 Well, thank you, Brendan. It's a very kind of you in elaborate introduction. Just to say clearly, I'm Geriria, this is John. We come to studying China from long academic careers. I was at UCD for 30 years. John Blair was at the University of Geneva for 30 years. We were both teaching American studies because we were already importing what was quite a foreign culture in the 70s into Europe. Mae'r gwahoddiad yma yw yw ni'n mynd i'r ffrindio'r grwp o'r cyfnod i'r Chynedd yn ffwrdd i'r cyd-y-ddyl. Ond mae'n mynd i'n ffrindio'r ymddug o'r rhaglen Cymru i eu hunain yma, ac maewn i'r ysgrifennu i'r cynnig ar gyfer'r ymgrifedd, mae'n gwneud o'r ddysgu'r llunydd. Mae'n gwaith yn oed o'r ymddug o'r Ysgrifennu. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. gwaith. John Blair had been there before in 1988. He was able to guide me through it, or I think I would have packed up and left in two months, but we taught a course, invented a course, really, for our university, which is called Beijing studies, Foreign Studies University, an elite university, small, teaches every language known in the EU, including Irish, by the way, now. And it also prepares the diplomats and foreign service personnel. We taught in the School of International Studies and English, thankfully in English, to the best, reputedly, the best 200 English speakers in China. Well, it was actually 220 in our class. And the first discovery was we could not teach Western civilization there. It was so weird. It was so strange. And particularly since the Chinese students didn't know their own culture as partly the result of history, the cultural revolution, but they had been deprived. We knew more about Confucius and Zhuangzi than they did. So it was a bit like teaching French to people who didn't know what a preposition was in English or a participle. You had to begin where they began. So we teach through Chinese culture. We decided to make this our project. Over 3,000 years, a comparative course, and it's a small quarter. Initially, the course was one year, then it was reduced to one semester. So if we're given to large generalizations who understand why, two huge civilizations, if you call it the West and China, over 3,000 years. But we did see very clear patterns in both. We saw them because we had to make them the stepping stones to get from one to the other. So we were quite clear what we could teach and what we couldn't teach. There's some things you only learn very painfully, like the language. There are other things like the concepts and divides. So we also decided after the first year that, and when John Blair taught the course and I sat in the back, I didn't quite heckle, but I prepared a critique. Which, on Friday morning, was delivered over, so he very clearly took the advice of Machiavell and keep your enemies close and asked me to teach with him. So we then teach comparatively, which leads another view because we don't think quite differently in many ways. So I'm going to hand it over to John. If there's a lot of back and forth, it's because we have a slideshow in which we teach. You have a screen there, so I don't know where you can see that. This is the cover of a book published in the United States in 2013. It's the American edition of this Chinese book published in Shanghai by Fudan University Press. That's the third edition. These are the readings from the last 3,000 years or so in the West and in China. Of course, according to us, if you want to study these civilizations, we want you to buy our book. What we're going to distill for you in over rapid fashion is what we've come to understand in this process of spending part of every year in the last dozen years in China, teaching, lecturing and so on. Many of you have been to China already. You will have your own basis of experience and knowledge to test our generalizations, but let's give it a try. So it's misunderstanding China, as Brendan says. Cultural barriers, which we think are major, and we think the usual Western responses to these barriers are not helpful, and we would want to suggest how it might be done better, and you see what you think. So how is it that the West doesn't understand China? There are more than 200 books in English published every year, these years, about China. Two to 300 of them. And most of them approach China using Western categories rather than Chinese ones. Obviously, we think that's a poor idea because it creates something we call an echo chamber. If you try to understand China through Western modalities, here's what happens. You take information, quantification, causation studies, that's what we've learned how to do well in the West, and you try to make them work on China. You discover that it doesn't, because the information is not readily available or it's skewed for various Chinese reasons, and you cannot possibly understand China in terms of a single cause for any event. If you ask Western questions, you're likely to find China lacking. That is, China's not the West. Simple as that. But the books keep coming out and say China ought to become like the West as quickly as possible so we can get on with business as usual. That's not going to happen. The echo chamber effect is our phrase for trying to see China as Western or approach China in Western terms. It does not recognize the specificities of China, and hence any negotiation, any collaboration, for example with the climate crisis that's on us now, are not going to succeed. So another specific reason why the West doesn't understand China is because we, most of us, believe in universal laws and principles. We're going to talk about some of the key words that keep being repeated in Western discourse, like democracy, equality, freedom, science, causation, all of them. They do not apply in China. That is, they can be learned by Chinese as part of what they learn in school, but they do not grow out of Chinese culture. They're part of Western civilization, not natively part of Chinese civilization, according to us. So the West, as we view it after these years of trying to compare the civilizations, is primarily shaped by Judeo-Christianity. Maybe that's controversial. I don't know. If you, like many Westerners, many Irish people feel you are living in a post-Catholic world or a post-Christian world or a humanist world, you have every right to categorize your worldview as you choose. But according to us, all of the worldviews common in the West are based fundamentally on Judeo-Christianity, even for people who now consider themselves to be atheists. And we'll discuss that if you want to ask about it. It makes a big difference because in the Chinese world, as you'll see, these things do not apply. The West operates from first principles. That is, Plato got it started talking about ideal forms and people still talk about ideals, the things that ought to be. The rule of law, the rule of law is the Western way of putting it. If the Chinese use the terminology, it will be a rule of law. What's the difference? A rule of law implies there could be several different versions of rules of law that would apply, but if you have the rule of law, there's only one. And that's usually understood to be us, our particular version of that. And the universal laws don't extend to China. Many of you know the American Declaration of Independence, famous Western political document begins. We hold these truths to be self-evident. In China there are no self-evident truths. There are some observations about the nature of things which are widely held. For example, everything changes and everything is connected. But that gives you a modality for coping with the world, not for deciding how people should believe about it. So there are no self-evident truths in the Chinese world. Therefore, obviously, Western authority systems that we're used to in politics and business and elsewhere are radically different from what works in the Chinese world. So our goal, then, is to try to explain better what happens in China. Here's Michael Axler. This is a summary in a nutshell of what we don't understand about China. There is no Creator God. Obviously, that comes to us from our Judeo-Christian and even from the Greek myths. There's no Creator God. What does that imply? Who creates you then? Your parents. All the kind of reverence we Christians have for God is transferred onto the parents. They are the ones who made you. To the extent that Confucius said you cannot do anything to your body, for instance, piercet, have tattoos, because your body belongs to your parents. Now that's Confucius in traditional teaching. It led the eunuchs, for instance, to preserve those bodily parts which were taken away in Mercury so they could be buried with them. It leads now to a resistance to organ transplants. So your parents, your reverence, and all the ancestors before who gave you life, you would not be here except for the millennium of ancestors before you. You have no eternal essence or immortality. You have no self or soul that is not given to you, in this case, by others. What does that mean? Your immortality rests with your children, your ability to prolong the family. In this case, for China, it's the one child, which is one reason why so much weight is put on that child, so much pressure on that child. That is family's immortality. That is their prolongation through millennia. Also, of course, longevity is very important. In other words, no independent transcendental world. There is a kind of vague realm of spirits and ghosts and so forth, but it is not, as we see it in Judeo-Christian, it is not a city of God. There is not a civil service of angels up there, and so forth and so on. The sort of world that Milton describes in Paradise Laws. There's not a one world in all the stable first principles that can appeal to the famous painting of Raphael in the stanzas of Plato pointing upwards to truth. When we teach this, people look at it as if we start to teach the history of Christianity, we have to do it to visual things we usually do to the Sistine Chapel. In the end, this makes China sound very weird, but when you're in China, actually it's the West that seems very weird, believe me. When you're suddenly in a world in which these things are not automatic beliefs, you wonder how you're totally disoriented. This is the outcome of this. Why do we think of China as weird? In fact, since the reordering of the world over the last 10 or 20 years in which the rise of China is increasing visibility of the rest of the world, one of the things that has been evident through investigation, in this case by social psychologists, is it is not the rest of the world that is weird. It is, in fact, the West. The West is very particular in many fields. Now, I'm going to cite you. On a handout you have, it's the third item there. I have an outdated handout. We don't have it on the handout. We were posted on the website. This is weird. Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. There are very few countries in the world that have all those qualities. Some are rich, but not democratic. Some are educated, but not industrialized, and so forth. The West, in fact, according to these sociologists, there are three social scientists that made a study. It came out in 2010, very recently. It's taken off in terms of the animals of reading about the West. It says that in these domains, now I'll list them, they were able through big data for the first time to look at huge studies in social psychology across all sorts of civilizations. One was an anthropologist working in small civilizations. They thought the following domains are in contest. The concept of fairness, the concept of equality, the concept of cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential reasoning. We'll see that in a minute, how people form categories. Moral reasoning, very different in the rest of the world. Reasoning styles, very different in the rest of the world. Self-concepts and related motivations about who you are and what you want out of the world. And visual perception. So the rest of the world, in contrast to the West, sees the world literally very differently. This could be established, as I say, through psychological tests. Now I'm going to give you one test which has been given widely, in this case by an American who is cited here, Richard Nisbet. A very interesting thinker, a social psychologist called The Geography of Thought. And the conclusion of these Western ways cannot be privileged for the rest of the world. Because traditional Asian ways which China shares with the rest of the world, most of the traditional Asian ways of thinking and acting. So in fact, it is not China that is weird at all. It is we in the West who are most particular. But the difficulty is, of course, is others aimed to become rich, say, in Brazil, in Mexico or in China. That we also think they're going to become weird. That is democratic. And that isn't necessarily so. The two do not follow. Now I'm going to give you a test to show you how one arrives at these presumptions. And I'm going way back to when you were four, if you can remember that far back, some of you. This is a test that was given by Richard Nisbet to four-year-olds in America, a wide variety of them. One group of Americans, one group of Asian children and one group of Asian American children. And because they were only four and could not read, he had to show them pictures. So he showed them four pictures, one of hen, one of cow, one of grass. And he said to them, please tell us one by one which two belong most comfortably together. So I'm going to try it here. Okay, friends, which two belong more comfortably together? Does the hen belong to the grass? How many would vote for that? No takers. Does the hen and the cow belong? Is there specifically just one link? Just one link. If you had to put the two together in one go, which would you put the hen and the cow together? Okay, there's one person. And who would put the cow and the grass? Well, gosh, I know you're Irish. We all don't cows eat grass in America, they don't know that anymore. They keep them in birds, you know. Well, what he discovered, of course, was the western. Then we only have one westerner here, fully acculturated. First of all he discovered, you must realize by age four you're fully a member of your culture. You will not change in the way you think. You can think in the other way, but you're effectively in culture. The western way of thinking, immediately, the four-year-olds, this is amazing. Had an invisible concept up there in the cloud called an animal. Now none of us have seen an animal. It doesn't exist. We've only seen instances of animals. In this case, a cow and a hen. The western children were terribly sophisticated in their reasoning. That's very interesting. This transcendental world is being built by four-year-olds. This cathedral we carry around with us of first principles and ideas and categories. All in hierarchies. Where is the Chinese and the Asian children saw them and saw things? Sorry. Where is that graphic? It's not coming up. What is wrong with this? What I want to do is show you a circle which should have been there. I don't know where it's gone. Of the cow eating the grass, producing milk which feeds more cows. You all know this circle. There's twice as many cows. There are people now in the washroom. We know this. But in other words, it goes way back to learning the mother tongue. Language is a key here. When mothers teach words to the children in the west, mothers tend to sit the children on their knee or point to think, look a car. Look a bus. They're both transporter machines or whatever. They enforce that grouping through categories. They point to objects and nouns. Or that is a teddy. Hand mummy the teddy. Whereas parents from East Asia, mothers in particular, also grandparents, reinforce relationships. They don't care whether it's a teddy bear or a toy truck. Give to mummy, I give to you. They teach verbs. They teach exchange. Here's a picture that maybe speaks more than the words. The western mother trying to teach her baby to read. It may be six, eight, nine months. Look at the distance. She's holding up an object. Trying to teach him with his head and his eyes. Not with his body. Whereas the Chinese mother here is hugging her child, you give the flower to mummy, I give to you. Back and forth. What is the emphasis there? A world of nouns versus a verb. We live in a world of objects and nouns versus a world of verbs. So we have cultural divides here that are very large from a very early age. So this slide just tries to summarize what's been implicit in our focus on acculturation, which is a condiment in anthropological emphasis. How do cultures get passed along without changing very much from one generation to another in China and the West? Even though there are enormous numbers of changes going on in the world, and in the world, and in the economy, and so on, the mentalities don't change that much. So the Western world is focused on categories, principles, oriented to systems, very detailed and very abstract. And children learn to get along, because they want to talk with us, their parents. And we call on transcendental universal values maybe because we've had centuries of the West dominating the rest of the world, coming to believe that the West does things is automatically the best for all human beings. Highly doubtful, but in any case a common assumption on the part of Western people. And finally, if there are hierarchies involved, we so emphasize the notion of equality, that the hierarchies are in the other world, the transcendental world. In China, quite the opposite. It is oriented to this world, that the values are focused on relationships in context, very concrete values. There are pointing to more and more complex interactions between people, families, clans, villages, ultimately a nation. And finally, there are many hierarchies, but they're in this world, not in some other world. So, if you take that, those fundamental cultural differences in orientation, you begin to think about governance. This is the way Western governance seems to work for most countries today. It presumes really from the first principles, and some of them are words that we are familiar with already, the language that represents them, and these are Judeo-Christian in origin, as articulated through the Enlightenment a couple of centuries ago, and the key words, you all know them, I think you probably use them. Democracy, equality, freedom, individuals, there are others, science, rationality, reason, so on. And in our world, debate and confrontation is considered constructive because individuals are competing with each other to define what is true or worth believing. In the Chinese world, confrontation is destructive because it challenges the solidarity which is presumed to be most important to be maintained. So, in the West, it's okay to confront and have differences of opinion because it's an impersonal process. It is a principal process. Debate is our standard word for it. Debate is very difficult for the Chinese, and if there's time after... Do you want to tell the Chinese professor's story about disagreeing with him publicly? I think the story about your teaching your class how to debate is more... Okay, well I have to teach my class how to debate it, but it's very, very difficult. You're not both debating. Right, right. Who's going to give the example? Right, well, I'll start. They didn't want to debate because they would lose faith if they disagreed with each other publicly in the class. I want to teach them critical thinking. That's how we think critically. They were even more concerned when I said I'll give you a controversial topic, but you won't be free to say what you're going to debate for or against it. I'm going to throw a coin. You prepare both sides and be prepared. In the end, they said that's not acceptable. I said, okay. I divided the room up and I said, next class you're going to debate and the proposition was China's becoming too westernised. I sent them away and said, prepare a pro, you prepare a con, off you go. Two days later we met up and the debate went as smooth as cream. They were all very polite to each other. They were all so forth and so on. I said, what's going on? Oh, we prepared this. They rigged the whole meeting. Because they didn't want to disagree with each other. But then when I got them beneath the formal debate there was almost blood on the floor. In that one minute. So it is clear that the trouble is that if you disagree with people in China, it's true here too. If you disagree with people, they lose face or respect. I learned never after a talk if I was asked to comment on a talk because you often are in academic circles to say what Professor Wong said is very interesting but I think I would take him up on two or three points here. You never say that. What you say is he's very interesting but maybe I'd like to supplement it with a few observations. You never disagree with a Chinese person and I'm sure as I say that Ireland's very much the same. The idea of our assumption about governance in China is that it is highly centralized and top-down, which of course it is, but we assume that that means it's inflexible. That's wrong. It's extremely flexible. It is in constant negotiation on different levels and it's very complicated especially for outsiders. It does depend on being respectful towards superiors. It's within the family and beyond the family that is probably the most widespread and important continuing value in Chinese life. Therefore we assume that the authorities are in control and control means suppression and repression and indeed citizens have few ways to come back against the authorities and indeed they do not have the checks and balances of western modes of governance. That does not mean that they are free or real. It does not mean that those in authority have the power which we presume we would have if we didn't have to stand for elections and things of that kind. Here is a western stereotype of Chinese governance. I think you recognize this comes from the Simpsons cartoon. It's your children and grandchildren that watch it even if you don't. The background here is from a Chinese poster. We have the three representatives of People's Liberation Army, and there are some the factories are laid behind and the robotic soldiers in the front lower right implying that that's the way the Chinese function. Only robotically following the orders that are given from above. Of course Homer Simpson is gagged he can't possibly express himself and that looks bad. He's being marched off to prison I think. The western stereotype of the Cold War vision of China. Here on the other hand is a vision in the other direction which is well damn. Go back on. Which has plenty of problems of its own. Of course you recognize this is focused on American politics, the symbols of the two major parties battering each other, neither giving up, neither making progress and governance as a process ceases to function adequately under those conditions. So if you were speaking to a Chinese audience this would be a perfect example of why China should not attempt to move in any western democratic direction because this is what is likely to happen. The next slide is really a question of if you move into the Chinese world what kind of an image would you select to represent governance as it works in China? We selected a very controversial image it's been controversial ever since it arrived by Hong Yong Yu some of you will know this. The Chinese here is a very familiar saying to anyone in China Zhang Yi Zhe Rian Bi Zhe Rian which means one eye opened, one eye closed. I'm sure that we in Ireland recognize this. It is only the wing, whether it's winking or whether in fact this was shot in my mouth this came out near the end of the revolution, was highly controversial. Is this a critique? Everything in art is regarded as political. I mean there's no separate political sphere. In fact the owl image goes back to the book of O to the book of songs which is extremely ancient Confucius cites it and it was taken as political then because the owl was a raptor. This was shown to Mao everyone was prepared to go out and prison the people and the artists in particular and Mao looked at and shrugged his shoulders and said everyone knows that I will sleep with one eye open, one eye closed and in fact he's right. I'll still sleep with one eye open, one eye closed because half their brain is still awake because they're not only raptors but they are also rapt. I mean they're also hunted. Now why is this an important image if you want to look at the cultural debate in China? It partly has to do with the way that the systems work or don't work and we as I say are quite familiar with the way. The owl is a metaphor clearly and it's how to preserve face. If you're very concerned a central concern in all dealings with China is preserving the other person's face or respect. Why is that? The only self you have in this world is face. It's not the image you construct for yourself. It's the image that others give you. It is the respect that others give you. You are judged by how you are greeted how you are received how much attention is paid to you. If you don't get that you do not exist. It's a kind of social suicide not to have face. The saying is a person without face in China is like a tree without bark. The tree still stands but without bark the tree will die. Everyone who knows about trees knows that. This is one eye open in the publicly visible events which you can't deny but one eye closed to whatever interferes with the appearances to avoid conflict and trouble. It's often ambiguous situations where you have a choice. Let me give you an example. When we lectured together it's a good thing because I can keep my eyes open when John Blair is talking to the audience and they being students of course the phones come out they start texting or maybe the computer goes up I caught one looking at friends now there were very few these being very attentive Chinese graduate students but it does happen right. Now I have a chance when I stand up to speak to say you and you turn off your mobile phones you know. If I do that I lose face because it means I'm calling attention to people who are not paying respect to me and therefore it becomes self-evident that some respect is not being shown to me so I go down a bit whereas if I ignore it and catch them after class you don't ever do that again right or avoid if you don't come to class. This is the way one maintains a certain authority we all know if we've been in positions of authority either as parents or teachers or professional people if there are certain occasions you just say forget it it's not worth calling other occasions you think I can't do that. I can't do that. Protecting not only yourself and your own appearance but those others in your your guanchi. Your guanchi are your networks but they are your networks of people who trust and who are loyal to you. It begins with your family where it's presumed and moves outwards. Now once guanchi is very important you move around with this kind of mob if you want but an example of how guanchi loylties work this is a network of loylties and trust in other words of exchange. In guanchi you do something for someone they do something for you you're always very careful in China to pay back eventually and not as punctilious as Japanese in keeping count of what you owe them but you do owe them so if someone helps you out you take them out to lunch you always lead with gifts everyone knows that when you go to China. So there is a famous incident of Confucius in the Annex who is being visited in his village by the governor of Shure. The governor of Shure is very proud he says I come from the you can't teach me anything about moral righteousness Confucius I come from the most moral village in the whole country. Confucius looks at him and says really and he says yes I'll show you how moral we are if a father steals a sheep his son will report him to the authorities and Confucius is horrified he says what? He said that would never happen in our village in our village the father covers his son and the son for the father now to us that spells when I open when I closed or is it loyalty that leads to what we call corruption which is by the way our corruption is not the same as other people's corruption as you all know if you've done any business in China you know we have a corrupt little society here they have a corrupt big society there what is corruption in this case loyalty is the primary rule that you are always low but from feint compliance is necessary in what pretends to be a top down centralized system which isn't really in control now feint I mean strategic compliance you make the gesture of compliance and go ahead and do what you want and every Chinese person is very strategic in every decision they take they are no understand how to game the system it is not regarded as immoral it is what you do in a rigid top down hierarchical system to get by you know and it involves a great deal of intelligence that's why strategy is so highly developed in the Chinese kind of tradition people like Sun Tzu didn't come from nowhere they came from a tradition which the emperors word was law and you had to learn how to work around it it's a work around so it isn't necessarily corruption it is you make the gesture everyone understands the gesture and lets it go and that's very important in terms of governance so we move on to a big issue power in China power in China of course is not centralized as we all know first of all is so un-centralized that there is a dual system of governance in place not even our Chinese students knew about this we managed to get a document that set this out every position of authority in China everything even in our university has a shadow we wouldn't even call it a shadow because it's a twin and every state position has a party official every party official has a state person they watch each other they make decisions together they are their checks and balances so in our university the vice dean, the dean, everyone the president for instance the party secretary they are permanently in our university over the last 12 years the presidents have changed three or four times the party secretary is always the same he and the president arrive at decisions about the university together so it's actually a Leninist model and it's unchanged since some people would say unreformed but it's unchanged it clearly works also powered structures that anyone who's worked in China knows this are very diffused they're diffused for many reasons a lot of delegations to local authorities are highly localised which means that centralized mandates become spotty implementation becomes a difficulty and how they're implemented is often left up to the authorities and if the mandate from central power is ambiguous how do you follow it? also influence is a very important thing in Yuan's Guangxi for instance in the army we know someone whose brother-in-law it was a general in the PLN that doesn't mean his influence is lessened we're told once a commanding officer always a commanding officer so any important decisions are being made in his branch of the army in Shanghai a phone call is made what do you think about this what should I say to the committee so influence is very hard to track what does this lead up to the result is very hard to assign accountability for any decision made first of all it would be made by consensus with at least two people there are no clear lines of command it's not a military structure it's not robotic as the westerners think in fact it's far more flexible and far more sophisticated and far more complicated as everything gets in China very complicated very quickly because you're not dealing with one person you're dealing with a Guangxi we're making a lot of decisions behind your back this is where we lead to how then do you govern such a country at the very top of the people's republic is the standing committee of the public there are now seven men they are presumed to disagree freely with each other but none of these debates ever surface there is a decision made by some kind of consensus among the seven and that establishes the position which is broadcast for everyone it's only rare in recent decades when controversy on the level of the standing committee surfaces the last time was a Tiananmen incident of 1989 which was so embarrassing to the authorities in China that they tried to cover it up ever since so there is conflict but we don't know what it is because it is for reasons of face kept out of sight because if it were to become public as it would in the west sooner or later that would lead to the loss of face the loss of credibility of the party the whole edifice would be threatened so criticism overt criticism is very dangerous and is very often suppressed long prison sentences or whatever so the governance in China as it works works through seen heart mind the poor translators who go from Chinese to English have a problem because in English there is no heart mind word a translator of this word has to use a mind word or a heart word something about feelings or something about thoughts this is true in all western languages because for centuries now we've presumed we believe in our weird way that you can separate your thinking processes from your feeling process Chinese don't believe that it's all connected you can't think without feeling you can't feel without thinking that's what it means to be a human being so governance then works through human nature in this way the greatest fear is a feeling matter a the thinking matter to it's Luan chaos the most recent time of extreme chaos and Luan was the great cultural revolution no one we've met in China is interested in going back to that period whether they're on the governing side or the side of the governed they say this was a terribly destructive because all the structures we came around to allow us to live were brought into question so the mantra of government in that world is control control control it doesn't have control but it keeps insisting that it does and it's only naive westerners who believe that kind of statement and the control the attempts at control are exerted through carrot and stick both sides their promises of prosperity and stability national greatness space program nine dash line in the South China Sea many recent instances or threats threats if you don't follow the line established by the authorities there will be poverty there will be instability Luan there will be punishment and shame for individuals who deviate too seriously too visibly from the public line so scene becomes translated as the feelings of the Chinese people as William Callaghan who spoke here some weeks ago has written sometimes there are statements from the foreign ministry in China translated into English as the feelings of the Chinese people are hurt by some western diplomatic initiative that sounds silly from the western point of view because we don't think feelings are part of diplomatic interactions but in the Chinese world because China is so central to the idea of human nature the feelings are intimately connected with the reasoning processes that go on so in negotiating with China in all kinds of levels the west typically evokes first principles of physics and I think you've heard metaphors like distraction leverage pressure these are Newtonian physics which went out for the physicists centuries ago but still seems dominant in western thinking about how you manage the world you try to have causes and effects and outcomes and it is hopeless as an approach to a complex world like China it's not useful to analyze complex situation in terms of single causes or predictable outcomes because there are many causes and there are multiple outcomes simultaneously at the same time China instead evokes personal relations the metaphors that they use are based on respect the negotiations follow Guangxi networks if you'd like to ask a question about Zhou Yong Kang and Bo Xilai we'll have time to show how that works in the networks of influence and hierarchies within the Chinese world the one thing that the west and China have as a shared tradition which is the greatest source of hope we see in the negotiations to come is pragmatism that is the common emphasis not on ideology, not on abstract principles which the westerners tend to believe in but nobody else tends to believe in them but rather concrete problems which maybe can be eased by negotiating some particular concrete specific non-abstract change in the way things are done if we can be sufficiently pragmatic together we have a chance of coping with the climate crisis if we don't we have no chance and the focus then is on we as human beings not just we as westerners which is where we began and we as human beings are now in the same boat there's the boat and you can see that it is of course a western boat because it's way down by western ideals and western power structures denial of climate change economic growth pdf rises in pdf no matter what despite the flaws in pdf wealth, keep our wealth I have the greatest wealth here in that elsewhere the rights as in human rights very complex issue worth commenting on in consumerism and all of these the weight on all of these the end of the boat where most of the people are out of the water but the man on top is saying, why don't you row otherwise we're going to drown and of course this boat is not going to escape that that is where we end this is our greatest preoccupation right now we need to understand we need to understand each other we have reached a critical point on this earth that if we don't the two biggest emitters are US and China right now of CO2 emissions China is even overtaking the EU now in terms of per capita emissions if we can't sit down and talk in concrete things about what's going to happen in the next 20 years we are indeed as a species we're in for a very rough time and that means our future and the future generations but we have to find common ground and we cannot have common ground if we insist in our arrogant way on them doing it the western way we have to find a common human solidarity and I think that actually the Chinese way of understanding this is a heart mind issue this isn't just a mind issue and it is a matter of one's heart mind it is a matter of one's posterity and then it is a matter of using all the cultural resources that we have in both civilizations to try to bring and we do have a long pragmatic tradition even America does of actually sitting down and saying this is the situation now let's just get on with seeing what common ground we have so I'm sure you have a lot of questions because we have covered a lot of ground