 So I'm delighted to welcome you to this IIA webinar. The IIA is honored to be joined today by Lord Patten of Barnes, Chris Patten, who has made time in his diary to be with us today. I'm Bobby McDonough, former Irish diplomat, and I'm delighted to have been asked to chair this event. Lord Patten will be speaking about China's international role and its evolution in recent decades. And in that context, he will talk about the actions of China in Hong Kong and give us his thoughts on how the UK and the international community should respond. Lord Patten will speak for about 20 minutes or so, and then we will go into Q&A with our audience. The whole event will last one hour. And Chris has told me that he's very open to taking questions on topics other than China, including on British politics. So you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screen. So please feel free to send in your questions throughout the session as they occur to you, and we will take as many of them as possible after Lord Patten's presentation. Chris has also said that he's happy for the whole presentation and Q&A to be on the record. And please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. Chris Patten is truly somebody who needs no introduction. He is probably the only person who, during his lifetime, has been addressed as honorable member, minister, secretary of state, governor, commissioner, chairman, lord, and chancellor. As far as today's topic is concerned, his periods as the last governor of Hong Kong and as European commissioner for external relations are of particular relevance. And of course, in Ireland, we always remember Chris's role in bringing peace to this island, including as chair of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland. So Chris, I'm delighted to give you the floor. Ambassador, thank you very much indeed. And thanks for the invitation to talk to this important and interesting group again, which I've done in the past, they're not using technology to do so, but thank you very much for the invitation. I've been asked to do China in less than 20 minutes, which requires me to give you what Dennis Healy used to call a turd of gloss. I'll obviously skim over some things, but I thought I'd try to set Hong Kong in the context of what I say more generally about China. The handover of Hong Kong to China from Britain as a result of the fact that the lease on part of the new territories was only signed for 99 years, the assumption being, I suppose, that 99 nip around was both politically and morally difficult, both for China and for Britain. And politically difficult because for both parties, there was some embarrassment, embarrassment in the way that Hong Kong had been acquired in the 19th century, partly as a result of the way in which the imperial powers had behaved towards the Qing dynasty, partly because of Britain's attempts to pay for Chinese tea and pay for India by globalizing China through the forced sale of opium to China. I'm slightly overdoing it, but not by much. So it was politically different on both sides because it was an embarrassing element in both parties' history. Morally difficult for other reasons, morally difficult for the Chinese because more than half the population of Hong Kong were themselves refugees from Chinese communism, right from the beginning, the people who brought the watch trade textiles shipping to Hong Kong from Shanghai. But later on, more than half the population were people who fled the events of modern communist history, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the tyrannous behavior of Mao and some of his successors. They had swum to Hong Kong, they clamber over razor barbed wire to get to this safe haven, rather humiliatingly for the Chinese, for Chinese nationalist communists, rather humiliatingly a British colony. Difficult morally for Britain because unlike every other colony, we weren't, or pretty well, every other colony, we weren't preparing Hong Kong for independence with democracy and the usual constitutional kit borrowed from Professor Jennings. We weren't doing that, we weren't able to do it. Every time there were suggestions that we should go faster in democratization in Hong Kong, and in my view, we should have gone rather faster, but every time it happened, the Chinese would line up and say, you mustn't do that because it'll give people in Hong Kong the idea that they're gonna be treated like Singapore or Malaysia, and come 1997, they're gonna be independent, they're not, they're coming back to us. So there was a sort of malign agreement between some in Britain and some in the business community in Hong Kong, that developing democracy would be a bad thing and pressure from the Chinese Communist Party. Against that background, Deng Xiaoping's idea of one country, two systems, which was originally designed to try to accommodate Taiwan, was a brilliant way through, and it was incorporated in an international treaty called the Joint Declaration and then was translated into a sort of mini constitution for Hong Kong written by China called the Basic Law. And what it basically did was to guarantee Hong Kong's freedoms, Hong Kong's rule of law, Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy to borrow from the texts from 1997 to 2047. And that would be the backdrop to Britain's transfer of sovereignty. We did quite a bit in the run-up to 1997 to try to embed Bill of Rights issues like the introduction of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which would actually put into Hong Kong's Basic Law, Bill of Rights, getting rid of some of the old colonial legislation, which had been used, for example, during the Cultural Revolution riots in 1967. We did all that. We didn't actually increase the pace of democratization or increase the pace of the introduction of directly elected seats to the Ledge Coat. The only thing I did was to try to make the elections as fair and free as possible by increasing the number of votes in functional constituencies. In other words, the constituencies which reflected the lawyers or the agricultural workers or the textile workers. Come 1997, I think we were mostly quite confident that Hong Kong wouldn't do too badly. And the conference was, I think, justified for the first 10 or a dozen years. Not everything well, but by and large China kept to its side of the bargain. There were one or two shortcomings. It slowed down the promises it had made, reversed the promises it had made on the development of democracy. There were occasional interferences. And in 2003, there was an attempt to introduce a national security law which led to demonstrations by about 500,000 people and eventually to the fall of the then chief executive and they backed off. Now, this opens up an issue which has been much talked about. The suggestion that Hong Kong needs a national security law because that was promised or suggested in the basic law Hong Kong's mini constitution and was never done. It's absolute nonsense. There are lots of laws in Hong Kong dealing with treason, dealing with terrorism is the crime's audience. I mean, it's the crime's audience and other things which have led to the arrest of about 900,000 people since the demonstrations began last year. What China has objected to is that it hasn't been allowed to define what national security should be for the people of Hong Kong. Now, things went pretty well, I think, until Xi Jinping. And Xi Jinping is, I think, a different leader to his predecessors. I've dealt in my time, both as governor and Hong Kong with Jiang Zemin. I was his personal guest in China on a trip with my wife, with Zhu Rongji, who's the cleverest and international public servant I met with Wenjia Bo, who was prime minister, with Hu Jintao. I've worked with them all and they were tough and their officials were very, very difficult to negotiate with. But I think this is a different leader. Chris, something? Yeah. Yeah, sorry. I think it froze there. I think it froze about 30 seconds ago so you could continue again. Okay, can you hear me now? Yes, can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay. Xi Jinping is very different. He's an old-fashioned dictator and I think he's assembled more power and more centralization for two reasons. First of all, I think the leadership were spooked by Bo Xilai's attempt to muscle his way into the standing committee of the Politburo a few years ago. Bo Xilai is the former mayor of Zhenjing, whose wife, you may recall, was sentenced to a British businessman. And the other thing which I think is apparent is increasing nervousness during the period of power's presidency. The Chinese Communist regime was starting to lose its grip over things as the economy was opening up, as technology was increasing information flows. So I think Xi Jinping has been determined both to crack down on what's happening in China and as part of that to turn the screw in Hong Kong. I think what he has also done recently is to take advantage of the fact that the rest of the world is focused on the fighting the coronavirus, which of course became worse because of China's failure to meet its international obligations, agreed after the SARS epidemic to declare what was happening earlier, the international health regulations of 2005 to 2007. And I think that Xi Jinping has been trying to take advantage of the fact that everybody got tension elsewhere. And also perhaps taking account of the importance of trying to whip up nationalist sentiment to sustain the communist regime, he's behaved pretty lautishly all around the region and around the world. Somebody the other day when we were talking about the importance of standing up for Hong Kong, moral and political reasons, somebody actually the chairman of Chatham House said that if we wanted to rebuild the economy, the last thing we should do is pick a fight with China. The point is that China is picking a fight with everybody. It's picked a fight with Indians, with 20 Indians recently, soldiers killed on the frontier. It's picked a fight with Japan. It's picked a fight with the Malaysians, the Vietnamese, the Filipinas, by the way it's been behaving in the South China Sea, which it claims sovereignty over despite the fact that the Hague Tribunal said that that was not the case. It's picked a fight with Australia because Australia pressed for a full independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. It's picked a fight with Canada because of an extradition case involving an executive of Huawei in Canada. So it's actually gone in for hostage diplomacy. Rather was that it was one of those ramshackle states in the Middle East or Western Asia. It picked fights all around the world and in Hong Kong, it's decided to double down on the issue of national security and threatened the territory with the national security law, which has finally been delivered today. The British Foreign Secretary today in a very precise and legalistic way, which I think was sensible, set out all the ways in which this proposed national security law infringes the joint declaration and infringes the basic law and imposed on Hong Kong, partly because the Chinese communists didn't think that they were capable of getting it through the Legislative Council in any way, wanted to disqualify legislators who don't accept the national security law in order to stop pan-democrats winning in the elections in September. It brings in national security agents to actually supervise things in Hong Kong. It cracks down on the media. It cracks down on the internet. There are aspects of extra territoriality in it so that you could be prosecuted under it, even if you're not Chinese or a Hong Kong citizen. You can be prosecuted for things that you said or did outside Hong Kong. It would appear. The whole legislation is drafted. I reread last summer on holiday. I reread George Orwell's 1984. And this legislation, when you read it, reads right like an Orwellian description of how you make the law. The crimes are not specified except by the Chinese when they want to specify them. And it's plainly the case that some cases will be taken out of Hong Kong and tried in China and dealt within China. So we go back to the whole issue, extradition, which triggered the protests last year, which had 1.7 million people on the streets and which led to an increase in concerns about democracy and increasing concerns about policing, which produced, I think, some of the turmoil and turbulence or most of the turmoil and turbulence of last year. It also makes clear that from now on, the chief executive advised by Chinese national security officials will choose the judges to try these cases under the national security law. There is no guarantee that the trials will be in the open. There's no guarantee that there will be jury trials. So in almost every respect, I think this is a flagrant assault on the rule of law. It tries to meld, or not to meld, but it tries to oversee the common law with Chinese law and it threatens a lot of the things which have made Hong Kong so successful and prosperous. It's already the case that a lot of hedge funds are talking about how they can do their job if they're not absolutely certain that when they report on the real scale, for example, of China's unemployment or China's trade figures or whatever, that they'll find themselves potentially threatened under the law for saying things which the Chinese government doesn't like. It looks as though even complaining that the police about police behavior in Hong Kong, and I know quite a lot about public order policing because of what Bobby mentioned earlier in Northern Ireland, it looks as though even doing that will be regarded as whipping up hatred of Beijing. All together, I think it's pretty ghastly and I think it's not any ends one country to system, but I think threatens to be very bad for Hong Kong's ability to continue its role as a very important Asian financial hub. Two or three other things about it. As I said at the outset, I think this has to be seen as a pattern of behavior by the Chinese communist regime. And on the whole, it's got away with this behavior over the years by picking off countries one at a time. Australia one week, Canada the next, Britain the next, India the next, Japan or others the following week. And I think it's very important that we stand up together not starting a new cold war with China, but just making absolutely clear that we will call out China when it behaves badly. And I think Britain has a particular responsibility in helping to ensure that that happens. In some respects, it's made more difficult by the fact that the so-called leader of the West, the American president or the present American president doesn't seem to believe very much in allies and alliances. But I do think it's remarkable the extent to which Chinese behavior has solidified opinion in Washington about how to deal with China just as it's done so, just as it's done in the UK to find myself in the same argument or on the same side in argument with the end Duncan Smith or whatever is a new and wonderful experience for me. But that's thanks to China because we find ourselves, for example, supporting the UK government as have 26 other countries in the UN Human Rights Council in the last day or so not only criticizing what China is doing in Hong Kong but also criticizing what seems to be the beginning of genocide in Xinjiang with forced sterilization, forced IUD, forced abortions all of which has been reported extremely fully and very well by the Associated Press who will doubtless suffer the consequences of telling the truth. So it's not surprising that the EU even has found itself able to make a very critical set of statements about what China has been doing. Australia, Canada, US, UK, the E7 as a whole, Japan, India and India has just reacted to Chinese behavior by banning I think 59 different Chinese apps like TikTok which were previously very successful in India. So I repeat, I'm not in favor of a cold war with China. What I am in favor of is what an old and very good international relations expert some of you will be old enough to remember him called Gerald Siegel who died a last ridiculously young who used to talk, he used to talk about constrainment about working together so that when China was doing things you approved of, you'd react very well to it. And there's all sorts of things we need to negotiate with China whether on climate change or preventing the next pandemic of antimicrobial resistance. Those are things where we have to work with China but when China behaves badly we need to take, we need to call it out and we need to work together in order to try to ensure that China understands there are consequences for what it's doing. I think in Britain at the moment there's been a complete change in the debate about Huawei partly because of seeing how China has been behaving and increasing disbelief that a company which is as involved as Huawei is in the surveillance state in Xinjiang can't be regarded as just any other multinational. So China is a great country, a very important country but the Chinese Communist Party is a threat and I think it's particularly dangerous for all of us that China has demonstrated whether what it's been doing in the last few months and particularly in Hong Kong that you can't trust it. Turn the gloss over. Thank you very much, Chris, thank you. That's a fascinating presentation. We have questions coming in here now. So there's a question from Rory Quinn whom you probably know, he's former leader of the Labour Party, former minister of finance. I have it over there behind me. He says that your first fact you were instrumental in presiding over the transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty and he asks what were your expectations at the time? Did you expect the new arrangement would stay in place without any change? I hoped it would. I didn't ever really think that the equivalent of the Chinese KGB would be given a carte blanche in Hong Kong which is happening and I didn't expect that the tanks would be rolling in as they did in Tiananmen Square. I thought the worst I thought would happen would be that Hong Kong would simply become the richest city in China but without the freedoms which had made it so special. I'm now more concerned because I think some of the things that have made Hong Kong so extraordinarily well off. Though I think that economic success hasn't been particularly well managed in the last few years and the social inequity in Hong Kong has grown quite considerably. I now worry that some of the things that are happening will actually undermine Hong Kong's prosperity. Not because of the Americans for example deciding that they can no longer treat Hong Kong as being economically autonomous or different than China. Though that will be hurtful a little but because of what Beijing is doing and I think that Xi Jinping regards Hong Kong as representing all the things he hates. When I spoke about Peter Sutherland in Dublin a few months ago, I quoted a document which Xi Jinping had sent out to all his political and government officials in 2013 called again the Orwellian title, Communique Number Nine, in which he listed all the appalling things which liberal democracy represented and why the Chinese Communist Party had to be vigilant in fighting them. And when you look at them, most of them exemplify institutionalized Hong Kong. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religious worship, very healthy civic organizations, proper education, not the sort of education which will then convince people that Tiananmen never happen. Those are the sort of things which I think Chinese Communist Party finds so dangerous in Hong Kong and I hope they will be able to survive. With the present leadership in Hong Kong, it's pretty questionable. Thank you. Could I just ask anybody who's submitting questions to identify yourselves and to give your affiliation that would be very helpful? I have a question from Dan O'Brien, an economist with the IIA, who asks how different are the US and European stances towards Hong Kong and who is closest to getting it right at this stage? Well, it depends whether you believe John Bolton or not. I mean, I suspect that a new American administration and Europe could work together well on Hong Kong and on China. I did a seminar like this the other day with Orville Shell and a group of Americans and a group of European parliamentarians and was very struck except in this security area where there were some differences by the commonality of view on what's happening in China and I think it's very important that that continues. I think inevitably European statements and I've said this before when I used to be partly responsible for trying to police them, European statements on difficult foreign policy issues tend to be very strong on nouns and adjectives but rather weak on verbs. And I think that the statement which came out the other day from the European Union on Hong Kong was in that sense remarkably strong by European standards and I very much welcomed what both the president of the commission and the president of the council had to say. There are of course some who are dragging their feet on these issues. I think there are one or two EU countries which have been seduced by the hope of vast funds under the Belt and Roads Initiative which I think is actually a pretty good example of debt diplomacy by China as people like the Pakistanis and others are discovering at the moment. But by and large, I think it's possible to shape a sensible policy on China which is in the same ballpark as what a sensible American administration would be doing. Look, our value system even with a president like this one is closer to that in the United States than it is with China. We don't want to have to choose between the United States and China. I'm sure that a Biden administration, if you think about the people who would be part of a Biden administration, you have people like Bill Burns and Susan Rice and so on calling the shots in terms of international policy. And I think that we mean much closer to the sort of view which Europeans have of the world. So I don't think that there are aspects of sinophobia which would separate us because I think sinophobia is appalling, is as bad as any racist phobia. But I think we shouldn't have too much difficulty in finding common ground in our dislike of Chinese communism and our dislike of the way that this regime behaves in relation to international rules and international agreements. Thank you, I'm going to take a question on the subject other than China now. The questions are still coming in on China. Cathy O'Toole, who was of course a member of your patent commission on establishing the new structures for police in Northern Ireland. And Robert Pierce, the secretary to the commission had an article in yesterday's Washington Post which suggested that some of the structures which you recommended for policing in Northern Ireland could now be applied in some cities in the United States to address the current policing issues there. Do you have any thoughts on that suggestion? Yes, I do, I mean it's interesting that when we were writing that report, we had a couple of two or three visits, number of members of our team to the United States to discuss policing, finding of course that most of the police commissioners we were talking to in individual cities were from the Irish diaspora, rather like my stepfather's uncles, people like Bill Brachten and so on. But you go to city after city and find that the commissioner of police came from an Irish heritage. And it's a terrible sadness at what's happened in some American cities. And I think the two things which I would most underline which were important, they're not uncontroversial or three, first of all, the definition of the human rights responsibilities of police services, which came to some people as a tremendous shock. There was, as I recall, a leading article and I think it was the Times, not even the Telegraph, saying what did we mean by all this? I mean, policing was about law and order and bonking people on the head. It wasn't about the wet human rights issue. Secondly, I think another issue that we got absolutely right was the importance of a vigorous police complaints body, something that would be nice to have in Hong Kong. And I think that is really important. And thirdly, the other thing which I think is incredibly important is recruitment. Probably the most controversial thing we did was going away from equal, from recruitment simply on the basis of what the recruiting officers thought made sense and trying to ensure that there was a specific proportion of the police service recruited who were Catholic. Otherwise, we'd never have moved away from a situation in which only 7% of the police force were Catholic. And I think we did very well getting up to about 30% today. And I think that sometimes you have to intervene in that sort of affirmative way in order to really change an institution and change it culturally. I think the fact that our policing proposals have lasted is a great deal of the results of the wisdom from Kathy O'Toole, from Bob himself who was the secretary of the commission, from Maurice Hayes, from Peter Smith, all of, and John Smith who was a policeman himself, a Metropolitan Deputy Commissioner. We had a really good committee. And it's, I think, the thing I'm proudest of doing, the most difficult, but also the proudest thing I've done, I think. And it's sad to see how much things seem to have gone backwards in some American cities. So just on that point, in particular, on race, when I went to America for the first time in 1965 as a student, we were in Montgomery, Alabama. And there was a very tense atmosphere because a couple of weeks before, three University of Pennsylvania students had been shot dead in civil rights demonstrations. We happened to have picked up at the airport a car with University with Philadelphia number plates. So we were regarded with some suspicion. That was there. Then roll forward to the night that Obama was elected. And I happened to be in Hong Kong delivering a speech for a shed load of money alongside Colin Powell who I'd worked with when he was, when I was external affairs commissioner in Brussels. So I knew him very well and had a huge admiration for him. When Colin, I was watching the Obama election, he was crying, an extraordinary transformation from 1965 in civil rights demonstrations to electing a person of color, a black American president. And I think it's hugely sad that things seem to have been going backwards in some respects in the last few years. Is it matters to all of us? Because if we're going to be able to be more formidable in the case we put for liberal democracy, not only in relation to China, but in relation to what's happening in Europe. If we're going to be more formidable about that, we have to be much better at dealing with the, with the beams or moats in our own eye and dealing with situations in our own societies. Thank you very much. Lots of fascinating questions coming in. Alan Dukes, also a former finance minister and former Finnegale leader, asked, and I suppose this is partly in the context of the fact Ireland has just been elected to the Security Council of the UN from next year. He said, would there be any benefit in escalating concerns about Hong Kong to the UN Security Council level? Yes, there would though, of course it would, they'd be vetoed by China and Russia. But I think in every respects, actually trying to elevate concern in international organizations is really important. Seven UN, as I think I said earlier, seven UN human rights organizations have raised concerns about what's happening in China. 51 UN special rapporteurs have said there should be a special UN envoy on Hong Kong. I think it's really important that we should raise these issues. And of course it's true that the Chinese Communist, the Wolf Warriors, won't like it. But I think we actually have to show them that we're not afraid to stand up for ourselves. Otherwise they'll go on rolling over us. Just as the Russians did to a very considerable extent in the wake of Putin's KGB takeover of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I much recommend Catherine Belton, her recent book on Putin and Putin's people. So you get rolled over by bullies unless you stand up to them. And that's a lesson which in Europe we should remember from Agadir, from the Sa'alan and in terms of uniting them history, the way we behaved in the 1920s in relation to Ireland. Chris, there's another question on a different topic from Terry Neil who's a member of the board of the IAEA. And he says that a recent British speaker at the IAEA suggested that the Tory party has now become the English national party. Is there truth in his comment? Yeah, there is some truth in it. And I think it's deeply disturbing. I think that it's something which is crept up partly under the guise of concern about Britain's role in the world and Brexit, but I think there is some truth in it. And I think that's worrying if you are as concerned as I am to keep the United Kingdom together. When you look at the way the coronavirus has been handled, I'm sure how many observers would put up their hands and say that they thought it had been better handled by Mr Johnson than by them by Nicola Sturgeon. I think that there are clearly differences to the way it's been handled in Wales and Northern Ireland and the way it's been handled in England. And to a very considerable extent, the vocabulary, the language used has been related to, I think, English nationalism. I think we suffer in England. We're trapped between two views of our history, one of which, and we've seen it recently in the arguments about the Cecil Road statue, which I know about all too much. Some people who think that everything we did in the past was terrible, that the British Empire was one crime after another. And you can think of all sorts of things which were awful, but not everything was bad. On the other hand, there were those who think were exceptional that everything we've done has been brilliant thanks to the English genius. And that's obviously rubbish too. I just wish people knew a bit more history and were better at their history and understood the extent to which, for example, in relation to Europe, so much of our history has been ruined so much of our history has been intimately tied up with Europe. I'll give you one example. Every country has these things of which it's fantastically proud and understandably. One of the great landmarks in our history is the Battle of Waterloo. There's a great book by Brendan Sims on the Battle of Waterloo in which he points out that 36% of the soldiers who began the battle, not including Blusher at the end, 36% of the soldiers who began the battle and particularly the soldiers who defended that farmhouse, were German speakers. That was their first language. They were Germans. So you could argue that the Battle of Waterloo was the first triumph for NATO. Of course, Wellington was an important figure. But it's an actual example of how one thing after another, whether it's cultural or political or security, has English as well as Scottish and Irish, nationality is all tied up together. The way in which I remember quite a lot of the Northern Ireland Unionist culture, the way in which it tried to overlook the number of soldiers from the Republic who died in the First World War and the Second as well. A wonderful novel by Sebastian Barrier about it, a long way to go. So I think there is a real problem for British politicians in underlining the fact that we're not rubbishing our own country, that we're proud of so much that Britain's achieved, but we're really proud of it. And we don't think that there's a sort of English exception if there is an English exceptionism at the moment. I'm afraid it's that we've, I think, dealt with the coronavirus exceptionally badly. Yeah, I'm not sure you could make a direct parallel between the Battle of Waterloo and the first manifestation of NATO, given that I think 30% of Wellington's troops were from Ireland. So I'd like to put two related questions to you. One is of my own, first one. The second is from Noah Fahey, former Irish ambassador to Washington. I think you've written that the Chinese have used the COVID epidemic to break their commitments in Hong Kong. I just wondered to what extent it may have used Brexit also with the weakening of the UK's international authority. And the second question from Noah Fahey is, would the UK now be able to take concrete action against China, given its preference for building its future on trading beyond Europe? Well, let me deal with that point first. I'm very much in favour of what the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee under Tom Tugenhout, who's an excellent man, and others like Charles Palton from the Royal United Services Institute have written an argument. I'm very much in favour of a British Prime Minister having a committee which co-ordinates our policy on China and looks right across the board at, for example, at some of the arguments that are used which try to convince people that we can't do anything other than kowtow when China comes calling. People say we're so dependent on Chinese investment we can't make a fuss about it well. There's a very good report written by a man called Michael Pettit about suggesting that actually Chinese investment is investment which would have come here anyway because the Chinese invest in things they can make money out of. The Chinese investment in Britain isn't a sort of bombouche from the St Vincent de Paul Society. The Chinese invest in things they can make money from. And as for trade, we have a huge deficit with China on trade. Are the size of our deficit with China the same size as our exports and like every other country or pretty well every other country we have serious issues about intellectual property theft about not being able to invest in China in the same way they can invest often in a predatory way in Britain and what we should look at is the number of things that were a number of areas where we're dependent excessively dependent on China and decide whether we can't make a change we're excessively dependent in a lot of pharmaceutical areas we're excessively dependent in antibiotics for example we're probably excessively dependent in some technological spheres so we have to look at those economic areas in order to make sure that we can as a more independent country even while working with allies allies were prepared to behave sensibly with us and trade sensibly with us we can't simply sign up to deals which help the other person much more than they help us as far whether Brexit has contributed as well as the coronavirus I think to some extent I think that a lot of people think that the fact that we seem to be so keen on not just leaving the European Union but leaving so on any conceivable terms perhaps with some people thinking that whatever the consequences if they're bad they'll be blamed on the outcome of the coronavirus not looked at in their own right I think there is it must be the case that other countries look at that and say well maybe they'll need us more now than they did before but the idea that what we should be looking for in order to replace a market which is 44% or more of our exports what we should be looking for is a fantastic trade deal with China I'll tell you this this week on Monday they asked about Brexit but one of the questions they asked about was whether the answer was to have a really good trade deal with China fewer than 10% thought that was a good idea 34% said that any trade deal with China should be pursued with the very greatest caution so what China is managing to do is to make us more grown up about some of these issues and I guess some that in due course they're not without a good deal of pain and we'll find ourselves in that position as well because of Brexit There's quite a lot of questions coming in Chris about how what sort of action can be taken to contain China Bill Emmett, former editor of The Economist who is now a Brexit exile in Dublin and very welcome asked if next January the US President is Joe Biden what sort of containment could be undertaken with allies of China and the person who spent 20 years in Hong Kong Jeremy Godfrey talks about how heartbreaking it is to have friends in Hong Kong and also wondering what sort of action can be taken for bad behaviour so just in that whole area of what action can be taken and how optimistic can we be that action is going to have an impact Well I imagine and certainly hope that a Biden presidency would first of all reopen the question of America's participation in the TPP and the Trans-Pacific Partnership and would help to rejuvenate that idea and would also provide an option of European countries I don't just mean EU countries I include us as well actually having some sort of relationship with TPP I imagine that a Biden presidency would also be better at rejuvenating and reviving the quad of Australia United States Canada India which is a more of a security relationship and I imagine it would also be better at reviving the Five Eyes relationship as well but above all what I would hope that Mr Biden would do and his colleagues would try to work with our partners in shaping an agenda for dealing with China which didn't press for another cold war but did as I said earlier reward China when it behaved well but made sure that there was a price to pay when it didn't and what some of the prices you'd have to pay would be in terms of where the Chinese were allowed to invest and what they were allowed to do in your own countries with we know from some of the work that's been done in Australia from a book that's been published there and it's now being about to be published in the UK despite legal action being taken against it and it's been published I think in Canada showing the way Chinese influence can distort institutions and attempts to make sensible policy so I don't think it's impossible for the world to actually work together but I think it's pretty awful that when a Swedish citizen is arrested outside China taken back to China and given 10 or 15 years in prison when two innocent Canadians are picked up because of an extradition argument in Canada when the Australians are picked on and threatened with trade sanctions because of the fact that they've argued for a full WHO inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus when those things happen I think the rest of the world or friends of those countries should stand up and say you can't behave like that to our friends on the whole we tend to sort of look the other way and hope that it all goes away and I think it will only go away if China understands that there is a price to pay what was the second question? No, it was a series of questions about what sort of action can be taken if Biden is elected or otherwise and how optimistic we can be that's going to have an impact on China I think that what's interesting is the way that the Chinese are solidifying political opinion critically is the communist regime I think it takes a certain sort of genius for them to have done that as I said at the outset but they've certainly achieved it not least in the US the latest discussions in Congress are about fast tracking young protesters who were threatened with arrest in Hong Kong a remarkable thing to happen in the American political system at the moment but very welcome there's a question here from Esna McDermott it's a very broad question I think only you could give a synthesized answer to it but what are China's overall global current strategic aims at the moment? The main name as Kevin Rudd is pointing out the main name of Chinese policy is for the party to stay in power that's the aim that's aim number one and aim number two and aim number three wants to do in order to ensure that that happens is to secure a narrative about its position in the world which matches that of the Chinese Communist Party so at the moment I think it's very dangerous when we start talking about China and the reasons for standing up to it not to allow that to play into the Chinese Communist narrative that this is all about sinophobia we should actually be hugely grateful to those doctors in Wuhan who bravely had to that the outset of the reporting coronavirus was shut up by the police for trying to do so it's not about sinophobia it's about a totalitarian regime which is cutting loose and behaving badly I have a question from Louis Brennan the professor of business studies in Trinity College Dublin and he asked what is your view of the apparent willingness of some commercial interests in Hong Kong and elsewhere to side with China well I was asked this the other day and I said I guess if you were doing if you were trying to run a business in Sicily in the 1940s or 50s or 60s and the mafia came knocking on the door you paid up and I think that's rather what's been happening the idea that when the appalling CY Leung the former chief executive of Hong Kong said about HSBC that if they didn't back the security law there'd be financial trouble for them and this was well before the national security before anybody knew what was in it the idea that we should have responded by saying the Bank of China in London unless you support us on this or that aspect of policy and we'll make life difficult for you but this is the way they do business and should we go on putting up with this I think there are two other things I would say about about a business's behaviour that you have to give the mafia its due two things first of all I hope people in Hong Kong businesses in Hong Kong will just remember from time to time that most of the people who run them even the Chinese people who run them most of the people who run them have another passport in their back pocket and they should perhaps think a little more of those who work for them who don't have the option of going elsewhere if it all goes wrong and secondly they should ask themselves what their customers and clients must think of the fact that they signed up to this law before anybody knew what was in it now I hope they're more careful about their customers and their clients financial affairs than they are I hope they take rather more care and I hope that they will ask themselves how much serious research they're going to be able to do on financial issues economic issues in China if they're not allowed to say anything which is remotely critical of what's happening in China I think it's going to have a deadening effect on their ability to do the sort of research which any open and free market depends on Hong Kong has done incredibly well partly because of the combination of free flow of information free flow of capital and the rule of law and once you start picking that apart I think it becomes very dangerous I have a question from Rose Dre who works with the Department of Foreign Affairs and she's interested to know what you think of the merger signals between the Foreign Office in London and DFID and what that signals for UK international relations moving forward well I think it's pretty extraordinary in the middle of this crisis to unscramble DFID which has been a huge success story the other day shortly after saying how successful DFID was and how much he wanted it to go on being successful the other day having said that Boris Johnson then referred to it as providing a cash point in the sky as though the money that we provide better than almost anybody else and more generously than most other people for fighting poverty around the world for trying to stop babies dying as though that was cash point you would always find something that looks ridiculous paying for juggling lessons in the Lebanon or something you could always find problems but by and large DFID has been a fantastic success story and now it's going to be ripped pieces and stuffed the Foreign Office now I used to be the minister for what is now DFID before it was an independent cabinet level department and we used to cooperate with the Foreign Office and cooperated very well you can cooperate about your strategic intentions for aid flows without destroying the organization which is doing it I thought it was interesting the example that Mr Johnson gave for doing it was that we spent so much more money on in Zambia than we did in the Ukraine well we spent more money in Zambia than we do in the Ukraine because there are more poor people in Zambia and overseas development assistance is about helping the poor and there are which are policed very carefully by the OECD for defining overseas development which take account of what you're doing so you can't for example define as overseas development assistance providing people in Ukraine how much there might be an argument for that so I think it's intellectually muddled I think it's a really unnecessary fuss at a time when we should be really focusing on dealing with the international implications of this virus and of Chinese behavior I think it threatens what is generally regarded as one of Britain's best exports that namely our overseas development administration and when you look the only reason for doing it must be to transfer money from development assistance to other things and I think that's lamentable Chris I think we only have time for one more question so faced with quite a lot of questions I'm going to ask one myself which is Boris Johnson became Prime Minister a year ago and I suppose as Chancellor of Oxford you're used to the termly reports that students are given whatever they're called in the different colleges but if you were giving an annual report to Boris Johnson first year in office how would you summarize it? He always clearly presented the fact that his contemporary David Cameron got a first and he got a second which is one of the reasons why he called even when he was Prime Minister he called David Cameron a girly swat as though he had rankled all these years that he didn't get as good a degree as Cameron I think he'd be lucky to get a second don't you? I think that's I think that's to be charitable I don't think being Prime Minister during this period has tested his political skills and capacities whatever they may be and I commend to any who haven't read it except with what it says about China I commend an article about Boris Johnson Birdie Mount who's no lefty in the current edition of the London Review of Books and I also recall what well I won't go into the other articles I agree with I've never been as you know the greatest fan of Boris Johnson but I hope he somehow gets written through this awful era and we've had at the moment one of the worst records in dealing with it in the world I hope we don't follow that with one of the worst records of getting out of the pandemic economically but I look at the performance of Mr. Varadkar and his colleagues though I know he's now in a coalition I look at that record with a good deal of envy Chris thank you very much we've come to the end of the hour I'd like first of all to thank the audience because I think the quality of the questions is a sign of how thriving the IIA is but above all I'd like to thank you for your openness and for your interesting presentations you're obviously very passionate and you've spoken about this before about the threats to liberal democracy we have to wait and see how optimistic we can be about that but certainly the fact you're grappling with those issues is a reason for optimism and the other thing that just in conclusion struck me is that there's a huge knowledge and wisdom about many many specific areas but one of the great things is the interconnectedness of your wisdom the way for example you identified three specific learnings from setting up the PSNI that could be applied to a completely different situation in North America I think that's a fascinating aspect of your presentation to us and your reply to the question so Chris on behalf of all of us and on behalf of the IIA just two final thoughts first of all I can't remember who first said that you can lock up people but you can't lock up an idea and secondly I remember that I'm unfashionably these days still a passionate admirer of Thomas More rather than Thomas Cromwell and I remember that passage which Robert Bolt writes and a man for it all seasons when Moore is dealing with Roper and trying to explain to Roper why even the devil needs to have recourse to the law and he says to Roper you cut down all the laws and you turning them into a barren area and who protects you then from the wind and I hope that's true about Hong Kong I hope something will protect you from the wind Well Robert Bolt also puts other words in Thomas More's mouth he says God made animals to serve him in their innocence plants to serve him in their simplicity but man he made to serve him visually in the tangle of his mind so thank you for serving us all in the tangle of your mind Chris Thank you