 So this is the CIW annual lecture, it's the fifth annual lecture. There's a kind of, in Chinese culture and history, there is a cycle of 60 years is very important. This is a kind of cycle of five years, because the first CIW annual lecture was given by tonight's lecture, Jeremy Varme, in 1911, on the theme of Australia and China and the world whose literacy. He was followed in 2012 by Professor Wang Gung-Woo, a member of our advisory board, who spoke on China's choices. In 2013, the former Vice Chancellor of the ANU Ian Chup, AO, now still I think the Chief Scientist for another short time, spoke on partners in influence, how China and Australia relate through science. And last year, 2014, the annual lecture was given by Mr Gerald Cito, I'm very pleased to say this in the audience tonight. Gerald is normally resident in Beijing, he is the inspirational architect of the buildings that we have here. He spoke indeed on the architecture of education in Canberra and Beijing. Tonight, Jeremy gives his second lecture within a different capacity. Jeremy is now founding director of CIW. And he speaks on the topic of new psychology in the Xi Jinping era. To introduce this particular lecture, I think there's probably no better way than to quote Jeremy himself ten years ago. New psychology is a term that entered into signological discussion, if you will, at least in Australia, in a small magazine, a small newsletter, called the Chinese Studies Association of Australia newsletter. And in issue number 31 of May 2005, Jeremy wrote an article about new psychology. And with your forbearance, I'd like to read some of it. The concept behind this rather nebulous expression, new psychology, is a simple one. And one that to many colleagues who are engaged with things Chinese will not appear to be particularly new. I speak of new psychology as being descriptive of a robust engagement with contemporary China, and indeed with the cinephoned world in all of its complexity, be it local, regional or global. It affirms a conversation and intermingling that also emphasises strong scholastic underpinnings in both the classical and modern Chinese language and studies, at the same time as encouraging an ecumenical attitude in relation to a rich variety of approaches and disciplines, whether they be mainly empirical or more theoretically inflected. In seeking to emphasise innovation within psychology by recourse to a word new, it is nonetheless evident that I continue to affirm the distinctiveness of psychology as a mode of intellectual inquiry. Implicit in the inquiry of new psychology is an abiding respect for the written and spoken forms of Chinese as these have evolved over centuries. New psychology can thus also be described as an unrelenting attentiveness to cinephoned ways of speaking, writing and scene, and to the different forces that have shaped the evolution of cinephoned text and images as well as cinephoned ways of sense-making. Textually, the interests of new psychology range from the specificities of canonical and authoritative formulations in both the classical language or rather the languages of the pre-denastic and denastic eras, and the modern vernacular to the many inventive bylines that have emerged more recently in our media-saturated times. So those of us who know Jeremy and have read this work will recognise how new psychology can and should be done. As an approach, it is the guiding light of research in this centre. As a practice, it has become for many of us simply how we do our work. And that's huge praise. Ten years ago when Jeremy's article on new psychology was published, Hu Jintao had been General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the People's Republic for only a couple of years. Winshar Baal was the new cramming. In January of that year, Jia Zhiyan, the reforming General Secretary of the Party in the late 1980s, had died. In April it was the turn of Zhang Chunqiao, and in December that of Yao Winyue, the last two surviving members of the Gang of Four. Somehow, 2005 when Jeremy wrote the initial article seems a very long time ago, we are now firmly in the era of Xi Jinping. Things have changed. So now I'd like to invite Jeremy to address us on exactly how they have changed and what a new psychology might look like in this new era. Thanks, Jeremy. I hope not to quote too much of myself. I've tried to write something new on this topic. I'd first like to acknowledge Lois Connor, whose image graces the screen at the moment and many of whose images will appear during this evening's talk. If you understand my interest in China's contemporary infections and classical dimensions, you'll appreciate why that picture looks like it is. By the way, in the background, it's a picture of the Forbidden City on a hoarding over the other side of the street, and Lois is taking an image of a picture on another building reflected in a window with Xi Jinping fans. That sums up my whole lecture. Traditionally, the 28th of September marks the birthday of the Chinese sage Confucius. It also happens to be the birthday of a man by the name of Pierre Wittmans, also known or famous under the pen name of Simon Lays. He was formerly a Chinese teacher here at the ANU. In fact, Pierre taught me Chinese, and indeed he was my doctoral supervisor and also my mentor. It's Pierre about 50 years ago in Hong Kong, looking out over a body of water with his sea or the command and that of his son. I mentioned this because Pierre passed away just over a year ago. To mark the anniversary of this loss, as well as to commemorate his 80th birthday, he would have been 80 this last September, 28, curators of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Sydney worked with his wife Han Fang, or his widow Han Fang, the art historian Claire Roberts, also a doctoral graduate of ANU, one of my students, but also an MA student of Pierre's, to put on display five Chinese ink paintings from Pierre and Han Fang's private collection. This is one of the images by Surin Shan, an extraordinary eccentric and little-known Guangdong artist, who Pierre made famous. We don't have time to go into the details, but anyway, the event was held last Wednesday, on the 21st of October, and Michael Brand, the director of the gallery, yet another ANU graduate, hosted the dinner for the friends, admirers, scholars, and public figures who had gathered in Sydney to commemorate Pierre's life, his writing, and his artistic insights. Next to the podium at that dinner, there was a piece of calligraphy on display. Sorry, actually, that's a terrible reflection in the picture, so forgive me. It is in the hand of the noted outstanding calligrapher Huang Miaoz, a very old friend, both of us, who passed away a few years ago. Miaoz wrote this for Pierre in the 1980s when he left ANU, I'm afraid, in a bit of a huff, and took up the chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at Sydney University, therefore, the dedication for those of you who read Chinese. It is a calligraphic work from one of the most famous sayings in Chinese. It comes from the Confucian Analects, that's the connection back to Confucius, and reads simply in Chinese, in Chinese, within the Four Seas, all men are brothers, and yes, it's gendered, it's men, elder and younger brother, I'm sorry, 5th century BC is just the way they wrote stuff. In his address at the dinner, Michael Brand quoted Pierre's 1996 ABC Boyer lectures. In the last of the four lecture series, Pierre offered a meditation on culture, both at home and abroad. Pierre observed, popular imagination often associates the great age of China with a picture of the Great Wall. Sorry, this is a close-up of the Great Wall. I believe it really is. And tourists tend to, I'm going to do one of those stock shops, they said, and tourists tend to view this monument as a symbol of China's antiquity and power. In fact, it can represent neither. It is not very ancient, by Chinese standards at least, and in Chinese history, it is associated with a phenomenon of decadence and incipient paralysis. A civilization is strong in proportion to its capacity to tolerate within itself what is foreign to itself. Once it loses this bold confidence and the natural resilience of its own values, once it feels a defensive need to surround itself with walls in order to keep the outside world at bay, its very survival becomes problematic. Not long after those lectures were broadcast in 1996, you'll all remember, a liberal coalition government led by John Howard would be ruling the country from the city, Canberra. That regime change, the regime change, ushered in a decade during which a long shadow was cast over Australian cultural perspectives, university life and social values. As the local version of the culture and history wars unfolded, new and tipidium great walls were thrown up. Ten years before the rise of the Howard government, John Minford, another A.M.U. graduate and presently professor of Chinese literature and I, Ed, as in the book, titled Seeds of Fire, Chinese Voices of Conscience in the Pied in 1986. The first thematic section of the book was called Walls and we began with a quotation from a short, lapidary essay by the great Chinese writer, Lu Xun, written some 50 years earlier, in 1935. In it, Lu Xun said, I have always felt hemmed in on all sides by the Great Wall. That wall of ancient bricks has constantly been reinforced. The old and the new conspire to confine us all. When will we stop adding new bricks to that wall? The Great Wall of China, a wonder and a curse, is a more stopped image. As many of you know, since my illness, I am much given to ruminating about my sense of living into the past. Who would have thought that as Howard and Ilk rose to power and influence two decades ago, a distant lament about great walls of the mind in China would strike a chord with me here at home. But I also took Pied's remarks about cultural defensiveness and narrowness to be a comment on the continued predicament of the life of the mind and the heart in the People's Republic of China. After all, 1996 was only a few years after the political and cultural cataclysm that followed in the wake of the 4th of June 1989. Since then, the Communist Party state, apart from accrued instruments of political repression, would increasingly bolster its rule through nationalism and the promotion of Chinese exceptionalism. We are different, like the Americans, we are different from everybody else. In the early 1990s, between pursuing work on a post-doctoral fellowship here at ANU and working on a film project in Boston, I frequently travelled to China. And in the post-1989 malaise, I sought out academics, thinkers and strategists at various points in the Chinese political and cultural spectrum. Among their number were unspoken activists like Lu Xiaobo, later of Nobel Peace Prize fame, who I had interviewed during his first flush of fame in 1986. There was then the raffish and wealthy hooligan novelist Wang Suo and the journalist historian Dai Qing. There were also thinkers like the pro-confucian values conservative Xiaowong Qin, Republican historian, the great liberal-intellectual historian Xu Jilin, the fledgling political scientist Liu Qin, as well as the pro-party strategist and the noxious Mr. He Xin. Among their number were also younger, brash, up-and-coming xenophobic nationalists like Wang Xiaodong and Yang Ping, now very famous and very influential, who were involved with a blood-curdling journal known as Strategy and Management. You know that, but if you want to really discuss yourselves, go read that. The Chinese Young Turks, these young Turks were in particular to great relish in lecturing me and finger-wagging certainty on how I should think and how I should abandon my noxious Western biases. Sorry. This is not particularly affronting, after all, for someone like me. After all, in my early 20s, when I was 20, 21, 23, 24, I'd lived in China in the Gulf Revolution and I'd been lectured out by the best of them, by the army leaders of the Mao Zedong thought propaganda teams that ran the universities where I studied. After that, any shrill con-deception and finger-wagging seemed mild by comparison. But what did these thinkers discern in China's future? Liu Xiaobo would famously become a more transient pro-Western liberal and he's paying a terrible price for that. Dai Qing, now much older, had faith that the party would gradually create a moderate, law-abiding civilian government, always ahead of his time, Wang Shuo, abandoned his insightful fiction and indulged in the lifestyle that his success, wild wealth, allowed him to enjoy. Other artist friends would emigrate and enjoy success as migratory cultural power-voids. As for the hardliners, well, they've done well. I wrote up one message I thought I had gleaned from them about China's future in an academic article under the title To Screw Foreigners is Pathiotic. That's rather interesting. In their search for meaning, a search beyond China's century-long quest for wealth and power, back then you could already make out the mainstream values of pro-party patriots. They promoted a mixture of strong state and secular power, radical materialism, crazy, mythic talk of Chinese uniqueness, cultural essence, and some Jim Crack form of collectivist state confucianism. This dialectical materialist, well, it's a mash-up, was and is held together by a regnant communist party that was shaped in the Maoist crucible of discourse and ideas about serving the people while supporting elements of state-directed, neoliberal market reform with constant repressive police action. Now Xi Jinping, Ben mentioned, took over the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012, and as many people have commented, in the three years since, he has amassed more titles and power than any leader since Mao Zedong himself. In fact, Xi Dada, Uncle Xi, Big Daddy Xi, as he's known in the Chinese media, is so burdened by office that I have dubbed him myself China's COE, Chairman of Everything. Upon his elevation, Xi Jinping immediately announced that as part of the, quote, revitalization of the great Chinese nation, an idea that had been first made prominent under Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, he would lead the country to realize the China Dream. The China Dream, like so many elements of Chinese political life, is something of a doppelganger of things American. You see, it's inspired by the American Dream, and the China Dream was first articulated in the Olympic year, but that was all forgotten in 2012. In the 1930s, when the American Dream was first spoken of, it was described as following. It is that dream of a land in which life should be better and fuller for every man with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. Unhampered by the barriers with which, which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, by Europe, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human beings of any and every class. Today, the China Dream is about the individual realizing their aspirations in the context of a dreamscape determined by the Chinese Communist Party, and verbatimed those who dream the wrong dreams. But Xi Jinping is yet to really develop the lame motif of his period of rule. There are rumors that he is developing a new theoretical construct that will be revealed in the next year or so, but this rule may last a decade, another seven years, may last a little less if you believe the Australian newspaper of today spoke about attempted coups and assassinations, or it may, for those of us who believe in the North Korean solution, last a little bit longer. Is it going to be the last stand of the Chinese Communist Party and its theoretical heritace? Or merely a waystop on a much greater journey that China has undertaken for nearly 150 years now? A journey that I've called about to call the grand conciliation. That is, the reconciliation between late dynastic behavior and ideas and institutions and thoughts, the republican era richness of diversity and possibility and institutions of a modern society, and the Maoist, as well as the dumbest legacies of mixed Leninism and state capitalism with the market. This grand conciliation is still taking place and is yet to unfold in its full complexity and will continue to do so for decades to come. So as they say, well, when one said about the so-called French Revolution, or the results of the French Revolution too early to say, that's actually misquotation. That might go into the details, but in question time I can tell you why. But will this conciliation be new? I have no doubt it will. It will combine elements of the dynastic past, the high socialist era, and this period of reform that we are seeing unfolding now. As we know, Xi Jinping pursues stricter discipline and renewed high ethical standards for 80 million or so Communist Party members. Reviving hopes that have reinvigorated Communist organization, though still essentially secretive and Leninist with elements of Maoism in it, will be able to pursue a mass line, a semi-Chinese form of democracy in which the people have some say, although it's a guide and say, and that usually told what they want rather than really expressing all of their needs. But using, Xi Jinping does, the old mechanisms of criticism and self-criticism as well as public shaming and choking bureaucratic demands to inspire carders and public figures, aiding them on to ever greater heights of achievement. This is at the moment the Xi Jinping model. It's not universally popular within the party or outside it. After all, such strategies for enlivening society and bureaucracy have not been particularly successful in China in the past. And in the period of increased party surveillance during the ongoing anti-corruption drive and demands to break the loyalty for party carders, this is a perilous time indeed. After all, they confront a pitfall littered socio-political landscape and a system that creates a reality distorting force field of self-promotion. It's still called propaganda in Chinese. And after nearly four decades of economic reform and social change, at every turn Chinese Communists must deal with for something that I have for some time called the other China. And most of you have visited the other China or may have plans to go there or even live there. Now I'm not talking about just Taiwan and not to amount that other China. I'm talking not about the two-China scenario. I'm speaking about the broader Chinese world with which we here in the centre and Australia in the world, the China world, engage. It is a China of liveliness, invention and imagination. One that despite all the glum policies of the control of Big Daddy Xi and the Party apparatus can be glimpsed at frequently in the People's Republic of China and that is also vitally alive in Hong Kong, Taiwan and in communities throughout the world. It is that other China. It is a live world part of the international community and burgeoning. It is a multicultural, multi-dimensional China. The members of which draw inspiration not only from a rich past but also from the boundless contemporary energy that they enjoy. It is a China that often flourishes despite and not because of what the Communist Party does, although when the Party lets China be more itself than its Communist other, it does very well. It is a China that I sometimes think is summed up well in a line from Clive James, a great Australian author, who said, in culture there is never an innovation that does not spring from a tradition because the interweaving of innovation and tradition is what culture is and that I think is exactly the fundamental deal with China. Certainly the Chinese reformer of these past decades has supported the growth of this other China but also frustrates and hinders it. What will this other China become? Will it be stymied by ambitious Party leaders with a 19th century worldview, egged on by encirclement, by Western powers and jealous others? And will they be frustrated in their titanic aspirations for the 21st century? These are some of the big questions that we all deal with. As Ben mentioned, the way I have proposed to engage with this other China, as well as with official China, is through an approach I first articulated in 2005, new psychology. That was the other China picture and we wanted that because it's sort of relaxing. There's a psychology or study of things Chinese, psychology is actually a translation from Chinese the term han shi. That is the study of the learning of the han dynasty that became the basis for all educated people in China from the 2nd and 3rd century AD onwards. It was called the body of han learning, han dynasty learning. And han shi translating into English is psychology. So when Westerners first encountered this body of learning, they were encountering the body of han learning, codified learning and classical texts and so on and so forth, that they felt they had to read and understand to engage with China. So that's what psychology started off as. 480 years ago. But I spoke about the new psychology linking back to this history in the 1580s, that first engagement between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese thinkers. 430, sorry. On the other hand, I was also interested in a new psychology that engaged with a post-China studies world. China studies is the study of China in a Cold War context. American based and originated, a very particular intellectual lineage, now much even more misunderstood by those who use it. I was interested in a post-Cold War study of China and a post-Colonial study of China. A Chinese world that was important to understand by truly educating people about and doing research on the thinking, speaking and acting in China as a world of today and it's traditional, revived, as well as 20th century underpinnings. Over the past decade I've written a link on this subject and I won't bore you with my repeating it all here. It's all online in the ChinaStory.org site that we produce for this centre. That suffices to say that in propounding a new psychology, it was to a great extent merely stating, as Ben had said, the obvious and recalling the views of generations of scholars of China, both in China and elsewhere, including my own teachers. I was also giving an updated account of arguments made very clearly in 1961, believe it or not, by one of the great professors of Chinese here, Lu Sunen, by one of the great professors at Oxford University, David Hawkes, and also by a group of leading American based China scholars, historians and others at a symposium. They, whose letter group was at a symposium organised by the Association of Asian Studies in 1961, titled Simply Chinese Studies and the Disciplines. I would encourage those interested in that debate to look up the arguments made then, in particular as they are still relevant today, but let me just quote from one of the participants, the great Harvard Intellectual Historian, Benjamin Schwartz. Ben, who I had the great pleasure of becoming friendly with in his later years, summed up his views of the kind of infectious insularity of the disciplines that was already suffocating serious academic work on China, in an essay that he just titled The Fetish of Disciplines. Obviously not a fan. In that essay he said, whatever a man's discipline, the broader and deeper his general culture, his general education, the more willing he is to bring whatever wisdom he has to bear on the subject he is treating. Whether this wisdom derives from the methodology of this discipline or not, it increases the likelihood of his saying something significant. Conversely, the mechanical application of an isolated discipline narrowly conceived in terms of a self-contained model or system to a culture whether contemporary or traditional, which has not been studied in any of its other aspects by a person of limited culture, may lead to sterile and even preposterous results. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? Without this approach, one that in relation to China, I call new psychology, what we are left with is a kind of clerical academia. It is one in which China, and things Chinese are generally reduced to being a kind of intellectual footnote to the international and acceptable disciplines. And they're promoted specialists in the quest for tidy outcomes which reduce the scope of teaching and learning. At the time of increased need, that is in the Xi Jinping era. Many find themselves disarmed and variously ill-lettered apologists and careerists arise in their wake. I want to get in there. Centers of power. It is ironic that as the Xi Jinping era demands a familiarity with the various modes of Chinese language and thought as never before. If you listen to a Xi Jinping speech, heaven forbid that you should, he quotes the classics constantly. Whenever you deal with contemporary Chinese strategists, economists, regional specialists, cultural thinkers, sociologists, if you don't have a basic understanding of classical Chinese knowledge, thought, and the way meaning is made using those bodies of thought, you really don't know what you're talking about and what you're listening to. It's just the matter of reality at this crucial time. And as we need this type of training and education understanding as never before, because Xi Jinping is a boon to a new psychologist, what a gift to us all. Boring though he may be. It happens to be that he and his colleagues are making sense of a world that is different. Oh, horrors that there's something different from the Anglo-American way of doing things. And as I mark the decades since the publication of New Psychology some five years before it had become Center on China World, this more holistic teaching and study of China at the undergraduate and graduate level in particular instruction in literary Chinese are basic familiarity with the building blocks of that culture is being quarterised by those who will see what a major teaching institute, to see a major teaching institution or many major institutions reduced to Confucius-like rumps. For those of you who don't know literary or classical Chinese is that living language gives serious students of the Chinese world access to everything from the headlines of the Chinese press. Yeah, you actually can't read most headlines in a newspaper if you don't have basic literary Chinese. Isn't that embarrassing? Yes, they're written in the telegraphic style of the classics. You can't read advice papers to the Politburo because to have any impact you have to write a type of literary Chinese or letters of protest because they're written in that style too. You can't understand how pathetic is that? Well, let alone it comes from a novel because it's one of the most popular forms of Chinese literature ever produced nor can you understand material from the storehouse of historical records or the philosophical texts, just the basics even the readers' digest version that's the version of people like Wenzhou and Xi Jinping actually use. But they're the things that are drawn upon to make sense of China and its place in the world today and to not suffer from what I've elsewhere called translated China. That is relying on Chinese commentators and propagandists to understand China's reality. If you actually want to understand the reality for yourself you have to get some learning and it's not going to be provided by the English language sources. These are all crucial things to us dealing with the Xi Jinping era. As Xi Jinping more than any other leader since Mao is using Chinese ideas, ways of seeing, doing and talking to create Chinese realities. Whether we like it or not. The pedagogical disavowal of this kind of approach will mean that students that we train will not be able to recognize the bricks in these new structures let alone gauge the dimensions of the walls with which they are confronted and which only the brave among them might hope to scale. That's the less successful one. Sorry, it'll never be. Again, the lowest columns. BDI, I mean around a couple of months ago. Oh, you may say this is all such arcane stuff more suited to the China boffering of the past. Isn't really not the kind of thing people like us should expect of students or general China scholars or others working in China today. Well, I say that such a reaction is that of those interested merely in the narrow, the transactional and the exploitative. I would go so far as to say that such an attitude is something a colonial relic and one that does not bother taking the country that we're interested in seriously beyond what it can do to enhance academic CVs, share portfolios and to further careers. If we are interested in this major civilizational center one which is at the core of life in Asia and the Pacific then there have to be places like this that teach about the civilization in its various dimensions and that do research into it and educate the public about it beyond the requirements of the contemporary money-obsessed and metric-driven communication industry. That is one of the reasons why this center exists how we cajole about the government to do it. It's supposedly one of the reasons that this College of Asia and the Pacific exists and is why we have been celebrating here in this center the proud A&U history of the study of China in an exhibition put together by young scholar William Seimer and curator and post-doctoral fellow Olivia Krischer that's the little picture and the exhibition will be open after this lecture if you haven't seen it please have a look an example of the work of young scholars on this subject. A&U's foundation which will mark its 70th year next year was implicated, involved closely with China and discussions about China and East Asia and its very origins. So does A&U matter beyond educating a few people in the overlap between dynastic, republican and people's republic China? Is it a mere academic indulgence? Or does it partake of a near 500-year history among thinking people from a western background who have for generations taken seriously Chinese ways of thinking speaking and acting? I would argue that it does and that for us to abandon that rich tradition we are the imperilous at the time when China plays an increasingly important role globally and in our own neighborhood. If there is such a thing as a China choice punch a few white or choices in the era trumpeted by our present Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbullus being the most exciting time to be an Australian we had better have an idea of what we stand for where we stand and why we're standing at all. So clearly new psychology is one of the keys to doing this. Now there's originally in this speech a long excursion of three lessons in new psychology to actually give you examples of what I mean but we'll be here all night about it I'll publish them online just very quickly. One of them relates to something that happened in England last week in Manchester. Xi Jinping visited a high school in Manchester and the school had been told by the Chinese embassy the children there in the Confucius classroom that is one of those communist funded things and had to recite Xi Dada, Big Daddy Xi's poem to the communist martyr Jiao You Lu who died in 1964 getting obscure enough for you and Xi Dada had written the poem in the form of a Song Dynasty 11th century Song Lyric poem in obscure classical Chinese and he'd written it in 1990 which was the year I mentioned earlier reviving nationalism, patriotism and culture and re-emphasizing party power after the June 4th massacre and he'd written in a style that is reminiscent of Chairman Mao's 1937 poem called Snow But We Don't Have Time to Go Into Any of That Anyway, nobody understood why the hell these kids had to recite this ridiculously impossible poem to Xi Jinping when he came. He knew why asked everybody with any education in China and we don't have people who are afraid to at least understand why that might be important. I think it is very interesting at least. Anyway you can read online my lessons in the psychology later on when I published them but to continue forgive me for that excursion New Scientology is a highly touchy feeling thing. This is one reason why I have so frequently employed the ancient Chinese word Dung Yong to describe this type of engagement. It's a term I use to describe the robust demeanour of those who would engage with the outspoken feisty and aggrieved world of China's path of state today and those in through all of its education and propaganda. You'd better be ready to scream that finger weird way that if you're going to engage with it at all. It's not just all other China niceness and flirtation. The idea of the Dung Yong Dung Yong was an ancient term as I said it means a principal or candidate advisor or friend underlies also collegiality and the healthy educational relationship in universities of boisterous intellectual exchange. Well at least it did. From 2008 I have used the term in various places in various ways. Not only describing a stance for those critically engaged with China but also it's a way to deal with one's own powers that be. After all to be frank and aware you also require empathy that must be alert to the problems of the marginal, the victimised and ignored. That is why in the lead up to Xi Jinping's investiture in 2012 as the head of China's party, state and army that's right he's the head of everything COE as I said. I translated an essay at that time by a man by the name of Yuan Peng Yuan Peng was one of those delightful characters that they generate so frequently in China. He's a strategic thinker who works with Beijing with Think Tank the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. An institute that this centre has many dealings with and Ben Penny just visited quite recently has found that a long term collaboration. It's a Think Tank directly aligned with Ministry of State Security, it's one of the reasons we deal with them because at least in dealing with real spies as opposed to the phony spies of the other institutions in the country. In mid 2012 Yuan Peng wrote in the advice paper to the Chinese media and he produced a popular version of it which I translated into English because it was in the news page of Think Evans that sums up my attitude he wrote in the advice paper and he said that China had from 2012 a 3 to 5 year period of strategic opportunity and he's probably right, much of this I don't deny at all that the country enjoyed this period although China could take advantage of a relative American economic and strategic decline and weakness relative only he also warned that during this period that is the first period, the first 5 years of Xi Jinping's rule the US would continue using local surrogates and agents of influence to undermine the People's Republic which is a long term American strategy from the 1950s which it is, it's not a lie Yuan declared in the period up to 2017 and I quote the US will avail itself of various non-military means to delay or hinder China's progressive rise in so doing it will hope to gain strategic advantage revitalize itself and consolidate its global hegemonic position again, I think it's probably completely correct among other things Yuan Pong you'll see why this is important in the moment identified 5 groups in China that could well threaten the society's stability it's a hit list he said the US would use these groups the groups are in the name of internet freedom they believe in transforming the traditional mode of pursuing top-down democracy and freedom as part of their strategy they will utilize right lawyers, lawyers who fight for individual rights they will use underground religious activists they will exploit dissidents in China internet leaders and they will also encourage rebellious vulnerable groups in the society these will be their core constituencies they will use with the aim of infiltrating China's grassroots so as to carry out a bottom-up process to create conditions to transform at its overturn China's communist party in essence Yuan provided the incoming leaders in this essay and there's a longer internal version of course with a hit list of groups that had to be attacked or neutralized during the first 5 years of Xi Jinping's rule guess what's happened back in 2012 he's listed outrage in many people but in retrospect we can clearly see it is thinkers like Yuan Peng who have helped inform party state policy on the Xi Jinping it's like the central government has gone through the checklist and wiped out or quarterised by Beijing for the last 5 years in the year of the China dream the cloak of the collective is used to muffle difference and diversity China's day is once more a nation of wars in many ways whether they are spoken of in terms of Chinese characteristics they denote a closing of the Chinese mind and we don't have time to go into details but I work with academics in China and I can assure you that's where things are going but not only do we require empathy not only for Chinese difference and to understand the mechanisms of party control and rule but also more broadly the difference within the Chinese world and how it has been used and dealt with in the Xi Jinping era here if I had time I'd go into greater detail about the problems related to both Tibet and Xinjiang and how I think they are changing in this particular period I would just say that one of the compromising things that we must deal with as people here in Australia in discussing policies towards Xinjiang and Tibet is our own issues since the Howard era in particular related to our own indigenous peoples and also the policies generated by successive governments in relation to refugees giving Australia no longer any of the moral right or superiority it might have presumed to enjoy decades ago we also appreciate the grotesque predicaments not only of minorities and vulnerable groups in places like China and those here in Australia that we have become witness to since the mid-1990s we after all to repeat a line from Pierre with which I started this talk we are a society that feels a defensive need to surround itself with walls in order to keep the outside world at bay and as a result it's very survival becomes problematic as Australia developed its strategic relationship with its neighbors and engages more closely with China with relative boom values continue to play some role I had no time to go into the debate in China about ultimate values to the West but I'll just quote a very pressing comment made recently by a friend of the centres well known journalist by the name of John Garna who has recently writes a lot about China but also about regional affairs and just recently on the weekend he wrote a piece in which he spoke about Australia's attempts as the defence white paper is being prepared here in Canberra to realign itself with key and democratic allies in our region and he talks about what this might mean in real terms and China and Australia's moral stance he says, one weakness of a defence architecture that Australia is pursuing built upon fine principles is that it can be undermined by hypocrisy India, Japan, the US and Australia these close allies have each been domestically inconsistent in upholding the principles of democracy pluralism and rule of law that they propound the board and particularly propound when they're dealing with China and places like China if India's Modi's loyalist like to see him as a Superman then Hindu chauvinism is his kryptonite that's weird, it's very John Garna in recent weeks the Indian press has been consumed by his failure to convincingly condemn the murders of Muslims for allegedly killing cows and eating beef this undermines the international quest for shared values just like Japan's airbrushing of history and Australia's obsession with unilaterally turning back refugees it makes it harder to build bridges with the fifth and sixth major democracies in our region currently missing from our story that is Indonesia and Korea as the Chinese party state concocts its parallel value system based on selective Chinese characteristics and exceptionalism which we question and resist the monolithic narratives that constitute China's official China story we are also aware of the assimilation as narrative of our own post-colonial state and what elsewhere I've spoken of as Australia's unfinished 20th century I've also said that new technology is like a mirror as Jung Yong has described as a mirror in the Tang dynasty one that reflects not only other realities but in which we too must assert our own features the young emperor who spoke of his wise minister Wei Zheng as being a Tian a mirror to himself said he was a Jung Yong because he also reflected reality back to himself before I finish I just want to take an excursion because tomorrow we're officially opening this building we had a soft unofficial opening last May which Gerald was after and spoke during but the official opening will occur tomorrow which we're very grateful for so they've taken the government 18 months to get over to late to come and see us but I'd just like to give you a little bit of the story about how this place came about because I've never said really spoken about it publicly before you see the year 2009 that's when it all happened was an important one for those of us interested in China it's also the year that saw the creation of the centre on a national level 2009 was a fraught year in the Australian-Chinese relationship perhaps the most anxious period since the normalisation of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic since 1972 in fact I think of 2009 please forgive me as our Annas Oribilis Sinensis Sinensis is China during it there was a negative trifecta first in June 2009 there was a rankerous controversy rising from the failed bid by the huge Chinese aluminium corporation called Chinalko to invest in Rio Tinto you care you forgot one doesn't matter this was followed in July by the arrest in China of the Australian-Chinese businessman and Rio Tinto Executive Stern Hu culminating in his summer imprisonment and then there was the official Chinese fulminations over an invitation by the Melbourne International Film Festival to the Xinjiang or East Turkestan activist Rubir Kadir to attend the screening of a film about her life in August the Chinese Embassy the Chinese authorities went crazy the press was full of Australia leaving an anti-China chorus globally and creating great problems for China internationally etc etc you know that wonderful Mao style high-dudgeon of the Chinese though so beautifully earlier in that year there were suggestions of the ANU trained Chinese speaking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd might turn out to be Australia's Manchurian candidate I'm not making any of this up I'm quoting in April the Labour politician Kim Beasley even went so far as to openly criticise the head of the opposition and by the name of Malcolm Turnbull then the head of the coalition now our Prime Minister for suggesting that Rudd and this is a quote had assumed roving ambassador status for China for a time and for the first time in decades the bipartisan political unity between the Labour Party and the Liberal Party collapsed and there was a fracture and it led to great consternation for those who care about relative sanity and continuity in policy in the event this wobble was a boon for those interested in the more serious engagement with China and for us here at the ANU who wanted to build on our long heritage of studying the Chinese world that year was also and I'll get to why this is relevant in the moment was also on an intimate ANU level with Morrison the son of George Morrison whose name we celebrate with an annual lecture here at the university and had done so now for many decades passed away that year Alistair was the support of this university and its work on China in particular through the efforts of Claire Roberts and also because he'd shared the work of his wife Heather Morrison with us all then in August of that year Professor Translator and writer and friend of this place passed away followed the same month by the passing of our great professor of Chinese literature, thought and philosophy Professor Li Utsunen a teacher in guiding the classical Chinese thought for many of us and for many years Professor, nice to meet you Professor at the commemoration held by Professor Li Wood University House in late August 2009 after this anensis a eulogy was sent by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who'd been one of Professor Li Wood's students and it was read out by John Mentor who I mentioned earlier in early September Kevin invited me to the lodge for lunch over which we reminisced about Professor Li Wood discussed the Sino-Australian Anders the Rivaless and then I told Kevin about my plans for a more holistic study of China and U.S.A. and blah blah blah getting my spruce the idea and he got interested and was enthralled and offered support and I found myself with colleagues entering into negotiations with the government of the creation of a new China Concentration or Centre eventually this place and we got into writing vision statements, strategic plan blah blah blah blah and in the process we encountered the arcane and the lights of the Prime Minister in catalogues the head of PMMC particularly derisive about the new AAU Commonwealth collaborations which include an extension of the Crawford School the creation of a national security college oh and then there was us which came late in the piece and that is why the head of PMMC called us the steak knives we were that supplementary afterthought that special little gift that Ian Shaw would be given if he was in the room I'm not honestly not making you do this ask the bizarre and often ridiculous negotiations about creating not only the centre but the building, this building unfolded in October 2009 I happened, just happened to be watching on TV rerun of a political satire called The Hollow Men as we don't know it is set in the office of the central policy unit that is it's a show that depicted a group of unscrupulous advisers to the Prime Minister who were dedicated to his re-election it was actually planned during John Howe in the era who would have known it fitted poor old Kevin's rules so perfectly anyway, a show about political spin about the dizzying news cycle about bullshit and about overstatement and bombacity it actually was a show that reminded me there's nothing so much as the atmosphere of Maoist hyperbole that I had lived through in my 20s once over a private dinner with the Prime Minister at the lodge late one night when we devoted our discussion to my vision for the building, this building that was going to exist I remarked to Kevin that I felt as though I was living through an episode of this show in fact, I was living through one particular episode called edifice complex it's about the analysis of a major new construction in Canberra and after all the follow-all and media involvement and all the rest of it it ends up being about announcement of a new traffic roundabout as we know we always need another one but I would learn to have greater confidence in Kevin and Ian Chunt to actually deliver on the words and we didn't end up with much more than a roundabout but I just thought you should know that there was this going through and when I said I was living through an episode of The Hollow Man, Kevin just laughed and said yeah, that's all he said yeah now as illness and disquietude both physical and administrative over took me five years later last year in 2014 and as I was a water relegator to the position of founding director of CIW this year it was with no small measure of smirking delight that I watched the latest offering to the creators of The Hollow Man the show called New Tokyo it is set in the offices of the nation building authority which is oversight for major infrastructure projects the show lampoons the gap between suffocating bureaucracy and grand wanting ambition but things have changed, well for me anyway maybe none of you have noticed I don't know what was for me but The Hollow Man is somehow not nearly as funny reincarnated in today's utopia the reason is that the reasonable disconnect between bureaucratic folder all and our lived reality is no longer as distant, as funny or as different as it seemed to be in the past that's why it's been an ideal time for me as Mao Zedong put it himself to retreat to the second line Tui Ju Ar Xie that was finished by just remarking on some of his stuff to have in the last few days I've quoted John Gano but this relates to some wonderful developments and also amusing to allow me to round off this lecture over the last few days there have been a number of developments regarding China at ANU that promised to carry a little of the fuson of the heady weeks of October November 2009 when Kevin Rudd and I were formulating the ideas and architecture of this center first there was the announcement Francis Adamson, the Australian ambassador in Beijing would upon her return to camera take up a role as foreign policy advisor of international affairs advisor the new prime minister, Malcolm Turner Francis has been a strong supporter of this center and its intellectual and policy work she's also made major contributions to the center through her membership of the advisory board and proved to be an extraordinary person for us to have in Beijing at this crucial period and I have a great pleasure regarding Francis as a friend and wise counsel then over the weekend the Saturday paper published an interview by Hamish McDonald with our incoming Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt who declared that he hoped that this university could develop along the lines of a Harvard give us a few billion dollars and we will I'm sure he wants to change the culture of how we work it's working him and engage we want to be in the center of making sure the government has the best possible advice on policy we are the national university we need to be in there working with other national institutions we have to making sure our research is second to none taking risks on young people who have great ideas so I look terribly much forward to him and as the term I prefer deep provincializing this university kicking out the mud in the bloody chance and making a real difference to the place and this coincided sorry another bit director I can say so soon and this coincided with an article by Peter Hartman another friend of the center and an old friend of mine in the Fairfax press with an interview with the prime minister and it was extraordinary because he started off Shades of Mao he started off comparing and going so far as to say that the Australian people have stood up and then he says the same line in Chinese which is a live tribute of the chairman Mao spoke in 1949 at the first national people's political consultative congress so that's very hard to remember so that's where it all began after all 43 years ago with golf with whom who by recognizing the people's republic of China among other things expressed the hope that we had indeed as a country stood up I'm still waiting and I think if we do indeed stand up we have sadly some very new and also some very old walls that we have to scale thank you