 So, welcome everyone to this panel of the SOAS Festival of Ideas, which is on Capital in Conflict and the brief discussion of the panel is as follows. This panel considers how the process of globalization affects the global south and what are the exclusionary practices of capital that increase the gap between the rich and the poor. It explores the relationship between capital and conflict and looks at the specific examples of states and their participation in the global political economy. What are the global processes that determine international relations and how do politicians and policymakers mediate conflict. To what extent is the crisis of capital in the global north connected to histories of colonialism or nationalism and how can we mediate and dissent the flow of knowledge through a global south perspective and how does this further contribute to understandings of conflict and capitalism. Now my name is Alessandra Mazzadri and I work at SOAS in the development studies department and I am your moderator for the capital and conflict panel and I have with me now for distinguished speakers that will each speak for 10 minutes addressing different issues and angles related to the theme of the panel discussion. The first is Professor Gilbert Hachkar, who was born in Senegal, grew up in Lebanon, research and taught in Beirut, Paris and Berlin and is currently professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He is another publisher in over 15 languages, his many books includes the clash of barbarism, the making of a new word disorder, the Arab and the Holocaust, the Arab-Israeli war on narratives, Marxism, Orientalism, cosmopolitanism. The people want a radical exploration of the Arab uprising and most recently morbid symptoms relapsed in the Arab Spring. Gilbert is a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique and a regular columnist in the Arabic press. He will speak on conflict in capitalism. Then after him, and I'll just kindly ask him to just now come to the webinar opening his video, after him we have Gita, we have apologies, we have Gita Patel, apologies. After this we have Gita Patel is a professor at the University of Virginia, with three degrees in science and a doctorate for Columbia University, New York in interdisciplinary South Asian studies. She has published widely in both academic and popular venues on the collusive conundrums posed by bringing gender, nation, sexuality, finance, science, media, capital and aesthetics together. Her first monograph is called Lyrical Movements, Historical Intents on Gender Colonialism and Desire in Mirages or DuPoetry. And her second book is Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy, Reflection on Sexuality, Media, Science, Finance, uses techno-intimacies as the locus for interrogating capital science, media and desire. Dr. Patel is completing several other projects and is with us today to engage with a series of small books she's engaged in writing on historical pensions, insurance, credit and debt. And the first is on the first private public pension fund, the Madrasa Civil Fund, which started in the late 1700s and whose articulation brought Mughal and European nation notions of financial compensation together. This is what we'll present today on our thinking pensions and revisioning welfare. After we have third speaker, Terry Cannon, who's a senior researcher fellow at the IDS and has been working in development studies for 40 years. His current focus is on the social construction of vulnerability and unnatural hazards and climate change as challenges to development. He teaches postgraduate courses at the IDS, King's College London and several other European universities and has been affiliated with the International Center for Climate Change and Development in DACA. He has published academic and policy work on climate change and disasters and it's co-author of at-risk natural hazards, people with vulnerability and disasters. This is one of the most cited work in vulnerability and disaster studies translated into Spanish and Japanese. Terry's research and capacity building work is mainly in South Asia, especially Bangladesh, including a recent project in Bangladesh to research what can and cannot be done to support livelihoods in cyclone disasters. Other recent publication include the cultures and disasters and international Red Cross were disaster report 2014, a focus on culture and risk. He will speak as a third speaker on hand in fake binaries, decolonizing development and erasing notions of developed and developing. The final speaker we have is Steve Tsang, who is a professor at SOAS and director of the SOAS China Institute and is an emeritus fellow of St. Anthony's College at Oxford and an associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and Chatham House. He previously served as the head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies and as director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham. Before that he spent 29 years at Oxford University where he'll earn his Doctor of Field and work as a professor of fellow dean and director of the Asian Studies Center at St. Anthony's College. Professor Tsang regularly contributes to public debates on different aspects of issues related to the politics, history, foreign policy, security and development of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and East Asia more generally. He's known in particular for introducing the concept of consultative Leninism as an analytical framework to understand the structure and nature of politics in contemporary China. Now the focus of his intervention will be on talking, inquiring about the China's narrative about the status of Taiwan based on the research paper that he just completed named from Japanese colony to sacred Chinese territories where he addresses issues of decolonization of knowledge also considering the new rising dominant narratives of new great powers like China. So I'm extremely pleased to have this tremendous lineup for this panel and I will now ask the first speaker to turn his video and audio on Professor Giber Hachkar that will talk about conflict in capitalism. Each speaker will speak for 10 minutes and we will address some initial questions at the end and then I will take questions from the Q&A box. I will ask kindly all the public that wants to put questions to the panelists to actually write their question in the Q&A box and not on the chat box. You're free to use the chat box but we will not consider questions put in the chat box, which is generally busier. Thank you very much. The panel will last approximately until 2.45 so I very much hope that you will have time to pose your questions to the panelists. Without further ado, I just invite now Gilbert to speak for 10 minutes on the issue of conflict in capitalism. Thank you. Thank you Alessandra. Thank you very much and glad to be here with all the colleagues, all speakers and the panel. The title is hugely broad, capital and conflict is a very, very broad title and since I'm the first to speak, my own intervention will be, has to be general in order to just maybe contribute to setting the framework of the discussion. Actually, I mean, of the two terms of the title capital and conflict, one is relatively limited in time that is capital, I mean, the real development of capitalism is just a matter of a couple of centuries when you can really speak of capitalist economies. Whereas conflict, of course, starts with the birth of the humankind and so that's conflict is much older than capital. So the question becomes here if we are mixing the two terms, what kind of conflict is specific to capitalism. And here we get to the idea of the specific form of class struggle that is related to capitalism, the struggle between the classical view of the struggle between the proletariat as Marx was the key theorist of the struggle, the specific struggle of capitalism between the proletariat that is the working class or the neighbors in general and capital on the other hand. So if we were to identify a specific form of conflict that is related to that, that would be this specific conflict. And indeed with the development of capitalism in the heartlands of capitalism, this conflict started developing early on and that's here where you can see a landmark in the identification of the struggle in Marx in his communist manifesto is a joint book with Engels, which starts with class struggle, with the forms of class struggle in history up to the struggle between workers and capitalists being the new form of struggle in the new age of capital. But at the same time, it's obvious that capitalism developed in those core countries in the heartlands of capitalism through a relation to the rest of the world. And then we got into this new configuration of the world which took the form of what came to be called the division between global north and global south with those core capitalist countries in the global north, subjugating the global south economically, first through a plunder and then through structural dependence through economic domination with the generalization of capitalism as a mode of production. That happens gradually, but with this generalization we have a structure which is hierarchical structure of the global economy that was put in place with a structural dependence of the global south towards the global north, and even for a long while you can see what was called by Gundar Frank the development of under development, that is at the development actually of the global south, that is in one phase of this historical development. And well, I worked recently on a study of socialism and colonialism and I was struck by the fact that the conscience of the colonial issue within the socialist movement came so late. It's only in the early 20th century that you start having discussions about colonialism actually within the socialist movement which was very much European or let's say global north in those core countries of capitalism. So this discussion comes very, very late, and of course it will be boosted later on by the revolutionary changes that happened with the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Revolution trying to appeal to the global south. And this will of course lead to the massive changes that happened after the Second World War and the age of decolonization and there of course you have a rise, a political rise of the global south. And the fight, the struggle, the issue of imperialism becomes a very central issue in global struggles. And now, with the age of what has been called globalization, we have a number of key changes towards in relation with all that. I mean of course you have a permanence of some of the factors that I mentioned. You have a permanence of the North South's exploitation, subjugation, economic subjugation and political subjugation, this carries on, we can see it carrying on even with the pandemic, just to speak of something very topical. But the impact, the social economic impact of the pandemic, let alone the health issues, but the social economic impact of the pandemic is much harder and harsher on the global south than it is on the global north. So these issues carry on. However, we have a number of major changes that occurred over the decades of what has been called globalization. And one of them is the rise of China as an economic powerhouse. And I think the implications of this are just beginning to unfold. It's quite early to really assess this, but it is the first real breach in the North-South divide that has characterized the global economy, the global political economy over two centuries. And this, the rise of China as a new global power is of utmost importance and will weigh necessarily and weighs already necessarily on the configuration or the perception of the world and of global conflicts. The second one, so you have one part of the South join, I mean, competing now with the North in terms of global power, and you have another development which is the emergence of the South within the North. And that's the product of migration and this massive migration of the last decades has created this very, very strongly. So you have, I mean, the North-South divide, if you want, is one that is now also within the global north. It is represented within the global north has been through this issue of migration. So I think these events, these developments, of course they are open to a lot of reflection because they are really see changes in global history actually, but they have implications also on the struggles. As I see it, they are actually facilitating a real globalization of struggles. I mean, we are moving from the age of internationalism to the age of actually much more global type of struggle, which we can see even in the increasing globalization of forms of revolt on the classical class issue on the political economy issues and we can see this global trend of uprisings of revolts. The last year was, I mean, the year 2019 was very striking in this regard with all these from Hong Kong to Chile to Sudan to Algeria to all these revolts against, in some way, all of them related to the effects of neoliberalism as the dominant paradigm. We can see that also in the through the cultural, the technological dimension of globalization, the communication dimension of globalization, helping and combining with what I said about the global south and the global north in globalizing struggles, we can see that in very much in the Black Lives Matter wave of struggle most recently. So we are really getting into what Boa Ventura did, this was a sentence called Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, I liked the formula of Insurgent Cosmopolitanism because I think this is very much the now the form of social conflict that is that has been developing and will carry on developing with with the advent of globalization. Thank you very much, there was such an insightful way to actually get into the first intervention of our panel. And I already see a lot of very productive lines of inquiry for me to actually probe you at the end in relation to this tension between the spatial and social relation of conflict, as well as in the direction of struggle. Without further ado, I just now ask Gita Patel to give us 10 minutes and Gita will speak to the theme of pension and welfare, about de-centering historical work from a focus on classical historical takes of welfare coming from the West and France in particular to de-centering study analysis towards India. Thank you Gita, you have 10 minutes, thank you. Thanks Alessandra, I'm really happy to be on this panel with all these amazing thinkers. I'll start right away. And I, you know, there's stuff that I've left out obviously because it's a fairly complicated argument but so pensions are currently under intense scrutiny. As the ratio of debt to GDP rises in country after country employees and employers, citizens and governments lock in contest over type of compensation, they once availed without question. Which opens a different sight line into what might have been many have taken for granted as the genesis of pensions by de-centering the pension story, which is usually said to start in Europe. Colonial India, I suggest that colonial India is one precursor to the sorts of pensions with which we are now quite familiar. It also begins to reveal the way in which fiscal governance, even in Europe, becomes part of a jurisdictional imperative through both of colonial states. The historian Philip Stern argues that the East India Company, and I am talking about the 18th and late 18th early 19th century, when the discussion on pensions had become sort of really spread in different parts of the world. The historian Philip Stern argues that the East India Company was not just a corporation, which then became a political entity. But began, you know, and it's sort of the standard story as it became political entity when it became, when it began to consolidate itself in India through charters and the acquisition of military and naval resources. But Stern argues that the political that the East India Company was always a political corporation, in other words a corporate state so it actually takes back the idea of the corporate state from the present to the colonial period. Stern then gives us a sight line on governance and governmentality. To Stern's arguments, I actually add another argument that the East India Company established itself not just as a corporate state or as a company state, but specifically as a fiscal state through financial jurisdictions and we think of financialization as again contemporary and I'm taking it back to the 18th and 19th century. And many of these jurisdictions were in fact compensatory in character, the things that we think of as part of the welfare state, pensions, annuities and consistent salaries. In passing the financial history of the East India Company, it's possible to see the inception of statecraft through fiscal manipulation as well as fiscal municipans, whose mobilizations give it a jurisdictional shape as a corporate state, and I call this kind of financial collective that states got involved with setting up life finance and continues into the contemporary for me this continues into the contemporary period. We can talk about it later. So pensions in India want to go back to the 1700s when a significant contingent of British colonial employees in South India. Many of whom were reduced to bankruptcy and vagrancy at the end of their service and a petition to the East India Company, in which they threatened to steal from the East India Company if they were not permitted to start a pension fund. People think of East India Company employees as especially the European ones, making a ton of money and coming back. In fact, I would say that was true for maybe 5%. I'm exaggerating slightly but very few employees actually made a ton of money and came back. The bulk of them ended up vagrants debtors in prison, dying with almost no money. In fact, after protracted negotiations the company said yes. This British colonial setting for the establishment of pensions and social security schemes is rarely recognized as a source for their modern counterparts. This fund, called the Madras Civil Fund, actually began in the 1780s. It's important because rather than being handed out to the East India Company, this fund was argued for by employees, composed from their own contributions. And this is when a time of the poor, when people talk about the, you know, there's a lot of history on the poor laws, certainly in the, in the UK, this fund was composed from their own contributions. And people who are usually bereft of resources rarely fashions their own means of support. And the shape and form this, the employees arguments took actually, as well as the genre that the arguments obeyed, they owe their allegiances not to European ways of forms of argument arguing, but in fact petitions written by local South Indian weavers and Dalit Paraya agriculturalists in South India and we can talk about this at a later point, if it, if it comes up. The East India Company threatened by its employees in the late 18th century was a company state, severely strapped for funds, no financier was willing to loan it money. Not locally nor was a public purchasing its bonds, unlike the first European pensions, in which public or royal monies were segregated from private capital, money in the semi semi privatized corporate pension fund. Perhaps the first defined contribution pension scheme created by East India British employees were not was not so easily ring fenced the madras civil fund invested in loans as well as the bonds of the company state. The money from salaries used to fund the pensions became the reserve that permitted the company to roll over some of its local loans and justify company rule in the face of charges that that it had defrauded Indians. Now, though exchanges and the viability necessity for universal pensions were also occurring in Europe in America is between people like Thomas Payne and Marky the condo say. As well as their nemesis Thomas maltus these discussions were actually occurred more than 10 years after the pension fund in redress was already established, and some valuable distinctions between the civil fund and though those put together by your American economic and political philosophers was something that the East India Company employees understood immediately, and that went unrecognized by Payne and mouth first. This is a part and parcel of an employees wage relation. And this is something marks talk talks about, you know, almost. I mean, I'd say 100, almost 100 years later. And second that pensions form the nucleus of an investment in the company or corporate state and investment that enabled the company or the state to live beyond its means. In other words, employees or denizens invested their funds in the ongoing life of a country or a state. And actually, and this investment was made through their pension funds. It was it, we can think of it as an effective promissory note that employees and state functionaries and denizens in other words people who live in the area, invested in, which relied on trust as well as the future life and survival of the person state of cooperation on whom the note was drawn so in other words, because you have a pension fund you actually ensure the life because you have a pension fund you actually ensure the life of the organization that's giving you the fund means so really undoes the standard idea of how these funds are constituted. Given that pensions found their Genesis, not in the so called metropole but in the global south in the colonies. Pensions adopted owed as much to pre existing Indian practices of compensation as they did to schemes drafted in London or Paris. And one of them is Mughal land grants to soldiers, accompanied with pensions which became part of a kind of understanding how pensions were constituted. This argument is actually grounded in in the colonies were pensions and they challenge the conclusions of scholars is written a long time ago and it's a lovely book by Robin Blackburn in 2003, who locates the Genesis pension funds from in Europe in the late 19th century. So the late 18th and early 19th century in South Asia also saw the beginnings of what will be termed the benevolent state, which month with money set aside by the British parliament for their depredations incurred by the by the late 1820s the company state began to restyle itself as the benevolent state, which incorporated into its purview benevolent health prisons infrastructure orphan schools and pensions to its denizens and the madras civil fund was its first incursion into this type of state craft, one that would later become to come to be called welfare. And here we see a few more parables about how finance works for short of the usual conventions welfare is as much provision of states as it is of self funded claims of demands made by those who belong so in other words those who belong. We think of welfare is coming from the state and what I'm arguing is actually welfare comes not from the states but the idea of welfare itself is constituted and crafted by those who belong. So in however tenuous and tentative key certain genres of welfare. When they've been established what they reveal is the imprimatur of the corporation as a state. An imprimatur that was granted to the company or corporate state through fiscal jurisdictions long before nations or corporations took those jurisdictions as their own. And these jurisdictions have had had at their heart, the ensuring of a life of both the state corporations as well as those who belong to them. That is welfare was insurance for the state as much as it is for the pensioner. So if we look at the 19th century arguments after the colonial, but actually the British state the to cove late the sort of mid 19th century, this kind of colonial reasoning continues in the sidebars of the arguments. The stake is the fiscal fiscal accountability and more responsibility of both the state corporate state, and both sorts of parties now we often separate the state from the corporation we think the welfare state and the corporation is separate. So another thing I'm asking us to do if we go back to the colonial period is to actually reconsider all these separations as something that is coming in the present that's part of a neoliberal kind of Genesis. The idea of the state and the corporation coming together. So, at stake is the fiscal accountability and moral responsibility of both sorts of parties both the corporate state and the pension, the pensioner, and that stake is trust as a solvent that enables liquidity for only one set of parties in the compact. We'll talk about this later so in other words, it works. The, the only party that remains is permitted to remain liquid is the corporate state. And here, you know I want to just close with a few points the welfare, which I've sort of articulated I think over and over again that welfare the Genesis of welfare might not have been where we commonly put it in in democratic polities but in colonial ones. So one of the contemporary promises made and disavowed assumed other valences under the companies. East India companies rhetoric of welfare for its subjects. This was a result that the subverted by the company's systematic policy of extraction at the same time as which it offered something called benevolence. The attitude of contradiction between care and ruin. I think holds lessons for contemporary struggles of a pensions around the world, as more and more people grapple with tensions between what their pensions mean to them, and what they mean to the organizations that fund or oversee them. I have no idea how long I took, but I figured I would try and end early so I cut a bunch of stuff. And I hope that made sense as a result. That's all and it was actually spot on time so thanks, Gita for this. I just found your conceptualization of this India company as a corporate state really challenging and entirely convincing. And I think about my own work when we have to focus a lot about the rise of global corporations during the neoliberal era which is generally set by the 1970s, while indeed the first global corporation was the East India company if you look at the flows of commodities and finance that we see during the pre colonial and colonial period so I find your talk really fascinating. It does flow naturally from Jill bears, more general setting, and I think as we dissenter debates now towards the global south, it will, let's get now into also the issue of knowledge production. We have our next speaker with Terry Cannon, and he will address issues of ending fake binaries and decolonizing development also in terms of decolonizing and dissentering the terms that we come to use on a daily basis that already produce a knowledge base, based hierarchies across the world economy. Thanks, Terry. Now it's said the floor is yours for 10 minutes. Thank you. Thank you very much. Very nice to be here with you. I'm going to talk a bit about capital but in some ways to say that analysis of capital is not enough. And when I refer to conflict it's going to be about conflicts of ideas, including the fake binary between developed and developing. I'm tying into this but it's much coming much wider from the arguments about decolonizing aid and decolonizing development studies. So I've chosen this title to show my concerns about how development aid and development studies is changing for the worse under current systems of power. I'm going to start with a very simplistic statement. The world is the way it is, because those who have power, want it to be this way. And I think what has happened with development studies is that this is being forgotten. Ways of compromising with getting funding and so on is it is enabling compromises which make development studies weakened. And that's part of my argument. And of course I've used the phrase those who have power and that is a shorthand for a very complex set of interlocking and conflicting interests, and I don't think they can be neatly incorporated into the title of this session around capital. I think radical critiques of development have sometimes given away too much in terms of talking about capitalism and globalization, as if all problems of exploitation and oppression of peoples in the world can be tied to capitalism. So I think that narratives about the 10% or the 1% fall into the trap of seeing the world in terms of a kind of pyramid scheme of one dominant power system. And I think this gives an easy right to those classes who dominate in quasi feudal or semi feudal systems that co is co exist in hybrid forms of with capitalism in much of Asia and Latin America. And if we relate to this as well if we are understanding and wanting to end gender oppression. It's extremely difficult to imagine that gender oppression is related to capitalist domination, because in many parts of the world. It is related to these non capitalist or pre capitalist systems, something perhaps we can come back to in the discussion. We have power, wherever have the ability to command systems that allocate resources assets such as land and water, jobs, livelihood, and income. These allocations are not natural or God given they are socially constructed. The reason that the powerful command these assets and income are designed to produce the benefits for the minority, and the arrangements for this and not an accident. The economically powerful also dominate political systems that legalize and legitimize these allocations. They're also unable to, they're able to determine the rates of taxation, which are usually low for corporations and rich people. So these taxes could not be used for creating greater equity. So these systems of power themselves are the reason there is much suffering that development aid and research claims to be fixing. The way resources and incomes are allocated is the reason aid is supposedly needed to help fix these problems, which are caused by power. Now I don't think that framing power is so helpful because. Hundreds of millions of people in our oppressed in semi feudal or quasi feudal systems of land tenure, and other forms of local power which is why I don't think it's not particularly helpful to have this kind of monopoly notion of capital being all powerful. Power also involves complex agenda, ethnicity, caste, sexuality, age and disability. And the key question here is why would those benefit from these systems of power be willing to give them up. Does development aid actually challenge those who have power. And then how can we expect development aid to be solving problems if it is not addressing the root causes of what is causing the problems we're supposedly addressing. And a question for us would aid and research on development be different if we were not dependent on those who have power for funding. I would like to really decolonize aid and development studies. Now I fully realized that what I'm saying oversimplifies, but does it simplify away from the truth or in the direction of greater honesty. I think that many aid interventions have a very low potential for changing the ways that the powerful decide what happens in the world. Development interventions can somehow be neutral and not disturb the powerful. If what is done in the name of development is neutral to power, then can it really do much good. And are we confident, and are the funders confident that after 10 years there will still be some evidence that what happened with the aid or whatever the project was is still visible and having an impact tonight like to come back to that point in the discussion afterwards. I will talk at the moment in the COVID crisis about building back better, but I think it has to be different. I don't think it's possible to build back better under existing systems of power. I would argue that it's only possible to build back better if it is also different, where the systems of power are changed so that resources and incomes are distributed more fairly and oppression is reduced. This is not easy. Going against power is difficult and can be very risky. What I'm really calling for is greater honesty. So if the aid and the research cannot be effective without changing power, then we must say so. If a problem such as hunger cannot be solved without changing the systems of power which cause hunger, then we must say so. So how does development studies help? Development aid claims to influence the way that power is used to push back against some of the negative impacts. Development studies supposedly provides the research that both identifies who needs help, and how it should happen. I believe that development research is increasingly avoiding analyzing the causes of exploitation and oppression. Otherwise, the funding may not be available. So we modify what we do in order that we get funding. We are embedded within the systems of power that use aid for power. Development organizations do what they can rather than what is needed by poor and oppressed people. And I think this is really something I want to emphasize is organizations that are involved in so-called aid and the research or institutions are doing what they need to do to stay as an organization and to carry on getting their income. And that is not always the same as what is needed by poor and oppressed people, especially what the organization does is to ignore or subordinate what is actually causing the problems of the people. So how different would our ideas and analysis and our behavior be if we were not having to do it within and for our organization? Development research organizations are trying even to increase their funding from billionaire philanthropists, sorry tax evaders, people from the 1% who are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Can we always claim that we are investigating the real causes of the problems we are supposedly trying to help to fix? Do the standards that are used for interventions effective and actually working? So we have all these buzzwords like participation, being grass-rooted, community-based or community-led, ensuring local ownership, being pro-poor, leaving no one behind, empowering people. All of these words have been critiqued for decades, some of them for decades, and these are just being forgotten, these criticisms are being forgotten. What is, does anyone actually go back to find out if people were really empowered, whether it was community-led and so on? I think we get sucked into using dev-speak and jargon that fails to do with root causes and instead enables the reason for problems to be covered up. We are full of jargon words that rip beaming out of analytical research, food security, governance, resilience, sustainable transformation. Do we ever seriously discuss how long transformational change may take? It took 100 years in Britain for women to get the vote. How long would it take to end feudal land tenure systems in much of Asia? I think food security is a good example of terminology that takes the explanation out of the problem. So 30 years ago we would have talked about hunger. Today people talk about food security. Before we said people are hungry. Now I expect almost everyone listening into this is aware that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone in this world and some left over. So what happened is that instead of discussing the political and economic reasons why people are hungry, what has happened is it's been transformed into a situation where it is discussed in terms of more food needs to be produced. There needs to be food security. So once it transfers into this language, it's ripped away from actually looking at the causes of why people have hunger. So development is embedded within existing systems of power and trying to push against them is contaminated and distorted so that we can feel comfortable within them. And I think they pay us so we fail to adequately change challenge them. And we have the extraordinary situation where institutions like my own are celebrating the 50th or 60th anniversaries. Why are we celebrating instead of looking at why are we still necessary or considering believing that we're necessary. I think it's where we are integrated into this bogus binary of developed developing global north global south and I think that this problem is a bogus binary, which disguises why people are suffering and pretending this something special exceptional in these two sets of countries, and this I believe overrides the issue of exploitation and oppression, which takes place in all countries. So hunger in Britain may have very different types of explanation and those of hunger in say India or Tanzania, but to assess them. And I don't think this is useful. The causes in India of hunger will not be the same as in Tanzania. And they will be different in one part of India, but in another part of India, but the value of having a developed developing binary is only useful to perpetuate a system that is convenient and valuable for the more powerful and insist that this binary is useful to separate analysis of hunger and poverty in Britain or the United States from the analysis of hunger and poverty in the so called global south. And I think that a developed research become the means to perpetuate the idea that there are two sets of countries that they are meaningful in this binary. And I think it becomes a way in which it can be assumed that one set of countries has the answers and the funding, which then must be transferred from us to them. And I think the fundamental problem here is this disguises what are the causes of the problems and how those causes relate to systems of power within which aid and development studies are themselves embedded. Thank you very much. Terry, you were part on time as well. So that helped me a lot. And of course, I very much liked the ending notes of your interventions in relation to the need to address the political economy factors that are actually determining socioeconomic outcomes across different regions because they can be very, very different indeed. I just wonder in a context where at least in the UK we're witnessing, you know, these arguments perhaps being weaponized to reduce aid, how this will plan out. I'm thinking about the FID merger with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, for instance, you know, that in a sense we can argue would agree on the need to ditch the developing countries dividing line but perhaps for a set of all different reasons. I will actually continue and get to the last, not least, contribution of our panel that I'll take debates on decolonizing knowledge further and address also how we need to do this exercise, keeping in mind the rise of new powers and their own narratives around new forms perhaps of colonization of knowledge and then enhance our need to cool out those as well. So without further ado, I'll ask our last speaker, Professor Steve Tsang to start his intervention. Thank you very much, Steve. You have 10 minutes. Well, thank you very much, Alexandra. Great pleasure to speak with this distinguished group of colleagues. And of course, nobody in this group needs me to remind us that colonization is about power. And therefore, the colonization of ideas, the colonization of knowledge is really about countering the dominance of ideas being imposed by certain powers. Usually, when we look at something like this, we see it in the old colonial context, the global north and the south, the old colonial powers that were rich capitalists and dominant shaping history previously and shaping narrative previously. And I'm very glad that Gilbert in his opening remarks reminded us that when we do so, we have to bear in mind that there are rising powers, and some of those rising powers have an equally strong capacity to shape and impose narrative. And China is a very good example of that. Gilbert also reminded us of the case of Hong Kong, which I thought was particularly interesting, even though I'm not going to say very much more about Hong Kong. It's interesting in the way how Gilbert mentioned it, because he is raising an example, a territory, a people that was previously part of the British Empire. And now, it is, well, at least last year, it tried it to, in a way, rebel against mother China, which is what China would like it to be described. But from Hong Kong's perspective, it would look like a new colonial master. And that is an interesting idea that we need to bear in mind. And the main issue in Hong Kong is about the idea of whether they could or could not decide their political system and their weight of life, and even their own future. So what I wanted to focus on for the rest of my 10 minutes, on the idea of the colonisation of knowledge using the case of China, I will pick in particular the case of Taiwan. The reason why I picked Taiwan is that the Chinese government has for a very long time now. Remind the rest of the world that Taiwan is part of China, Taiwan is, in their worst, a sacred territory of China from the ancient car. There is such a thing as a one China principle that the Chinese government ask all other countries to respect and uphold. Some do. Some other countries like practically all the other great powers will say that they have a one China policy, which is somewhat different from China's own one China principle. But fundamentally, the one China principle is the idea that Taiwan is part of China. This is historical, this is not contestable, and everybody must accept and embrace that. By and large, the world does so. But what really is the history of China's relationship with Taiwan. If you look at that objectively as academics as intellectuals, we will have a bit of a problem accepting the Chinese government's narrative of Taiwan being historically incontestably part of China, or that is a sacred territory of China. The concept of sacred territory, a sacred territory of a country is a very strange one to begin with. If a country described a particular territory as a sacred, that implies the rest of the country, which is not being so described as any less sacred part of that same country. That's where in mind and think about. Now, looking at the history of it, what's interesting is that Taiwan has not been for one single second, being part of the People's Republic of China, or was under the jurisdiction of it, ever. Not for one single second. Okay, let's see if we expand the definition of China from beyond the People's Republic of China to just sort of China, China. When did Taiwan become jurisdictionally part of the government in control of China. And how that happened in the late 17th century under the Qing, which is the last imperial dynasty in China. And the Chinese government will tell you, Qing is Chinese. There's a big problem there because the Qing government was not actually Chinese. It was Manchu. They conquered China, and they conquered other parts of Asia, and run them as a great empire. China was a colony of the Manchu's. And when Taiwan was taken by the Manchu's, it was also a colony of the Manchu's. And you get into a bit of an issue that if you look at different colonies of the old, say, British Empire, and one of those colonies now say that, oh, well, because we were all previously part of the British Empire, therefore territory X. Another previous colony of the UK is basically my sacred territory. You've got a bit of a problem there in nautical terms. In any event, Taiwan was ceded by the Manchu Empire to the Japanese after a war which they fought over Korea in 1894 to 1995. And when Taiwan was ceded, there was really not much of any objections from China. It was a far away frontier region, largely populated, not by Han Chinese. So really, they weren't that bothered about it. They literally allowed Taiwan to be a Japanese colony where it did in some ways forest for nearly 50 years. And the status was only changed, or the idea of Taiwan status was only to be changed in the wartime conference of Cairo in 1943. When the leader of China at the time, Chiang Kai-shek, asked for Taiwan to be returned to China. And the Allied Powers, Churchill representing UK and Rossville representing the United States thought that, okay, you want some former Japanese territory or some Japanese territory, we don't care, you can have it. But you will not get the other things you want, which is resources to fight the war. And that was the first time that Taiwan was to be given to China. In 1945, at the end of the war, by order of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers, Douglas MacArthur, an American general, a Chinese army as part of the Allied Occupation Force was dispatched to Taiwan to take occupation. Under international law, the status of Taiwan is not changed until a peace treaty is signed and the peace conference was the San Francisco Conference of 1951. And because by then, China had become divided, the Communist Party had won the civil war and seized power of mainland China in 1949. And the UK recognized that the US didn't, and the US continued to recognize the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's government, which had retreated to Taiwan as an island without. Taiwan's status became undecided because the Japanese renounced sovereignty over Taiwan, but did not hand it over to either Chinese government or anybody else. So under international law, Taiwan became an undecided territory. And then we have the Korean War in 1950. And when the Korean War happened, the American government under Truman decided to contain the Korean War and avoid the risk of China getting involved and spreading the Korean War to become a third world war. And therefore he had a policy of neutralizing the Taiwan Strait. And at that point, Chiang Kai-shek Mao Zedong in control of China thought that it means the Americans were involving themselves in the Chinese civil war, preventing the Chinese government and the Communist Party to take over Taiwan or liberate Taiwan. And then it was after that point, the suddenly Taiwan was elevated to a sacred status. And Mao tried and created two crises in the 1950s, and then he realized that the Americans would not actually use Taiwan as a base to attack mainland China, so he got relaxed. Taiwan status was put on the back burner. And then in the post-mile period in the beginning of the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese government started to rethink about Taiwan. They still wanted to get Taiwan, but they were not prepared to use force. But Taiwan, for the first time, began to acquire a kind of geo-strategic significance because of a change in the defense doctrine in China. All through the Maoist period until late 1970s, Mao had a policy of people's war, which was that China would not defend its coastal region. And if there were to be an invasion of China, let the enemy go into the inland of China, Chinese forces would close the coast and then destroy the landlocked enemy. With the reform and opening policy of Deng Xiaoping and the massive development of urban coastal China, China decided that it needs a forward maritime defense policy, what they call the first island chain. And the first island chain goes from the southern tip of Japan through the islands of Taiwan further south into the South China Sea towards the coast of your Philippines and the Malay Peninsula. There you have it. Taiwan is now strategically critical to the forward maritime defense perimeter of China. But still, the Chinese government did not have much of a navy in those days. And by now, under Xi Jinping, China has built up a navy which is numerically larger than that of the United States Navy. Now they can nearly have the capability to take Taiwan or hold Taiwan and Taiwan become so important to them. What I think matters here is that the Chinese changed their view about Taiwan because of the changing strategic considerations of them, but they force us to simply accept their interpretation of that history. I think it's a bit of a problem. You can talk about Taiwan in those terms. You can talk about Xinjiang in similar terms. You can talk about Tibet in similar terms and people in Hong Kong will say you can talk about Hong Kong in those terms. I think we have to bear in mind that when we are talking about great new rising powers, when they try to impose their narrative on their people, they sometimes in the case of China also try to change our narrative. That's where I think if we are looking at the decolonization of knowledge and of ideas, we do have to contest it. Words have meanings and words matters more than just the meanings. It can actually affect real politics and real people's life. I think I have taken up more than 10 minutes, so I will stop here and hand it back to Alexandra. Thank you very much, Steve. You didn't. Everybody's spot on time, according to academic timings as well, which we shall also consider. So what I'll do now, I'll just throw a few questions at the panel, mostly one each and then a general one that I'm just particularly pressing for me that I think perhaps those figures can address. And then I will ask the speakers to quickly respond. And as they do so, I will start collating questions from the public. And I would invite the public to actually pose their questions in the Q&A sections because I will just pick from there. I will start in the order of presentation. And to Gilbert, I would just from your talk, what fascinated me was the issue of how addressing the very broad concerns of completing capitalism might be done through different methodologies in a sense. And from what you presented, it seems to me that there is at least two ways to address, to explore conflict in capitalism. And the first is more spatial in nature in relation to a distinction between the global north and global south, developing, we have posed this distinction in different ways during this panel. But the second one is around social relations. And the capital liberal relations being central in its conflictual character being central in capitalism. And I would like to know if you could explore how the two might enforce each other but sometimes also sort of undermine each other or combine in very complex ways, because as you rightly said, not only we see the rise of the south in the north with the rising migration, but we have always had the south characterized by highly polarized levels of income inequality where the global elites have always been very much part and parcel of the global north since colonial time as a matter of fact. So I wonder if you can sort of elaborate on this two four ways in which we can see a conflictual relations and the capitalism. And to Gita, you mentioned a number of issues that I find mostly fascinating, and particularly the idea of welfare, not as a state provision, but as a provision to those that belong. Now I'd like to you to sort of if possible to expand on this concept, and particularly in relation to what we can learn from this in relation to struggles over welfare today. And also, if we do frame welfare in these terms, who is in and who is out. The question I have for Terry pertains to the basis for decolonizing knowledge and world decolonizing structures of power aid in this context. And I wonder if you could expand on the challenging of decolonizing aid in the context of declining age rates and the entry of massive entry as a matter of fact and well before the disappearance of key donors. The massive entries of private actors in in the eight sector and also the rise of new non Western donors like China in fact which now much evidence suggested might have again very sort of colonizing neocolonizing projects and objectives with reference to regions like the Horn of Africa, for instance, you know in the job I am in the type of work I do. Now the entry for instance of Chinese capital as an alternative to aid in certain parts of Africa seems to be posing both sets of new challenges. And, and finally to to to Steve. Well, you know you meant you you put a case that of Taiwan. In relation to sort of the imposition of Chinese narratives. And, and I do wonder, for instance, what is the Taiwan is basis on which these narratives themselves, however, can be strengthened because Taiwan is also the site of massive capital conglomerates like for instance so when we think about in position from China to these territories. The imposition is to whom and which instead might be sort of the, the segments or like the classes that entirely embrace locally this type of discourse and finally I will ask all. All panellists to please consider commenting on the how the impact of COVID-19 speak about conflicts in capitalism, because as a matter of fact I don't think that what we have seen with the pandemic is so much the impact on spatial divides so neatly north south or developing developed as one would have expected that is a matter of fact if we look at what the killing them there's called the necropolitics of capitalism that followed from COVID-19 is one whereby you have a poorer or like more vulnerable classes communities across regions that suffered the most so again I think this speaks very loudly about who bears the brunt of conflicts and in this case pandemics under capitalism. Thank you very much. I'll give our panels a few minutes each to answer the questions and as I do so I'll just collect your answer from the Q&A. Thanks. We can use the same order of presentation for this round. Okay. Are you hearing me. Yes, I do. Okay, thank you. I mean, very quickly because if you want to leave time for for for the audience. Yeah, you put things quite quite well and quite clearly and I mean, indeed, there have been a number of shifts going on over the recent times of over the decades that's what I tried to to to outline. You spoke of this, the two dimensions of conflict you called one spatial and the other social relations. And indeed, they were also connected as you said, the elites in the global south where maybe could be regarded as part and parcel, or at least depending on the kinds of elites but the capitalist elites of part and parcel of, of the global system of the domination that that is very, very old. So this presence of the global north in the global house is old. The new phenomenon is the presence of the global house in the global north in the form of migration here on the other end, not as part of the elite but as part of the of the laborers of the of the working class. So this this contributes to this integration of of the world, and then we have also a shift with the generalization of capitalism capitalism I think breeds struggle in some way. And, ultimately, the development of capitalism and the civilization development education conscience of various forms of conscience, create both the objective and the ideological or political grounds for also a shift, or, or arise in our combination of the struggles between what we call in the jargon vertical inequalities and horizontal inequalities, gender race, etc, etc. All these kind of struggles that have been developing tremendously over over recent times, and I would say it's no coincidence that you had a term emerging recently, you know, to designate this implication of of struggles and conflicts the term intersectionality, which, which is very much, very much about that quickly on the second point. Yeah, what I was mentioning about the pandemic with regard to north south of course the pandemic is a pandemic so by definition, the very term means it's is it affects the whole planet. And in terms of numbers we can see that the United States, for instance, more infected people than than countries like Brazil or India so so that said that would tend to give the impression that everybody's all are equal. In the face of the disease, but it's not true because the means when you just if you look I mean even if you put aside as I said the health issues and the huge difference in health. There are cities and means in between rich countries and poorer countries, but if you take the economic impact. I mean this is tremendously different because no country in the global house would have the means to to to to launch the kind of stimulus investments that you have in the north just to give you a figure because I just finished recently an article, you'll you'll see it soon, this under on this issue but I mean just think of it that the stimulus plan in India was $10 billion stimulus plan, the previous one now they're discussing a new one in the United States with one quarter of the population of India was $2 trillion that is 2000 billion so 10 billion 2000 million that gives you an idea. But that was a convincing question, although I guess I still wonder, for instance, when I see countries like India, the US or Brazil, the UK scoring so poorly against the pandemic in relation to their responses and instead countries with very limited capacity like Ghana, or Senegal, or Vietnam instead doing excellent work in terms of prevention. If there is, you know, very strong policy story there in terms of which type of governments actually sort of fail their citizens. Can I ask Gita to please engage with the some of the questions I posed as I follow what's going on in the Q&A I think there is someone that is struggling to pose the question. Alessandra, can you shut up my shut off my video I can't start it or somebody has. Okay, great. Yeah, I don't have such power. I think it's Stephanie. I think it was Stephanie. So, I think that let's start with. I mean it's the questions that you asked. I mean I'm not I'm not sure what you mean by welfare now who is in and who is out but I think that the thing. The reason I was surprised. The reason I began to think of welfare from below was because I realized I was I was looking at the history of the British poor laws in relation to what was going on in colonial South Asia. And I realized it was a completely different understanding of the idea of charity and largesse right so the poor laws were certainly before the, the new poor laws were instituted on the old poor laws of the late that was still being that was still in place in the 18th century. And I came through, you know, people got compensation and care through parishes, but the sense was, and this is the point of the charity and largesse that people were being taken care of by something bigger than them. And the pain, the Thomas pain condos say discussions that Thomas Malthus kind of argued against, had the same kind of structure. In other words, you know, so and then the condos say discussions and pain discussions were, they said at least 10 years after the civil fund was already established now. The thing that's interesting to me was that the idea of protection, when it was proposed I mean there was certainly I'm making a big generic argument but there were lots of forms of protection that were set in place by the East India Company that were not proposed from below. Right, but the first, the design of the first private public pension on the madras civil fund was absolutely proposed from the salaries of the people who were being, you know, who was factors in the East India Company. I think it's important to really to actually understand that as something that's both literal and conceptual because the reason I think it's important to understand that as conceptual is because the conceptual kind of mythos of welfare is given by the state to its citizens it also constitutes the citizens as actually sort of not not quite belonging it's kind of interesting right. The other thing that's interesting about welfare is that, you know, there isn't a sense that it's a gender whether it's a collective pool or or a pool composed of individual funds are different ways in which welfare and I mean pensions let's talk about pensions and insurance together. The fact of the matter is the funding of it comes from groups of people who belong to the area. Right. And that's something that's actually that keeps on seem that keeps on being forgotten. The other thing I have a couple. I mean it's this is it's the topic is so large that it's hard to do it justice and in a few quick moments but the last thing I want to say is, what's interesting is when people get tossed out of protections from the state, the standard story is one that the state can no longer afford to do it right that's one standard or the corporation can no longer afford to do it. Now if you look at the East India Company. Basically, the, the civil funds invested in the company the company agreed to pay their employees took a portion of the salary from the employees and agreed to pay them after retirement and the different structure organizational structures that that certainly for the madras civil fund the employees designed. When the East India Company began to lose even more money than it had and again this is very schematic it's the historical data is much more complicated. They actually sent in actuaries to prove that the civil funds was bankrupt, the fund was not bankrupt. The organization that was bankrupt was the East India Company and the money, the amount that they agreed to pay. They borrowed the money from that from their employees and the amount of interest they agreed to pay. They could no longer afford to pay it. And I think it's to me it's a slight of this this is an important kind of architectural if you will, and political and political economic political sleight of hand, that I think we have to look at when we look at welfare. You know, what is the slight so rather than assuming that the figures are true so this is the problem with the work on double entry bookkeeping is that one assumes states actually and corporations actually perform a transparent form of double entry bookkeeping When you actually look at double entry bookkeeping from the goals, the perspective of the global south and the perspective of colonial states. You actually realize that it consists of a series of slides of hand that I think I'd like us to actually take those as necessary to how we understand the abrogation of states and corporations. To the promises because the promises can only be abrogated one way. Right. I can't say to bank I'm sorry I need to stop paying my loan I have no money. So I want to say, I think, Alessandro, you made a really good point about COVID. And the thing is, I think what's interesting about the impact of COVID-19 is it's not just how much. How well countries are managing their finances, and I'd actually take as you'll bear up on his. I mean this is much more complicated idea of how India's working and stimulus packages, and not the only way one actually thinks about reviving an economy. So I would, the one thing I would say, Alessandro, is the point that you make which is extremely important is it's not how much, how well funded an economy is in some simple way, but in fact, the type of government that, you know that, and the way in which a particular kind of governance or form of governmentality has been institutionalized in a state. And again I'm being very generic here that actually gives us some indication of how effective the COVID-19 measures in an area are going to be. So, thanks a lot, Gita. Terry. I really don't want to take too much time because there are a few questions from the audience which would be good to look at. I think the entry of new players into so-called aid is indicative of how it relates directly to exercising power. So new actors like Japan and China, they combine what you might call soft power to try to gain influence with investments. They're taking civil engineering contracts which they can get either through the China Development Bank or the Asian Development Bank, building bridges in Bangladesh, for example, enormous expenditures which are mainly through loans, not grants. So it's part of business. You can just like the Netherlands goes around Asia at the moment saying we can help you solve your flood problems. And then the country will take out a loan with the Asian Development Bank and give the contract to a Dutch civil engineering company. They can all play that game now. So the link between so-called aid loans and so on, this is really important because a lot of aid is actually done through loans, not through grants. Really, really important to understand that difference. So it's basically still giving business to the corporations which used to be Western but now include Chinese, Indian and Japanese corporations. As regards the private actors, principally what are called billionaire philanthropists, my take on that as I said in my talk is that these people have got their billions through nefarious means. There's no way in which most normal moral people on this earth would find it acceptable that somebody accumulates that amount of wealth. And if they are managing to do it, there is something wrong with the systems that enable that to happen, which is again a reflection of how power operates. So the fact that some of them want to use this as they would say to do good is quite interesting and it deserves looking at. There are a couple of billionaire philanthropists I'm aware of. One is, I think she's in the Disney family, I think she's the niece of Walt Disney, who is trying to give away all her money and she has quite a good critique of capitalism. And there's another rather private billionaire philanthropists who a couple of months ago announced that he has managed to give away all his money. Thank you, others who have pledged to give away huge amounts. But, but the problem is that they're getting it in the first place amounts of money which are, you know, how many yachts can they buy how many houses can they buy so it's, we really need to look at that system. I don't understand why is it that research institutions, my own included are trying to increase the amount of money they're getting from these people. It seems to me that we can't on the one hand have a critique of unfairness exploitation and oppression in the world. And that is the critique of development research of capitalist system, and then on the other hand, willingly accept money from the proceeds of that capitalist system. I think that's a short answer to something which is quite a complex issue. I hope that helps. You're on mute. Yes, I am. Thanks. I said it really does help. Yes. Thank you very much for your thorough answer. I have Steve. And then we have three questions which I hope we're going to address from the Q&A section. Alexandra, I think you raise a very questions about the Taiwanese capitalists. There are indeed some very rich and powerful capitalist in Taiwan. But in terms of the Chinese narrative, they all willingly or not accept or acknowledge and or at least not challenge the Chinese narrative. That's quite a very simple reason. In the last 30 years, all the major Taiwanese capitalists have enlarged their fortune on the basis of their operations on the mainland of China. And the Chinese government has made it absolutely crystal clear that if any one of them should be singing from a hymn sheet different from that issued by the Communist Party of China, pun intended there, then they will have their fortune taken away from them, or at least the means of making or keeping their fortunes removed from them. So the capitalists in Taiwan are subjected to the need to accept or acknowledge or tolerate or play by the narrative of the Chinese Communist Party, just like everybody else. None of them would stairs to mentioned a simple historical fact, which is that the Communist Party of China had from the 1920s all through until towards the end of the 1940s been one of the strongest advocates of independence of Taiwan. It's not something new. This is something the Communist Party advocated for two decades. None of them could even say that none of them could even cite the historical sources to justify that they could not even cite the Communist Party documents, which is the independence of Taiwan. This shows you how much the power of a rising power can be one that is becoming very, very rich. And here, if I may just sort of echo very quickly to the point you raised about the COVID-19. I think interesting for me in this particular context for the COVID-19 and China is how effectively China has shaped or affected the way how we have been narrative about COVID-19. We are not even outside of China, able to establish and find out how COVID-19 really originated. I'm not saying necessarily that the Chinese government was responsible for it and therefore they were covering up. We don't know. But we are not allowed to find out because the Chinese government doesn't want to take the risk that any independent investigations into the origins of COVID-19 might embarrass the Chinese government. The control of that narrative, I think, is very, very important. I mean, there are a couple of questions related to that, at least one question related to that, but I won't do that until unless you ask me to do so. So I'll hand it back to you now, Alexandra. Thank you very much, Steve. That's such an insightful answer, actually intriguing if describing some of the things you raised. I have a few questions. One is, well, two, actually, by Kevin Webb, and I'll try to interweave them together. Someone was living in Shenzhen, China and visited museums there in other parts of China, the rewriting of history about Tibet, Taiwan is the narrative that the Chinese believe. And it's illustrated and enforced in these museums. That is a segment of the question. And also that nobody has mentioned corruption, but that is very high in Thailand now. That skewed the wealth towards the rich, those in government, those working for the government, teachers, servants, etc. So I guess, okay, so there's the same speaker, but there's fairly different questions. So one relates to the actual ways in which the narrative that you talked about, Steve, is internalized by the Chinese people themselves, I guess, and also through the production of popular knowledge inside China. And the second issue is one on corruption and sort of, you know, the support towards the wealthier classes, although I'm quite not sure that this is only for Steve, because the example that is provided by Kevin is Thailand. So perhaps, so there's my want to comment on that. Another question. I'll just read also the other because it's by a different author, Halil that asks, in the tension between the US and China, how do you assess the Chinese arguments and defense of the right to development. And I think this is perhaps also a very good question for Terry. So, Steve, if you want to go first and then I'll just get the answer by Terry. Sure. Very good questions. The issue about the Chinese narrative of Tibet and other bits. I think we have, if I may, I would like to answer it in two ways. All governments in some ways try to shape the historical narratives and not all of them are always entirely truthful. But at least when you're dealing with that in democratic countries, other people can challenge them. When you're dealing with it in China, you are not allowed to challenge that. I think that is really the big difference there. What we have to bear in mind in the in the situation in China is that the Communist Party has a monopoly of the truth. And it has a monopoly of history, because the party is very much aware that he or she who controls the presence controls the past, and by controlling the past, one controls the future. And that's where they are going and that's what they want to do. When we are dealing with a domestic context of deliberately using a current of particular nationalism to shape the thinking of one's own people. One can understand it. I'm not saying that it's a good thing. I think we should be encouraged people to think freely and challenge that too. But at least we can understand that. But when that is being extended beyond one's border, then we are dealing with a much more serious issue. And that is where we are dealing with in the case of China there. I think I think Alexandra has asked someone else to address the other issue, so I will leave it there. Thank you. Terry. I wasn't quite sure which question it was you would like me to look at. I have a question about the right to development, which I thought you would be in a particular good position to answer. So in relation to the tension between us and China. How do you assess how would you assess the Chinese arguments and defense. I'll ask you because I think the Chinese, well, it interrogates China, but to an extent I think it's been an argument that has been put forward by a number of developing countries. Just one second. If Gita instead could take the question posed by Kevin as well after you finish your answer, that would be great. Thank you. I'm not sure what the question I was meaning in this question about the conflict between us and China but it's very evident in in arguments about climate change and who should contribute more to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. And basically this argument led to the failure of the Copenhagen COP meeting 10 years ago, because China argued for the right to develop which meant emitting lots of carbon dioxide from coal fire power stations and from its industries and so on. I think it's very evident to people that this is not about a right to develop it to, it's about a right to make profits, and to command the economy, because actually since then China has become the world's leading economy using renewable energy, wind power in particular. So, their ability to transition away from using coal, or begin that transition was a very, very positive thing but that was under their own particular forms of capitalism. Although coal has not diminished nearly nearly enough. So, this notion of a right to development is has to be couched around the idea of what that development consists of it if it consists of increased inequality and environmental damage. Many, many people involved in development these days would not call that good development so this was an issue around sovereignty and political argument not about whether or not it's good development. Excellent Terry. I'm very quickly I think I'm responding to Kevin's question. I mean Kevin's sort of comments on Thailand and socialized medicine to actually go back to what Alessandra said which is, and what I sort of ended with which is, I think socialized medicine is talking to a doctor in India. And basically one of the things he pointed out was the states in India that did the best with COVID-19, even within one country with those in which healthcare was available to almost everybody on a more equitable basis. And I think socialized certain forms of socialized medicine certainly permit that and allow for a different kind of response and that those forms of socialized medicine don't in fact have to just come in be available to people to denizens I'd say denizens rather than just citizens people who live in the area, because the country is considered one that is quote unquote highly developed or one that's considered, you know, economically completely and utterly viable cuba's a case in point. So with that, I end. Thanks a lot. I do have a last question after which I'll take the panel to a close, which is by Zulfi Karabanji, who's asking if the within that people should implement change in their own communities. In terms of creating systems of knowledge a fair distribution of wealth education and investment and participating in competitive business in the just related to a Robin Hood figure I'm not sure how that relates to that because we just I think here the issue is to what extent there's space for other forms of engagement in the context of the conflictual nature of capitalism. Whoever wants to answer the question can actually come forward. Yeah, it's very interesting questions will cut. I think basically what you're saying is the need for class struggle. Now that that sounds very vague and so on but basically what we have to do is to look back to how these transformations to better life happened in other countries over time. And if we look at that then it emerges because of people's organizations trade unions women organizing around suffrage and other rights. And so we need to look at how how did Britain go from being cut through capitalism in the 19th century involving slavery on a huge scale towards the welfare state which began to emerge at the end of the 19th century and came to its peak. In the 1950s and 60s. How did that happen. It happened because there was enough pressure of people from the from the grassroots through these class and gender organizations to get elected a party which was in favor of those the Labour Party was in favor of having those welfare conditions the socialized medicine that one of the other question is asked. So I don't really actually understand why people in development studies. Talk about transformations. This new, newish buzzword, but actually going back to look in history at how it happened in other countries. How did it happen in China to go from landlord ism to much more equitable distribution of land and wealth. I know it didn't always you know hasn't always ended up right but that transition was amazing. Geeta has already referred to Cuba as an example of a country where this grassroots movement led to a kind of a state which has embedded within it the idea of fairness. And, and I think that's what we can learn from so Zulfika, what we have to do is create all of these organizations that push for that from the bottom. And I will, I'll echo Terry. In fact, the we're being trained to think that, you know, we have to sort of reconstitute ourselves in a different way but in fact, it's collective organizing that actually got the madras civil fund started. The first private public pension fund, which I say, unlike Terry is the genesis of the under as an understanding of welfare took a long time, and it took a group of people and it took a group of people fighting. So, I absolutely at secondary to say that's where transformations occur from the grassroots and from collective struggle, not from individual work. Thank you, Geeta, and I want to thank you all panelists for having been with us and share their ideas on capital and conflict I want to thank very much the source festival of ideas support that has been like hidden, but very helpful in the background I want to thank all the public for their for staying with us during this one hour and 45 minutes I learned a lot and I hope you have as well. And with this, I leave you to the other many interesting sessions we have at the source festival of ideas. Thanks again to all our panelists and that is all for you. Thank you for great. Thank you, Terry. Thank you. Thank you, Steve.