 Good afternoon to you, to you if you are in London or in Europe and good evenings to you if you are in Singapore or Asia. My name is Steve Tsang, I am the director of the South China Institute. I'm delighted that we are now finally having this book launch for Professor Geng Wu Wang. Some of you may know that there is an event that we had planned earlier in the year, first of all I think in February and that had to be the third when there was a nationwide strike at British universities. And then the event was rescheduled for March, end of March, and that happens to be the beginning of the lockdown in the UK and therefore again we have to defer. So I'm really, really pleased that we finally can hold this online book launch for a distinguished alumni of SOAS, Professor Wang Geng Wu, who is also a senior fellow at SOAS. The format of this event is that we will have it for an hour or two together. I will make introductions to the book as I understand it and Professor Wang will respond. This should take us about 20 or a bit over 20 minutes and then it will allow us over 30 minutes of time for Q&A. And if you would like to raise a question, please use the Q&A box for that. And if you are watching this via the live feed on Facebook, if you could also send in your questions, our colleague will put that into the Q&A box so that Professor Wang and I can see the questions and we will address them. Let me start by talking about this absolutely fantastic book. To me, reading this book is a great joy. It is both a macro history. It is also a personal history in some ways. It is a macro history because this is something which really look at the widespread and deep roots of Chinese history and bringing that to bear in helping us to understand China and its relationship with the rest of the world today. And it is personal because Professor Wang has shared some of his personal experience and his development from the time when he went to China as an undergraduate in 1948, where he would stay for a year before the Chinese Civil War, meant that he had to leave China and complete his education back in British Malaya as it still then was. And by interwoven to two, it is an extraordinary difficult job to do. And I think he has carried it off fantastically well because of his deep knowledge, both of classical Chinese history and of his contemporary history, society, and people. And by combining this with his personal experience, I think we get a kind of perspective that we normally do not find in excellent history books of China, or other contemporary books on China. But I can't believe that there is anybody among our colleagues who is in a sense better suited to deliver this. So many of you will know Professor Wang is a very distinguished historian with very, very long record in explaining in detail and in the most eloquent way, China's history, culture and civilization. He's also somebody who, as a scholar, knows the history of Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean terribly well. So for somebody who is trying to fit Chinese history into the global context. Very, very few people are able to do that. And I would say that Professor Wang is one of the very few who can and he has done that extremely well. Now what I'm going to say next are entirely my personal take. It is not going to be a summary of the book. Professor Wang is here with us, and he can speak much more eloquently about his book in the second part of this book launch in response to your questions or queries or comments. So by looking at this big picture of how to relate how China's past connects with China's present and how China's relationship with itself connects with the rest of the world. This book also raises to me the question of what is China and how should we understand China's history and how is history affects the behavior of China as a country today. In the book scholar, I think Professor Wang does not really prescribe, but he offers and share with us a view on how China can be understood and he offer his understanding of it. And in so doing, he raised a lot of very interesting and important questions. One thing that jumps to me is when we talk about China, what do we mean when we talk about Chinese history, where do we use as the benchmark. To address this kind of issues. For most people looking at China, the pre-Republican benchmark was the last imperial dynasty, the Qing. Well, the Qing dynasty was also the mental dynasty, as the Chinese would call it. But we can also have called the Qing period as a mental conquest of China. The mental empire was an empire. How do we see that, I think is an important matter. Or do we go back to China as it was being defined by the first and the second empire, the Qing and the Han dynasties. And if we look at China by the benchmarking of the Qing and the Han, then we are looking at what we will today call perhaps China proper and excluding about a third of the country, which will really become integral part of what we now call China under the imperial Qing dynasty. The benchmark to meet, I think will affect how we will look at China today as to what it is. Is it a multinational state? Or is it, in fact, still a kind of an empire? Or be it without an emperor. That difference, I think is important. And that is, I don't think a definitive way that is correct or wrong. It simply is a different way of how we can look at China. And these are the kind of issues which I think have been raised as I read the book. And I found that really important and relevant for us to understand that. And given Professor Wang's focus on macro history, I think we can see that China's approach to its modernization domestically and its place in the world is being seen through the prism of China's long history. And I, by my own training, is first and foremost a political scientist, even though I have also doubled into history. But primarily looking at it as from the perspective of a political scientist, I very much admire and respect that broad historical swept with which Professor Wang look at the issue. As it does so, I think there is potentially a possibility that the way how the Chinese government is conducting itself is being put on a more positive course in terms of how it matches the general big patterns of how China behave in history. And we might have not looked so much into the specifics and the details of the nature of the political system. It's a bit like when we are looking at a particular tree and a big forest, focusing more on the forest. My result in us not paying so much attention to the details of the tree. Now, does it matter? Does it not matter? That's the fact that we are dealing with a Leninist Party's day from Mao, through Dong Xiaoping, through Zhang Jimin, through Hu Jintao, to Xi Jinping, really still present a China that is in the tradition of Confucian China, still really looking at a revival of a Confucian China, albeit of course a modernized version of it. And I got a sense that the book is saying that yes, more or less generally in big picture terms, that is it for notwithstanding that there are issues there. But looking at the same issue, rereading the book, something that hit me was that if we look at what Confucian China in a modernized 21st century might look like, what we see on mainland China clearly presents a credible manifestation. That's another equally credible and to me in some ways even more credible manifestations. And that is Taiwan. Now, this is not going to be very popular with a lot of people in Taiwan who prefers to see Taiwan simply as a separate identity. The fact that I am not going to take issue with that I'm looking at it purely from the perspective of a scholar and not getting involved in the politics of it. And to me, with my limited understanding of Chinese history and civilization and Confucianism. If we reduce Confucian Confucius teachings to is bare minimum. The most important teaching the Grand Master left is that we must do the right thing in the judgment of history. Not in the judgment of the Prince or the King Emperor, not in the judgment of the scholar serving the King Emperor at a particular time. It is to be judged in history. The right thing. It in some ways is very vague. What is the right things to do. Now, if we go back to Confucius own teaching, obviously, in his day and age, he did not know what democracy mean. But would he have objected to democratization, democracy, respecting rights of individuals and respecting a common playbook that all must abide by Prince or Pope. My reading is that Confucius would have very much a proof of that because that is, if you like, on the right side of history. That is what we have seen in Taiwan. And that's why I would say that if we're looking at a modern manifestation of a Confucian China, Taiwan provides a very, very credible picture of what it would look like. It doesn't have to look like what we see on mainland China, where you have a party state where it remains very top down and with the rise of individuals being considered secondary to the interest of the modern version of the princess. So I think there is something that I would certainly like to push to Professor Wang to see whether he might like to respond to see how by looking at the big picture, whether it does or doesn't actually matter in terms of how we see the specific nature of the current political system in place. And I wanted to end here by just saying how much I have enjoyed the book. I think it is a genuinely thought provoking an eye opening book on how we should understand China and his history. And use that as a benchmark to understand China today, we may well understand the country and his relationship with the rest of the world, much better. And in so doing, I think Professor Wang has done us an enormous service. I would recommend this book wholeheartedly. And I think we, anyone who prefers not to read it, probably has something to lose. And those who read it will help will find it highly rewarding. I'll stop here and hand over to you, for your responses. Thank you very much, Steve, you've been extremely generous in your assessment of what you've read. And indeed I have taken a big picture and big pictures have had a limit. There are many efforts to understand something which has a long history. If it's something of a shorter history may not be so important. But when we know definitely the Chinese people have this long history, and they talk so much about it, and history is so important in many in the lives of many of their scholars and intellectuals as well as their political leaders, then we have to take that into account. And I would say that I would like to begin by distinguishing between a country with a set of people, a civilization, a culture, with a set of very high ideals, and about how to be good, how to be happy and harmonious society, those high ideals, the moral values, the kind of tolerance and the freedom that every human being would value. That's a set of ideals. But there's another side of it, a country that lasted so long cannot just depend on the ideals. And this is based on a political structure of a powerful state, which has got both wealth, as well as military power to defend itself against potential enemies or to have the wealth to sustain its civilization at a very high standard, and so on. What China did was when China appeared on a scene as China, I think was when he was united, as you say, under the Qin and Han dynasties. That was when he became China. Before that, it was China culturally and in many other structural ways, but very different. But when it became a unified state, it acquired certain other characteristics, which are nothing to do with Confucius. It's a structure which is based on the military, on the economy, on centralized bureaucratic power, and the sense of united purpose to survive, to thrive, if necessary, to expand, and if not to expand at least to have the capacity to defend itself against all that is a state structure. It is a system of government and the Qin Han state, both the Qin and the Han, the Qin set up a highly centralized bureaucratic state with very strong legal structures, which extremely tough and very rough justice offered and very demanding, that is to in order to preserve the power of the state. And they were very, very tough, rough to all those Confucians and other scholars who are offering different ideas. When the Qin fell and the Han dynasty took over, they first learned from it and cut down on the mistakes the Qin made and brought in the Confucians to soften the image of the state, but the structure of the state as a legalist, realist state remained. But now, as it were, a very powerful fist wrapped up with Confucian rhetoric to soften it, to make it more acceptable to, as it were, to provide the softness of the power that lies within. That balance of hard core of power and wealth, with a soft image of concern and caring and welfare oriented sense of respect for people and so on, remained a tension all that time. And in that context, it survived many, many blows. After all, that state that the Han dynasty had set up, lasted for nearly 400 years, was destroyed, basically destroyed by invasion after invasion. The invasions that destroyed the Qin, for example, and divided the country into two, the reunification under the Tang. In a way, this is nothing to do with whether you are Chinese or not Chinese. Whoever controlled this machinery of the state provided the structure of what we call China. And I think that this is what I mean by China. China is that reality of something that is powerful, highly organized, legalistic in a very narrow way, everything structured to preserve the power of the ruler. In this case, the emperor. But it doesn't have to be an emperor. It could be some other form. It doesn't matter whether it's a Chinese emperor, a Manchu, a Kitan, a Jurchen, or a Mongol, whoever took over the state, or in fact, brought in their own ideas of the state to reinforce, in fact, make it even stronger, as the Mongols did, and so did the Manchus in their own way, actually made that state that the Qin Han had created even stronger. And then I go back to my own education. The most Chinese are brought up to believe that idea of China stems from the classics, the Qin, the classics of the Confucians, as well as other thinkers, but in particular Confucius and Manchus. And these values represented the core of Chinese thinking, Chinese civilized life, and the values which the Chinese value. I think this study is perfectly correct. But actually, the state had was using that the state was not based on that the state was based on military power, economic wealth, and a tremendous capacity to use that wealth to stay in power. It was created by the Qin and the Han, and that survived despite many, many attempts to destroy it by invaders, because the invaders themselves found that it was very useful to keep the structure that kept it going. So what does this mean? It means that over the last 2000 years, when the Chinese built up a whole body of knowledge, they allowed the Confucians to determine the shape of that knowledge. So the Confucians put the classics at the top. These are the ideals, the sort of high ideals that everyone should have. But the reality was something else. The reality was the survival of unified state. Always the ideal is to unify the state, because when it's divided, it's weakened. And when it's weakened, invaders take advantage and will come and try and destroy the state. So in order to survive, after the 2000 years, the one major lesson that was learned by the state is that it must always be a unified state under central power in order to survive. And this is preserved, not in the Jing, the Jing talks about all sort of high ideals, but in the shi, this 2000 years of history. Now, what we mean by history? History is a whole set of records that preserved the system to show how the system has been protected, saved, strengthened, endorsed, re-endorsed again and again by being strong and unified. And it is a shi, which we call it the 24 histories from shuji to Ming dynasty, and then there's a Qing history. So when I talk about China reconnects, I emphasize the connecting the past to the present, the new world history. My stress is upon the fact that they have reconnected with that shi, with the 2000 years of continuity based on the centralized state with all the manifestations of wealth and power. And that has kept it going and it may enable it to fall again and again and rise again and again. After every fall, it will rise the next time even stronger. And this is true. The Tang dynasty in many ways was stronger than the Han, and then the Mongols after the Mongols, the Ming and the Manchus, much stronger than the earlier dynasties. And today, what has happened, I think, which is very interesting. The Chinese have learned a few things more. They've learned about science, they've learned about all the ideas, other people's political institutions, they learn about the economy, the capitalist economy, about manufacturing, industrial manufacturing. They've learned all the science and technology that can be learned, and the Chinese have no problems learning that at all. What they've done is that they've reconstructed the state, which is based on the idea of progress, something that the Chinese never understood before. In fact, the idea of progress is the one really revolutionary idea that was brought to China after the 19th century. Before that, the Chinese always looked to some golden age, which is all highly idealistic. But then after, and you can see this in the whole of the 20th century, I do not know of any Chinese intellectual who did not believe in some way that progress is possible. That China can be better, will be better, should be better than it used to be. And this idea of progress, where did they get that from? They got it from the West. But the West, of course, has some hesitations about it, but the person who symbolized the most complete faith in progress was Karl Marx. I'm not talking about communism. I don't think the Chinese understand or care about that. They don't believe really in communism at all. But what they do now believe is that China can be better. There can be progress. And the progress can come from science and technology and all the other economic and financial and other industrial advances that have been made by the West, which they can learn. And they want to make sure that this will be the progress that they will build on in China and enable China to move on to the next stage of development. And I think this is what I meant by reconnecting. They're reconnecting with the state system that has survived for 2000 years, with a lot of soft ideas. And so they do not want to discard the soft ideas. They know that the soft rhetoric that Confucius and his disciples provided down to the Song dynasty and beyond. All these idealists, they're very good for the state. They make the state more acceptable to people, make the state more human, make people more willing to serve it and be loyal to it. Because to talk about military power, to show it all the time is a great mistake. And they try to not to do it. And when you're really connected, you find all the Chinese state, when they write about themselves and what they want to do, it sounds tremendous. The rhetoric is beautiful. But of course behind it all has always been a strong structure of a system. So what I would like to say is that what we're looking at is after 100 years of two revolutions, three revolutions, if you include the cultural revolution, the Chinese have come out of it all. They know one thing. The past Confucius state is out. They don't want that is not enough. We now need a modern state. The modern state has been built by, first of all, the Kuomintang Nationalists started it. They didn't finish the job. The Mao Zedong tried to continue, did a bad job in many ways, didn't quite integrate it into something that worked. Whereas since Deng Xiaoping's reforms, they somehow managed to bring the whole thing together in a very forceful and at the moment anyway, very, very encouraging and hopeful way. And the people are tremendously inspired and energized to believe that the future is now in their hands because they've mastered the instruments of the modernity and the kind of progress, the ideal progress that they can achieve exactly where their progress will lead them to. I don't think they know. It doesn't matter as long as they're making progress and not turning back to the past. I think that is established. Now that is not Confucius. That is more like Marx than Confucius. So when I talk about, they go back to the Qing, when they overthrew the Manchu dynasty. And did they go back to Confucius state? No, they rejected it altogether. They tried nationalism, they tried liberalism, capitalism from the West. They didn't succeed. They lost out to the Communists. The Communist Party brought in new ideas from Marx, Lenin and so on. But what they really succeeded in doing was not to get the ideas across to the people. I don't mean that people care very much about what Lenin said or Stalin said. That's not the point. What they've achieved, however, is they've reconstructed the state. They've restructured it in such a way that actually spare some resemblance to the continuity with the past, offering the kind of wealth and power and centralized authority that would enable the country to stay unified. And if unified, can remain safe, secure from now onwards, and then make the progress which enabled the standards of living to rise for people to get wealthier and generally happier. This is their idea. So if you can see why I say that they now have two stages instead of one. One stage is sage is still says Confucius, but it's got nothing to do with Confucius really. It is simply to say, this is to let we recognize our continuity with the past. Confucius symbolizes that. And it gives you the soft picture, the softer image of China, which they don't, they really like. That makes them look very much better, makes them really feel that they are the human, caring, and really concerned for people. On the other side of it, the state, the nature of the state that it should be powerful and centralized must be secured, and they secured in order to get a better future because they believe in progress, and how to make how to symbolize the sage for the progress for progress, they put Marx there. Again, I don't think they care very much about what Marxist philosophy was, or where and where it really is linked to Stalin or Lenin, nothing like that at all. What they care about is that they need a picture of the progress to go forward, that you have something to go to do to become better. At the same time, they've learned that they must connect with the past. If they lose that, then they will lose their sense of security. If you have to take up everything from the West become an imitation Europe or imitation West, it do not be Chinese anymore so there's that element as well. So this mixture of a sense of pride in themselves, having this heritage of birth and power, which they like to restore, because it can be a clear idea that it can be restored, and that this progress ahead, has I think made them reconnect with the past. In that context, it's not ideology that counts today. It may sound like ideology whether it's Confucian or Marxist, it may sound like that that's all words. What really matters is that they have a system, and they want to make this system work, whether Xi Jinping can or not, and how long it can make it work, I do not know, and what the final form will be like, I do not know. But what I do not know is that they will always aim to make China unified, all of China doesn't matter, and the borders didn't matter, they never had proper borders anyway. Now they've been given borders, these are new features, they accept it, they accept the international borders, the world is recognized, that is the border, and everything within that border is China. And the China concept is nothing to do with the borders, the China concept is that whatever they have, they must keep unified and defend it with all means possible. And that part of it requires a system that is defensible, that can be reinforced from time to time, and we continually ensure the safety of the system. That must be as it were, self generating capacity to secure itself and make itself even more powerful and more secure in the future. I think I put it quite simply like that very bluntly. I'm venturing into your sphere of political science. Thank you very much, Kang Wu, that's really fantastic. Let me just remind all our participants that if you would like to raise a question or a comment, please use the Q&A box at the right hand bottom of the screen. Both Kang Wu and I should be able to pick up the questions and we will address them as they come. While we are waiting to see whether there are questions and comments from the participants, let me do two things. One is to remind you that this is a book launch which is supported generously by the publisher. World Scientific. I think they are offering a discount to participants who would like to purchase the books afterwards. And so you will find the details in the chat box. You will also find, I think a discount code on the website of the Source China Institute and we should be able to get that details. In the meantime, I think there was a question from Professor Sean Paul LeCond. He says the public opinion is more and more worried about climate change and environmental issues. How the environmental dimensions should be dealt with in barren road projects in a manner that the world would serve China and the wider world's long term interests. Over to you, Kang Wu, for that question. I think this is an example of kind of the new ideas and a new phenomenon that the Chinese are learning to cope with. They never had this problem as a really serious one because they were never industrialized and never needed to use the kind of energy sources that now are polluting the air and creating all the climate change problems that we now face. So they never had that problem before, although they were very quite sensitive about nature. I mean, and the whole body of knowledge can come from the Taoist, for example, place a tremendous emphasis on nature. And you see where all the temples are built all over the place. You can see how much these thinking people and love to be in a more natural context. So they never had that as a real problem. But today, at the speed that they were developing economically for the last 50 years, they have a serious problem. There are serious problems of water shortage, of clean water, of reliability, of how to control the weather, how to deal with the kind of things that the industrialization has created. Not only for themselves, not for the rest of the world, but it's the fact that by polluting it so much that it joins the rest of the world and polluting the whole world is now clear to them that it affects them. Especially how it hurts other people, it doesn't affect us. It affects them very directly. And the kind of cost that people of China are paying for some of the speed at which they industrialize is now becoming more obvious. And I think the government actually has been realizing that for the last 20 years, they have begun to do various things at a local level. I'm quite impressed actually by the amount of effort and the consciousness that's been built up among the ordinary Chinese people about the need to take care of the environment in order that they themselves can live to be healthy and have a decent life. I think this is now definitely rising. How to do it so that the rest of the world can also benefit, I'm not sure that is, that is a much more difficult message. But I think the fact that they're doing it for themselves, even just to protect their own interests that will help the world a lot. Thank you. We have quite a few other questions in the Q&A box. Let me first relate to the questions about, so is history guiding the present state authorities or is the present state authorities simply using history to justify their policy? I would say that they're not using it to justify their policy. They're learning from history to make their policy possible. In fact, their policies are learning from how previous dynasties, how the previous states all through their time, how they dealt with every challenge, how they use the institutional strength to cope with the kind of challenges they faced, whether it was the enemy from outside, big floods, locus, natural disasters that killed millions of people, how did they respond? All that is actually recorded in the volumes and volumes of historical records, the actual great details about how everybody responded in different periods of time, learned how to improve their methods of dealing with the disasters and challenges that China had to face. And I think that is a tradition that they believe in. The state must be able and have the capacity to respond to challenges and to deal with them in one way or the other. And the institutional basis of that still lies in the fact that it must be authoritarian, centralized, with efficient and incorrupt bureaucracy. That's something that they aimed at for a long time and never really succeeded. But it's something that they always aimed at. This is true if you look through the whole of Chinese history. Always the concern about corruption, nepotism, all these things, because it's real. And they never totally solved it and they will never solve it totally, but that they are conscious of it and they recognize that this remains a serious problem. In fact, the challenge is even greater because if you're corrupt today, you can be corrupt far more than you've ever been corrupt before. And the kind of wealth that they created by the new industrial developments and so on, absolutely unbelievable by the standards of the past. People now have genuine wealth. They have genuine capacity to, in fact, not only invest in their own businesses, but to spread out around the world. They can actually do things which are unbelievable to them and to their, among the ancestors. So this is a tremendously exciting and challenging thing for all these young Chinese that are growing up and being educated about the world today. So joining that path to the new world order is a really a new adventure for them. And they're tremendously inspired. And this is one of the reasons why of course it's fighting to other people. Other people see these tremendously enterprising and hardworking people finding the means now to challenge them across the board. And this is really quite alarming to those who have been used to assuming that their power, the power of the, you might say the Western Eurocentric world view, so to speak, has had a fairly easy time for the last 200 years. They have never expected there to be a genuine challenge that could come in this way. And they don't like it, understandably, and they will try to stop it. And this is what I think is building up to a new tension today, that they see China as a threat, not because it's a threat to any particular country, but it's a threat because it's offering a completely different way of doing things, which seem to work at least so far. And this is something that is unacceptable to those who are more accustomed to the kind of liberal traditions that you and I have grown up with. And in fact, we have learned to appreciate. And we're not that's why I'm not clear what will be the eventual fate of all these developments. All I know is that the Chinese have acquired that confidence now that they know what they need to build up the China that they want to continue the kind of success story that they made China so successful over the last 2000 years. And our next question from Richard. Could you draw a parallel between Xi Jinping and an emperor from antiquity. And if so, who would that be and why I think Xi Jinping is not a man, an emperor in that sense. What the emperor that I think has taken over from the emperors of the past in the emperor state I also call it the emperor state. Now it's a party state. So from the stage of emperor state to the party state was a very difficult period of several revolutions. In fact, this was attempted by the coming down to the coming down itself was a party state. That's that it wasn't a successful one. The party state under Mao Zedong was also a party state. It was a little bit more successful but in the end it failed. Now things helping has reconstructed the party state in a completely different way by taking advantage of all the new learning, the new capitalist methodologies the financial systems of liberal economic order the market system market economy of the world and integrated into their own system and what what has done therefore is that they have now actually created something that they believe can work. Now, the party, if you want to have an example of an emperor, the party is the emperor and teaching being represented yes he's one of many. He may want to be the emperor but it's not an emperor he's not the emperor, the party is the emperor. He is acting in a party's name, his capacity to control the party enables him to behave as if he were the emperor, but actual power rests with the party, and he is actually as much a servant of that party as as as its leader. Thank you, I'm going to combine three questions together next, because I think they kind of are related to each other. It is about the idea of the unification of China as a state. One of them would like you to comment on what is the span of this unification, it is all about China within the confide defined territories of the PRC, or is it much wider. Does it even include perhaps Chinese overseas. And related to this is a question about how does the South China see fit into this Chinese world order. And also the question of how does China and in its views of his possession fit in in the whole general area of Southeast Asia. These are several different questions there so let me let me try and put it this way. They've never had a clear border. The idea of a sovereignty of national borders territorial borders is a completely new idea. It's almost as new as exit as a powerful and ideal idea of progress. They've never had that before the idea of sovereignty has never really been developed by the Chinese. What they what they what they mean is that whatever area that is under the administration is China. And what has happened in the modern world and this is part of things that they accept for the modern world. The modern world is created an international system of nation states, and by that international system, they've acknowledged the borders over China, when it was created in 1911. 1912 as the Republic of China. People question that the Russians rather take some part of the, the West Northwest Mongolia, the Japanese took Manchuria, the British looked at Tibet. Also the people try to narrow China down to China proper. What happened was, it's remarkable story really was when the Sunnetsen passed on the presidency to Reshikai, and Reshikai got the Manchus to abdicate in his favor as President of China. He had the whole diplomatic world internationally, except that the Republic of China inherited the borders of Team China. Now, whatever that means, but that is now sacred to the Chinese. It was recognized, internationally recognized. And to this day in 1945, when the war ended, the borders of the people, the Burmindan, in fact, I don't think it was very clearly drawn lots of disputed areas, but it was the borders of more or less that of Qing China was accepted as a borders of the Republic of China, including the borders in Turkestan, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang. So all this was internationally accepted. And now they say, no, that is China. I mean, it's not a question of continuity, the continuity is that that is China because that is recognized as a territorial area to be controlled by the government in Beijing. And now they're holding that to everybody's, whatever the intent was at the time. And now they say they call it sovereignty, this is territorial, and this is sacred now. Now, but this idea that these are fixed borders, but totally new to them. They've learned this from the West, they've actually making use of international law to say, this is sovereign territory, you cannot intervene with whatever happens inside, because every country actually insists on that. Anyway, so China is using that. And so the South China Sea. Now, this is of course very complicated is on the one hand, we're talking about international law, which is nobody very clear about international waters anyway, they're all very modern, they negotiated over the last few decades, and the Chinese never understood that they understood territorial by land, even that over the century, they bet that it was a movable border always been you show me a map of China of any dynasty which is exactly the same. It's never been the same. It moved back and forth. It doesn't matter. However much you can control that was China. And now it is an international recognized border that is China, and anybody who says no, is challenging the sovereignty of China, and it's challenging something that the Chinese to consider sacred. When it comes to water. I don't mean they have anybody is really any clear idea of what that really means. You cannot use land borders as an analogy. And as for international law. They argued about this in close for a long time, but even in the across the left some things, some things very unclear. They agree that if there are sovereignty issues over over over islands or briefs or whatever. That is a matter for the for future discussion doesn't come under close directly, and they are dispute over territory. There's a lot of vagueness there in my mind I have talked with her international lawyers talk about this. They recognize that they're moving towards it in fact one of the reasons why this issue was brought to the court over the question of the Philippine petition to the court. It was another step forward in the hope of trying to resolve what what does it mean to have maritime borders, not clear. Now, in that context, what the Chinese claim, of course it's not based on any international law, but whose claim is based on international law that is universally accepted. I mean the Chinese don't accept that the Vietnamese claim is more legitimate than theirs, or the Indonesian or the Philippines they say we must be negotiated and understood. So that's number one that's the legal side and extremely vague and complicated. I think it's much more straightforward. And that is that they see this, the South China Sea, as well as the eastern sea, particularly the South China Sea, is now someplace they can be used to attack China. You see, for 2000 years, the Chinese had no enemies coming from the sea. They never had a single enemy that threatened China. In the 19th century, for the first time, enemy that came by sea, led by the British in the two opium wars, led up to the fall of Beijing, to burning of the summer palace and all that. And then finally ending up with the Bagua Lianjing in the end of the boxes. For those two few decades, it was clear that ships bearing the enemy can now attack China. The security in the past has always been about the land. They never had a security problem at sea. Now they recognize that you can be attacked by sea, and you can be very seriously threatened by sea. The whole regime nearly was almost completely destroyed. So they see the East China Sea and the South China Sea as their inner waters for the defense and security of China. Whether we believe them or not, there are lots of people who doubt what they say. I do not know. But all I know is that in their own minds, it is very clear. This is a very threatening area. It is the sea. The enemy can come from the sea and attack China. And China is vulnerable. The first time, since the first time, 600 years, for the first time, they have seriously developed a naval capacity to protect their course from the enemy. Only started seriously in the 1990s, frankly. Until the 1990s, the Chinese didn't have any money to develop a navy. Even since 1990, about a third of the century, that they really started. So they've only got about 20 years or 20, 30 years to build a navy. Nothing compared to kind of naval power that the Anglo-American heritage of 200, 300 years have built up. Nothing at all. But capacity to defend, I think they have the capacity, they're beginning to have the capacity to defend the course of the China. And the South China Sea, to them, South China Sea is their back door. The South China Sea is not apart from them. They are actually part of the South China Sea. Their coastline is about maybe up to a third, about one third of the coastline is the Chinese coastline. If you include Taiwan, of course, this is another issue. If you include Taiwan, definitely about a third of the coastline of South China Sea is actually Chinese territory, land territory. So they see their claim as being quite natural and justified. And the legal position is not as clear cut as some of us might like to believe. Okay, we have about four minutes left, and five outstanding questions. So I don't think we will be able to cover them all, but let's try to cover as many as we can. I'll ask you a question on something completely different on technology. This is a question from James and the question is about whether the surveillance technologies will now change the nature of China's pursuit of a strong state. I also wanted to have your views on whether technology had made a basic change previously in history, for example, in enabling the Qing kingdoms to play a role in building a strong and powerful unified empire. Technology is a two ways sword. I mean, you can use it to expand your power, but it can also be used by others to expand their power. So it's a question of how you handle it, how much of the technology is actually within your own control, how much of it depends on other people. China I think is still very dependent on other people for their highest technological developments. So they're still at a growing up stage. But I think they're very much more powerful than ever before. And this is the part that I think is probably what troubles everybody. And that is the speed at which China gain so much control over their own manufacturing world, the world of technology science and technology. So it's fantastic to learn so fast from the most advanced countries in the world in the last 40, 50 years. That is actually quite incredible. Of course, you can say other people have done it before, but other people have done it before at a different pace, but that whole world was much slower. The whole world is now so fast moving in the last 30, 40 years, and the Chinese have not only kept up with the pace, they've actually in some ways outpace those who were ahead of them before. And this is frightening to a lot of people. They've never seen a country like that, and not a small country or clever, a group of very clever people in a small country, relatively small country like Korea, South Korea or something like because they're small. This is a big country. And this big country can acquire all these skills and technology and, and the kind of advances that they have made in the last 20, 30 years so rapidly. And I fully understand why not only the neighbors were small neighbors, but even the United States feel threatened by this. This is very hard to understand because America is not being threatened by China. It's American hegemony in, in Asia that is certain by China. And if Americans admit that it's a hegemony they're trying to protect, not, not, they're not defending China at the United States against China. They're defending their capacity to be totally dominant in the sea, especially the sea, the whole Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. That is being challenged by the Chinese. And looking at what the Chinese are capable of in the last 20, 30 years, I think there are reasons why people are very concerned and very nervous. Well, the last round, I'm afraid that there will be some questions that I will not be able to put to you. The two questions about progress, which I think are related, they're raised by Lysbeth and Christine. The question essentially is about how China may change the way how we look at progress. You talk about Karl Marx as one of the, they gave the idea of progressed. And one of them would like to know, for example, that in the West, the idea of progress has changed, particularly as a result of the Second World War and genocide. And is that going to have a similar kind of effect on China and how he thinks about it. And the second question that being put in parallel is, what about progress in terms of making development sustainable. Would China perhaps look at its Taoist traditions to come up with an idea of progress that will contribute to a sustainable developing world. At this stage, I don't think the Chinese are doing enough thinking about that. I think at this stage, they are still excited by the idea of acquiring the obvious mastery of technology that is measurable as progress. It's all measurable. They learned all that from the West incidentally. They would never like that before. They learned all that, they mastered it. And of course, in a strange sort of way, it is precisely because they learned so well from the West that they have done so well. And that the willingness now to learn from the West has been unprecedented. They've never been so willing to learn from the outside world as they have been the last 100 years. The Chinese people, once they start to take something seriously and learn, they have this amazing capacity to integrate with themselves. That they're so excited by it. I think they have to, they have to be encouraged to start thinking about what are the consequences of this if you carry on like that. I noted earlier on that they're feeling, they're feeling it within China, where the pollution is so serious. And what they can see is that they're getting sick. Their people are getting sick, their children, their grandchildren, all are going to be affected by this. They, it does worry them. And do they do have in their own DNA, so to speak, the desire for the peaceful harmonious harmony with nature kind of life, which is romanticized in Chinese poetry literature. And Taoist philosophy and so on. They do have that, but it is not in the forefront of their minds at the moment. Secondly, even more serious to my mind. They have basically undermined the Confucian family system and the kind of morality that Confucians emphasize in the past are no longer significant to the young generation today. They know about it. They may say nice things about it. They pay lip service to it perhaps. Some of the philosophers and serious thinkers still do. But the impact on the society as a whole is very limited. What they're caught by and this is what is, I think, frightening to other people. The most interesting thing that most impressive about Western progress has been material progress. It's the Faustian kind of bargain that the West made as it were in the past and the 18th century, which has caught caught that caught that fever, and they're now developing. So the sustainable development part is something that I believe they will have they will have to have to face. In fact, already, they have already to think about aging before they get rich, that these are genuine problems. They have to think about restructuring the economy, not as export oriented as in the past 40 years. It's not that's not going to continue because the more successful they are. And if the rest of the world doesn't accept that anymore, they cannot follow that model already they are now trying to restructure the economic model. I'm not sure they know exactly what to do yet, but they are thinking very hard. And the fact that they are doing so I think cannot be denied. But whether they can find the answer as quickly as they found all the other things, I'm not so sure. But I'm pretty certain that, ultimately, they will learn everything about the West. And they will actually in the end adopt all the things that have made the world what it is today. They have reservations, those reservations are gradually as they see those reservations, less and less threatening to themselves. I think they will let it where they will, they will accept that. Thank you very much, Gong Wu Professor Wang for an absolutely fantastic session. I regrettably have been defeated by the clock and must apologize to the others who have raised questions that I have not been able to fit them in. Before I draw this completely to a closed, please allow me to share with you a fantastic piece of news. Today, our guest of honor, Professor Gong Wu Wang has very, very recently been awarded the town prize in psychology, which will formally be awarded to him in Taipei in September. This is a prize that was created as a parallel to the Nobel prizes, and one which had a special prize for psychology. So I think it's an absolutely fitting and wonderful tribute to a fantastic scholar who have just share his insight with us. Congratulations, Gong Wu. Thank you. Thank you. And just to remind everyone to view that if you're interested in getting hold of a copy of the book, you should be able to find a discount link or code from the chat box, or from the web page at the source China Institute, advertising this particular event. Let me thank you. Thank you all for your patience and for your participation. Thank you. Goodbye. Thank you all. Bye bye. Thank you.