 So, hello and welcome everyone to this first event in the SOS Continuing the Conversation series. I hope you can all understand me and see me. First, I would just like to welcome you all and thank you very much for joining. Can I please ask you to mute your microphone and maybe close your webcam because this will make it easier for all of us as this event is attended by 250 people. So, thank you very much. My name is Dr. Christina Max. So, I was previously the lecturer in Chinese politics at the SOS Politics Department and now I moved on to the University of Sheffield. So, I will be the moderator for today. The title of today's event is COVID-19 What Drives China's Approach and our speaker for tonight is Professor Steve Zhang. So, before I introduce Steve, I would just like to go through a few housekeeping notes. So, first of all, please be aware that this event is recorded and will be shared later on on the SOS website. Secondly, if you would like to discuss or follow this event, then you can find us on our Twitter account using hashtag SOS or hashtag SOS alumni. And then finally, I would just like to give you an overview of this event today. So, first we will start with about 20 minutes talk by Professor Steve Zhang. Then we will, during this time, you will be able to post your questions to Steve in the chat box on the right-hand side. Afterwards, we will then have a 20-minute Q&A session during which we will discuss or Steve will discuss and answer selected questions from the chat box. We will not be able to discuss all of them, but I'm sure we will have a very vibrant conversation today. So, finally, I would like to introduce our speaker for tonight. Professor Steve Zhang is well-known among many of you, I'm sure. He is the director of the SOS China Institute and has written extensively on Chinese politics, whether in the field of Chinese foreign relations, Chinese domestic politics, and also politics in the greater China area, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan. And most recently, Steve has started a very interesting new research project on Xi Jinping thought, and I very much look forward to his findings in this area. You will also know Steve from his frequent appearance on the news. So, he's a frequent commentator on the BBC as well as other global news channels and has already shared a lot of his insights into the COVID-19 crisis there on the news as well. And today with us here in this SOS series. So, I would just like to hand over to you, Steve. I'm very interested in your insights. Well, thank you very much, Christina, for your very kind introduction. Given that we only have 20 minutes, I will get straight on to the point. What I will do in the next 20 minutes or so is to start off by putting things in context, and then I will highlight what I think is the most important driving force of the Chinese government's response to the COVID-19 crisis. And then I will say something about how the Chinese government is dealing with the existence of a pandemic and also underline that we have to make a distinction when we look and say that the Chinese government doesn't understand. Sometimes we are talking about collectively and spiritually, whether they understand or not. Now, first of all, to put things in context, I wanted to start off by suggesting that we can forget about most of the conspiracy theories that are going around. The idea that the virus was the result of laboratory work in Wuhan and it was spread by the Chinese maliciously. But those are just conspiracy theories without much of real evidence and it's quite clear the Chinese government did not intend to start a global pandemic with China being the first major victim. So I think we can put that away. The second thing I wanted to put in context is to understand that yes, there clearly were major mistakes that were being made by the Chinese government at different stages, particularly at the early stage. But it's a bit too simplistic to simply say that they fail and it's kind of a system failure. And I'll suggest to you that in fact, the system in place in China did not fail. It worked very much in accordance to how it was being designed and conceived. And the system itself for all the awareness it had of previous problems like the emergence of SARS and the avian flu and all this happened in the last 17 years and all the institutions that were being set up to alert the government fundamentally, the incentive system in place make it very, very difficult for the systems to have responded in the way that we would have liked is to have responded or in a way that we would expect it to be responding. Fundamentally is a very, very heavily centralized system led by Xi Jinping. When you're dealing with the potential of something like a pandemic or an epidemic. At the local level, even though being head of the city like Wuhan 11 million people or the province in which Wuhan is a part of the province of Kubei and obviously both the party secretary for Wuhan and the party secretary for Kubei are very, very senior officials. But they really don't have the scope to take action without running it by the very top of the leadership. Because if they said that there was a problem of a new virus developing in Wuhan and here we're talking about December when they knew about this and it was again in December. Most people thought that it was in the market life market in Wuhan and if they simply close the market down and count all the animals and incinerated them and quarantined the people involved with the Huanan market. They would have raised questions by the international media and a lot of questions will be very embarrassing for the Chinese government. So there's no way that a local leader would have responded in that way and therefore it will have to be pushed all the way back to the top Chinese leadership. And it would not be decided until Xi Jinping have a chance to look at that and that didn't happen until the 7th of January. So in many ways the system worked to form and even at that time Xi Jinping was still much more focused on dealing with the relationship with the United States trade war. And therefore the prospect of some kind of disease that may or may not become an epidemic in a far away city like Wuhan would not have taken the attention of Xi Jinping. Now we also need to bear in mind that while the Chinese government did cover up and did mismanage it in the first place and if they had not done so and have responded much more quickly they almost certainly would have saved a lot of lives globally. But that is something separate from simply saying that we should all focus on what this government has failed to do because the reality is that most governments outside of China also responded in a very complacent way because we know certainly by January it was very very serious. But yet governments in Europe and in North America by and large did not take it very seriously. So the idea that if the Chinese had taken it seriously earlier on so it would all be hunky-dory I think is a bit fanciful. The only way that it could have made a difference would have been for the Chinese governments to have responded in the way the government in Taiwan had responded and Taiwan took it seriously in December and started checking people arriving in Taiwan from Wuhan for the end of December. And then here we're talking about a fully democratic government which was constantly aware that it was under threat and if you get into problems it will not get help and support from the external world. So unless we have that kind of conditions there's no way the Chinese government would have responded in the way that the government in Taiwan had responded. So that was I think where we have to understand how the Chinese government responded in the first instance. Now when the pandemic happened what was the single most important issue that focused the attention of the Chinese leadership? Now this is separate from what were the priorities of the Chinese government as a whole. I think there were a number of priorities and the priorities are reflected in the composition of the top level coordinating committee which was being set up at the end of January when they took it seriously. It was a committee of nine individuals and the committee's full name is the central leading small group for works to counter the new coronavirus infection pneumonia epidemic. We're simply called the leading small group. Of this leading small group of nine leaders there is not one single scientist or medical officer. Instead the membership includes the premier of the PRC who has the economy as his primary portfolio. We have also the vice premier Shun Chen Nan who has amongst her many portfolios public health. And then amongst the other members and this was interesting. You have the director of the Communist Party Central Office. Obviously he's the manager in charge of coordinating all the work of the party. And then there was the party secretary for Beijing, the foreign minister, the state council's secretary general, again the coordinating person for the state council and then the minister for public security. So all the portfolios involved represents priorities. There's one other area and the only other area that has two persons being represented and that's the propaganda section of the party. Both the supreme head of the ideological and propaganda work, the political standing committee member Huang Huning was one of them. The other one was the head of the central propaganda department of the Communist Party, Wang Kunming. So you can see that all these public health and economy were priorities. The most important about that all was in fact the propaganda department. It's about controlling the narrative. That was a single most important issue there. But here we should again be very careful, even though seizing and controlling the narrative was seen as the most important issue. It was not propaganda for propaganda's sake. The real priority, the real driver behind this was about maintaining the control of the Communist Party in keeping it in power and maintaining the leadership of Xi Jinping. So you have amongst them all the people with the portfolios, somebody to deal with the real issue of the public health, somebody to deal with the fallout of the economy. The others were all about spreading the message or keeping the country under control so that nobody could seriously challenge the leadership of the party and in particular that of Xi Jinping. And I think it really tells us how the Chinese government prioritized it. And once we can see that controlling the narrative is so important, then we can begin to understand why the Chinese government would use a very aggressive international propaganda campaign supported by its foreign policy establishment. And push ideas that people outside of China will find it very, very difficult to understand. Like pushing the idea that the virus did not start in China or Wuhan, but in fact it started by the United States military army. Or when Italy became seriously in trouble and was getting figures that would make Italy look like a worse victim than China, then they started to... So one say quote, extraordinary imaginatively of an Italian medic and imply that the Italians admitted that it really started in Italy before it started in China. Hardly anybody would seriously believe in that the Chinese government is not dumb, they know that. But pushing for that narrative is important in terms of presenting to people in China that the party is not to blame and that the evil foreigners are to blame. And of course once the crisis happened, once the pandemic happened, the Chinese government takes the view that one must not let a crisis be wasted. It happened. They didn't engineer the crisis, but the crisis happened. And the Chinese did what they did for primarily domestic party considerations. But the early lockdown of Wuhan and then the spread of it means that the Chinese government, China as a whole was the first in and it was also the first out. China came out of lockdown ahead of the others and that would give China some advantages. First of all, when China was the worst hit area, it was the one that suffered the most from shortage of PPE and therefore they very quickly take advantage of the industrial capacity to regear some of the manufacturing facilities to produce not their usual products but PPEs. And now that China itself has less of a demand for PPEs, they are able to export them. So they take advantage of that and try to see the narrative and present China as the saviour for the rest of the world. I don't think one can blame the Chinese government for being opportunistic about this. I think any other government in a similar situation would want to be somewhat opportunistic about that. And of course the reality that the capitalist, democratic, western countries have been very badly hit, much worse than they had themselves expected, or for that matter the Chinese had expected them to be, also provided an opportunity for the Chinese government. We are looking at countries like the United Kingdom, the United States and the EU as a whole, practically on their knees, dependent on China for PPEs. And these are the countries that usually will take the most robust stance on issues like Hong Kong. Really, there wasn't any reason to be surprised that the Chinese government would use the fallout from the pandemic to push for a hardline in Hong Kong in order to get rid of those protesters that practically put Hong Kong in power, economic difficult situations, most of the second half of last year. And I think the Chinese government will push even more in terms of how they can push in Hong Kong. And it's also quite likely that they will take advantage of this and push for controversial things like the setting up of an air defence identification zone over South China Sea, because that again is something that is normally very problematic for the Chinese government in terms of the reactions from the outside world. They will try to do that. They might potentially even try to push Taiwan harder. And they will also try to take advantage of this and push themselves a bit more over the Belt and Road Initiative. But here I think we have to be very careful. The system now in place in China puts Xi Jinping so much at the top of it and in control that most of your senior Chinese officials prioritise ingratiating themselves with Xi Jinping. So they may not be using the opportunity over the Belt and Road Initiative to promote Chinese soft power and instead they may well be doing things that they think Xi Jinping would like to see being done over the Belt and Road, but will not be well received by countries at the receiving end of it. And that's also perhaps why we have seen the current of very frankly racist treatment of African residents in the southern city of Guangzhou or Canton. Now finally in the last two minutes I just wanted to say that yes we can see from the UK, from Europe, from America that the very aggressive Chinese foreign policy, getting Chinese diplomats to come out to say things which are very problematic. And the very aggressive propaganda campaign is generating a lot of negative responses from Europe and from North America. Can the Chinese government really not know about that? This is where I think we have to make a distinction. The Chinese government officially probably doesn't really accept that. The Chinese government does not believe that it has done anything wrong. It believes that it's absolutely right and completely righteous of it. So in that sense they are in self-denial, but that doesn't mean that you don't have very bright people, Chinese diplomats and others in the Chinese government who do understand that this is causing a fair bit of negative backlash against China. But then they really do not feel that they are in a position to come out and contradict anything that Xi Jinping has said or implicitly wanted to be done. So we get into a situation that we see the Chinese handling it quite poorly. But when we say the Chinese are handling the pandemic very poorly, we should perhaps also bear in mind that most countries have handled the pandemic very poorly. I will stop here and hand it back to you, Christina, with 40 seconds to spare. Thank you, Steve. So there's still a lot of time left for discussion and I have seen that nobody has posed any questions yet. So please feel free to post any questions that might come to your mind. We do have a few pre-submitted questions and the first one is how has the COVID-19 pandemic changed the global perception of the PRC? What is your take on that, Steve? I think it's a very good question. Where I think the big change happens is that before COVID-19, there is a general sense that the Chinese government has been somewhat quirky, but it is a pretty reliable partner and a kind of hawkish rhetoric that the trauma administration was taking was perhaps unjustified. I think we are now popularly going to see a lot more people who are much more concerned about how the Chinese government deals with a crisis situation. A crisis where there is not a West versus China situation, but others competing with China. And the competition is in terms of the supply of PPEs. Is China a reliable provider of critical equipment in the moment of crisis? And there are perhaps too many countries or governments that feel the Chinese have not turned out to be as reliable as they were hoping they would be. And the same may also apply to some of the multinationals looking at the global supply chain. That previously China as a critical part of the global supply chain was not something that the multinationals thought much about. You may well have some of them now getting a bit worried because of the disruptions to the supply chain in January and February, before their own factories were closed down as a result of the general lockdown. Some of those effects may well be a bit rather more long lasting than I think we would like to admit. Over to you. Thanks very much Steve. So we have a few more questions. Mark for instance wanted to know in what ways does the political culture drive the consent within China to the surveillance measures that have been put in place? And similarly to what extent do the political cultural elements factor in the UK's consent to surveillance at this time? I would be inclined to think that it is more about the political system than the political culture. Because when we look at the political culture in China, it is easy to get confused between the traditional Chinese culture and how that is being modified by the politics of it. But in fact, a lot of what happens in China is driven by the Party's day. The Party says what needs to be done, really people did not have much of any choice. When we are looking at the UK, I think we are looking at a combination of the two. There is an element. Personally, I think there is a very strong element of conversations by the government when we look at the COVID-19 early stage, whether we are talking about February or by mostly in fact February. I think they probably should have taken it more seriously in January. But since the Chinese government did not formally take it seriously until the 20th of January, I think we can excuse that. But by February there is really no excuse for us not taking it seriously. Where I think the political culture element comes is the British willingness to think that yes, we don't have to impose very strict rules like continental Europeans have to. If there is going to be a lockdown in the UK, we can rely on the reasonableness and the good sense of the British people to do the right thing in the situation. So we don't need to require people to download and form, sign it to say why you are going out on a daily basis, which is what happens in France. And we simply say that you can only go out for exercise once a day and expect people to respond to that. I think that part is your political culture bit. I don't see anything comparable being applicable in China. They don't trust the people to do that. And that's why the surveillance becomes so important and it is basically imposed by the government and people did not really have a choice in terms of whether they wanted or not. Great. Thank you very much. And so we have a few questions that relate to China's rise or whether this is an opportunity for China's beginning of China's kind of global leadership or kind of China's China to rise even above the US leadership. What do you think, Steve? Well, I think at the moment it is a bit too early to know how the world will come out of COVID-19. We don't know whether there will be a second wave, or for that matter, even a third wave or not. If there will be a second wave in the winter, how countries will come out of that and manage that? We don't know. It hasn't happened yet. On the basis of where we are, the Chinese actually are doing better. The Chinese government is actually doing better than most governments in the Democratic West with a few notable exceptions. I think we can see that Taiwan certainly has done very, very well. It's shortened really well. South Korea has done pretty well, but for most of the rest of us, we haven't really done all that well in coping with it. And the Chinese economy is in a better place than most of the other major economies at the moment. And that will give them an advantage. And of course, there is also the tremendous helper for the Chinese government, which is Donald Trump. The mismanagement by Donald Trump of the US situation and the US position globally is very helpful in making it possible for the Chinese to appear to be doing relatively better, even though they are also not doing quite so well. If that doesn't change, I think the Chinese will try to use that to assert itself more. But the assumption that that will definitely remain the case in the next year or two I think is perhaps premature. Okay, thank you, Steve. We also have a few questions regarding what you just mentioned, the anti-Chinese rhetoric by the Trump administration, but also the labeling of the virus as China virus. So what do you think about the Chinese authorities responses and comments on this rhetoric? And do you think that is actually something that could help the Chinese government kind of in their anti-U.S. propaganda? I'm afraid that those pretty regrettable somewhat racist comments that were made by a few, mostly Donald Trump and some of the people working for him, and some of the other people in society really are very helpful to the Communist Party. I think the Communist Party is not all that unhappy about those comments being made. They needed to change the narrative in China to get people not focus on the failure of the Chinese government and focus much more on a hostile international environment that is being unfair to China, and therefore use that to provoke nationalism amongst the Chinese people in this response. So those racist comments fall straight into that. And Xi Jinping himself, before COVID-19 came into existence, gone beyond what his predecessors have done in terms of how he engaged with the Chinese communities overseas. Officially, under China's nationality law, if a Chinese person acquire a non-Chinese nationality, that person automatically lose Chinese nationality is not a Chinese citizen any longer. Now Xi Jinping has taken the view that if you have Chinese blood running through your veins, then you are Chinese and he wants you to be patriotic to China, which is usually very difficult to get to some of the people in Europe and America, particularly your second generation who are born here, brought up here. They feel much more British than anything else. But if those people are at the receiving end of racist abuse, it will not be so. It will be easier for the party to engage with them. And this is a leadership that is quite happy to do that. So I don't think the Chinese government is too upset by that kind of racist abuse, which I think is really quite regrettable because others will be paying the price. Over to you. Thank you, Steve. We also have a few questions regarding to what extent the Chinese Party State can use this as an opportunity to, for instance, put through more aggressive measures in Hong Kong or Tibet? Oh, I think the Hong Kong case is already happening. We saw in the last two weeks also the arrest of 15 veterans, Democrats in Hong Kong, which really was simply unnecessary. We are definitely already seeing that. I think in the middle of the crisis in China, when the two leaders in Wuhan city and Hubei province were being brought down for their failure in the early stages. The party also, under Xi Jinping, also changed the leadership of the Hong Kong and Macau affairs office and appointed a new party secretary who, well, a new head of the Hong Kong affairs office, somebody who had a long standing background as a party secretary, but never have any experience managing either foreign affairs or Hong Kong affairs. So it's quite clear that with the change of personnel in charge of Hong Kong affairs, both at the Hong Kong Macau affairs office and also had the central liaison office in Hong Kong, both on full ministerial level post. Both have no background with Hong Kong, is to get these people to enforce the lines that Xi Jinping want to be enforced and regrettably they will be, and this will be a hard line position that they will be pushing in Hong Kong in the months to come. Thank you, Steve. We also had a few questions about China's relationship to the US and how the virus has, this pandemic has impacted it. So to what extent do you see an impact on the Sino-US trade war or on the relationship between the two countries in general? Well, very good question. Again, the trade deal is no longer being mentioned much by either government. So the idea that they will move forward to phase two of the trade deal is just at the moment purely academic. I don't really see that happening. Most of the world saw the so-called decoupling between China and the United States as having been pushed by Donald Trump last year, 2019. Now, actually, Xi Jinping started the process in 2013, but very few people see that. So let's just stick to the mainstream narrative that the decoupling was pushed by Donald Trump in 2019. Most US companies did not respond very much to Donald Trump's evocation of decoupling with China. I think we are now going to see a lot more US companies which will take the decoupling much more seriously because they need to relocate some of the manufacturing facilities in China to somewhere else. It may not necessarily be reshoring them back to the USA, but they I think would be looking at putting their factories somewhere else, whether it's Southeast Asia or in Latin America. I think they will have to ponder about them and some will go in one direction and some will go in the other direction. Now, some will continue to stay in China for the simple reality that China is now the largest market for some of those companies. I mean, if you will say GM, you are not going to leave China because China is a bigger market for GM cars than the United States is. And they don't sell that many in Europe in relative terms compared to the US and China as a market. So they will continue to try to manufacture in China. And so we will see this complex relationship and we will also see a solidification of the bipartisan approach in the United States towards China. And it will no longer matter whether Donald Trump wins the election or not in November. The next administration will be even harder on China than perhaps the Trump administration has been. And if it's not a Trump administration, it will perhaps be a lot more rational and more easy to see how it goes. But I don't see a Biden administration being particularly soft on China and make things easy for China. Over to you. Thank you. And we also have a few questions regarding nationalism. So to what extent do you think is this an opportunity for the CCP to bolster nationalist, even xenophobic sentiments among the population? And how does this, to what extent do you think that the government would then allow this to be used against, you know, in the trade war as such? Well, the Chinese government use what I would call party-centric nationalism as a matter of course anyway. That is almost their default part of their approach in terms of how they try to mandate relationship between Chinese people and foreigners and also China's relations with the rest of the world. So we will see that happened. And we are already seeing non-Chinese people being required to face far more restrictions in China than we have seen for at least 20 years. And those restrictions, like now if you are a non-Chinese person but with a permit to visit China or to stay to work in China, you simply are not allowed to get back. Here I think we get into a much more difficulty which is that while the official policy is not racist, it is just foreigners who are being restricted. In the actual implementations of it, it gets actually quite racist. The darker shade of people do not get treated in the same way as the lighter shade of people from outside of China. And that's why we saw those very racist activities in Guangzhou where Africans who have apartments and hotel rooms, some of them were being evicted and being fought on the streets and in very, very dire straits. And that of course provoked very strong responses from African governments and that's what finally get them to put a stop to it. Thank you Steve. You also mentioned during your talk the ways in which the local government at first tried to cover up the situation. And a few of the comments also mentioned for instance the kind of disappearance of critical voices or citizen journalists. To what extent do you think this has will this impact on a greater push for kind of a greater freedom of speech within China? Well, we've heard that in 2019 they will not be doing freedom of speech in China or the move towards democratization or protection of human rights any favor. If anything, it will push them back a bit further. And what happened with COVID-19 was that by late January to most of February the Chinese government, the Communist Party, the people who worked closely to Xi Jinping were really worried. They saw that there was a serious risk that their legitimacy to rule in China based on their ability to deliver a better tomorrow for everybody in China was being challenged because they were not delivering. The first time since 1989 the Beijing, Mexico, the parties they failed to deliver visibly to people in China in a big way. So they were very worried. And that's why they're coming up so hard in terms of the repressive methods and doctors being sirens, citizen journalists being detained, disappeared, in fact disappeared. And they also then have to come up with this nationalistic propaganda to direct anger against foreigners. It's all because they were themselves worried about the risk of push within China for progressive changes, which might potentially undermine the party and Xi Jinping's whole onto power. So well, I'm not going to see, I'm not seeing that being changed in the foreseeable future. Over to you. Thank you Steve. We also had two linked questions regarding China's refusal to allow an independent investigation on the origin of the pandemic and whether this might lead to a litigation in the future. Well, I think the attempts by some people to seek reparation from China in some ways is really a computer based off time and be a distraction. The Chinese government will not agree to be a party to any litigation process. They simply will not be involved in any of them, whether you're talking about through the US court system, or whether you are talking about through some international mechanism. If they refuse to be parties to it, that's not a huge amount you can do. And there's no enforcement mechanism effectively in place for the Chinese governments to be tried in absentia and then be required to make compensations that whatever court might decide to do. And most of that, I think is a distraction because they focus on the wrong thing. The focus is very much on the virus start in China and this start from the lab in Wuhan. Well, we know the weight of the scientific opinion is that the virus was a natural mutation. It was not the result of human engineering. So it's not deliberately created in the Wuhan laboratory. And when we are looking at it as a matter of biology, we have to accept that new virus happens in different countries a lot of the time, most of the time. On this occasion, this particularly deadly one is happened in China. And we can't hold a country responsible for a physical mutation. It might not happen in the Wuhan Huanan market, the life market. Personally, I don't see any need, any point for any country to have life market, but China is not the only countries that have life markets. So the idea that because the Chinese have life markets in Wuhan, therefore you focus on that is a distraction. What we should be focusing on really is on when the animals to human transmission happened. And in particular, when humans to human transmission happened, as and we know that happens in December, how that government responded to it. That's the real issue. Not where the virus originated. That will be my personal view over to you. Thanks. So perhaps I will just have a last question. I see many more interesting questions, but unfortunately we won't be able to go through them all. But there are two questions partially related to Taiwan. So do you think this pandemic will have some kind of benefit to Taiwan? Or do you see more the party state kind of trying to use international organizations such as the WHO as a kind of diplomatic tool to kind of sideline Taiwan? Well, Taiwan is already benefiting from it because Taiwan has responded impressively well. Taiwan is the only country that took it seriously in December and then took appropriate and non draconian measures in accordance with the democratic rules and managed to contain the virus. And Taiwan has also managed to turn around the shortage of PPE domestically into a surplus and gave them away to other countries, which gave them a lot of soft power in the conventional sense of what soft power meant. So we already seen that happening where I think I would be much more cautious is to assume that this will simply continue and be sustained. The Chinese government under Xi Jinping is a very narrow minded and mean administration. The fact that Taiwan has done so well also shows up how badly the Chinese government have managed. And that contrast is really painful for the leadership in Beijing to see. It will not surprise me that the Chinese government under Xi Jinping will push much harder wherever they could to punish the Taiwanese because of the success of the Taiwanese and because of the goodwill the success of the Taiwanese government have generated elsewhere. So if we are seeing European countries pushing hard for Taiwan to be admitted as say an observer in the WHO, I would expect to see an unprecedentedly harsh response from the Chinese government to make that extremely costly for WHO or the country's sponsoring. So whether Taiwan will come up better off, I don't know. Bear in mind the Chinese government ultimately can use some sort of force against Taiwan. It does not necessarily mean it's a full-scale invasion, but there are still military means that they can use to make things very, very uncomfortable for the government in Taiwan. Your Beijing really wants to do so. On this rather unfortunate and depressing note I should stop. It is unfortunate, but thank you so much Steve for this fascinating talk and for answering so many of these many interesting questions that we had. And thank you all for attending and for posing these interesting questions. We will have to wrap up now, but I do have a few remarks as well as an end note so to speak. So if you would like to watch this event again, we will post it online on the source website and on social media pages. But you can also forward this to any other interested colleagues, friends or students that might want to watch it. There will also be more events on COVID-19 crisis in the future. The next event will be on the 28th of May and the title COVID-19 can linguists save lives. And this will be an event where Dr. Mandana Sethedini-Poor will talk about whether linguists can save lives and you can already get tickets on the Eventbrite website. But until then you can also follow this event series on Twitter again by using the hashtag SOAS or SOAS alumni. And until then I'll just say goodbye and thank you again and have a good night everyone. Thank you.