 Hello, I'm pleased to welcome you to this IEA webinar. My name is Alex Dukowski and I'm Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin and the Director of the UCD Center for Asia Pacific Research. Today, we are delighted to be joined by Dennis Staunton, China correspondent at the Irish Times who has been generous enough to take time out of his schedule to speak to us on the theme, what is happening in China. A bit of context, as Xi Jinping's President breaking third term as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party gets underway in earnest after a series of top level appointments in March, China faces formidable challenges at home and abroad. After three years of COVID restrictions, parts of the economy are rebounding, but important sectors including real estate are troubled and foreign investors and others have been unnerved by a crackdown on high profile entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, as relations with the United States continue to be tense, Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine has complicated Beijing's relationship with Europe. Xi Jinping himself often speaks about changes unseen in a century and I think it's not a stretch to say that how the Communist Party navigates these changes will go a long way towards shaping global politics of the current century. Dennis will speak to us for about 20 minutes or so on these very weighty and important themes and then we'll go to a Q&A with our audience. A couple of housekeeping points, you will be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should now see on your screen. Please feel free to send your questions in even throughout the session as they occur to you and we will come to them once our speaker has finished his presentation. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. Please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IEEA. I'll now formally introduce Dennis and hand it over to him for about 20 minutes. Dennis Stanton has been China correspondent for the Irish Times since October, 2022. He was previously London editor from 2015 to 2022 and has also served as the newspapers correspondent in Washington, Brussels and Berlin as foreign editor and as deputy editor. He is currently the only correspondent for an Irish news organization based in China after RTE's correspondent was forced to leave China following coverage critical of government policy. So he's in a unique position to explain developments to us in this incredibly important country. I will now hand it over to you, Dennis. Take it away. Thank you, Alex. And thank you to the Institute for inviting me. It's always very good to talk to you. One of the things that all foreign correspondents here as soon as they get to China is that experience tends to be that after a month here, you feel as if you could write a book. After a year, you feel as if you could maybe write a chapter and after five years, you feel as if maybe you could write a sentence. And one of the reasons for that is that the place is obviously so big. It's so diverse, so populous, so complicated and also because it changes so fast. And this is definitely, it's certainly my experience. I feel as if I've kind of almost leapt beyond the one-year stage, almost to the five-year stage so that it's difficult to... So if what I say is sounds tentative, it's because I think there is a great deal of uncertainty. And one of the paradoxes is when you're living here in China and you listen to a lot of the commentary from outside China, which I mean from politicians, particularly also from some other commentators, it often sounds as if it's being delivered with a great deal of confidence, with the kind of confidence when they say that China is on a particular course or that China is going to do X, Y or Z inevitably where Taiwan is concerned. And I feel sometimes as if it's said with the kind of confidence that people would not apply to predictions about say the United States or Europe, which are much more familiar. And I think it's particularly difficult here because obviously the leadership is opaque. The media is controlled. The language is difficult. There are very few foreign correspondents here. And so the information flow is such that perhaps we ought to be a little bit more careful about the confidence of our predictions. And even in the last six months that I've been here, there have been a number of events which have confounded expectations, including my own expectations. The first was the nature of the end of the zero COVID regime. I certainly haven't come across anybody who predicted that it would end in the way that it did. Either who predicted the protests, two forms, the street protests. But then there was also a kind of civil disobedience almost where just people at a very low local level were simply not applying the rules by the time you got to late November of last year because the application of them had become unreasonable. And also then the government response to that, the way in which the zero COVID regime ended so quickly. And something else which I think confounded expectations was that one of the predictions which was made very, very confidently elsewhere was that as soon as the zero COVID restrictions were lifted that you would see this enormous surge in infections and deaths. And you certainly did see an enormous surge in infections. And there's no question about that a large number of people died particularly in December and in January. And I would also say with quite a lot of confidence that the died were larger than the official number of deaths that were recorded. But nonetheless, I think it's pretty clear that the number of people who have died was happily much lower than was expected or predicted. And I think that you can tell that really partly because it's difficult to hide numbers of people. You can also just, although anecdote is not data in the absence of data, anecdote can be useful. And so if you talk to, for example, people who work in businesses, they will tell you and they were telling me about people who were taking time off for funerals in December and in January, and then in the way in which it tapered off. So it does seem that just to say purely on the level of what happened with COVID, it turned out in a way that I think nobody or very few people were expecting. And in the same way, I think if you, the other identity in it is of predicting what's going to happen or feeling so confident apart from the opaqueness of the system, is that there's often a contradiction or at least some tension between policy goals. So for example, since the end of zero COVID, one of the big priorities for the Chinese government has been to open up the economy, to get the economy going again. That means getting business going again, getting foreign investment coming back. And last week I was down by the Yangtze River Delta in Suzhou and I was talking to officials there who were telling me about how in late November and early December, they were chartering flights to go to take their people to France and to Germany to reestablish all of these relationships and to get everybody coming back. And so you see this all over China where the steps are being taken to encourage people to come back and to get business going again. But at the same time, Xi Jinping is continuing his, starting the Communist Party's control over more areas of life and governance. And so you saw at the recent, the so-called two sessions which is kind of the annual parliamentary meeting here in Beijing, that one of the announcement was a reform to the State Council which is like the sort of the executive, it's like the, and some functions of that say finance technology. Under the control of the Communist Party. And so you have a sense, you've got an opening up and you've got a clamping down at the same time. And you see this then reflected or just if you look at, say, the economic performance you've had some very good data coming out this week in terms of GDP growth particularly retail sales of more than 10%. And that's very encouraging. But at the same time, you still have persistently high youth unemployment, nearly 20%. And then you also have a lot of uncertainty. And if you, for example, at the real estate, the property market, you had, you know, the whole of the property market is facing difficulties as problems of confidence people not buying, not selling. And, but this is particularly affecting the private sector element until, until fairly recently, the, you know, about half of the market was the domain of state-owned enterprises. And the other half was private companies. And the state-owned enterprises have an advantage which is that they can borrow from state banks at about three or 4%, whereas the private companies they pay about 13% are there about interest. But they had efficiencies and it kind of tended to work for them. But it's not working for them anymore. So what's happening is that, you know, so far as there is business, it's moving to the state-owned enterprises. And also because of the way the market works here, you buy your apartment before it's built here. So if you buy an apartment, you're probably going to, in the current climate, go for a state-owned enterprise because you would feel more confident that the thing is going to get finished. Then if you go for it. So if you talk to people within that sector, they'll say that they feel as if the market could come back later on this year, but at the same time, they fear these, those people in the private sector that you might end up with only a handful of private companies, big ones really left. And so you have all of that happening. And at the same time, although that's a kind of a trend towards, you know, within that sector towards state ownership, you have Xi Jinping and various other people within the leadership, constantly speaking about the importance of the role of the private sector. And they are trying to encourage the private sector to create jobs because so much of the growth and so much of the job creation has been done by the private sector. He then had, for example, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, he made a brief appearance a few weeks ago back in his hometown of Hangzhou and that was kind of hailed as a signal that, you know, that China was welcoming for its entrepreneurs once again. And yet at the same time, you have all of these crackdowns. You've got other business people who are being targeted. You've got due diligence firms that are being, you know, suddenly they're, people are going in to search them and to investigate them. And you've got, you know, so you have in a sense, you've got these sort of contradictory actions that, you know, and then at the same time, lurking in the background, there is just this whole question of, you know, what is the party's approach to wealth, to people getting wealthy until, again, a few years ago, it was extremely relaxed in the words of Peter Mandelson about people getting filthy rich. Now much less so. Also, you know, a doctor of common prosperity which hasn't been highly, you know, sharply defined, but what people in business tend to think is that it means that if you get very, very rich, you had better start putting quite a lot of it back because otherwise, you know, your wings are going to be clipped. And so there is, you know, so all of these efforts to create confidence for business are sometimes undermined by other efforts. And then, of course, the big uncertainty is a geopolitical uncertainty and particularly around the China's relationship with the United States, which has deteriorated really very sharply in recent years, but particularly I would say in recent months. And really since the Trump administration, but it has been accelerated, I think, probably under the Biden administration, you've seen the United States adopting what China would see as kind of an approach of extreme economic competition where it's not to create a level playing field. In fact, they're trying to create a very, the opposite of level playing field and they're trying to hobble China's rise. And they're doing this partly in the name of national security, but from where China is, this looks like very aggressive behavior. And you've had, you know, there was a little glimmer of hope around last autumn when Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met in Bali on the edge of the G20 summit. But that then was blown off course by the whole kerfuffle over the spy balloon over Washington or over the United States and Washington's response to that. And so now you have, if you talk to people here, there's almost a sense of despair about the effort to get the relationship of the United States back on track. And one part I was talking to an expert in this field was saying the other day that he thought that the U.S.-China relationship would be very bad for the next 20 years at least, although he didn't think it was gonna work, which is I suppose some bit of comfort. But I think you do find, you know, that the right now people don't see exactly how you see, how you find your way out into an improvement of this relationship. What people hope for is just that it won't get worse that they'll manage to avoid the escalation of their confrontation. And I think part of the reason why this impression is formed here is if they're good course and you work very hard to find a single member of the United States then who speaks up for engagement China. And that's something which is relatively new in terms of American foreign policy. And obviously the flash point in the most dangerous area for all of this is the question of Taiwan. And the U.S. has, in a sense, its language over Taiwan has changed and the Singaporean history the other day was speaking about the fact that this had become framed for the Americans as a conflict between democracy and autocracy, China as autocracy, Taiwan as representing democracy. And this is a very dangerous framing of this because it tends to undermine the basis that has kept the status quo for so long, which is the one China policy and the various caveats that have been introduced around that in U.S. legislation in terms of, and also the strategic ambiguity with regard to both Taiwan status and also what the United States would be prepared to do in the event of any Chinese action where that was concerned. The, you know, while this relationship has been deteriorating, China has been cultivating its relationships with other parts of the world. And it's in pretty good position where the global south is concerned. You saw the Brazilian president Lula here last week and that would have been a very successful visit from both China and Brazil's point of view. And then if you look around this region in Asia, most of the countries around China, for them, China is their biggest overwhelmingly, their biggest trading partner. And many of them have very important relationships with the U.S. as well. And they're not willing to make a choice between the two unless they're absolutely forced to. Certainly they resist the idea. And for them, the idea of this confrontation between the U.S. and China is something to be feared. And a relationship that has improved in recent months is China's relationship with Australia since the election of Prime Minister Albanese. And one of the interesting things there is that Australia's policy hasn't really changed at all. It's still part of the nuclear-auction deal, but the tone has changed. And the change of tone has affected a change in the tenor of the relationship. And that's something which might be instructive for countries elsewhere in the world and indeed for China, which brings us to Europe and the relationship between China and Europe. China would like Europe to be strategically autonomous. It's particularly keen that the European Union shouldn't simply follow the U.S. lead in its approach to China. And so this is the context for all of these recent visits here from Emmanuel Macron to Ursula von der Leyen, you've had Anna-Lena Baerbaugh and you've had a number of others. Your sub-brel has been, it was supposed to come, but he got COVID, but he made it. He delivered or published a speech that he was going to deliver here. And so these are all feeding into it in a way what seems to me to be the beginning of a kind of a European negotiation about a new policy towards China. And obviously Europe's relationship with China had taken a number of hits even before the beginning of last year. And so you've had tensions over, you had ongoing tensions over the imbalance in the trade relationship and over what the Europeans would see as unfair practices on China's part. And then you also had these difficulties over, for example, over really, but I think Europeans probably correctly would describe as China's overreaction in the case, for example, of Lithuania's opening of a representative office for Taiwan in Vilnius and then also the sanctions that were imposed against the MEPs. And I think that many people here in Beijing now would probably recognize that that kind of knee-jerk response that they made, that kind of diplomacy which was very much invoked here a couple of years ago is probably, it was counterproductive and it's certainly not the appropriate approach for them to take to Europe right now. And so they're taking a much more emollient approach and we'll see how it goes. But the big problem, of course, is Ukraine. And after the Ukraine, after the Putin's invasion of Ukraine last year, the Europeans, when they had an EU-China summit online, they were taken aback by what they saw as the lack of understanding from Beijing of the European response and the European emotional response in a way to the invasion of Ukraine. And I think it's true that China doesn't perceive the invasion in the way that it's perceived in the West, but then that's also true of a large part of the world. And that's partly, of course, because they don't perceive the West in the way that it's perceived in the West, in what they perceive that way. So the uniqueness of the outrage of the war in Ukraine, the invasion of Ukraine, is something which feels very obvious if you're in Western Europe and it just doesn't feel that way here. China, I've yet to meet a single person here who has said to me that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was justified. Having said that, China has interests. And part of that interest is that Russia should not be defeated and humiliated. And certainly from China's point of view, it doesn't want to have a large neighbor like Russia falling into the American sphere of influence. And so it's an important, it's not an alliance, but it's an important relationship between Beijing and Moscow. And that's something which when you're trying to work out what China can do or is going to be prepared to do where Ukraine is concerned, I think you have to be clear-eyed about where its strategic interests lie. Having said that, China has presented itself as being a possible peacemaker and the Europeans and the Western powers more generally reject the idea of China as an honest broker. But it may be that at some stage, once the parties are more willing to talk about peace, once events on the battlefield have progressed in one way or another, that China could play a role perhaps in facilitating with others proximity talks or some other kind of diplomacy. So I think it's something that, I'm not sure they're going to be able to replicate what they did with the Saudis and the Iranians. But nonetheless, I do think that it's, if the reporter, Macron thought that he could work with the Chinese to try to promote a peace for resolution of that conflict, then I think it's something that certainly shouldn't be rejected. So I think that China could in the future play an important role there. Just finally, I just wanted to briefly, before we go to some questions, just talk about my role here. And it's obviously not, it's not a straightforward place. It's a country of 1.4 billion people. And as Alex mentioned, I'm the only reporter for an Irish news organization here. And you might well ask what can one person do in these circumstances. And there is indeed a huge limit to what's possible, partly because of the news culture, partly because of the lack of access, partly because of all kinds of factors. But I think what I hope I can do is to try to understand the country. I also want to understand actually, not just the system, but also what the Chinese government and leadership thinks it's doing, wants to do. And also then to understand really how the society works. And finally to understand, to some extent, the people. And to report on the Chinese people as people. The Irish Times is governed by this trust, which has articles, rather high-minded principles. And like many high-minded principles, they're not bad ones. One of which is to promote understanding between peoples. And in the environment that we find ourselves in now, I do think that one of the functions of journalism and of being a foreign correspondent in a country like this, is to try to promote some understanding, is to try, I suppose, for me to try to understand the Chinese people and then perhaps to share that with the Irish Times. And with that, I'll hand back to Alex and thank you.