 Okay, awesome. Greetings, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 13th Tufts China US Symposium. My name is Jerry and I'm the Director of Tufts Search. The Tufts China US Symposium is a two-day academic conference held every spring by search. Our goal is to foster academic understanding of China and cultivate cooperation between students, experts and policy practitioners from different backgrounds and cultures. We wish to create a unique crossroad of ideas, experiences, and people that characterize Tufts University and to promote an atmosphere of deep analysis and critical awareness. I want to apologize for not being able to host you at our beautiful Maverick campus. In the past, this event is held in person. There are drinks, snacks, and other refreshments. And after the conference, all the students and speakers gather together for dinner in a room that has superb view of Cambridge and the Boston skyline. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year's symposium will be our first and hopefully our last remote symposium. The theme of this year's symposium is crisis and opportunity. The Sino-US relations are in deep crisis. The two countries spat and confronted each other on almost every subject, on trade, technology, human rights, to China's sparring time claims. The Biden administration has made it clear its attention to pursue strategic competition with China, yet at the same time, opportunities for engagement remain. There are many areas where the two superpowers can cooperate for the interests of the global community from the current global health crisis and climate change. We hope that this symposium will provide a platform for all to consider and better understand these issues and the future of Sino-US relations. So under that same, this year's symposium will explore a variety of topics from the Chinese moving industry in the culture panel, which will be held later today, to the security panel, which will explore China's never built up and its sparring time strategy, to the econ panel, of which the topic is the prospects of the economic divergence between the West and China. For more detailed information about this year's symposium, schedule, panels and speakers, you can find them in our program booklet. I'm sending it to the chat, give me a second, here we go. Our first panel today is the David Rawson Memorial Lecture. This is the symposium's keynote speech and will be presented this year by Mr. James Pamler, Deputy Editor of Foreign Policy. Now, before we get started, let's hear from my Deputy Dash, who introduced the background and purpose of the David Rawson Lecture. Right, thank you, Jerry. So every year we're excited to present the David Rawson Memorial Lecture. So it's a keynote lecture commemorating David Rawson, who was a tough student, a member of the class of 2007, whose life tragically ended the summer after his graduation. He was an international relations major, graduated cum laude and was an early member of SURGE and studied abroad in Hong Kong. So a deep love for this group and the US and China. He was involved in a lot on campus, was a talented tenor with the toughs chamber singers for four years, acted in drama performances and wrote for lots of campus publications. And he was in the process of applying to become a US officer Navy, he was applying to become a US officer Navy candidate, intelligent officer when he passed away in the summer of 2000. So that's a little bit of background on the lecture itself. And now I'll introduce James Palmer. All right, and now Jerry rejoined who's having some technical difficulties. So I'll pass it back to Jerry and have him introduce Mr. James Palmer. Thank you, Deb. Sorry about the earlier, my internet just jumped off and the audio went off as well. So this year's David Rawson Memorial Lecture will be presented by Mr. James Palmer. He is the deputy editor at foreign policy. As a journalist, he has extensive experience living in and reporting on China. He is the author of the Bloody White Baron, the extraordinary story of the Russian nobleman who became the last count of Mongolia and the death of Mao, the Tangshan earthquake and the birth of the new China. Mr. Palmer won the Shiva Nepal Prize for travel writing in 2003. He had worked previously in Chinese newspaper and is currently deputy editor at foreign policy. So Mr. Palmer will give us a 30 to 40 minutes lecture followed by a Q&A. So without further ado, let's welcome Mr. Palmer. Thank you so much, Jerry. So today we're going to talk about the US-China relationship and about the questions of knowledge. Who knows what on each side, how does each side perceive each other and what are the perceptions of the future? Because we're at a point now where China-US relations are at a crisis point like nothing we've seen for maybe 50 years. The level of tensions has ratcheted up continuously over the last four years. In the last month alone, I would say the Chinese rhetoric, the Chinese tone has taken on a even more aggressive tone, both against the US and against other Western allies of the US such as Australia and Canada. Part of which of course is this extra only pushback against the designation of the crackdown as a genocide. And we've seen a full-throated kind of retort from the Chinese state and that using every means at its disposal. This confrontation has been coming for some time. The contradiction between a US that believed it could remake China essentially in its image as a Westernized, democratized power through engagement and a Chinese party state determined to stick to its guns, determined that the survival of the party and the power of the party was the overwhelming factor that would shape a newly powerful China and determined to use China's power to force the rest of the world to accept the limitations of the party state. That's been on a collision course for 20 or 30 years, a collision course that Americans didn't really realize was happening until maybe as late as 2014, 2015, a huge number of members of the Western establishment, particularly on the business and the diplomatic side, deeply believed in a China that would accommodate itself to the rest of the world. And the answer instead that they got was that the rest of the world had to accommodate itself to China. That's something that they weren't expecting and something that all the actions of the last 10, 20 years left them extremely open to and unprepared for. So now we have this point at which the US is collectively almost panicking about Chinese power. We've seen from both parties the rhetoric of Chinese influence, of Chinese threat, of China's growing presence in the world. We've seen talk about how Taiwan is in danger of being invaded within the next four to six years. We've seen discussion of how the Chinese military is getting to a point where it can conceivably challenge the US military. Either some claim globally or in China's own backyard. And on the Chinese side, we've seen a massive hardening of attitudes towards the outside world. 10 years ago, the notion that China had something to learn from the outside was still pretty common inside Chinese circles, that China could imitate other people's systems, could reform its own failed policies, could learn from others. That very idea is anathema at this point. The only thing that we're seeing this drumbeat from the state is the idea that China is right about everything, that the rest of the world is against China, that the Chinese system is the superior one, that China's decisions can't be questioned. And that's gone along of course with this hardening of attitudes towards internal dissent, the crackdown on lawyers, the crackdown on human rights activists, the crackdown on NGOs, the crackdown on religion, the crackdown on ethnic minorities. Everything in China itself has become stiffer, more resistant to any criticism, and more determined in this notion of Chinese greatness, of China's rightful place in the world. Underlying all this though, is a big question. And that question is this, is time on China's side? And what I mean by that is, is it inevitable that in the next 10 to 20 years, China will continue to grow more powerful, the Chinese economy will overtake the US economy in 2028 or 2030, that the Chinese military will come to rival the US military, that China's influence will be on a par with the United States, and that the future is only bright for China. And on the reverse, that US power is doomed to diminish, that the US share of the global economy will continue to shrink, that the US ability to impose its values or its will or its whim on other nations will grow smaller as China's grows larger. It's very easy to say, yes, China's going to keep growing, China's going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. Because we've seen this amazing rise, these straight lines of growth. We've seen China climb the economic ranks from overtaking India to overtaking the United Kingdom, to overtaking Japan, the each of these moments celebrated massively inside the country. We've seen Chinese people go from being citizens of a poor nation one perceived as backwards to being for the urban middle classes, triumphant players on the global stage, tourists with money to spend, consumers with the power to buy and the power to shape global markets. On the diplomatic stage, China has become the foremost power of the United Nations, the power with the ability to block, to coerce other countries into signing up to its measures. Chinese companies have become some of the world's largest. China has gone from being perceived as incapable of creativity to being this massive innovator in financial tech, in solar panels, in areas that were once seen as the domain of only developed Western nations. And so, futureologists always have this tendency to go by what's happened in the last decade and just see it going onwards, to see a China that will only continue to grow. And if you're the US looking at that, then you feel inherently challenged. You feel that the only time that you can stop this is now, the only time that you can take action is now. And we see this rhetoric coming increasingly from policy makers, from think tanks, from journalists that the US hasn't acted, the US needs to act, the US must move on countering China. But look at China another way. Look at a country that still has a GDP per capita lower than the global average. A country in which 400 to 500 million people are still offline. A country that is constrained by demography thanks both to the natural changes caused by economic growth and by the limitations imposed by the one child policy. That's a China where sunny times seems to be working against it, where the moment that China is enjoying now may be the greatest chance and the biggest influence China has. And if you're a Chinese leader, if you're Xi Jinping, you're looking at these figures and you're thinking, can this continue? Can this growth, can this power continue? Or are we going to get stuck? And there's a fear that comes out quite often in Chinese commentary, less so in the last few years because commentary has been so stifled, so restricted. That China is going to get stuck. That it's going to get caught in the middle income trap. That this is as far as China gets. And you can look back in Chinese professors, Chinese analysts have looked back at other countries that have come too close to the United States and see where they didn't make it, see where the growth suddenly hits a cliff, see where things fall off. You can look at things like the failure of China to ensure a high school level education for the majority of people. The kind of education that moving up the value chain of the long run depends on. A school system that in the countryside is falling apart. You can look at the burden or imposed by the one child policy of the inverted pyramid where the current generation is stuck caring for two sets of parents, four sets of grandparents and their own children, squeezed between the generational needs of retirees and the demands of increasingly expensive schools and so on. We saw that coming out, for instance, in the almost panic in the Chinese media when the shift away from the one child policy failed. It's happened a couple of years ago, there was this decision that pretty much everybody should get to have two children should have this limit that had been in place for 30 odd years lifted. And Chinese media, Chinese analyst, demographers almost universally predicted a baby boom would result that you would see this sudden eruption of pent-up desire for kids. And it didn't happen. There was almost no growth in the numbers, there was almost no impetus of the change in policy because the factors that were constraining people from having kids at that point were not just government policy, they were the immense expense of raising a kid in a Chinese city, especially compared to the average income of most people. The expense, not just of sending them to school, sending them to university, but also of anticipating having to provide them property to get married or having to cover the costs in bribery, it influenced buying, needed to launch a career in the Chinese city. And so the people that were looked at this opportunity given to them by the government and said, no. And that spurred another wave of panic, of fear that there were just not going to be the numbers of young people needed to keep the economy going. So if you're looking at all this, and if you're thinking perhaps time isn't on China's side, perhaps we're going to get bogged down in these limits that have held back so many other countries in our position. That raises the question of what you do with the time now, what do you do with the moment you have? And that raises a lot of dangerous possibilities because if now is the moment of China's ascendance, China's power, that moment won't last, you have to seize it, you have to move on it. And what's the main way that you turn that moment of power, turn that moment of advantage into something permanent, it's by territorial revanskism. It's by taking back these areas such as Taiwan, such as the Himalayan borders that have been claimed by China for so long, but not realized on the ground. And if the Chinese leaders are thinking that way, if they are thinking that this is our moment, this is a chance we can't miss, it massively raises the stakes of what's going to happen in the next few years because if they're thinking this way, they have one shot, they have a chance now to imprint Chinese territory, Chinese power in a way that hasn't been conceivable before and may not be conceivable afterwards. And on a personal level, they have a chance to make themselves as leaders, the man who took the men who took back these territories, who took back Taiwan, who took back the disputed Himalayan borders, who took back, who stamped Chinese rule permanently into Xinjiang or into Inner Mongolia, who are fundamentally like the shapers of the nation in the same way that their father or their grandparents generation were in the creation of the new China. So that's one possibility or one fear that I have. This idea that there's a belief that this is China's moment and that it can't be wasted. Here's the other fear. On the US side, we have this belief that China's rise is inevitable, that unless stopped, that it must be stopped now. And so this is kind of the reverse of the pattern that I think is emerging within the Chinese leadership. The US believes not that this is China's moment, but that this is the only US moment to stop China. And that means that where that China can't just be waited out or challenged in the long-term, China must be confronted. And so we're seeing all these measures, all these policies wrapped together around this idea of confronting China. And while China perhaps sees this as the moment it has to act, so does the US. It sees this as, and it sees this as the moment that it can recover a sense of national purpose, a sense of national wellbeing by confronting China, by making China into the determining enemy of the day. One of the ways that materializes in DC is the obsession with the idea that China policy is bipartisan. In fact, that's because almost nothing in DC is bipartisan these days. So the idea that a policy could be bipartisan, could have both Democrats and Republicans enthusiastically backing new measures against Chinese influence, against the Belt and Road, against China's military buildup is inherently exciting to policymakers. They see it as the foundation of a new continuing American order, a new way at which DC can put aside the breaks and fragmentations of American democracy and project itself out into the world. Because one can actually see is fascinated with this notion that you can do something that isn't political or isn't domestically political. There's a couple of reasons. One is that the limitations of think tanks mean that bipartisan policy is always more attractive because it gets attacked less, it opens you up less. And the other is that if it's bipartisan the money will flow towards it. And China fulfills both of these needs. But for China to be this urgent enemy, this power that must be struck against now, China can't be something that can be waited out. If we think of it in terms of we can just keep going, we can run as it were delaying actions, we can continue with the things that the US has been doing before, whether that's promoting democracy, freedom of navigation operations, these kind of things. We can stay on this study course and China will diminish or China will, China's sense of new power will shrink by itself. That takes away that urgency for funding. That takes away that urgency for military buildup for contention. And so these two great powers, these each locked into the notion that it has to act now are heading straight towards each other, straight towards a crisis in the Taiwan Straits, straight towards a clash over some literal in the South China Sea, straight towards economic decoupling on a scale that would have been unimaginable five years ago, where connections to the other power are seen as inherently treasonous or inherently is aiding and supporting our strategic opponent as opening you up to espionage. The two have started to mirror each other in terms of their own paranoia about the intrusion of the other. Now, when I say this, whenever I talk about US-China mirroring, we're still talking about this with the proviso that the US is a somewhat functional democratic state with the rule of law and China is very much not. So things that happen in espionage paranoia inside the United States are inherently constrained in a way that they are not in China. But that said, we've seen a wave of arrests of Chinese Americans over relatively minor or technical offenses. We've seen a wave of discussions of discussions by US security and intelligence community leaders of China as an all of society threat, things that frame Chinese-ness as being inherently threatening, that posit Chinese immigrants, even Chinese American citizens as inherently risky, inherently a security warrior. And with this too, we've seen this rush of anti-Asian attacks in the United States over the last like six months to a year, particularly the last couple of months attacks on elders, attacks being carried out by people who are often mentally ill or homeless or otherwise desperate, but which reflect language and fears that permeate the US system right now. On the Chinese side, way before this, we've seen a massive uptick in the number of arrests in so-called espionage cases. We've seen for National Security Day, which was yesterday, the announcement, the gleeful, the boasting announcement of the arrest of a 20-year-old student for listening to anti-Chinese to anti-Chinese media for starting a blog that posted articles about China for working at foreign media. News assistants at Western media in China, and news assistants, by the way, is the term used to describe Chinese journalists working for Western media, but they can't legally be called journalists. And so they get this somewhat ridiculous title of assistant, whereas in reality, they're often the ones doing the bulk of the work. But a bunch of them arrested, harassed out of their jobs, their parents threatened, their friends interrogated and intimidated. But that's gone double for any journalist working outside of China, such as Vicky Xu in Australia, where there's been a massive hate campaign launched on social media against time. And so while they're mirroring each other, while both are going through this period of intensified paranoia, the Chinese version is worse. The Chinese version comes without any access to legal counsel that comes on a much faster scale. It comes with the brutal intimidation of friends and family. But they still look like each other. They still have the sense that each power is deeply and fundamentally afraid of the other in this moment, afraid that it will lose the chance it sees to rise or to stop the rise. Accelerating this is the breakdown in lack of knowledge of each other. And this has very different roots on each side. On the US side, it's simply that US journalists are no longer able to work in China for all intents and purposes. The Western journalists as a whole. There's been dozens of journalists kicked out of China or denied the ability to go into China to report a more or less blanket ban on new journalist visas in the last year and a half. The only one I think that's been issued has been a single one to a Japanese news outlet. People are stuck for six months, nine months in Taiwan in Seoul waiting for even the chance to come into China to report. And as well as the formal bans we've seen journalists being chased out of the country by direct harassment or threats such as John Sudworth of the BBC who left abruptly because there was the chance that he was going to face a trumped up lawsuit over his reporting on Xinjiang and have an exit ban imposed on him. So we've had that loss of journalists coupled with that. We've had a loss of a lot of the ways that we used to be able to see into ordinary Chinese life or get some sense of Chinese public feeling. Now that was mostly being done through the internet in the early 2010s because the arrival of the internet and the boom in social media created these huge opportunities to see Chinese provincial and Chinese rural life for the first time. You would get these stories of localized corruption of officials with displaying too many watches on their wrists and being hunted down for anti-corruption by bloggers online of rapes in small villages, of success stories of entrepreneurs who boomed under the new possibilities. But that's gone and that's gone because the Chinese internet itself has been closed off not just to Westerners but internally because the crackdown on Weibo, the smashing of the so-called big Vs, the verified users who drove the sort of liberal discourse in China. The arrival of intense ultra-nationalism promoted and sponsored by the government online that drowns out all other stories. That's destroyed any sense of any ability we had to really read what was happening in China on the ground where journalists couldn't go. Because remember, Western journalists were very limited, deliberately limited in the cities they could live in. The JVs stuck you in essentially Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing. And even when you traveled provincially there would be security forces following you, harassment and so on. Now that was always a limited window. It was always a narrow view on a vast country but it was the only one we had and it was a tremendously useful way of seeing ordinary Chinese life or seeing the poor, the rural, those who don't normally get a voice. On and as the number of journalists has diminished and as the ability of Chinese to reach out to the rest of the world has diminished with it. That's inevitably meant that the stories being told about China are the kind of stories that you can do from Taiwan or from Seoul or from DC. And those tend to be stories about things like rhetorical aggression, military buildup, surveillance technology, Chinese presence in other countries. What's absent from that has been the small, the sorting of human stories that once gave the foreign public a sense of the Chinese as people, not just as a threat or as objects or as members of this malevolent surveillance state. These stories were often kind of daft. These stories were often things like skateboarding in China. Chinese discover hip-hop. They sometimes had a slightly orientalist tone to them, a tone of like, wonderment that the Chinese people were people like people anywhere. But nevertheless, they were important, evening in coverage that gave the West some sense of Chinese being like them. But as the wars have come down, that's disappeared with disastrous consequences. It's one of the reasons why COVID was not taken seriously by much of the Western public or the Western leadership because we were not getting stories on the ground. We were not getting the kind of reactions of ordinary Chinese people that we could have got. If we did see them, they were not being taken seriously because they were being framed as something that was other, that were worlds and lives completely apart from us. And so the sense of panic in China, the sense of fear over COVID did not translate to the West. Chinese lockdowns were treated as something that was purely a result of a dictatorial system rather than as a measure against a rapidly spreading pandemic. Chinese lives were not taken seriously with the result that lives all over the world were lost. On the Chinese side, the problem of knowledge is a little bit different. There, what you have is not a lack of information about the West. After all, the West churns out information about itself. There's nothing the American media loves to cover more than America. But what results within the Chinese system is nevertheless a distortion. A distortion for two reasons. One is that Chinese officials, and this is a longstanding problem but one that's worsened under Xi Jinping. Chinese officials fundamentally believe that the rest of the world works like China. That democracy is a fraud, that powerful interests manipulate or shape the public everywhere, that the real players are invisible and that the media cannot be telling the truth, that the media must be censored or limited in the way that it is in China. And they read Western media through that light. If you talk with high level Chinese officials as I have, this becomes quite obvious because whenever you raise something that goes against their worldview, whenever you say, but there's a powerful, whenever you say, but you know, there's a powerful civil rights lobby in the US, they say, oh, but that's really controlled by X. Their worldview is so inherently conspiratorial because the Chinese system itself operates through a series of interlocking fairly obvious conspiracies within the party and against the public, that they can't understand the system in which openness is possible, limited but possible. Now, on top of that, which has always been a problem, you have the new inability of the system to tolerate any information that goes against the official line. It used to be that there was a discrepancy between the outside version and the inside version, that you obviously had propaganda, you had highly controlled media and so on, not as controlled as it is now, but a highly controlled nevertheless. But on the other hand, you had a whole series of channels within the government, within the party that were relatively honest. You had what were called internal reports produced by Xinhua staff, the Chinese news agency, that went directly to leaders that tried to give fairly blunt assessments of the situation in China or the situation in foreign countries. You had the equivalent of dissent channels. Now, you may know the dissent channel in the State Department is a way essentially that a member of ambassadorial staff can register a complaint when they feel that US policy is mistaken. And surprisingly, those channels existed within the party system as well. They were riskier because, objecting to your superiors in a hierarchical party state is always risky, but they were there and they were somewhat effective. When Xi Jinping came in though, and when his anti-corruption campaign effectively purged the system, not just in one kind of expulsion, but in this ongoing series of falls of high-level party members, crackdowns on local officials, determinations to stick to the party line, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That destroyed the ability of the system to dissent internally. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs dissent channel was literally abolished in 2013 or 2014. The internal reports written by Xinhua became much more muted in their language. It started to say only what their superiors wanted to hear. As the demand for following one political line grew, so too did people who had dissenting opinions start taking themselves out of the system, retiring to other jobs, moving to the West, staying silent, and political mediocrities, people who had no great talent of their own accept an ability to sniff out the political wind, started to rise. That produced this burst of wolf warrior diplomacy of aggressive nationalism by Chinese diplomats targeted at following the line they think will please home rather than attempting to appeal to their whole countries or the rest of the world. As those political mediocrities rose and were put in key positions, like Charlie Jen at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who went from being a minor consulate official to being the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so others inevitably followed that line, went along with this. So you have an entire system of yes men, an entire system that cannot contradict the official line that cannot say we are making a mistake. You're seeing a few, kind of limited efforts to try and go against the tide. Yang Shui Tong, at the Tsinghua University, for instance, talking about the dangers of wolf warrior diplomacy, but those efforts get censored, they get shut down, they have no power, no grip. So a US that's increasingly unable to see China as a place full of people as another human society rather than an enemy. A China in which dissent against the official line is stamped on with brutal force. This is a recipe for disaster. And this is something that is going, this is something that is going to play out in the form of crisis. I would guess sometime within the next four years. A crisis that is going to require a level of diplomatic skill, of willingness to back down by both sides, and of belief that problems can be tackled in five years time or 10 years time instead of now, that I'm not certain either side has those capabilities at the moment. I'm more confident of the Biden administration's diplomatic ability than I was the Trump administration's. I'm not at all confident that the Chinese side has the diplomatic or political capacity to back off from confrontation. What can we do about this? What can people like yourselves who are coming into this, who are coming into this field, who are moving into being analysts, being government employees, looking to make careers that, looking to make careers in this broad field of US-China relations. What can you do? Well, the truth is not a lot because none of us can do a lot as individual actors, but we can stick to us to a certain set of principles that will help. One of them is just to remember the humanity of the people on the other side. And I mean this in two ways when it comes to China. I mean, both that we need to consider, that we need to consider the lives, the hopes, the ambitions of ordinary Chinese people, including those who are most persecuted, most crushed by Beijing at the moment, such as the Uyghur. But we also need to remember the, we also need to remember and think of Chinese officials as individual actors themselves, trying to survive in an incredibly paranoid and tense political environment. And we need to try and build in ways for them to be able to back off from language or avoid crisis that do not put them in political danger in a home. We've done this before. We've dealt with regimes like this before, Soviet Union most vividly, but we've lost some of that institutional memory in how we handle these situations. And the other principle I would say is just to remember that perhaps there isn't this crisis moment. Perhaps China is going to settle into a role as a second power simply by weight of demography, of economic stagnation, of all the problems that developing countries have fallen into after 20 or 30 years of growth beforehand. Maybe when it seems like this crisis, the sensible thing to do is just to wait and see what happens, not to try and force a moment, not to try and create a confrontation between two vast powers, both of whom are stuck in a web of domestic nationalism and fear of the other, both of whom sense the need for immediate action, both of whom have nuclear weapons. Thank you very much. And let's go to the audience and take some questions. Thank you, Mr. Parmer for this fascinating speech. I'll start off with a leading question. At the beginning of your presentation, you talk a lot about demography. I wonder why is that important and why is it such a big issue in China? Because my general impression is that demography, the fascination on demography is a pretty outdated concept, like pre-war one maybe. So I mean, demography is the foundation of economics to a large degree, just in terms of the working age population. And that's the thing that causes the most consternation in China is the idea that you may have, that the generation of parents of the one child generation, the parents of the one child generation are now retirees or about to become retirees. Because remember too that the retirement age is very, very young in China. That's left the one child generation, a shrunken generation financially supporting this older generation. And it's left Chinese factories and Chinese with workforce shortages that have already been materializing on the ground with concerns over rising labor costs. It's been one of the impetuses pushing companies to move from China to Vietnam or Indonesia. Now, there's still many factors on Chinese side there. China has a much more developed infrastructure. But the combination of more expensive labor greatly increased political risk. And a relative actual lack of educated labor, our educated labor to the sort of high school graduate standard that still persists in China is causing a lot of companies to rethink whether they want to be in China even before you add in the effects of forced decoupling of the U.S. end. And then I think fundamentally that the worry is just will we have enough people? Well, we haven't, and not that there's a, not the fear of underpopulation but the fear of an aging population of a population that just doesn't have enough young people to support it. Now, we've seen those fears in Europe and America too but the solution there has been, I'm not gonna say easy. The solution there has been easier because immigration is part of the narrative of those countries as part is an accepted political need or not accepted by everybody but the U.S. has a very, the U.S. has a relatively young population compared to most of our countries in part because it has this constant stream of immigrant talent. China has almost no immigration. It has, the exception is a certain degree of marriage immigration brides from Southeast Asian countries and so on. It's not done a good job in making itself seem like an attractive immigration option even for countries that are poorer than it and its own domestic narratives of ethno-nationalism position anybody coming in as non-Chinese as not being able to find a permanent place in China. And I think all of that combined creates a real problem. Again, a problem that we've, we're also seeing in South Korea and in Japan but Japan has the immense advantage of being a much, much richer per capita country than China. South Korea is also richer per capita. South Korea has also deliberately attempted to foster multiculturalism and foster an atmosphere of welcome to immigrants in the last 10 years with mixed success in a way that is currently very hard to imagine the Chinese government doing. Thank you for answering my question. We just want to remind everyone that if you have any questions, please type it to the Q&A session and we'll try to answer it one by one. And now we have a question from Ardham. He's asking, could you please touch up on Chinese? Wait, the question jumped off. I think it may have gone to answered, Jay. There we go. So Chinese increased military and civilian presence in South America and African, what drives this expansion? So I only really know the African side of this. I haven't looked at the South American situation closely. So I'm going to mostly talk about that. Partially it's just the natural need for resources. We've always had this situation with the West where Africa is this tremendous source of resources. And so there's been for 140 years a huge Western presence first in the form of colonialism and then in the form of business and post-colonial power like France's military presence in West Africa in order to extract these resources. And China is in the same boat and it's not surprising or I think worrying that China wants a share of African oil, of African rare earths, of African diamonds. Now, the question is, is in doing so, does, will China repeat the same kind of horrors that the West inflicted upon Africa historically? And I don't think so. I think these are not great arrangements. These are arrangements made with somewhat corrupt African elites that allow this extraction but so are a lot of the Western arrangements. So is ELF, the French oil company, for instance. And I don't think it, and I think we should be fairly, blasé, fairly calm about China looking to fulfill these needs. And if we overreact to them, I think we just generate more fear on the Chinese side that anything China tries to do, any legitimate Chinese action will result in Western pushback or counteraction. And so we need to distinguish very clearly between things like China's lending to developing nations or Sino-Pex presence in Africa that are well within the balance of legitimate state action as opposed to things like the genocide of the Uyghur or the destruction of freedoms in Hong Kong, the breaking of international treaties, most of all, or the threat of invasion of Taiwan. If we see every Chinese action as a threat, we lose the legitimacy to talk about the Chinese actions that are genuinely problematic, that are genuinely challenging to the international order or that are moral horrors. One more thing that you get, there is a strand of thinking inside China that sees Laban's realm in Africa. There is talk in Chinese military forms and so on and sometimes in Chinese strategy of like China's settlement in Africa. It's, I think, a fantasy and a non-starter. I don't think there's any, other than the same things that have driven the Chinese diaspora worldwide, like trading, there's no real possibility of colonialism in the sort of 19th century sense of settlement of Africa by China because the justice and the will of the desire of Chinese to go and live in Africa en masse and because African nations are sovereign nations that have the ability to push back against that in a way that they didn't a century ago. I just want to remind everyone that ideally, if you can, please leave your first name for the questions. Our next question came from an anonymous attendee and his question is, why is the US becoming closer and closer with Taiwan at this moment with arms sales and visits? Doesn't this provoke China greatly? Do you actually think that China will invade Taiwan in the near future if the US doesn't protect Taiwan or is that an overreaction by US officials? So I always dislike this language that's saying that protecting Taiwan or aiding Taiwan is a provocation because it raises the question of why is the US offering aid to Taiwan a provocation and China's constantly threatening to invade or dominate Taiwan, not a provocation. Like simply because the Chinese demand that they should be able to crush a neighboring democracy is a constant demand, doesn't mean it's not a provocative one. Again, we've seen not only that, but on the ground we've seen daily provocations, the constant overflights by China of Taiwanese air defense space, massively increased rhetoric. And again, because the Chinese rhetoric on Taiwan is so heated all the time, it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish real threat from just bullshit talking. This is a wider problem actually. I'm just gonna divert into it for a moment. CCP language since its foundation has been the language of war because it started off as a militant party. It became a wartime party. It kept that wartime language well into the Maoist period. So this language of crush, break, oppose against is very normalized in Chinese political speak. And the problem with it being normalized is it often doesn't mean anything. It's often just the metaphors and the rhetoric that's so normalized that people don't even see it as aggressive. That makes it very hard to tell apart when the Chinese state is just talking bullshit or is talking the normal level of, like we will fervently oppose separatism, and when it's actually upping the ante. And if you spend a lot of time reading the stuff as I do, as other experts do, you kind of get a nose for it, but it's always like a judgment game. It's like trying to tell if an old bridge is gonna fall apart when you cross it this time, when it always shakes and creaks as you do so. So I would say that I would say there is, I think, not a definitive chance that China is actually going to invade Taiwan, but given that China constantly talks about how it may invade Taiwan, given that quasi state agents like Hushijin of the Global Times talk about crushing killing Taiwanese, I don't think it's unreasonable for the US to respond by increasing its defense of Taiwan in return. On top of that, we've already seen the existing order of Taiwanese-Chinese relations destabilized by Taiwanese democracy itself. In the 2000s, it was conceivable for China that, again, the course of events would eventually take Taiwan back into that orbit, and it was even conceivable for many Taiwanese that China would evolve to a state where some kind of deal with the mainland was acceptable, where you could have a quasi-independent Taiwan because China had maybe not democratized but reformed or changed enough to a point that those deals could be trustworthy. But of course, what were they looking towards there? They were looking towards Hong Kong. And what happened in Hong Kong, all those promises were broken or the ambitions of Hong Kong democracy were crushed. And whatever trustworthiness China had in the eyes of Taiwanese was destroyed. And that's why we saw, we've seen such a boost in the anti-China camp in Taiwan, where we've seen figures that are seen as aligning with China or as favoring China's interests, destroyed in elections after bursts of initial popularity. And that, I think, is a choices, and frankly, smart choices made by the Taiwanese people themselves in terms of who can be trusted. And I want to add that the security panel tomorrow, deal with Chinese naval buildup and maritime ambition. And I'm sure that panel will also touch upon the issue of Taiwan. And our next question from the audience is that during the Cold War, it was pretty clear that the ultimate foreign policy objective was of each side, global hegemony. It is still pretty clear what the current US foreign policy is maintaining global power, but what is China's ultimate foreign policy goal? Does it want to replace the US or just want to be considered as an equal power or is it something else? So I would say that the main Chinese foreign policy goal is to destroy the possibility of any threat to the domestic Chinese political order from the outside. And that makes China's active, China's foreign policy is always primarily domestically directed, it's always directed at domestic politics and domestic fears. And if you look at modern Chinese history, the support from the Chinese diaspora for revolutionaries, support from the outside for communists or nationalists or whatever has always been a critical factor in determining the future of China politically. And I think that more than anything else, what the CCP wants is for the rest of the world to shut up about Chinese politics. So what have we seen the main use of Chinese power be in the last year? We've seen it be to force Muslim countries to come out with statements backing the atrocities being committed against Muslim Uighur by China. And that's the main thing that China has demanded from third powers has not been basing or trade or so on. It's been limitations on speech. And so I think that that is the ultimate dream of the CCP is to be able to impose those limitations on speech worldwide to contain any threat to its own power. Now, that has a couple of consequences. One of them I think is that it's something that will be distinctly different if we had a democratic or semi-democratic China. I think that there are ways in which a democratic China would still clash considerably with the US, but that's not one of them. It also really affects like where we should be thinking in terms of putting our own influence, our own pushback in ways that matter. Though the question is, does this actually, can this actually help at the moment or are we just looking towards a time when politics in China will be different, when openness in China returns? I don't think, and I think there's a mixture of, a weird mixture of desire to be simply taken seriously and desire to control. And the desire to control comes out of that desire to control speech. The desire to be taken seriously, to be respected, comes out of the narrative, somewhat based in reality, of national humiliation. That is, so deeply, deeply ingrained into the way that history is taught in China, into the vision of the world that the Chinese leadership has this idea that China was humiliated and has now returned to its natural status, its natural power, and therefore must be respected. And that, by itself, is not an unreasonable demand. That's something that we could hope that all countries aspire to. The problem is that that often turns from the idea that China should be respected, to the idea that China inherently outranks or outweighs others because of its historical status and its historical place and its size. So we saw that, for instance, in the post-2008 atmosphere, when the Chinese ambassador to Vietnam was calling it a small country, with this idea that we often see that's from this paradoxical idea because on the one hand, China has this leftover kind of communist rhetoric about the equality of all nations and so on. On the other, we see in practice on the ground, this disrespect for the status of others. Particularly for Chinese small neighbors, the idea that they should naturally fall into line behind the Chinese order because that's what the historical order was. The idea that that was the historical order is a mistake. In the first place, the historical order was all over the place, but the idea that China is the natural leader is very much still there. And we've seen it in things like when Chinese journalists claim to be speaking for all Asians, this belief that China is in particular the natural leader, the natural power of Asia is very strong. And do feel free to ask follow-up questions on any of these as well, by the way, because if there are things that you want to push on on a question or ask about further, just pop it in the Q&A. And our next question is, what would you advocate for any immediate policy changes? If we are not at a crisis moment, should the US lesson its pressure on China? So, I think that we should be backing off not necessarily pressure on China directly, but the rhetoric of pressure on China. I think that we can do a lot of stuff and not boast about it or call it anti-Chinese. I think that we can promote, for instance, if you look at the bill that was passed, went from the Senate last week, I forget its name, something like the comprehensive security China act, something along those lines. It's got a lot of stuff in it that is stuff that maybe the US should be doing, but the US does not need to frame in terms of this being against China. So, for instance, it's got $100 million for independent media that it frames expressly in terms of like examining, questioning the Belt and Road, pushing back against the Belt and Road. Now, firstly, the Belt and Road is kind of bullshit. There's a whole other question. The Belt and Road is not some magical Marshall plan that's going to transform the world in China's image. The Belt and Road has been a bunch of boondoggles and failed pushes and competition between Chinese companies and collusion with elites in other countries that's resulted in public pushback and generally a big old mess in the way that foreign aid, foreign investment generally is. But, and giving $100 million to independent media worldwide is a good thing. It's something the US should be doing, particularly in the Chinese language where the CCP has bought out a bunch of newspapers, cut off a bunch of independent Chinese language media and so on. But there's no need for us to say this $100 million is against the Belt and Road. That's just dumb provocation. That's just pointing a finger where it doesn't need to be pointed. We should be doing these things anyway because they're good, like aiding other countries, but bolstering independent media supporting democracies. We don't need to frame them expressly as being anti-Chinese measures. The one area on which I do think that we should absolutely keep up pressure as absolutely as possible is on Xinjiang because I think that's forcing the Chinese state to back off in some regards, on the atrocities on the ground, on the some regards and in the lot, but it's also causing people within China to question the necessity for this ethno-nationalist policy that's causing this pushback, causing the stigma in the first place. And I'm hoping that eventually we can get to a point where China sees the Uighurs being a US problem and therefore allows the kind of scale of mass immigration that we sort of use from the Soviet Union, for instance. I don't think there's any future in which there's ethnic reconciliation in Xinjiang in the next 20 to 40 years because the cruelty and the fear has been so absolute, but I think that if we keep up the pressure, we can push to a situation that does allow some degree of relief and that potentially allows Uighur to flee in the long run, to have a safe route and a route to new lives elsewhere because the only real hope for Uighur culture at the moment, the survival of the Uighurs of people is within the diaspora. I think we have a follow-up question on specifically regarding the Belt and Road Initiative. Can you expand on your earlier statement on the BI? Okay, yes. So I can point you actually to a few things we've written on foreign policy on this, but broadly speaking, okay. So the Belt and Road started as a relatively coherent and decently logical project of Eurasian connection so that essentially a series of rail networks that would go across Russia, across Central Asia to provide new routes for Chinese trade coupled with the development of new ports and sea routes that would allow maritime trade to be boosted between China and Europe or the Middle East. Now, annoyingly, the road part of this is actually the sea part and the belt part is the land part, which has never made any sense to anybody. And I honestly think that at some point somebody just mixed them up and they were too high level to correct it. But this was a decent idea. Now, it didn't really work out in practice because of Western sanctions on Russia, the only rail route that has ever made a profit here is the initial Chongqing-Doisburg route that was set up before the Belt and Road by, as a private initiative. All the others, all the other rail routes, all the other sea routes have just bled money. But when she came into power, he really latched on, he really used the Belt and Road as like his idea, his baby. And so all other foreign initiatives, all of China's foreign investments, all of China's dealings with other countries that weren't like clearly developed nations. So there's even developed nations like Italy. Got lumped into being Belt and Road because everybody wanted to please Xi. Or to, and so you had, I remember all over Beijing, you had posters plastered with things like, you know, the second Tianjin Baidu factory supports the Belt and Road initiative. All these companies that had really nothing to do with it, that wanted to show political support. If you actually look at the investment numbers, if you actually look at the money involved, it has gone up at exactly the same rate or slightly slower since the Belt and Road initiative started than before the Belt and Road. China's been gradually growing its foreign investment for years as its economy improves. So in fact, on the ground the money just hasn't particularly been there. And in fact, what you've had instead is a lot of competing projects because companies would leap upon supposed Belt and Road opportunities and end up competing directly against each other to build, for instance, I think there's three different competing Chinese rail programs in Thailand, for example. So it's not that, you know, China has gradually built up foreign influence, China has provided itself as a reliable lender to developing nations and so on. But there's no grand new model there. There's not even a huge wave of money with the Belt and Road. Almost all the figures that people throw around in the Belt and Road are theoretical figures or figures lumping together or any number of things over 10 years to try and make it seem bigger. And the US panic about China's Belt and Road is going to transform the global order was very silly. And another follow up question to the previous one on the Belt and Road initiative is that is the BRI providing an authoritarian alternative to the liberal order and is China actually pursuing debt trap diplomacy? I honestly don't, okay. So debt trap diplomacy, no. Like there have been a couple of cases where you could argue for it but almost all the research late has pointed to this as largely mythical as these as actually being fairly standard international lending practices there certainly hasn't been a deliberate intention to create these debt traps. They often in fact China has been the loser in these deals. And before 2015, 16, when the Chinese media just abandoned all ability to criticize you used to have a pretty constant stream of criticism in Chinese newspapers about Chinese companies inability to operate well abroad because they lacked the cultural understanding, the nuance to actually deal well in a foreign environment. In terms of the authoritarian order kind of but I don't think it's even that intentional. I think that yes, China will give out loans to states that maybe the US wouldn't loan to or will back states that the US wouldn't back but so will a lot of other countries. So will Russia, so will a lot of Europe. So will the US itself in on many occasions the US is own record in wielding its power to promote democracy through trade is very, it's pretty shaky. I think and sometimes we've ended up with a situation where you have almost these client states that China doesn't really want like Myanmar. So China would have been very, China had a pretty good working relationship with the Sukhi's party, the NDP. They were going fairly well and that was partially because China made no noise about the atrocities committed against the Rohingya while it was other donors, other powers did. But this led the Myanmar military into thinking that China would like really back it in the coup and thinking even that the, I think it was one of the factors in convincing them that a coup was a good idea in the first place. And now we're stuck with this like blazing, borderline civil war, economic collapse that China didn't want this. China has, you will be seeing Chinese businesses, Chinese firms attacked exactly because China has become so associated with the Myanmar, with Myanmar's military in the eyes of the Myanmar public. There's no advantage for China in that. There's just a huge bloody mess that's going to be laid at its doorstep. So I would say that China is an authoritarian, is an authoritarian alternative, but there are lots of authoritarian alternatives. There are lots of powers competing in this space and also that there's just so much dumbness on a lot of the Chinese side. It's a little bit like the image of the American, the Americans abroad when they in the 1950s when you'd have these CIA agents, American mass agents on blundering around the developing world, not knowing what they were doing. China has that problem in space. A great recent example of this was that Chinese intelligence got kicked out of Afghanistan recently. They lost a couple of dozen agents, I think, because they were trying, all they knew about Afghan culture was that the Afghans grew opium. And so they got a bunch of opium. And so when they held the meetings with Afghan officials, they were taking them into places where the apartments were covered in pictures of opium pipes and they had opium there. Would you like to opium? We know you, we know you Afghans like opium. This kind of, I think more than anything else with a lot of Chinese projects, we forget that they suffer from the same degree of incompetence as institutions everywhere do in dealing with the rest of the world. They're not super Machiavellian. They're not brilliantly planned. It's a big, messy system that makes a lot of mistakes. But because it doesn't talk about those mistakes, because it's closed down criticism internally, we're often unaware of those mistakes until foreign reporting finds them or they become so obvious that we can't miss them. Shall we take another question? Yeah, and on a similar note, Steve has asked that, can you frame how other autocratic lesser powers like Russia, Iran or Turkey might seize their place in the US, China standoff? And how other Western allies like Australia or India, Canada, Japan seize their place? So, I mean, this is a lot of different countries with a lot of different answers. I would say broadly speaking that we're seeing an increasing Western alliance directly against China because of the level of rhetorical aggression coming out of China that has destroyed confidence even in countries that might previously sort of favor Chinese relations. So very obvious recent example of that, the CIAI, the investment agreement with Europe is being scuppered because China pushed back so hard on Xinjiang, sanctioned America, sanctioned Swedish researchers and so on, did these blundering kind of Twitter offenses and so on that have really scuppered China's reputation. And Canada and Australia, both kind of Australia and Japan, the public mood has for different reasons and each swung violently against China. And so even with all the kind of skull-duggery and nonsense of the Trump era, even with all the reputational damage done to the US by Trump, they're still coming in, even by the end of 2020, they were still coming in on the US side on this. And I think we'll continue to do so because I think the level of sort of, like the level of like retaliatory measures coming from China will continue to increase against all of these states. And it becomes again a cycle as they align closer to the US so China does more things like unofficial trade bans kidnapping of Australian or Canadian citizens, et cetera, et cetera, that just feed into this desire to get closer to the US. The authoritarian states using the label broadly, I think are happy to go along with the Chinese ride as long as it frustrates America basically. A happy, there's always been this kind of, will Russia and China break off because they have these old disputes about Siberia because the Russians are pretty racist or this kind of thing. And I just don't think it's gonna happen as long as the US is there. Like absent the US or if the US like genuinely fell to this, to not being the first powers, I think we'd see more divisions emerge. But as it is, I think like the shared anti-US feeling is strong enough to keep them together. India is the weird one because India is a country that the way things are going under Modi might seem, it's authoritarian tilt would normally we might say put it in perhaps conflict with the West and perhaps sympathy with China over things like the oppression of Muslims. But the truth is the Indian and Chinese conflict is so purely geopolitical, so much competition over the Indian Ocean, over the Himalayas, that that overrides everything else. And so in fact, we're seeing India tilting far more strongly towards the US than it has done for really since independence. And I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see even more like formal US Indian alliances against China. More than anything else, you know, the killings at Doklam, the just sparked this big old wave of anti-Chinese feeling in India. And I think there's going, you've got to get more of that partially because the demand for nationalist measures for demonstrating political further in China is going to push more Chinese Indian border conflicts. Oh, unfortunately, we're running out of time. Thank you, Mr. Pamela for giving us this fantastic presentation and answering our questions. I want to remind everyone that we're taking a short break for 30 minutes and we'll be returning at 3 p.m. Eastern, East Coast time. For the cultural panel, the topic this year is the development of the Chinese film industry. And once again, please, everyone, join me in thanking Mr. James Pamela for giving us this fantastic speech. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jay. Thank you for having me. And thank you all for coming today. I'll see you later, Esri.