 All right, good afternoon, everyone. I think we have a few people still trickling in, but we will go ahead and get started. We have a lot of great material to cover today. First of all, welcome. Thank you all for joining us this afternoon at the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Jennifer Statz, and I'm the director of the China program here at USIP. I know many of you have been here before, but for those of you who may not be familiar with the Institute, we are an independent national institute founded by Congress and dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, peace is practical, and peace is essential for US and global security. We're headquartered here in Washington, DC, but we also have teams on the ground in conflict zones all around the world working with local partners to help them prevent conflict from turning violent and ending them when they do. Here in the China program, we are focused on China's impact on global peace and conflict dynamics. And a big piece of that, of course, comes through China's economic engagement in fragile and conflict-defected states and the explicit link that China's leaders have made between economic development and security. And as China becomes more involved in the global economy and increases its efforts to promote peaceful development around the world, many experts are examining how and why, or excuse me, whether and how, China might help these different fragile states achieve lasting economic growth as part of a broader peace-building strategy. So today we're going to talk about how Chinese investments and assistance might help mitigate or complicate local conditions in countries experiencing violent conflict. We will also discuss whether there is a, quote, China model of development that might be replicable in other places and what lessons China's own experience might provide for other countries around the world. There are a lot of really big and important questions baked into all of this, but fortunately, we have an excellent panel of experts with us here today to help shed light on all of this. Our first speaker is Dr. Yunyan Ong. She's an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan and her recent award-winning book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, looks at China's own development experience and forms the foundation for her broader research on theories and processes of development. Perhaps most importantly, the event this afternoon was her idea, so we thank her very much for not only spearheading the effort, but also traveling to be with us today. Our second speaker is Jonathan Papolitus and he is currently a World Vision USA's executive advisor on fragile states, and he's also a visiting scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He also has a fascinating background working on the ground in places like Haiti, the DRC, Indonesia, Liberia, Turkey, and probably others that I'm missing, so look forward to hearing about all of that. And our third speaker is Dr. Matt Furchin, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie-Chinghua Center for Global Policy, where he runs a program on China's economic and political relationships with the developing world. And he's also spent most of the last decade on the international faculty at Tsinghua University in Beijing. So again, we've got three great speakers today. They will each speak for about 10 minutes, and then we will open the floor for conversation and discussion questions with the audience. So first, Dr. Ahn. Thank you very much. I am ready to start with the presentation, okay, perfect. Yeah, so I would like to start by, so I would like to start by first extending my warm gratitude to USIP for hosting this event. I had proposed this idea to Jennifer a couple of months ago, and she very graciously and immediately said yes. And I would like to thank Jennifer Chang, who really put in all of the hard work behind the scenes to make this possible. And last but not least, of course, I'm really delighted to have Jonathan and Matt join us and enrich this discussion. So I will have about 10 minutes. I'm gonna kind of try to keep my remarks sort of short. And so I'm gonna focus on revisiting this enduring debate about the China model, what it is. And I'm gonna focus on sharing some of my reflections about debunking three myths about the China model. So today's discussion, for me, is a really nice extension of a very similar discussion I just had two weeks ago in Beijing. In Beijing, I gave a keynote address at this international seminar that was organized by DFID, which is UK's Development Agency, and by the CIKD. The CIKD, as you can see from the slide, is the Center for International Knowledge and Development. This is a new center that is established within China's State Council. And you might think of that as the equivalent of the Premier's Cabinet. It was also launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the UN Submit. So this, you can think of this center as a very high level center focusing on ideas and on disseminating development knowledge. And so it was really great to be part of this discussion where I had a chance to share some of my thoughts for my book, as well as have discussions from China's bilateral and multilateral partners like DFID, World Bank, ADB, UNICEF. The most, this was an extremely eye-opening experience for me as a China expert, as a development scholar because it was really about having a front row seat and looking at exactly how the China model or China's experiences are actually being discussed and debated at this high policy level. And so I'm really delighted to be here to share a few of my informal personal reflections on some of the sort of key takeaways that I took from this experience. Remarks around what I would call three myths about the China model. So the first myth that is out there, I think is the myth that there is a Beijing consensus, i.e. that there is one China model that policymakers in Beijing had conceived in a mastermind plan and that it can all agree upon. And it was so obvious to me that there is in fact no Beijing consensus. And in fact, one of my biggest surprise is that until today, right now, China's policymakers are in fact still trying to make sense of China's development experience. And in fact, very interestingly, the mandate of this new center, CIKD, is to study and to organize and to extrapolate exactly what had happened in China in the last 40 years and then to share the parts of that experience that is useful for the rest of the world. And so the fact that they're still trying to make sense of what has happened tells us that there is no Beijing consensus. So this sort of fact is surprising, but it is logical because China's development had proceeded in the past 40 years by practice. It was not driven by some type of predetermined ideology. And so you can imagine that with all of the drastic changes that have happened in the past 40 years, now that these policymakers look back, like any other human being, they're thinking, what happened? That was dramatic, what exactly do we do? And so this is actually a really serious policy exercise for them. It is not just an academic exercise because unless China's policymakers can make sort of coherent sense of their past experiences, they can't move forward. They don't know, for example, what experiences they could share with other countries. They don't have guiding principles for their development assistance. So understanding this recent history for the Chinese policymakers is actually their foremost policy priority. I think another very useful concept that we might revive in trying to challenge this concept of a Beijing consensus is the idea of fragmented authoritarianism, which was a phrase coined by Ken Libathal that was popular in the 1990s. And the basic idea is that, rather than this stereotype image of a unified, coherent CCP, this entire bureaucracy obediently lined up behind strongman, cheating, paying, the reality is that the bureaucracy is really vast and it is disjointed and different parts of the bureaucracy have really different opinions. And so at least during my short time there, what I saw constantly was debates, puzzlement, exploration, people trying to figure out what happened. You see disagreements not only across departments, you also see disagreements even within departments, even within fairly small units. And so rather than this idea of a consensus, actually debate and disagreement is the norm within the Chinese bureaucracy until this day, okay. So the second myth, which is a really strong myth, is that if we speak about learning from China, it means that we must copy China, that learning means to copy, i.e., if other countries like Afghanistan or Nigeria, if they cannot copy or replicate exactly what China has done, then the so-called China model is completely useless. If you can't copy it, it's useless, right? So this is a very strong assumption, but it is wrong because learning is not copying. So this is a really common fallacy and the flawed logic really needs to be pointed out because in fact, no country should copy what China did and indeed no country should copy what the US or Denmark did. And I think if we look back on a lot of the humanitarian development and system projects, if we look back at the moments where these projects have failed, they failed because we thought that you could just copy entire political and economic systems, that if you could make Afghanistan look like Denmark, then the problem would be solved, right? So this is a fundamental fallacy. Learning from China is not about trying to copy the CCP or copy any particular thing that the Chinese have done. Nevertheless, we can apply insights from China's system of problem solving. So I'm gonna sort of leave you on a little bit of suspense in that point and come back to that at the end of my talk, but just sort of remember that learning from China does not mean to copy China. And then the third myth, I think it's really prevalent and basic, which is that the China model is basically authoritarian capitalism. So when we speak of the China model, even though we don't really define it, people might debate it, but I think there's a general agreement out there that what defines China is authoritarianism, right? So China succeeded primarily or even only because of authoritarian control, and therefore the whole idea that the China model might spread becomes fundamentally threatening. So for example, when Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke at the party congress, the 19 party congress, he spoke about China blazing a new path, he spoke about the Chinese approach and wisdom, and the audience in America immediately reacted with alarm, you know, even fear, because it sounds like, you know, is China saying that they will spread dictatorship, you know, that they will spread communism and control and censorship? And so those are the misconceptions that's underlying sort of the American fear towards this idea of spreading China's experiences. And those fears are misplaced because what I argue, and this is an argument that I have to convince not only the American audience of, but also the Chinese audience of, so it's very interesting, what I argue is that what drives China's success is not authoritarian control. Now that is not to say that authoritarian control doesn't exist in China, obviously it does, right? The Chinese government censors the internet, the definite instances where freedom of speech is suppressed, you know, they have tried to control the stock market and it failed, and what I'm saying is that in instances when the CCP tries to assert authoritarian control, it is almost always counterproductive. When they only try to control, they almost always fail. But the times when they actually do succeed to everyone's surprise, including their own surprise, they succeed not through authoritarian control, but rather through what I call directed improvisation, which is a combination of top-down direction from the top leadership in Beijing with bottom-up improvisation from grassroots actors at the lowest levels of China. It is the combination, this paradoxical combination of top-down and bottom-up that makes China successful. And so I keep trying to emphasize this to my colleagues in China that it is important for them to understand what makes them successful because if they are trying to spread these lessons, then we wanna make sure that they spread the right lessons, right? Obviously, neither China nor anyone else would think that spreading authoritarian control is a good thing. So this idea of directed improvisation, let me just spend a few minutes elaborating on this concept and I realize it's new, including to my colleagues in China, this term directed improvisation just refers to a generic system of learning and adaptation. The idea is very simple, which means that you need to combine top-down direction with bottom-up improvisation using existing resources. If you have only one of either two elements, it is not gonna work. So if you only have direction without bottom-up action, that's not gonna work. If you have, go ahead, experiment, do whatever you like with no structure whatsoever, that's not gonna work either. You need to have the exact combination of these two elements. With that, it becomes possible to generate diverse solutions that are tailored to local conditions. And for any China expert who knows anything about China's development, China's development is highly localized. It is very tailored to local conditions. And this is a fact that China itself has completely undersold. So if you go to China, if you go to Jiangsu, if you go to Zhejiang, if you go to Sichuan, you'll find that they are endless China models, numerous, even within Zhejiang province. Every single county has its own method and style of development. And so there is, in fact, no universal blueprint given to them by Beijing, right? And so this is not a China-specific model because, in fact, if you Google the term directed improvisation, you'll find it previously used in two different settings. One is performing arts. The other is artificial intelligence. And it actually makes sense because both of these settings are about how do people get creative, right? And so the work of doing economic development, that is creative work. That is definitely creative work. I can assure you of that. So how does directed improvisation manifest in the context of China? It manifests within the party states. So that's the Chinese characteristic because the entire development process from the very beginning was a state-led process. They began as a planned economy under the leadership of the CCP. So if there is change, change has to happen from within the party state. So therefore, when I speak about directed improvisation, I'm talking about the combination of top-down direction by central government, combined with bottom-up improvisation by local governments. And it is the combination of action by these two different sets of actors that then creates diverse solutions tailored to local conditions. So when I was in China, my main job was to try to get the Chinese government and policymakers to see that this is your greatest strength, not authoritarian control. Your strength is not just about the top-down part, but the fact that, in fact, there is a lot of bottom-up improvisation and adaptation within China. And so that is the thing that you should be promoting to the rest of the world, not this top-down image that central policymakers, of course, are familiar with. So that was my main sell. And I'm really glad to have Jonathan here today because the obvious policy question, both from you and from the Chinese government, would be, okay, how do we apply this in practice? How do we apply this to development assistance, to humanitarian efforts? That's a great question. So I myself had had really interesting, illuminating discussions with, for example, a top policy advisor from Afghanistan where basically we brainstormed for two hours of if we were to take lessons from China's experience, how might we do things differently in Afghanistan? But I won't go into the specifics now, just kind of paint you the broad picture, but I just want to give you a few snapshots of reactions to this narrative, which I also show to the Chinese policymakers. So this is a review of my book by Michael Wolcock at the World Bank. And for those of you who know Michael Wolcock, he's one of the co-architects of what is now known as PDIA, problem-driven iterative adaptation, which is sort of a new acronym of an adaptive way of doing development. And he says that this narrative helps him to see that the Chinese state from the center to the periphery across time and space has actually practiced and not merely preached innovation, problem-solving, and effective implementation. And the important thing is, I'm saying I'm giving this same talk, showing the same slide in China, and it is important for their policymakers to see that in fact, this is their strength, innovation, problem-solving, implementation. Rather than the strengths that, because of their own experiences, their daily work, what they're familiar with is sort of commanding, giving directions, and so they think that, well, that must be what we should be sharing with the rest of the world. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is what you should be sharing with the rest of the world. This is in fact your strength. And this is Keith Johnston. We don't, and I don't know him at all. We don't know each other at all. He runs a leadership training program for public servants in New Zealand. So this is very far away. He just happened to pick up the book, and he wrote a blog, and he said, I had not imagined that China would provide such a rich example of complexity principles in action. And I was really heartened when he said that after reading the book, it really kind of motivated his organization to rethink some of the way they train leaders. And so again, this is refreshing for the Chinese policymakers, and hopefully, would channel some of their thinking toward these four takeaways. So to very quickly recap, the first thing I want to emphasize is there is no Beijing consensus. And I think this idea of a Beijing consensus basically sort of misleads us into seeing the Chinese government as one person with one brain, with one mind, and that is completely untrue. It is a massive organization with different parts, with different interests, different agendas, different priorities. And so there is in fact no consensus, and their foremost task and challenge right now is to figure out what had happened in the past 40 years. The second takeaway is that learning from China's experiences doesn't mean to copy China. This, I think, is the hardest myth to debunk, and I probably have to say a million times. And with concrete support from the other panelists, hopefully, but I hope that you sort of begin to consider this takeaway. And the third is that China's success is actually not driven or defined by authoritarianism alone. That's only one element of their entire experience, but rather by directed improvisation. And my final message is, in other words, this is surprising, China is actually a role model of hashtag adaptive development. So if you're on Twitter and you go hashtag adaptive development, you see that this is the emerging, this is the most fashionable, trendy paradigm in development where basically we've come to a consensus that the old sort of one size fits all, blueprints, mechanical way of doing development is out of fashion, did not work, and today we should really be thinking about localization, adaptation, creativity, but we don't yet have a rigorous way to think about how to do that. We don't yet have operational guidelines on how to do that. We don't even have a concrete example of what does it look like when you do adaptive development? And what I'm trying to convince Chinese policymakers of is you, you have actually provided that concrete example of adaptive development, and that is your greatest strength. And so it is important not only for China, but also for the rest of the world to recognize this role because I think it is a matter of fact that China's influence on global development is not going away. It is definitely, it will definitely only grow. And if China's role in global development is growing, then we would all like to hope that this will be a positive role. So I think if they could understand that in fact a lot of their experiences are about things that people in democracies are familiar with, bottom up improvisation, creativity, adaptation, social capital, local resources, and that they have actually used those things, then I think that China could actually become a really positive player in the global stage. So, and on that note, and look forward to your reactions. All right, thank you very much for getting us off to a great start. We'll turn now to Jonathan to talk a little more about how this may be playing out in practice. Wonderful, thank you so much. So David Petraeus, the general Petraeus, said earlier this week when interviewed, how do we engage China? And he said, well, you know, this is a very critical issue at this moment for two reasons. One is because China is now presenting itself as a viable alternative to democratic capitalism. And the second reason is because at the 19th party Congress, President Xi said, we have a developmental, he didn't say model per se, but we have a developmental option for countries, an alternative option, and we wanna be a global leader in helping countries affected by conflict, looking at the root causes of it, guaranteeing the rights of people, providing fast development. And so it's interesting to pair that with Union's experience in China where they're trying to study this model, there's definitely something that they're trying to pull up in terms of their experience and bring forward. And I think what Union's book has done is to bring out the best of the China experience in terms of what it's done, but also to show where the course has strayed in some of the cautionary tales as well. And so I'd like to talk a little bit about the importance of the model as Union has framed it, but and made it accessible to a broader audience of people working on fragility, working on political economy, working on adaptive development, hashtag adaptive. And then speculate in contrast how that model is quite different from the current traditional development approach and how through adaptive development, both pieces need to come together more to really help address fragile states, fragile contexts. And they spell out that this could be a point of convergence and then just perhaps speculate as to where it could be points of divergence and so there's a need to sort of engage further. So let me start by picking up on two points that Union made to sort of frame this directed improvisation, but I'll take it from a slightly different angle. The first angle is that, I should actually say one other thing first, which is that China itself over the last 40 years has had an experience coming out of areas of high fragility and into a place of where it is now as the world's second largest economy. So 1980 or so, it was poorer than Bangladesh, Chad and Malawi, all of which are on the OECD's fragility context list right now. It had gone through two wars in the past 20 years. There had been major famines accumulated grievances amongst the population. It was quite fragile and very weak institutions. And so the experience of how China grew and to take the title of your book, Escape the Poverty Trap can be seen as a contemporary, not a historical example of how using these kinds of dynamics and these guiding principles, China went so far, so fast. And indeed part of why we're having this conversation is because of that massive step up that China's had and the curiosity around it. So the two elements that Union touched upon, that frame directed improvisation can be stated in a different way as well. The one way is that China began at scale. So it made a decision at a top level that economic growth was going to be a core organizing principle for the country. And it didn't try to do it through some kind of a pilot project. Let's take a coastal city and experiment with it and then see what happens and then go somewhere else. It made a decision across the board all throughout the country at scale to start thinking about growth. Now in traditional development, that's not the case at all. It's very much a kind of a pilot project thing. Let's tinker with something that might work in one place, whether it's in health or food security or in infrastructure. This was radically different. This was an outcome-based model operating at scale, not messing around in the weeds. Now the second piece of that is this notion of improvisation. The idea wasn't to have some kind of model in mind for economic growth and then to start testing it and controlling it from a sort of a top-down approach, the sort of centralization, and then to look at the experiment and see how it worked. And then get feedback loops and then try to revise it. Quite to the contrary, it was sort of an unleashing of local government to come up with ideas. Now this is right in the adaptive stream. And this idea that you figure it out, you create alternatives, things that we could never have thought of. And there's this piece that President Dang said, these local village councils and township enterprises, they kind of came out of the woodwork. We had no idea that those were organizing elements, these sort of village-led bodies that could be agents for growth. They had no idea about that at all. And so had they tried to direct an experiment from the top-down, they would never have come up with these kinds of resources. And so the idea of improvisation was to look at generating variation, as Yunying talks about, alternatives, and then over time to see what worked and what didn't across a very large country and to select the most winning models and then from there try to create niches and coordinate around the efficiencies. Now in traditional development, we don't do that at all. It's the beginning of efforts that Michael Wilcock and Lance Pritchett and others at Harvard are trying to introduce it to the stream now. In part because in places that are very fragile, that kind of limited thinking about pilot projects and directed sort of fixed design kind of causal, you map out the causes and the outcomes, et cetera, that sort of piece just doesn't work in these places. You need to be tapping into something else. So this idea then at a very broad scale, using improvisation is what frames the directed improvisation part. Now where the hat trick comes in, and the interesting part is that this was happening in very, very weak institutions at the local level. The leftovers of the sort of the Mao bureaucracy, which was very uneducated, very unskilled, not a lot of resources to go off of, no real salary, et cetera. And so how to get this whole workforce, which couldn't be fired, into action to create this sort of massive growth, this is what one person at the World Bank called a liberating message. The bank is trying to figure out how to stimulate growth in fragile states. It's dedicated over half of its International Development Assistance Fund, with $26 billion, just to fragile places, because this is where by 2030, 80% of the world's extreme poor are gonna be located. What's happening in traditional development is not working. And so looking at how they mobilize the weak institutions is a fascinating piece, in part because the way that China, using this big outcome, resolved the problem was to say, we need to give a high-powered incentive for local bureaucrats to start figuring out how to do this outcome, how to start creating growth. And so introduce this idea of profit sharing, kind of like what a corporation would do, a union calls it the Franchised Bureau. And the idea here is you go out and start raising funds, and mobilizing domestic resources, and you give a portion of that to the state and you keep the rest. And as you can imagine, this generated a lot of interest and incentives, and it created a lot of low quality, but resource-rich types of experimentation that was being improvised on, and kind of feeding up to this high-level piece. And at the same time, one part of the story that I would punch up in the whole tale is that the way that these bureaucrats were able to sort of go out and mobilize domestic resources and foreign investment and through this process was through factions and patronage networks. So the accumulation of these informal institutions that wielded power, that could organize, that could stimulate violence, but also check violence, this sort of informal system that kind of ruled the rural areas through this decentralized model of authoritarianism. Those are the models that these bureaucrats were going out to and were part of through kinship and through other kinds of loyalties. And it was those bodies that began mobilizing these resources as well. And that's where the story gets even more interesting in the sense that in addition to being an agent, these patriot of domestic resources and foreign investment, the patronage network themselves, in addition to facilitating this work and solving coordination problems in different bureaucracies, formed what is today the sort of political settlement, I would argue, within China. And what I mean by that is how do you empower and create massive wealth of really influential heads of these large patronage networks and factions without having them run away from you and break off and you lose control of territory. And the way that China did it was to incorporate these types of officials, these sorts of faction leaders into the bureaucracy itself and find an upward mobility such that they kept assuming more and more responsibility and access over resources and power. And at the party committee level, they have this intricate fashion of how they then, how within the party and the bureaucracy, they mediate between the factions. They horse trade various factions getting very powerful, coming up the ranks, wanting their people to fill up the bureaucracy and to continue this wealth expansion was all being made to be part of the state mechanism. So the state became something that served the interests of themselves as well as the broader interests. So it became a mechanism, sort of a win-win internally, but to counter feuds and factions that could otherwise break apart the country, which we see a lot in fragile states, they mediated this through a mechanism themselves. So it's a fascinating story that one of the China scholars in Australia, Ben Hillman, documents beautifully, talking about how this kind of pageant system and network both provided the agency for getting these resources and mobilizing it, but also provided the political stability in the system. Now this becomes really interesting when you think about China's engagement abroad. I think it was last year you had Alex DeWall here talking about his book around the political marketplace. And he said that in places like Afghanistan and South Sudan, the real problem with instability and breakdown is that the system of buying off patronage networks and factions was broken. So in South Sudan, the government ran out of funding to continue funding the paying off basically the network of conflicting parties through a series of missteps and history. And in the case of Afghanistan, the problem was that a lot of money was coming in, including from international development partners, but certain donors and NATO force, et cetera, kind of block that funding from being spent by the government to come up with patronage networks to sort of find their political settlements. And what Alex recommends is that you have to provide a space for these political settlements to take hold. And this is part of the lesson from China in the sense that it found a path to growth through very weak institutions while simultaneously working on its political settlement to ensure the durability of it. And the World Bank was actually here as well last week. I had a panel on with the EU and they said, we've been looking at conflict prevention across various countries and we're puzzled because Mali has a lot of international funding, donor funding, and yet it's still very fragile and tipping over. While Niger doesn't have the same amount of funding, but it's proved quite resilient to a lot of the conflicts and the disasters it's facing. And we found that it's been able to kind of cultivate its own political settlement. And so what the wall basically says is unless you can get to the place where the local government is able to kind of come up with its own political settlement, you can't do much else. And that's why Somaliland versus Somalia has been such a puzzle in the sense that Somaliland without virtually any international sport has become a very stable place, potentially on the road to democracy, but it's been very peaceful whereas Somalia has been in constant interfacial disputes and clan disputes and foreign and domestic threats and so the China model is fascinating in the sense that you have at work a highly-scaled vision empowered through an improvisation technique of generating advice and experiments that then could be learned from across a very large group as opposed to through piecemeal projects and then from there a selection can be done and coordination can be done to sort of get the quality higher and higher and higher as you go. And below all that was the instrumentalization and harnessing of patronage networks to create political settlements that would make the whole thing work. And the wall's recommendation in places like Afghanistan and others is where you have the bad guys now controlling the marketplace, the political marketplace, you've got to provide enough funding streams from donors and others such that there can be a political price to political settlement and you've got to provide a space to do that. Now China might be in a place to understand that a lot more than other donors. Although other donors, including through the recent talk about stabilization in the US where there's talk about needing to get these political settlements right in the beginning and whatever they look like and then kind of growing from there, there might be some real consensus here and so where China is now experimenting beyond just its typical investments in infrastructure, try to create energy markets and exports, are in places like South Sudan where it has such a big investment, it's kind of been pushed into playing roles with iGOT and others for peace. And in Afghanistan, it's also kind of been pushed into supporting talks with previous talks with the Taliban and others. So it's in a place where in the more fragile places, it is engaging beyond its comfort zone, it doesn't have a deep bench in terms of its diplomatic core that can be thinking through these issues in a high level. It also doesn't necessarily have a contextual basis, doesn't have a firm understanding of some of these contexts, but its own model, as it may learn, and I mean the experience is there to be cultivated across a variety of experts, is how you develop that political settlement, how you work at scale, how you empower through incentives as well as improvisation, some kind of turning point. And I think these can be areas of convergence with some of the leading thinking around for Jillian now, with this problem-driven, iterative adaptation approach and others that are very much looking at, the last 50 years of fragility has not been stemmed, and we've gotta be doing something different. Now, where the divergence, so I think those are areas of convergence in places of fragility, where I think, and I should say that China's gonna be into this on mass more than usual, because not only is it the largest trading partner in Africa, which hosts the majority of fragile states, but the New Silk Road, the Belt and Road Initiative, is gonna take it through some very fragile places as well. And so this sort of set of guiding principles, this sort of framework of the experience itself, I think is something that can converge with other partners to really move it forward. But what you have now in China is the entrenchment of this pageage network. So it's gone all the way up and through to the point where the president is saying, we've gotta now tackle corruption. But the subtext is it's not just malfeasance or graft, it's part of the political settlement itself. And so it's using a variety of tools to try and get at this. And we're at a point in history where, as experts say, China will either be hauled out in the middle because of this, or we'll find some adaptive way of creating more space, more people-centered approaches, less authoritarian control, and more contestability, as the World Bank would call it, to sort of invent its new fashion. If traditional aid can begin to think and match the experience of China through its demonstration effect that it works at scale through improvisation, looking at political settlements, and experimenting. And we can kind of converge to really help the worst off of fragile states. Because of the stakes involved, the investments from Western donors as well as China there could be tremendous convergence, but they're also at points might be divergence in the sense that where the authoritarian side comes out more, where the crackdown, where the censorship, et cetera, Western donors, there might be a bigger dialectic in place, there might be more tensions. And so as Union Ang's her book, she basically says, we bear witness to this moment in history, which is extremely dynamic, where we're hindering a multipolarity. And at the same time, in fragile places, there's a convergence of interests. And so we've got to be thinking about, obviously, multiple issues of engagement in China, in these contexts, geopolitically, geo-economically. But I think where we can get it right in fragile states using convergence, really thinking through some of these approaches, it could have a multiplier effect. Thank you. All right, thank you very much. And now we'll go to Dr. Furchin for some of the political aspects, thanks. Great, thank you. And thanks for the comments and thanks to Union for inviting me and to Jennifer for hosting. It was almost a year ago that Jennifer hosted me for a discussion over at Carnegie for a talk on some related issues on the sort of connection between development and security. And I'm gonna revisit some of those issues again here. I'm gonna take off on some of the ideas that have already been discussed, and I'm gonna push them in a little bit of a different direction. So I'll say just a few limited things about the China model itself. I'm in general agreement that it's really difficult to sort of pin that down. But I would also argue that China is increasingly pushing a version of what it thinks it can offer to the world in terms of development and in particular the relationship between development and security development and stability. So that's gonna be sort of the direction of my comments. So let me begin by talking a little bit about this new term that has started to emerge about the idea of a China solution or China, Zhongguo Da'an, sort of, which has come up relatively recently. Xi Jinping himself has been referring to this. I think this is indicative of a general package, again, that I've just mentioned, which at its core is that China increasingly is offering to the world, its own people, but also to the world the idea that China is an engine of economic development, that its own prosperity is supposed to be good both for the Chinese people and for the world, and that the added benefits that come out of this development on the international stage are to be stability, security, and increasingly better global governance. So there's this whole package that goes together. And I'll talk a little bit more about what that package is. And I just wanna underscore here, what I'm going to be talking about here is what the highest levels of the Chinese government are saying, what many others, academics, think tanks, and many others are saying, and it's sort of the official line, and I'm gonna sort of scope that out a little. It is not what I believe. I may agree, I may disagree, but I'm not an advocate for that line. I'm just trying to explain what it is. I sometimes go through this exercise and people are like, oh, that's what you think. Now I'm saying this is what the official line is, and I'm trying to flesh it out a little bit in terms of what it means. So this idea that China is going to be an agent of economic development has been around for a while, but I would say that it has really picked up steam in the last 15 or 20 years, especially as China's engagement with regions like Africa and Latin America in particular have really grown. So what we see here is the emergence of a real sort of comfort zone for China in its relations with developing countries around the world with regions that the Chinese government thinks of as developing country regions. And again, Africa and Latin America fit most clearly in that for historical reason. So this is all part of a sort of emerging, developing country diplomacy, which is also part of this idea of South-South relations. So this has only picked up steam and it's certainly gotten more momentum, I believe, under Xi Jinping himself. So again, the key to this is that China, the Chinese government wants to be seen as an agent, as an engine of economic development with all the benefits that come from this. And I'll go through those in a second. And what I mean by an agent of economic development is not what many outside of China may think about what development is. So we've just had a lot of discussion about the China's own experience over the last 40 plus years in terms of economic growth and development. For China, everything that has happened for the last 40 plus years has been part of development. The term development has been core to this reform and development. So everything that the country has done, which is essentially about economic growth, but a whole lot of other things, has been what China has done. In the West, development is thought of as the thing that rich countries do on behalf of worse, for poorer countries. For China, it is the essence of what China has done. So for China to say we're engaging on development is not just restricted to the area of aid, which is largely what it is thought of in the West. I think this is really important and sort of misunderstood a lot of times in terms of the discussion about China's role in development, how that's officially conceived at the highest levels in China. So what is it then? I would say it's primarily the push on the economic side. It includes all aspects of economic engagement. This means trade, it means investment, it means finance, and lastly, and only really marginally, does it include what we think of as official development aid. So it is important part of China's development policy, the aid part of it, but it is only a really small fraction of it and it's really mostly geographically focused on Africa, but the way that China officially is sort of pushing its overall promotion of development and China as an agent of development goes way, way beyond just aid and it is about basically doing business is development and you can sort of see this encapsulated in Justin Linifu's new book, his new co-authored book, it's called Beyond Aid and he goes into how China's contributing to structural reform and it's again beyond aid and it's like in the title it says something about how investment and finance are also going to contribute, but basically it's like doing business is a huge part of development so this is sort of what's on offer. Now, the additional outcomes of this that have increasingly been promoted, especially under Xi Jinping, is a sort of security outcome. This is on top of the core logic of the peaceful development foreign policy. So the logic is basically China engages in economic relationships with countries around the world. This is good for China's development, this is good for the development of other countries, especially developing countries and that peace is an outcome. So China has been trying to signal for quite some time that China is not a threat, that it's engagement with other regions of the world, especially developing country regions, but it also extends this logic to the United States to say we are not a threat, we're simply engaging in economic transactions in order to underpin our own continued economic development and that is good for us, it's good for you and the outcome is a sort of stable, peaceful international environment. The ante has been upped by Xi Jinping himself saying not only that, but increasingly China's engagement through all of these economic interrelationships is going to contribute to security. So this has been on the table for a while and I would say it's been increased at the level of sort of elite promotion of this connection between development and peace and increasingly what's been added onto this is that China will contribute to good economic, global economic governance, often through promotion of economic development and sort of peaceful outcomes. And increasingly we see this packaged in this new idea of a developmental piece. Mostly that's been, there are a couple of articles on this and it's mostly focused on Africa, especially in conflict or fragile state environments. This idea that China has got a very different approach to development than sort of the aid-based one coming from the OECD countries and that its promotion of development as development will underpin security in fragile environments more than traditional approaches. So again, this is coming from a variety of sources. Just one thing to note about this that I think is relevant is that this idea of the connection between development and security or development instability at the international level is clearly linked and comes from a domestic governance framework which has been central to governance within China for a long time, which is the connection between development and stability. So what has been on offer by the Chinese Communist Party for decades is the idea that the party will provide development and that development will then underpin stability and again that stability is necessary for the development. Who gets to decide what development means and what stability means is up to the party. Now there's a huge amount of discussion and I would say that a lot of what has already been talked about here for decades, there has been a back and forth among many in China, powerful institutions, thinkers and others about what development should be and sort of where stability should come from and it's changed over time. But I would say that this core logic of the relationship between development and stability has been crucial both at the domestic level and now increasingly at the international level and it's the sort of comfort zone of the party to be able to say this is what is on offer domestically and here's what's on offer internationally and there's sort of different audiences but the logic is relatively similar but obviously works quite differently at the international level than it does at the domestic level. And let me just say that this I think is all increasingly sort of being represented at even higher levels and in a sort of more and more ambitious way and we see this through institutions and initiatives like institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank initiatives like the Belt and Road. These are increasingly part of this overall idea that China will be an agent of development and then logical extensions of that extend to peace and security. Okay, so what are some of the problems with this and some examples of what's actually happening on the ground. So you'll note that these terms, these ideas, concepts, development, peace, security, stability are all very vague. I would argue this is very much on purpose and this is in both in the domestic context and the international context. So who gets to decide what these good things are development and peace and stability and security sort of up to the powerful and in this case party officials and others who are making some of these decisions. It's one thing again in the domestic context, it's quite another in an international context. So it's vague by design. That I think is both an opportunity and a problem. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But in many ways it sort of serves for a lot of self-interested behaviors on the part of China which may or may not actually then be doing the work that it says it is in terms of providing development and security for others but it may not be. A lot of this is sort of a good story for China doing business around the world and the outcomes of that being beneficial for everyone. So I think we have to sort of be aware that for as vague and open-ended as some of these terms are, there is also a self-interested component and that's just normal. I mean the United States for a very long time has promoted democracy and freedom and other sorts of values abroad through its foreign policy and that is also sort of self-interested in some ways. And so I think we should look at that in the same light as sort of China's promotion of this development security stability sort of angle. But if we are to ask what is the relationship, sort of what is development, what is stability, what is security, what is good global governance and what is the connection among those all, you're not gonna get a lot of concrete answers from Chinese counterparts. I've been involved in quite a few discussions in very difficult contexts including in the Middle East where in the Beirut office of Carnegie for instance where the Chinese counterparts at the discussion said, well the solution clearly is more development. And the other folks in the room were like, well it probably wouldn't hurt to have more economic opportunity, sure, but it's a lot more complicated than that. So once you scratch beneath the surface of, so I think this discussion has been great but you're not gonna find yourself involved in a lot of discussions with Chinese counterparts probably like in the Myanmar context for example or the Venezuela context where people are saying, oh we've been in a lot of self reflection on what our model is and now we're gonna interact with our counterparts in such and such a place based on that really thoughtful overview of what we think. I hope there's more of that but at this point I don't think there is a lot of that sort of self reflection when it comes down to the actual day to day interaction with other developing countries especially those that are in more fragile conditions. And a lot of this has to do with the difficulties of creating the sort of necessary background and area expertise among Chinese officials. And a lot of the fact is the people doing the majority of the interactions, the institutions doing the interactions between China and developing countries, fragile developing countries in particular, it's businesses. So a lot of the focus is on them. It's not the intellectuals, it's not necessarily the policy makers, it's not necessarily those in the foreign ministry, it's businesses who are out there doing the day to day sort of work. So what we see is a sort of, in a lot of way there's a lot of goodwill on the part of developing countries I think to have more economic engagement with China but increasingly a sort of pushing back and also saying okay but on any given project or maybe even overall, what is, what really are the developmental outcomes? And this is not just sort of governments that are pushing back but communities and civil society that are saying well what exactly does a given railway project mean for us in terms of our needs and what that's gonna mean for, especially in a sort of a difficult security environment, will that exacerbate tensions or will it contribute to solving them? So you're starting to see a real pushback at that sort of specific level but also at a more structural level in terms of like should we take on this amount of debt? Should we really try to move beyond the sort of export of commodity kind of relationship that we have? So you have this sort of pushback that's starting and let me just give three quick examples of where I think some of this is happening and what China's response is. So Venezuela, Myanmar and Zimbabwe I think are all interesting cases where this logic of development is supposed to underpin security and stability has kind of been upended a little bit in each of these cases where the development part of it, the economic commercial part of the relationship has not been sufficient in and of itself to maintain the kind of stability or security outcomes that China might want and in some ways this has backfired. Now there's been interesting learning in the case of Myanmar I would argue and so China has worked hard to try to transform the behavior of its enterprises, more corporate social responsibility, engagement with local communities and that sort of thing. But now what we see is exactly the same kind of argument that what China hopes for in the case of Myanmar is stability. It is engaging in some of the discussions with the Rohingya problem but it is also saying that okay, we'll do some of the brokering but what we're really gonna offer now is some more development. We're gonna really push forward some more investment in the port facility. In the case of Venezuela there are really no answers. There's a sort of sticking head in the sand hoping that there is some kind of a positive outcome. In the meantime China still has a huge amount of loans outstanding and the situation in Venezuela is deteriorating and in Zimbabwe we're starting to hear some of the same language that what China hopes for in this very difficult situation is stability. What does that mean? How's it gonna contribute to it in some way? Well, what China will offer is more economic opportunity, more development kinds of outcomes. So we're gonna continue to see more and more I think of this promotion of China as an agent, as an engine of development and saying that stability and security will be outcomes but in just these examples gives you a little bit of a sense of how difficult that actually is and what it actually might mean for there to be these sort of outcomes that are promised. So let me close just by saying that I think that this very high level promotion of the connection between development and stability and security and increasing economic global governance provides an opening. The very sort of open-endedness of the concepts themselves is an opening for governments, for civil society in the United States but also in each and every one of the countries where China is engaging to say, okay well what do you mean by development on any given project? What is that sort of what we want in terms of development? Is it contributing or not contributing to the kinds of stability or security that we might want? There are no easy answers for this but there's an opening now because China's pushing for it and has kind of set these expectations so high. So to me this is a real opportunity to engage in a sort of critical but hopefully also in a constructively critical manner with China on these issues and in these places. Thanks. Wonderful, well thank you very much to all three of our speakers. I think you've covered a lot of ground and highlighted a lot of issues. I think one of the things that really stuck out to me was the number of contradictions that make this so difficult. And part of this is I think, Matt was describing very much China providing development, which is very disconnected from what Yungo was talking about in terms of empowering local actors and bottom-up creativity. Those two things are two very different dynamics. Also just about aligning learning in the narrative that it's very hard for China to share its experience with others which is what it repeatedly says it wants to do, not force its experience on anyone but help people understand its experience when it sounds like they don't necessarily understand it the way you have described it or have a common narrative to share in a way that might be compelling or accurate or consistent which I think is also really interesting. And then there's just the issue of perception that I think what you've all described I think three very different sets of dynamics that could be perceived in a lot of different ways and I think what people often just see certain slices of the picture and that will obviously influence and shape how they perceive China to be acting in a lot of these cases and how they would then respond to some of the ideas and you put forward but also some of the developments on the ground. I have a lot of questions but I know we don't have a lot of time so I do want to open it up and make sure folks here have a chance to engage. So if you have a question please raise your hand and ask the E please identify yourself try to keep it brief because we are short on time and also please ensure that your question ends with a question mark. So if you want to start at the back thanks. Thank you reporter from Voice America it's a fascinating presentation but I also have lots of questions and I don't know how to make myself clear and the first question is about China model. The conventional thinking me if my understanding of the China model is like China has an authoritarian political system but it has a quite open economic system. So but now it's like from your discussion seems to me that there is a different understanding here so I'm just wondering can you pin down a little bit about what a China model is. The other thing is could you give me you will mention that China is a kind of example itself is an example of adaptive development. So could you give me a small concrete example of what is China doing as a adaptive example? Thank you. We may try to take a collection of questions try to make sure as many people as possible have a chance and then we'll get the panel a chance to respond to several at once so best of soon. You talked, I understood you to sort of give a different approach to whether there is or is not a China model that seemed to almost go from one side down the line to the other and my question to you is those of you who believe there is a China model whatever your definition may be I'd be interested in knowing more about the degree to which the Xi Jinping government is trying to promote that model to other countries. Matt sort of got into this to some extent the others didn't but I'd be interested in all three of your views as to is there an effort to promote this model if you believe there is such a model. We'll take one more before we respond in the green sweater. Janet Benini, George Washington University I wonder what advice you have for US foreign policy to interact with China in development situations and how can we maximize the benefits of both viewpoints? All right, thank you. So I think we'll actually just if everyone wants to take a minute to respond we'll just go down the line and give you a few minutes to address various parts of that. I just want to go first if I could have a couple of minutes just to- Is that all right? Okay, Matt, why don't you start? So I'll pick up on your question. So I actually have an article going back to 2012. My original research for my dissertation was about domestic political economy and about the China model. And I have an article saying who's China. Who's China model is it anyway? And basically saying that the model there can be no model because it will always be politically contested. And I think this is part of why UNION is also experiencing like who gets to take credit for it is a deeply like within China is a deeply contested will never be resolved kind of issue in part because it's the party wants to take credit for it but also sort of wants to say that give some credit for the dynamic influences of the society and private enterprise and all that sort of thing. So I basically have this super skeptical view that we cannot ever sort of absolutely objectively pin down the model. That said, I now find myself as I look at foreign policy honing in on these issues that I was mentioning about the relationship, the promotion of development and stability and security and global governance as a kind of package. And I think that all works together in a way though because development and stability and security are so open-ended as I was saying. So you don't need to have an agreement about what the model is to promote China as an agent of economic development and all good things in terms of outcomes with peace and development. And so I think that's the way of sort of squaring that circle. And in terms of US foreign policy, I've been arguing recently that I think the first thing is to understand that what China means by development is not what traditionally we might mean by development and it is not just the work that AID might do but in China's case it is basically everything. It is what we might think of as providing economic opportunity, providing economic growth and for the US to sort of abdicate the field of economic development to China thinking that it is only sort of these traditional ideas of what development are is going to be to miss a really important engagement with countries and regions all over the world in an area where the United States probably can and should play a much more positive role so don't abdicate that field is my point. I mean, I think externally you could see a different kind of a model taking shape, this notion of sort of economic statecraft where the China model, the external model is as kind of not saying it's this massive investment, it's this opening up of infrastructure for energy, et cetera. There will also be a sense of campaign style kinds of approaches where you're shaping the message abroad. China's buying a lot of stakes in different newspapers across Africa and other places so part of the external kind of model will be how do we invest but also how do we control the message and the narrative in these places around Chinese investments and what's happening as part of the stability. And the other piece you can see in parts of Africa especially is this sort of linking this investment with a sense of performance legitimacy, this notion of the more economic stability you have, that's a good in itself and so getting more of that kind of good, getting those options, livelihoods, services, et cetera, that should make itself content. So there's this external piece that would look somewhat different from its domestic experience. The piece that if you look at sort of how China grew internally by both incentivizing growth but finding that kind of new political settlement, figuring out how to again co-op these large patronage networks to get them moving in its own service but also giving them this profit sharing motive and you compare that what's happening in Africa and other places when they say non-interference the one side of it could be for all the reasons that are typically talked about we don't want interference in our sovereignty so we're not gonna have interference in your sovereignty but at a deeper level it could really be this sense if we're stylizing it or if we're trying to give it a more kind of good development focus there really does need to be that space to create a political settlement without a lot of, it's a place that a lot of donors don't wanna go because it requires a lot of breaking of eggs. And so the World Development Report this year that's put up by the World Bank on governance it basically says yes Europe and the US have these advanced economies and are peaceful democracies but and I think I'm almost quoting here today's governance is the child of yesterday's violence and most of these places have been fragile states for their historical trajectory I mean that's in the report and so when you're getting to places that are fragile there's gotta be this sense of what needs to really happen there and I think that spills into this idea of how US foreign policy can think about it too. On a stage at USIP last week there was this discussion about where Europe's going in terms of conflict areas and where the US is going and there was a lot of talk about stabilization and the need to come up with political settlements that might not be democratic to begin with but they're gonna create conditions of peace and then let it go from there. That's a place for cooperation I think that's a place where if you can appreciate new principles of how to do work in these places looking at that space for political settlement looking at sort of how do you scale development. As Matt's saying you've got these big dynamics China's investing 10 fold and the US is not playing at that level so how are you actually trying to transform these societies what kind of leverage points can exist there and then as these places take more shape as they get more stable as growth starts to happen then be prepared to talk about things where you diverge maintaining a presence obviously to do that. Thank you very much. I will first directly address the question of is there an effort to promote the China's experiences and my answer is absolutely yes. That's very clear. That's very clear. China wants to promote and share its experiences and as I've described in my presentation they had only three months ago created this new center called CIKD where I gave the keynote address and the whole mandate of CIKD is precisely to figure out what China's experiences had been and what lessons it should share. So that is a clear yes. And the other interesting thing to note about this center is that its political placement is very high because it is parked under the state council which is the premier's cabinet meaning all of the ministries are under the state council and it was launched by President Xi Jinping himself. So you can see from that placement the priorities that are being put on the mandate of this particular job of figuring out and sharing China's experiences. So it's definitely a yes. China wants to promote its experiences. The irony however is that they haven't figured out what are the experiences they should share. So that's the irony and that's the reality. So I agree with Matt that China's policy makers are vague about exactly what the China trail approach or model or whatever you wanna call it is that they are vague about it but I would disagree that they are vague by design because from my interactions with them it was very clear that they are vague because they really are still trying to figure it out. And indeed if they had already known had some very clear consensus among themselves what the China model is they do not need to create a new center just three months ago to do this job, right? And they do not need to ask me a foreign scholar to go share with them my thoughts about what the China model is, right? So it really is a reality that they're still trying to figure it out and so this is work in progress. So that's the irony they wanna share but first they have to figure out what to share and that's what they're doing. And the implication of this very interesting irony a very important implication is that it means that China's global development policy is at an embryonic stage. So this is the moment in history where it is open to influence, where it is open to ideas and in my experiences with them I was really impressed at how open-minded they are they're willing to talk about a whole range of things. You know, nothing was really off-bar. I for example had suggested that China should be engaging social actors and they were like, yeah, yeah, you know, that's a good idea we should think about it. They were very open-minded. So this is I think a really critical point in history where because they haven't figured out and come to a consensus about what the China experience is this is the best time for really anyone to influence that thinking process because I could imagine 10 years later once they have come to some kind of consensus that we think this is what the China experience is, maybe they might be like, oh, industrial parks, five-year plans, commands. If they consolidate and come to this consensus that will be very, very difficult to change their minds and very difficult to change their policies and their programs. So that is why I think it is very exciting the fact that it is only three months old, a baby, an infant, and this is the best opportunity to sort of give them new ideas, at least let them consider it. So that's my answer to the first question. I think this is a second comment that I wanted to make which is, I think it's very important, it's a question I would throw it back to the audience which is, who is China? And I teach Chinese politics class at UMish and I always ask my students to make sure when you talk about China, we like to use the pronoun day, day, day, day and then we're like, who, who? When you say China, do you mean Xi Jinping? He's obviously very, very important in China but he's not all of China. He has some kind of very, very grand vision at the end of the day. The implementation has to be done by the bureaucracy which is really vast, very big, divided and fragmented. And so, are you talking about, when you say China, are you talking about a Mofcom? Development assistance is parked under the Ministry of Commerce. We're talking about the State Council which is more focused on economic issues. We're talking about the Party Committee which is more focused on political issues and so, I think it's very important when we speak about China that we need to realize it is not one person with one mind that it really is a massive actor with divergent players and interests and that understanding is important because it helps us then to engage China in constructive ways. Rather than this delusion that it must be one actor with one mind and with one master plan which is not the reality. And then the third question about a concrete example of adaptive development. There are many examples in my book. The usual one, the most common one that I give is if you look at the history of how coastal cities in China first developed and attracted for investments which was the first engine of economic growth, they did it in the most unconventional way. They mobilized the entire civil service regardless of your title and office to use your personal connections to recruit investors. And if you succeed, you actually legitimately take a cut of whatever investments are earned. So that is what Jonathan Mann by Profit Sharing and everything that he had discussed about networks and patronage will all mobilize in this particular process. So in the beginning of China's takeoff, many of the methods that they had used to promote development were all in defiance of global best practices. And so, Land Pritchard and Michael Wolcott of Harvard Kennedy School coined the term doing development differently as a way to sort of change the discourse of development. And the term that I sometimes prefer is doing development wackyly. If you look at examples from China, and China's not alone, if you really seriously go into the of how development happened in countries like India, Nigeria, any of these third world countries, you'll find that their methods are unordodox, right? They're wacky because in that particular context of poverty, fragility, resource constraints, you have to be wacky in order to get things done. So that's the usual example. And I have a very interesting anecdote to share. When in my interactions with the Chinese policy actors, I gave this particular example that I just described to you. And one time, one of them told me, and I was really struck, he said that, he told me that he was really kind of surprised by my example because he knew of his existence, but he felt that it's something that China should not tell other people because it's something shameful. It's not consistent with best practices. It's not something that you should be telling the world. It's not something to be proud of. And so that was really sort of striking to me. And so I think sort of the benefit of being a scholar is that we can say anything that we want. And so we find the facts and we document what had actually happened. And for me, because I completely have no normative, any type of normative presumptions about whether this is good or bad, I was just reporting what had worked. And so this is an example that was refreshing for even the top policymakers in China. Thank you. We're in a really tight spot because we have five minutes left and I want to end on time, but I know there are still some questions. So I will open up for a few additional questions. If the questions are short and the responses are even shorter, then I think we can do it, but okay. So we'll start, yes, right here. You're all in a line. So actually, why don't you go first, yes? I have a question for you concerning another example, Sri Lanka that they recently had alone, the last global financial crisis was bad loans that were here in the US. How would this affect the global development and conflict? China's bad loans resulted in sovereignty claims and these nations didn't decide to sell back that territory. All right, and then a few. Is there a centralized model of education in China, for instance, with Qinghua, and what would be the impact on the local or the bottom up? All right, and there's one more. So far we've been assuming development. What if there isn't going to be development? China's debt to GDP ratio has grown enormously. China will have to impose austerity, we'll be, it's doing that now. IMF just came out with a report saying China has to increase bank capital. So what if development is not going to be the issue? What if it is going to be undevelopment? All right, three questions, you each have one minute to respond and we will wrap things up. Why don't we go back the other way and you're gonna start us off? I, since I have only 30 seconds, what I would say is, well, I think maybe I would pick up on the undevelopment issue and I would say that David Dollar actually came to give a talk at UMish two days ago and I was very much educated by his analysis, which was very balanced. The issue of China's development is that there are actually many bright spots in the economy. Consumption is growing very strong, a lot of rebalancing taking place, but they definitely do have risk with respect to the debt to GDP ratio. And so I think what we can expect to see in years to come is that China is transitioning from middle income to high income. They will face many challenges, but I do not think that we will be in a situation where China will be going backward. And so in fact, if anything, China will keep going forward and it now really wants to take on a big global role. And so that's why we need to understand the global aspect of China's situation. Pass, okay, Matt. All right, so on the Sri Lanka and debt, and I think this connects to the question of whether it'll be a development or not, absolutely I think that this really highlights both the question of whether, of debt sustainability from the point of view of any country, especially when it's a government to government kind of loan like this, it really highlights the questions for governments about whether that taking on that debt is sustainable or not. And that's just one of other examples. And some are arguing that China's doing this on purpose to try to get leverage, but there is an equal chance that the Chinese side, that the organizations, the financial institutions that are providing these loans, that if those go wrong, that this is gonna create ripple effects with an already existing difficult debt situation within the country. And there's a little bit of discussion about this, but it's extremely difficult to talk about because these institutions are very powerful. So like the China Development Bank. So the debt issue and debt sustainability are gonna be issues both on the side of the countries that are taking the debts, but also on the Chinese side. And we've really just seen the tip of the iceberg without tricky this is gonna be, but it's absolutely what's on offer with the Belt and Road with AIB and others. And on Tsinghua, happy to talk to you maybe afterwards about how Tsinghua works. All right, well thank you very much to our panelists for joining us. Thank you very much for all of you for coming. Before we go, I'm gonna say one special word. Thanks to Jennifer Chang, who did all the hard work to organize this event today. So thank you very much for making this happen. And please thank me once again and joining our panel for today's discussion. Thanks.