely important to our ally in Washington. He went on to say, it is insane for Australian commentators to regard the mere fact that the Chinese government does not like such comments to prove that it is wrong to make them. Part of the great strength of Rudd's China policy is its balance but Australia's political debate has become so polarized and unsophisticated that any balance any internal tension in any policy seems exotic and almost un-Australian. Sheridan then goes on to say some of Australia's diplomats and officials don't always enjoy Rudd's leadership well probably not just them quite rightly he is happy to overrule them and make the big political decisions himself and he will insert political values and the broader strategic considerations into the China relationship whereas often they just want smooth business. In recent times colleagues here at ANU have noticed an important bifurcation in the understanding and discussion of China that is the People's Republic in this nation's life there are those who rightly concentrate on the momentous significance and value of the resources boom trade and two-way investment with China. At the same time there is increased anxiety and not only among security analysts about the strategic challenges of China's rise and the import of its regional military build-up there is concern that while others may lecture Australia on the problems of its two-speed economy we in this country may be developing a two-tier discourse on China itself one that may well create friction and contestation at home, let alone abroad. As academics we may well or should indeed have a different perspective or a range of perspectives more likely different from the more narrow-bore pragmatists, the focused group-driven politicians or even effective business people and judicious diplomats. My vision of our work is one that is driven by humanistic thought popular with copyright dagging and old-fashioned it's a thought that and I quote Clive James, a famous Australian writer living in London it's a humanistic thought that by its hunger its scope its vitality and its inner light an inner light produced by all the aspects of life illuminating one another in a honeycomb of understanding some may well be concerned rightly But we are part of a public enterprise and we must think beyond the constricting circumstances of institutional demands. Through speaking to and through the media, print TV, radio, electronic, through social media, through translation and commentary, we can enrich and enliven the discussions about China, China in the world and China in Australia. Our Centre wants to encourage such engagement and to help foster new generations of students, scholars and practitioners in China literacy. In closing I'll say a few words, again quoting Clive James in his remarks about the English historian Louis Namier, and James says, one of the measures of our commitment to civilisation is the extent to which we realise that material strength can never be more than the part of it, even if the part is essential. At the 1929 conference on the promotion of Chinese studies at Harvard University, the German-American anthropologist and Orientalist, Berthold Laufer, said that he hoped that Chinese studies in the United States would make up for some of the sterility that he felt marked the study of China in Europe. He looked forward to, and I quote, the creation of a new humanism wider than that of the Mediterranean world. He remarked that truly humanistic education is no longer possible without a more profound knowledge of China. We endeavour to advance the scientific study of China in all its branches for the sake of the paramount educational and cultural value of Chinese civilisation, and thereby hope to contribute not only to the progress of higher learning, but also to a higher culture and renaissance of our own civilisation and to the broadening of our own ideals. We advocate with particular emphasis the study of the literature and language of China as the key to understanding of a new world to be discovered as the medium of gaining a new soul. In some respects it's these concerns that motivate some of the most engaged Australians in China. Speaking recently with a businessman who has had a long-term and very successful career working with China, I noticed that he said that China's rise should lead us, in particular to question our own values, our system and our behaviours. For all of us who study China, this touches on something that is central to any serious engagement with the Chinese world or with Asia generally. That is the ways in which China's presence as a country and a civilisation confronts us and causes us to interrogate our own understanding of the world, our principles, our values, our intellectual trajectory. This is the centenary year of China's 1911 Sinhai Revolution. In Linda Javen's Morrison lecture the day before yesterday, she noted the role that both W. H. Donald and George Morrison played in the early days of the first Chinese Republic. Donald helped draft the communique announcing the Republic of China's creation. That was a time when Australia's own relationship with Chinese in Australia was still profoundly fraught. In his 2007 book, Big White Lie, the historian John Fitzgerald provides a unique account of the Chinese experience in this country in the decades leading up to our own moment of national transformation, federation in 1901. It is a book that offers an account of the history of Chinese in Australia that is nuanced and complex. It is a history that has contributed in surprising and important ways to the creation of this country. It is also part story of racial tensions and exclusion that should now continue to inform our views of the past as well as our understandings of the present. Big White Lie was written at a time, written and published at a time when specific Australian values were being vaunted as something that were, and I quote, a distinctive suite of national values that are regarded as a unique preserve of Australians rather than by a common set of universal values. Perhaps today people are clearer on the point that universal values in our context retain a particular Australian idiom to use Fitzgerald's expression, and that a broad embrace of them, that is, of universal values, underpins in vitally important ways this society and its worldview. Among other things they include, of course, respect for the rule of law, democracy, institutions of state, freedom of expression, and association. As events unfold, the debate over values, be they national or universal, may well reappear in this country. We should similarly be aware that in the People's Republic of China a shrill discussion about the importance of what are called Chinese values, the importance of those over-water regarded and sequestered as universal norms has been raging in recent years. It is a discussion that will also inform and impinge attitudes towards Australia and Australia towards China. In the same year that Big White Lie appeared, the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's 2007 published a poem entitled, Gazing Upwards Into Starry Skies, Yang Wang Xinkun. In it, Wen Jiabao wrote lyrically of the pursuit of and soulless in truth, justice, vast possibilities, and hope for humankind. Nice you all know. In China, when you gaze skywards these days, more often than not what you see is a pea soup smog mist. Just as we share a global climate, Australia shares in that particular Chinese reality. Just as we in this country value broader human values, people in China are alert to a language and disposition of possibility. It is, I believe, that possibility that Canon will inform a shared literacy in a human condition. Thank you.