 Well, you're all very welcome. My name is Patrick Murphy, and we're very happy to have as our guest today Professor Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China in Oxford. China is on all our minds, I think, and has been for some time. It's about 40 years ago now that Deng Xiaoping gave the marching orders for the China we see today, which essentially was softly, softly catchy monkey. In other words, China should develop without making waves. I think those days are gone. It's fair to say, but in the meantime, we've heard various different formulae from Beijing, like harmonious rise. Everything would happen without making any waves. From the Western side, I think Robert Zillich, who was in the George W. H. Bush administration, gave the formula of what was wanted from Washington's side in those days as a responsible stakeholder. I was interested to read an interview that the same Robert Zillich gave in the middle of 2017, in which he effectively said that China had been a responsible stakeholder in the economic area, but he was beginning to have some concerns about the security area. I think that it's fair to say that in 2019, the wider Western consensus is that there is concern about the responsibility of the stakeholder in the economic area, as well as in the security area. Professor Meyer-Mitter is one of the great experts on China. He couldn't have come here as a better time in the background of what I've just been saying. He's going to speak to us about what does China want, China, Europe, and global ambitions. He would speak on the record and in the question and answer session afterwards, we will operate under Europe House rules. That's to say, you can quote what has been said, but may not ascribe what is said to anybody or any place. Before he begins, could I give you a friendly piece of advice to switch off your mobile phones if you haven't thought to do it until now? Professor Mitter, you have the floor. Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed to Ambassador Murphy and it's very kind of you to chair today and it's very kind of all of you to be here for this lunchtime talk. It's always a pleasure to be back in Dublin. What I'm going to do is just to speak for about 20 minutes or so because I suspect there are a lot of people here both with expertise and with questions and thoughts about China and its changing role in the world. So after I've made some comments, as Ambassador Murphy has said, we will be, I hope, holding a conversation in which I hope to also find out what all of you think about one of the most important questions facing the world today. The question of what does China want and how will the rest of the world respond? This question has become in a sense more urgent over the last few years. Can I just check? Everyone can hear me. Okay, yeah? Good. It has become more urgent in the last few years because of the changing way in which China has engaged with the wider world, as Patrick Murphy said. For a long time, the general assumption about Chinese foreign policy was that it would follow what Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader of the 80s and 90s, would call the policy of Taoguang Yang Hui. Hide your light and conceal your greatness and rise to economic and political power under the radar, so to speak, until the time comes to show forth your greatness. Well, it's certainly the case that in the present day and age, under the leadership of the current President Xi Jinping, China is taking a much more engaged and at times very assertive role in the wider world. This military parade in Tiananmen Square, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia just over three years ago, was one example of the display of China's new military prowess. Also, of course, geopolitical problems, such as the disputes which have simmered up and down over the Yauyu or Senkaku Islands, depending whether you're Chinese or Japanese, placed in the middle of the East China Sea, show that many of the territorial problems which in some parts of the world would essentially have disappeared into history are still very much current affairs in the present day, even though one should say that the relationship between China and Japan specifically is right now relatively quite smooth. And trying to assess the meaning of China's new, more visible position in global politics, it's worth asking some questions from first principles. What is the role that China is seeking to play in the world? And I would say, boiled down to a few points that I make here, that some of the things that are worth understanding are the following. First of all, one of the aims that China has, and I think this is something that is not a great secret to say, is dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. And I've chosen that word dominance quite carefully. We're not talking here about invasion or occupation or any of these sorts of languages from the old days of empire. Instead, we're talking about something that's stronger than mere influence, but a rather different mode of engagement with the wider world than would it be in the case when country-to-country conflicts were at least one way of resolving many of the more violent questions that countries faced. So in this case, dominance in the Asia-Pacific region is thought to be a sort of return to a status quo that existed, perhaps in the modern historical era, but which China has lost in the last 150 to 200 years of being the go-to power in the Asia-Pacific region. So just as the United States is dominant by any description in the North American hemisphere, so China seeks now to regain a place which it held historically previously. And one of the ways in which it does this is by seeking to increase its influence in that region and the wider world through a variety of diplomatic, strategic, and military deployments, and second, and by no means secondary, by increasing its economic role in terms of investment, finance, and infrastructure. And we will, in a few minutes, address perhaps one of the most comprehensive aspects of China's newly outward-looking foreign strategic policy, which is the so-called One Belt, One Road, or New Silk Road policy, probably the most visible aspect of China's economic diplomacy and strategics. In using a term that tries to bring together these ideas, you will quite often hear the term Zunhe Guo Li, comprehensive national power as a way of expressing what it is that the China of the present day is seeking to find in the wider geopolitical environment. And if that sounds like a somewhat broad phrase and even perhaps a slightly bland phrase, I think that is not necessarily a misleading way to think about it, because in one sense, I think that China as a rising power does not yet have an absolutely pinned down and clear sense of what it wants to do and where it wants to go. I should add, I've just, of course, come from the United Kingdom, a country which right now knows exactly where it wants to go and what it wants to do, or so I'm regularly assured by my government. But in this particular case, the long-term strategic aims of China in terms of influence and economic, military, and political strength are clear, but the goals within that are still in some ways to be defined and indeed are very much in flux in the present moment. It's also worth thinking a little bit about how the factors I've just mentioned, China's growing political and economic strength, look when viewed from other parts of the world. First of all, from the UK and the EU, still for the moment one unit, of course, China is a factor growing in importance. First of all, in terms of course of economic engagement, that is obvious, but also in terms of a changing security environment in which the relationship of a post-Brexit UK and an EU which is seeking to create its own strategic priorities and capacities will have to think about engaging with China in a wider and newer context. The second issue is the way in which in some ways China has been a sort of missing link. If you look at the top level of strategic concerns, perhaps in what you might call the North Atlantic and Western European world, the Middle East, for various obvious reasons, has been and continues to be very central. Questions to do with NATO and the relationship with Russia, an increasingly confrontational one in some ways, are also part of that mixture. Until recently, China has not been a central actor on that list. For many actors, including many European actors, it still isn't, but that situation of having to engage with the dilemmas of economic dependence and security issues that countries like Australia, for instance, have had to deal with, is becoming rapidly more important for a variety of actors in the European sphere. And third, but by no means least important, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has created a whole variety of new, unexpected changes in the geopolitical environment. This is by no means a phenomenon confined to Europe. It is fair to say that Japan, to name but one important American ally, has had to rethink its regional and geopolitical role very, very extensively in the context of Donald Trump's election in large part because I think literally his first action in the first day or so in office was to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in which Japan had been a very key actor negotiating with the United States. So what with the Trump withdrawal from the TPP and then of course the United Kingdom pulling out of the EU and jeopardizing Japanese car factories in the north, it hasn't been the best of years or two years for the Japanese government and its overseas economic policy. And in the wider context of Europe of course, the same sets of questions have been asked. First of all, what does common European security mean in the era when President Trump is skeptical to put it least, to put it most simply about NATO and its continuing role and again the eternal rising question of what does that mean in the context of a world where China will inevitably be a bigger and more important factor. To understand why China has appeared in some ways over time in other ways actually quite suddenly as a factor in this set of calculations in the minds of many in the western world both in North America and in Europe, it's worth just remembering what is so distinctive about the China of Xi Jinping, the current President and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. And in a sense, centralizing, the centralizing of control by Xi Jinping since he took power in 2012 has been one of the most distinctive elements of what's gone on. Until that point, for the best part of a quarter of a century, maybe even longer than that, since essentially Degashao Ping stepped down from power in the early 1990s. China's leadership had operated as a sort of authoritarian collective, clearly not a liberal society, not one with free media, one where political action was highly constrained. But within the top leadership, most analyses would have said there was factionalism, different debates going on about economic direction, strategic direction, diplomacy, and presidents like Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao in the 1990s and 2000s were seen in one sense as primus inter pares, obviously top leaders, but top leaders within a decision-making collective. From all accounts, and again, China is not a very transparent society in terms of its politics, Xi Jinping's rule over the last six or seven years has been much more of a centralizing nature. And he has also not been shy about using the instruments available to him to concentrate that control. One has been the setting up of very, very strong anti-corruption mechanisms, particularly what became the central discipline supervisory commission that's now been morphed into a kind of super ministry, the National Supervision Commission, which actually, in technical terms, is one of the agencies not subject to China's Supreme Court. So as an agency, enabling the Chinese government and the leadership to swoop down and make up people who they accuse of corruption, it's a very, very powerful piece of governmental authority. That has, of course, created pushback, A, from interest groups who may argue that even if they're being picked up for corruption, they're being picked up because of political opposition to them and not just because of what they've done, but also because of the economic stagnation that is now becoming increasingly clear is a real problem for China at the moment, partly because of Trump's imposition of tariffs as part of the trade war, but partly and in fact significantly because of factors that really have nothing very much to do with the United States at all, such as the very high levels of local government debt taken on after the financial crisis of 2008 when China created a credit boom to build all of the infrastructure that we now associate with that country but set up large amounts of very, very volatile debt as a result and the results of that policy are now coming back to roost. Link to that and also very distinctive now is a much greater sense of ideological nationalism as well in China. This takes many forms. One is a sort of culturalist element, the using of historical ideas both from the recent past such as China's victory against Japan in the Second World War or more ancient such as the reviving of a rather communist oriented version of Confucian values associated with China's ancient philosopher. But link to that, which in a sense is the kind of backward looking part, you have a very forward looking but again very assertive view that it's time for what the leadership has called a great rejuvenation of the Chinese people in which China will now rise to its role as a major leader in global society. And that form of nationalism, which is not necessarily the same as an aggressive anti-foreignism. It can be, you know, driven from inside as a sense of national pride, is an, nonetheless, a very notably more visible element of the mixture that goes with the political control and economic change that make up contemporary China. These constraints, I think, have led to what I would say is probably the central problem that China has in trying to exercise the various aims in the wider sense that it wants to put forward, that comprehensive national power. First of all, its geo-strategy has been highly inconsistent in the last five to seven years. If we think about the way in which it has ramped up tensions with Japan, say in the early 2010s, but that has now been smoothed over in relations with Japan, once again rather satisfactory. Or in which it expressed fury at the South Korean government for accepting an American missile defense system, encouraging Chinese consumers, for instance the boycott Korean holidays in South Korea, and even the very popular Korean boy bands and girl groups and soap operas that were something of a plague on Chinese TV for a long time. These often rather sort of small minded seeming attacks on a smaller neighbor then sort of flipped over to a hasty backpedaling when it appeared that South Korea's relationship with North Korea might cause a geopolitical problem for China as President Trump sought to rewrite relations on the North Korean Peninsula. Now, every country has inconsistencies in its foreign policy, just again that I have just come from the United Kingdom, but at the same time, it's also more problematic when you are still attempting to actually demonstrate to the wider world what your overall strategic direction is, and second, when you are of necessity, as in the case of China, a highly opaque, non-liberal, non-democratic system which is very difficult for outsiders to interpret, and frankly often it's not that easy for insiders to interpret either. So that leads to the lack of international trust that China has still suffered in the wider global community. The Economist magazine put this rather nicely and I stole their title, I have to say, with attribution for today's talk. The big cover question they had a few years ago, what does China want? The answer to that question by no means being immediately clear, but what is clear is that that wider sense of what China would like to have, the sense that it's a reliable, responsible, trusted actor in the words of Ambassador Murphy, quoting Robert Zellig, the idea of it being a responsible stakeholder, a Fuzer and a Dagwai, a big country bearing responsibilities. This is not how China is universally regarded in the wider world. Despite some very specific areas where you could argue that it has been a positive influence, unlike the United States, still very committed to the World Trade Organization in some form, committed to climate change agreements, but at the same time in a whole variety of areas including restrictive trade practices at home and often a very strong sense of creating international commercial and economic decisions that benefit China, perhaps more than the partner countries. This is still a country that has a very long way to go in terms of demonstrating that wide level of trust that ideally it would like to have. One of the other reasons, of course, to be specific, why many external actors have become rather nervous about China's intentions is, of course, its ballooning defense budget. If you look at the figures there, just under 20 years ago, inflation adjusted, we had around a 12 billion US dollar defense budget in China, which in global terms was pretty tiny. Now in 2016, and actually it's only increased slightly in the last few years, but we're talking about something more on the level of 150 billion US dollars per year. It's still much smaller than the budget of the United States Defense Department, which is around four times that amount, but the United States, of course, has even now many more global responsibilities than does China. So concentrated particularly in areas such as the Asia Pacific, the South China Sea, which China is militarizing quite swiftly, and of course naval projection into the Indian Ocean. Many more questions are being asked about where China is going with all this, and those questions are still very much up for grabs, up for discussion. We should add that the ground forces of the People's Liberation Army are actually being reduced by a certain number, but this is as part of a modernization program in which China is seeking to have a navy and army fit for the 21st century rather than having the large land forces that suited it during the 20th. So we might round up with a quick tour around some of the neighbors and the views that they have about what's going to happen in China. What I'm going to do is give you a quick set of rapid fire. Maybe predictions is too strong, but these projections, which I then hope very much that you will dispute heavily in the discussion afterwards. I'd be delighted to have a discussion or indeed an argument about those. First of all, in terms of the Korean Peninsula, I think at one level we should actually realize that compared to a year ago, and I think it is a year ago, it's February of 2018, at least in the short term, we're probably all safer than we were. It was very likely that a variety of factors might have brought a confrontation on the Korean Peninsula about a year ago. That's no great secret to say that. But as we discussed, whatever the situation in the Korean Peninsula now, it seems actually more likely that in the short term, there will be negotiations and discussions before we actually get to anything that looks like a confrontation as well. I very much hope those are not famous last words, but one of the reasons is that South and North Korea both realize that they have a vested interest in trying to get stability on the Peninsula. And China, having for a very long time stated that it was the problem of the United States to sort out, it wasn't China's problem at all. Once President Trump actually decided that he would try and sort it out solo by inviting Kim Jong-un to Singapore to talk to him in his inimitable way, this actually clearly got Beijing extremely worried, which is why the rapid-fire diplomacy with the North Koreans started about a year ago. So my projection, maybe even a prediction on this, is that the most likely outcome will be a kind of reversion to the sort of six-party talks and some kind of six-party grand bargain in the next year or two, in which some level of denuclearization is achieved, or not the full level that the United States would like. And China gets to guarantee the survival of the North Korean regime, i.e., making sure that a China-friendly regime remains on the northeastern borders of China, which is their most important priority. And obviously that would suit the North Koreans just fine. And the fact is, if you look at the opinion polling in South Korea, the younger generation who are coming up today are far less interested in reunification with the North than was the case for their parents and grandparents. So it might just be a grand bargain that in geopolitical terms suits everyone, even though for the North Korean population it may be a rather unfortunate outcome. Japan, which we've mentioned, is currently in a rather relatively worn relationship with China, not enthusiastically so, but nonetheless correct and fairly calm. Japan continues to be the other big military spender in the region in terms of the amount, just over 40 billion US dollars, again much less than China. But unlike China, there's only two countries that Japan is really worried about, one of which, of course, is North Korea, where actually ground forces and spending won't make that much difference. And the other, of course, is China. In terms of its own spending, Japan is keeping enough of a defence capacity to make sure that it can worn off China if it looks like any sort of confrontation. And China, I think, has no particular interest in genuinely going into a confrontation with Japan. Therefore, protection on that front is that actually you may hear harsh words between China and Japan going up and down in the next five to ten years. You will not see a confrontation between them. Taiwan continues to be another factor that goes up and down. I think at the moment, despite some saber-rattling and some loud words from the Chinese leadership about the need to resolve the Taiwan question, what in practice is happening, I think, is an attempt to wait out the current DPP government in Taiwan, which is becoming domestically unpopular for economic reasons, hope for a return to election of the nationalist Kuomintang party to pick up some of the cross-strait negotiations that basically ended when the current government was elected. An all-out confrontation with Taiwan again doesn't seem to fit any of the current strategic needs on the Chinese side. India is also a country with which China will continue to have a strong trading relationship, but a very cool diplomatic relationship. You occasionally hear big-think stories about how China and India will get together and conquer the world. Prediction? They won't. The South China Sea will continue to be an area of confrontation, but again, it's one of the areas where Chinese diplomacy has been much more successful than people realize, particularly in places like Myanmar, the Philippines, even in some of the more confrontational parts of the region, such as Vietnam, there have been attempts to try and find modus operandi and ways of dealing with what is, undeniably, a militarization of that part of the sea. And in that context, I think that we are probably moving towards de facto dominance of much of the traffic in that region without that ever officially being stated. And perhaps, finally, on this note, we should note the One Belt One Road Policy supposedly going to put forward $8 trillion of investment, infrastructure investment in a huge area that, as you see, stretches not just across Eurasia, but actually even to East Africa. But again, many of the practical problems, including the huge amounts of debt that have started crippling countries like Sri Lanka, Laos and have been rejected by countries like Malaysia, suggest that even this policy is beginning to have blowback. So to conclude, the issues that come from the growing importance of China in the wider world include issues that Europe, both the EU 27 and the UK in one of the status it will have after the Brexit question to use the Chinese phrases resolved one way or another, still has to be debated and decided. First of all, divisions within Europe the 16 plus one mechanism as it's known has been one way in which China has had conversations with some EU members, but not others. The Visigrad Four, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czechs, Slovakia and Poland and Hungary, sorry, I missed that one more. We've got one too many there, not Slovenia. Our countries that are operating much more in the direction of what Viktor Orban has called the so-called authoritarian illiberal democracy in some ways very attractive to China and that is an intra-EU conversation. Cyber technology is going to be the area where a great deal of these questions will come to a head. Germany has just in the last few days lowered the threshold at which potential Chinese investment in German tech companies or any companies is going to have to be examined at a governmental level. There's also I think going to be regionally in Europe, much more stress on Asia. It's a part of the world that traditionally Europe has not had a kind of common view on. I think largely because it is both a militarily more important area, secondly economically more important and thirdly because it does in some sense stand as one of the oppositional elements when it comes to Chinese influence in the region. Both Europe and the UK and indeed North America will have much more to say about that part of the world. And then finally as a Brit I cannot finish without pointing out that even after Brexit whatever that may end up being there will still be a choice about confrontation or cooperation within the European space. And I think I speak, I hope I speak for Brits on whatever side of the Brexit debate they may be by saying that it seems to me evident that having more elements of consensus cooperation and mutual discussion in terms of how European countries however defined deal with the changing face of Asian geopolitics will be a very very important priority. And in that context as we day by day look at changing news from China about its politics, about its economics about its strategic I think it is worth remembering that the conversation we have today is part of an arc. It's part of a set of changing discussions if we come back after a year or a year or five years. No doubt many of those elements will have changed and I might end by saying cheekily that that means that I hope perhaps at some stage I'll get an invitation back to Dublin to take that point up again. Thank you all very much for being here today.