1 00:00:01,110 --> 00:00:06,260 The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series 2 00:00:06,260 --> 00:00:08,220 under the Cornell East Asia Program. 3 00:00:08,220 --> 00:00:11,440 The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belongs solely to the speaker. 4 00:00:11,440 --> 00:00:14,630 We hope you enjoy. 5 00:00:16,980 --> 00:00:21,080 Thank you for the introduction, Robyn and for the invitation by the way. 6 00:00:21,080 --> 00:00:25,220 This is the person through whom the invitation came so double thanks. 7 00:00:25,220 --> 00:00:25,720 You can tell that I was being introduced by a China person because he got the title of my book 8 00:00:25,720 --> 00:00:34,360 a little bit wrong at the last instant. He fixed it but he wanted to say the traditional term 9 00:00:34,360 --> 00:00:43,200 for the phrase that my book's name draws upon which is, in Chinese, it's usually translated as 10 00:00:43,200 --> 00:00:49,640 "all under heaven" and so my I played with that a little bit in naming my book "everything under the heavens" 11 00:00:49,640 --> 00:00:55,620 which sounds a little bit more modern in English and perhaps a little more intriguing also I hoped 12 00:00:55,620 --> 00:00:59,680 and I'll explain what this all means in a few minutes. 13 00:00:59,680 --> 00:01:06,660 So most of you I assume have not read my book and I'm gonna try to cover a lot of ground 14 00:01:06,660 --> 00:01:11,060 in a short period of time to try to give you a flavor for some of the themes and 15 00:01:11,060 --> 00:01:17,680 initial findings, if you will, of this effort of writing a book 16 00:01:17,680 --> 00:01:22,350 which is essentially about Chinese history and Chinese geopolitics and 17 00:01:22,350 --> 00:01:27,070 at the margins, both in the early parts of the book - the beginning and 18 00:01:27,070 --> 00:01:31,869 the end of the book - an attempt to kind of anticipate where 19 00:01:31,869 --> 00:01:37,200 things are going in the world today with regard to China and with regard to the international system. 20 00:01:37,200 --> 00:01:43,480 When I'm forced to say in a phrase what the book is about 21 00:01:43,480 --> 00:01:50,440 I say it's an attempt to kind of discern a civilizational logic to Chinese geopolitics. 22 00:01:50,440 --> 00:01:55,090 Excuse me, I have a little bit of a cold so if you hear me 23 00:01:55,090 --> 00:01:59,780 clearing my throat like that I hope it's not too much of an annoyance but 24 00:01:59,780 --> 00:02:03,189 I think I should start at the very beginning which is how did I end up 25 00:02:03,189 --> 00:02:07,600 writing a book like this and I started this project in a very different place 26 00:02:07,600 --> 00:02:14,050 from where I ended up. I started this project with a question, having served in 27 00:02:14,050 --> 00:02:18,460 lots of the places that that you heard about in the introduction, various parts 28 00:02:18,460 --> 00:02:22,100 of the world and most notably for this purpose in Africa 29 00:02:22,100 --> 00:02:30,550 in two different periods of my life. As a journalist I arrived in Japan to cover Japan and 30 00:02:30,550 --> 00:02:36,250 the two Koreas in 1998 for the New York Times, having spent a lot of time in 31 00:02:36,250 --> 00:02:42,670 Africa and was immediately struck by what to me at that moment was a 32 00:02:42,670 --> 00:02:45,040 perplexing feature of life in Northeast Asia 33 00:02:45,040 --> 00:02:48,580 politically speaking, geopolitically speaking, diplomatically speaking, 34 00:02:48,580 --> 00:02:54,310 economically speaking and that is that. When we usually think of Africa I think 35 00:02:54,310 --> 00:02:57,990 most of us think of a part of the world that is disorderly 36 00:02:57,990 --> 00:03:03,110 that is certainly a relatively poor compared to many other parts of the world, 37 00:03:03,110 --> 00:03:07,460 that is chaotic, that is underdeveloped etc etc 38 00:03:07,460 --> 00:03:14,260 and when we think of Northeast Asia, with the exception of North Korea, which is a very particular case 39 00:03:14,260 --> 00:03:19,380 we think -- we have very different images come to mind 40 00:03:19,380 --> 00:03:26,968 especially most recently of advanced economies, high-speed growth, lots of technology, 41 00:03:26,968 --> 00:03:29,350 explosion of wealth etc etc. 42 00:03:29,350 --> 00:03:34,150 So I arrived in Japan in 1998 and within a year or two I found myself asking 43 00:03:34,150 --> 00:03:43,630 lots of people: Why is it that in West Africa - West and Central Africa - you find much 44 00:03:43,630 --> 00:03:49,280 much more regional integration than you find in Northeast Asia. What do I mean? 45 00:03:49,280 --> 00:03:54,180 In West and Central Africa back then as well as now despite the fact that 46 00:03:54,180 --> 00:04:00,220 West and Central Africa or Africa as a whole is considered less well developed than 47 00:04:00,220 --> 00:04:05,769 Northeast Asia, you have all sorts of regional frameworks and institutions 48 00:04:05,769 --> 00:04:09,840 that tie the various countries of these two regions together 49 00:04:09,840 --> 00:04:14,652 whereas in Northeast Asia every country is sort of each man for himself 50 00:04:14,652 --> 00:04:20,480 or each country for itself, to stretch this formula--agenda. 51 00:04:20,480 --> 00:04:22,620 In western and central Africa you have regional currencies 52 00:04:22,620 --> 00:04:27,220 where multiple countries use the same currency in close cooperation with each other. 53 00:04:27,220 --> 00:04:33,940 You have regional airline. You have regional customs and immigrations agencies. 54 00:04:33,940 --> 00:04:38,980 You have political institutions or organizations 55 00:04:38,980 --> 00:04:42,960 that arrange very frequent meetings of heads of state, 56 00:04:42,960 --> 00:04:46,420 sometimes two three four times a year on a scheduled basis 57 00:04:46,420 --> 00:04:52,620 just as a matter of calendar, where they come together to discuss the important business of the region 58 00:04:52,620 --> 00:05:02,099 with nobody, without any fuss about it and in Northeast Asia when I was just arriving I noticed that 59 00:05:02,099 --> 00:05:07,140 of course each country has its own currency, each country has its own airlines, 60 00:05:07,140 --> 00:05:11,229 each country manages each of these various things all on its own and 61 00:05:11,229 --> 00:05:14,400 at the level of heads of state, 62 00:05:14,400 --> 00:05:19,600 arranging meetings between the heads of state of Japan and the head of state of China 63 00:05:19,600 --> 00:05:24,129 and of the two Koreas is a very tricky business. 64 00:05:24,129 --> 00:05:26,540 These meetings don't happen very often. 65 00:05:26,540 --> 00:05:30,680 Meetings of any two of them don't happen very often 66 00:05:30,680 --> 00:05:34,560 and meetings of more than two of them as a group are very rare 67 00:05:34,560 --> 00:05:43,540 and so this was the initial kind of question that I began with. 68 00:05:43,540 --> 00:05:46,280 It set me on a long winding path to produce this book 69 00:05:46,280 --> 00:05:53,800 and after I got over my sort of African hangover I began to look for other 70 00:05:53,800 --> 00:05:58,389 kind of analogies or points of comparison for North East Asia and one 71 00:05:58,389 --> 00:06:02,979 that seemed even more apt than West and Central Africa came to mind very quickly 72 00:06:02,979 --> 00:06:06,080 and that was northwestern Europe. 73 00:06:06,080 --> 00:06:08,660 So I was now based in northeastern Asia. 74 00:06:08,660 --> 00:06:12,920 I was covering there. I was the bureau chief of the New York Times for Japan and the two Koreas, 75 00:06:12,920 --> 00:06:20,180 flying back and forth between those three countries, not so often to North Korea 76 00:06:20,180 --> 00:06:21,860 but also visiting sometimes North Korea, 77 00:06:21,860 --> 00:06:24,600 and from time to time even though it was not my assignment 78 00:06:24,600 --> 00:06:27,120 already back then beginning to go to China 79 00:06:27,120 --> 00:06:31,640 and the European model came to me this way. 80 00:06:31,640 --> 00:06:37,240 In Northeast Asia as I struggled to learn Japanese and years later struggled to learn Chinese 81 00:06:37,240 --> 00:06:42,200 I became quickly aware that you have all of these points of common culture. 82 00:06:42,200 --> 00:06:49,750 You have a common basis in writing systems, namely in Chinese writing systems that 83 00:06:49,750 --> 00:06:52,380 all of those cultures have drawn upon. 84 00:06:52,380 --> 00:07:01,240 You have common basis in religion, philosophy, legal codes, moral and ethical codes etc etc and yet 85 00:07:01,240 --> 00:07:05,340 just as I had said when comparing or comparing North East Asia to 86 00:07:05,340 --> 00:07:11,100 West and Central Africa the North East Asian countries carry on 87 00:07:11,100 --> 00:07:16,220 as if they have at best nothing to do with each other or little to do with each other and 88 00:07:16,220 --> 00:07:21,330 at worst like they're just barely short of being outright enemies with each other. 89 00:07:21,330 --> 00:07:30,969 In northwestern Europe if you accept this construct I sort of selected 90 00:07:30,969 --> 00:07:36,580 in thinking about this three main nation-states as the leading powers of 91 00:07:36,580 --> 00:07:41,080 Northwestern Europe and the three that I focus on in this analogy are 92 00:07:41,080 --> 00:07:46,720 Germany, France and Britain. Germany and France and Britain have many of the say -- you can say many 93 00:07:46,720 --> 00:07:51,099 of the same things I just said about commonalities of culture, history, 94 00:07:51,099 --> 00:07:56,250 and the like as I did with Northeast Asia - writing systems, legal codes, 95 00:07:56,250 --> 00:08:01,943 philosophy, religion, ethics, morals etc etc. 96 00:08:01,943 --> 00:08:10,539 When I first began in Northeast Asia to ask the question among Northeast Asians or two Northeast Asian 97 00:08:10,539 --> 00:08:14,080 people in these four countries that I was traveling in and writing about: 98 00:08:14,080 --> 00:08:18,930 Why is it that you don't, that you get along so poorly with each other? 99 00:08:18,930 --> 00:08:23,589 Usually the question will be laughed off as if this was the work of a, 100 00:08:23,589 --> 00:08:26,760 the inquiry of a naif or an idiot, 101 00:08:26,760 --> 00:08:28,820 you know, what do you mean? 102 00:08:28,820 --> 00:08:32,365 We, you know, it was just a day before yesterday we were killing each other 103 00:08:32,365 --> 00:08:36,940 there were wars here. There's lots of bad blood. There's lots of animosity and hatred 104 00:08:36,940 --> 00:08:39,700 and there's a hangover of all of these things 105 00:08:39,700 --> 00:08:44,620 but when you think about the Northwestern European analogy you realize that's all true there too right? 106 00:08:44,620 --> 00:08:47,735 The Northwestern Europeans - Germany France and Britain - 107 00:08:47,735 --> 00:08:51,860 they killed each other a lot too and for centuries and centuries. 108 00:08:51,860 --> 00:08:56,127 I'm a bit of a Francophile. I speak French. My wife is a native French speaker. 109 00:08:56,127 --> 00:08:58,460 French is the language of my household. 110 00:08:58,460 --> 00:09:03,069 I spent a lot of time in France and one of my early jokes about this 111 00:09:03,069 --> 00:09:07,060 that I picked up many years ago among French people was 112 00:09:07,060 --> 00:09:09,940 kind of a crude little ditty that said something like: 113 00:09:09,940 --> 00:09:17,380 What does a German do the moment you hand him a rifle? He runs toward France. 114 00:09:17,380 --> 00:09:23,920 So you have this long record of animosity in Western Europe, in Northwestern Europe, 115 00:09:23,920 --> 00:09:28,200 immense amounts of bloodshed, centuries and centuries of atrocity 116 00:09:28,200 --> 00:09:34,000 so this is one of the things, one of the objections that the people in Northeastern Asia would raise 117 00:09:34,000 --> 00:09:36,560 when I would ask this naive seeming question they would say: 118 00:09:36,560 --> 00:09:39,880 "But you don't understand that Japanese did really horrible things to us, 119 00:09:39,880 --> 00:09:44,900 atrocities, they kill people you know, the Rape of Nanking or this or that and 120 00:09:44,900 --> 00:09:52,660 I said but you know Northwestern Europe is no small potato in the realm of atrocity 121 00:09:52,660 --> 00:10:00,780 I mean they killed people on mass scale and in the most gruesome and morally objectionable ways also right? 122 00:10:00,780 --> 00:10:09,380 So I spent a long time thinking about this and I got put off of pursuing this question 123 00:10:09,380 --> 00:10:16,780 with a kind of peremptory conclusion 124 00:10:16,780 --> 00:10:23,000 which is that the reason why well actually I'm getting ahead of my story 125 00:10:23,000 --> 00:10:26,160 so obviously as you all know Northwestern Europe put all that stuff to the side 126 00:10:26,160 --> 00:10:29,400 and created functioning regional institutions. 127 00:10:29,400 --> 00:10:31,960 First of all they created a lasting peace 128 00:10:31,960 --> 00:10:34,700 then they created functionally regional institutions 129 00:10:34,700 --> 00:10:36,180 they created a common currency. 130 00:10:36,180 --> 00:10:39,860 All the things that the Africans did they did even bigger and deeper 131 00:10:39,860 --> 00:10:43,820 and now nobody in Western Europe or Northwestern Europe thinks, 132 00:10:43,820 --> 00:10:46,280 these people don't think about each other that way. 133 00:10:46,280 --> 00:10:50,200 Brexit may be taking place but even with that being the case 134 00:10:50,200 --> 00:10:56,160 we're in a totally different era. They have overcome the past it would appear, 135 00:10:56,160 --> 00:10:57,820 it would seem to be, right? 136 00:10:57,820 --> 00:11:01,570 And so when I thought back then in those Japan days 137 00:11:01,570 --> 00:11:03,640 prior to arriving in China, what was going on, 138 00:11:03,640 --> 00:11:07,080 I came to a kind of peremptory kind of initial answer which was, 139 00:11:07,080 --> 00:11:14,637 well so this is really about the fact that the Cold War never ended in Northeast Asia, 140 00:11:14,637 --> 00:11:18,900 that there is no peace in Northeast Asia in fact. 141 00:11:18,900 --> 00:11:21,580 Today the United States and North Korea 142 00:11:21,580 --> 00:11:29,474 are at loggerheads quite visibly and quite disturbingly, 143 00:11:29,474 --> 00:11:29,974 often in the news trading insults, the North Korea's testing missiles and the like. 144 00:11:29,974 --> 00:11:40,150 This is a testament few people stop to think of, especially I think people of your age, 145 00:11:40,150 --> 00:11:42,886 stop to think of this but this is a legacy of the fact 146 00:11:42,886 --> 00:11:46,990 that there has never been a conclusion - never mind the Cold War - there's never been a conclusion to 147 00:11:46,990 --> 00:11:51,760 WWII in Northeast Asia, that there's a state of war that still persists 148 00:11:51,760 --> 00:11:55,330 between the United States and North Korea. We are literally at war. 149 00:11:55,330 --> 00:11:59,530 There was never a peace treaty signed. North and South Korea are literally 150 00:11:59,530 --> 00:12:05,410 still at war even though there is a ceasefire there was never a peace sign. 151 00:12:05,410 --> 00:12:11,470 And so my peremptory answer was oh so this is the reason that there's a war 152 00:12:11,470 --> 00:12:15,790 that still is under way even though it doesn't appear to be the case 153 00:12:15,790 --> 00:12:21,020 on the Korean Peninsula and a cold war that persists in Northeast Asia 154 00:12:21,020 --> 00:12:27,070 or in East Asia overall which doesn't appear to be the case because the United States 155 00:12:27,070 --> 00:12:30,340 trades so much with China and there's so much exchange between the United States 156 00:12:30,340 --> 00:12:34,240 and China but in fact if you scratch a little bit beneath the surface you can 157 00:12:34,240 --> 00:12:40,090 see all of the sort of hangover of the Cold War and the and the and of I'm 158 00:12:40,090 --> 00:12:44,290 sorry of World War two and the Cold War that still persists just beneath the 159 00:12:44,290 --> 00:12:49,040 surface in that part of the world so this was my initial answer for what's going on. 160 00:12:49,040 --> 00:12:54,224 When I got to China in 2003 and began to think 161 00:12:54,224 --> 00:13:00,600 this idea sort of became reactivated in my mind and I began to think about it more deeply again. 162 00:13:00,600 --> 00:13:06,420 I began to put that peremptory initial conclusion to the side, to reject it. 163 00:13:06,420 --> 00:13:11,180 All of those things that I've just said about the Cold War, the persistence of WWII and of the Cold War, 164 00:13:11,180 --> 00:13:14,100 those are all true but they're not really sufficient explanations. 165 00:13:14,100 --> 00:13:21,380 I don't think for why Northeast Asia has never coalesced and become a functional unit 166 00:13:21,380 --> 00:13:24,240 the way Northwestern Europe has 167 00:13:24,240 --> 00:13:30,960 and so for much of the rest of my talk with you I'm going to try to explain why that is. 168 00:13:34,990 --> 00:13:43,700 In the wake of WWII even though China fought the United States to a standstill on the Korean Peninsula 169 00:13:43,700 --> 00:13:50,340 the United States emerged in the 1950s and 60s as by far the world's most preeminent military power, 170 00:13:50,340 --> 00:13:56,760 by far the preeminent military and economic power in that part of the world 171 00:13:56,760 --> 00:14:01,980 and created an alliance infrastructure throughout Asia 172 00:14:01,980 --> 00:14:08,460 that is has its sort of most robust foundations in Northeast Asia with Japan and with South Korea, 173 00:14:08,460 --> 00:14:16,130 nations which were transformed politically and economically by way of their relations with the 174 00:14:16,130 --> 00:14:19,760 United States after World War Two and into the 50s and 60s. 175 00:14:19,760 --> 00:14:27,520 But also throughout most of the rest of Asia the United States went about in the 50s and 60s 176 00:14:27,520 --> 00:14:35,980 establishing alliances with lots and lots of countries in East Asia, in Asia generally speaking in fact. 177 00:14:35,980 --> 00:14:43,103 And although China had had the sufficient power to fight the United States to a standstill 178 00:14:43,103 --> 00:14:47,640 on the Korean Peninsula which after all is on China's doorstep, 179 00:14:47,640 --> 00:14:51,650 China did not have the wherewithal either economically 180 00:14:51,650 --> 00:14:59,680 politically or especially militarily to contest for primacy with the United States elsewhere in Asia 181 00:14:59,680 --> 00:15:03,020 certainly not with any consistency and not with any vigor. 182 00:15:03,020 --> 00:15:10,260 China was for the most part preoccupied with a kind of autarkic management of its own economy, 183 00:15:10,260 --> 00:15:14,440 with creating a new political order in its own geopolitical space, 184 00:15:14,440 --> 00:15:17,520 reinventing itself under Maoism. 185 00:15:17,520 --> 00:15:26,733 When China emerges from the Maoist period in -- so Mao died in 1976. 186 00:15:26,733 --> 00:15:34,480 By the early 1980s we can say that China had emerged from the Maoist period 187 00:15:34,480 --> 00:15:42,290 when Deng Xiaoping takes over and soon thereafter economic reforms and what is it called? 改革开放. 188 00:15:42,290 --> 00:15:46,120 Reform and opening begin to take place. 189 00:15:46,810 --> 00:15:52,610 The view in the United States was that China is -- that we have won. 190 00:15:52,610 --> 00:15:57,240 I don't think politicians were on their rooftops crowing about this 191 00:15:57,240 --> 00:16:06,500 but the feeling was, I think, shared very widely that given time with under the sort of 192 00:16:06,500 --> 00:16:10,790 under the magic influence of capitalism China will become socialized 193 00:16:10,790 --> 00:16:15,740 to become not socialist which it already was but socialized to become more and 194 00:16:15,740 --> 00:16:20,089 more like us, meaning more and more like the United States, that capitalism would 195 00:16:20,089 --> 00:16:22,880 americanize or would westernize China 196 00:16:22,880 --> 00:16:33,380 and gradually if this process were pursued to conclusion through the creation of a middle class and 197 00:16:33,380 --> 00:16:40,730 widespread prosperity in China, Chinese perhaps even a western-style democracy, 198 00:16:40,730 --> 00:16:43,758 this was kind of the extreme version of this fantasy, 199 00:16:43,758 --> 00:16:47,340 but perhaps even a western-style democracy would take hold in China. 200 00:16:47,340 --> 00:16:51,529 There was a very, an axiom 201 00:16:51,529 --> 00:16:55,520 fond among political scientists back in that day which one, even still now, here's 202 00:16:55,520 --> 00:16:59,150 a little bit which says that democracies never go to war with each other and so 203 00:16:59,150 --> 00:17:04,500 if only capitalism could take firm route in China and a middle class could sprout 204 00:17:04,500 --> 00:17:11,300 China and the United States would become notional allies and close buddies 205 00:17:11,300 --> 00:17:16,300 and pursue common causes and joint purpose around the world. 206 00:17:17,839 --> 00:17:25,580 This sentiment had its sort of high-water mark in the George Bush administration 207 00:17:25,580 --> 00:17:30,980 when there was a man - I can't remember exact title - in the Bush administration 208 00:17:30,980 --> 00:17:34,460 but he went on to be the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, 209 00:17:34,460 --> 00:17:39,860 who I think he was the head of policy planning at the State Department, 210 00:17:39,860 --> 00:17:46,260 who very famously had a series of engagements with the Chinese leadership in which he urged them 211 00:17:46,260 --> 00:17:55,580 to become responsible stakeholders. This is an extraordinary phrase 212 00:17:55,580 --> 00:18:00,620 because it implies a commonality of purpose. 213 00:18:00,620 --> 00:18:04,760 How can you become -- How can you ask somebody to become a responsible stakeholder 214 00:18:04,760 --> 00:18:09,480 without assuming that you have a common sense of what responsibility means, 215 00:18:09,480 --> 00:18:16,700 what are you going to take responsibility for? So Zoellick, having bought into this idea, would seem that 216 00:18:16,700 --> 00:18:20,600 the United States and China, by way of Chinese opening and reform, 217 00:18:20,600 --> 00:18:26,750 by way of Chinese economic modernization, by way of the explosion of a Chinese middle class, 218 00:18:26,750 --> 00:18:30,650 that China and the United States were going to be on convergent paths. 219 00:18:30,650 --> 00:18:35,260 Zoellick is trying to say to China back in the 1990s, 220 00:18:35,260 --> 00:18:39,800 "Come on guys let's put your shoulder to the wheel. Let's all push in the same direction and 221 00:18:39,800 --> 00:18:48,360 be responsible together. Let's assume a shared custody of the world and manage the world's problems together. 222 00:18:48,360 --> 00:18:59,220 This represents a profound misreading of Chinese geopolitics 223 00:18:59,220 --> 00:19:06,480 and I want to go back to the decade or to prior to Zoellick to explain why. 224 00:19:06,480 --> 00:19:12,620 So I said that China had managed to fight the United States to a standstill on Korean Peninsula 225 00:19:12,620 --> 00:19:18,650 but that it had not really contested very much broadly in Asia with the United States beyond Korea. 226 00:19:18,650 --> 00:19:24,980 Of course there were incidents here and there where the two were on opposite sides of different problems. 227 00:19:24,980 --> 00:19:27,200 Indonesia would be a good example there. 228 00:19:27,200 --> 00:19:29,360 There are a number of other examples. 229 00:19:29,360 --> 00:19:35,120 China, actually, the Chinese Communist Party, funded Communist Parties in lots of different places 230 00:19:35,120 --> 00:19:39,760 including Japan but China was not vigorously fighting for influence 231 00:19:39,760 --> 00:19:45,660 in a head-to-head kind of confrontational way with the United States back then 232 00:19:45,660 --> 00:19:48,980 because it lacked the means to do so 233 00:19:48,980 --> 00:19:55,220 and the United States had, having imposed its security and alliance infrastructure throughout the region, 234 00:19:55,220 --> 00:20:02,240 pretty much had managed to - I like to think of this as having managed to freeze time. 235 00:20:02,240 --> 00:20:05,720 In freezing time - freezing time means freezing into place 236 00:20:05,720 --> 00:20:11,840 a certain number of arrangements that creates the illusion that the flow of history has stopped 237 00:20:11,840 --> 00:20:16,800 and that taking attention away from what I think is the critical issue here 238 00:20:16,800 --> 00:20:23,900 which is the long term thrust of Chinese civilization in geopolitical terms and 239 00:20:23,900 --> 00:20:30,660 thinking in a short-term perspective about rather shallow gains 240 00:20:30,660 --> 00:20:34,060 created by the United States especially and by the West in general. 241 00:20:34,060 --> 00:20:43,240 So with reform and opening, while Zoellick is thinking we're going to enter this era 242 00:20:43,240 --> 00:20:47,560 of common custody of the world and China is going to be a good junior partner, 243 00:20:47,560 --> 00:20:54,960 he never said junior partner but implicitly in patronizing language like "be a responsible stakeholder" 244 00:20:54,960 --> 00:20:58,020 is that the person you're talking to is going to be your junior partner. 245 00:20:58,020 --> 00:21:00,650 You don't talk to a senior or a co-equal that way right? 246 00:21:00,650 --> 00:21:05,040 You say to your junior partner "be responsible". 247 00:21:05,040 --> 00:21:12,840 What was really happening in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s 248 00:21:12,840 --> 00:21:16,100 as China began to take off economically 249 00:21:16,100 --> 00:21:25,940 and as all of the wealth that I've spoken about began to explode - shouldn't use a violent metaphor like that 250 00:21:25,940 --> 00:21:32,220 but explosive growth is actually a good description for what happened in China if you look at 251 00:21:32,220 --> 00:21:38,220 the extraordinary per capita wealth data over the over the decades of the 90s and the 2000s 252 00:21:38,220 --> 00:21:47,630 and in this most recent decade. What was really happening behind the scenes is that 253 00:21:47,630 --> 00:21:56,340 China was returning to its long-term historical direction in terms of dealing with its neighbors. 254 00:21:56,340 --> 00:22:04,820 China in the 1990s said about settling territorial disputes with lots of neighbors. 255 00:22:04,820 --> 00:22:11,320 It actually ceded small amounts of territory and settling lots of these disputes. 256 00:22:11,320 --> 00:22:18,320 It gained insider status as an observer and participant in lots of regional institutions, most importantly ASEAN. 257 00:22:18,320 --> 00:22:24,780 In the early days ASEAN had been formed kind of as a Cold War institution 258 00:22:24,780 --> 00:22:29,220 skeptical and hostile of China in its early days. 259 00:22:29,220 --> 00:22:38,780 China managed to work its way into their good graces by taking conciliatory approach to territorial disputes. 260 00:22:38,780 --> 00:22:46,180 Then by forming the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, China has its first initiative of, 261 00:22:46,180 --> 00:22:56,739 kind of creating large scale although vague in purpose super-regional kind of geopolitical architecture, 262 00:22:56,739 --> 00:23:03,260 inviting in Russia, inviting in all of the former Soviet states of Central Europe -- 263 00:23:03,260 --> 00:23:08,620 I'm sorry, Central Asia -- and in various other places, tentatively with India, 264 00:23:08,620 --> 00:23:14,140 with Burma, with Vietnam, country after country, China began to achieve a detente 265 00:23:14,140 --> 00:23:22,220 and then a high functioning relationship 266 00:23:22,220 --> 00:23:28,760 and through a combination of entering existing political organizations or creating new political organizations 267 00:23:28,760 --> 00:23:34,760 China begins to become an engine of diplomatic activity and of integration 268 00:23:34,760 --> 00:23:41,650 which is really the important word in the greater world beyond China's borders. 269 00:23:43,930 --> 00:23:52,070 So to return to the heart of my book, the true subject of my book is, 270 00:23:52,070 --> 00:24:00,310 you know, what are the wellsprings for China's economic, I'm sorry, geopolitical 271 00:24:01,970 --> 00:24:06,480 geopolitical initiatives and geopolitical logic. 272 00:24:06,480 --> 00:24:12,240 And to find the wellsprings of this I go back to early Chinese history or early dynastic history. 273 00:24:12,240 --> 00:24:18,820 The story, as I tell it, begins in -- actually it begins in a classroom 274 00:24:18,820 --> 00:24:23,540 and I'll tell you what I mean by that in a moment -- but historically speaking the story begins 275 00:24:23,540 --> 00:24:32,470 in the Han Dynasty which begins I think in 220 BC and runs until about 200 AD. Is that correct? 276 00:24:34,480 --> 00:24:39,440 The classroom joke though is a clumsy anecdote about experiences I've had 277 00:24:39,440 --> 00:24:45,760 for my last 10 years at Columbia. 278 00:24:45,760 --> 00:24:48,640 Every spring I teach a seminar about modern China 279 00:24:48,640 --> 00:24:52,260 and about a third of the students tend to be from China itself 280 00:24:52,260 --> 00:24:59,920 and we have these very intensive conversations about Chinese politics and Chinese history and 281 00:24:59,920 --> 00:25:05,280 almost every year there will be a comment or two if not more from a Chinese student 282 00:25:05,280 --> 00:25:11,732 who says, "Professor French, there's this really important thing that you seem to be overlooking 283 00:25:11,732 --> 00:25:17,480 in the way you describe Chinese behavior. It's kind of a big contradiction. I can't get over this 284 00:25:17,480 --> 00:25:21,180 because your account of things are so at odds with 285 00:25:21,180 --> 00:25:25,360 the way I or we have understood or been taught Chinese history 286 00:25:25,360 --> 00:25:28,640 and that is that China is not like a Western country. 287 00:25:28,640 --> 00:25:33,632 China has never invaded other countries. China is not a hegemonic power. 288 00:25:33,632 --> 00:25:38,600 China does not use force to impose itself on other people. China does not invade other countries. 289 00:25:38,600 --> 00:25:42,470 China does not and has never occupied other countries. China is not a bully. 290 00:25:42,470 --> 00:25:44,820 China - on and on and on and on. 291 00:25:44,820 --> 00:26:00,760 And so to answer his question one must go back to the Han Dynasty, I guess, 292 00:26:00,760 --> 00:26:04,920 is the best, the most elegant way, I can tell this. 293 00:26:04,920 --> 00:26:08,410 The China that we see on the map today, 294 00:26:08,410 --> 00:26:19,400 modern China, is nothing but the result of an almost impossible to quantify 295 00:26:19,400 --> 00:26:24,880 number of wars, of a huge number of invasions, 296 00:26:24,880 --> 00:26:32,090 an immense number of occupations, a - not constant because there was expansion and 297 00:26:32,090 --> 00:26:40,720 retraction over time - but a constant effort at extending the realm of the Chinese emperor, 298 00:26:40,720 --> 00:26:44,900 China of the Chinese Empire, from dynasty to dynasty. 299 00:26:44,900 --> 00:26:50,020 China begins in a place called Zhongyuan which we were talking about at lunch today, 300 00:26:50,020 --> 00:26:57,608 which is basically parts of four more or less central provinces in modern China today 301 00:26:57,608 --> 00:27:02,840 and from the Han Dynasty onward China gradually expanded. 302 00:27:02,840 --> 00:27:06,780 Now, the Chinese story that is taught to Chinese students in China, 303 00:27:06,780 --> 00:27:12,200 to give a rough and crude version of this, goes something like this: 304 00:27:12,200 --> 00:27:21,380 that China's civilization in its origins was so brilliant and so rich that other peoples came flocking in our direction 305 00:27:21,380 --> 00:27:26,380 basically saying they want to be with us, they want to be part of us, they want to join, they want to sign up 306 00:27:26,380 --> 00:27:32,400 and that we didn't have to do anything to convince them. It was just the sheer brilliance of our culture 307 00:27:32,400 --> 00:27:36,420 that led to all of these things happening, 308 00:27:36,420 --> 00:27:39,895 that led to the creation of the grand China that we see on the map today, 309 00:27:39,895 --> 00:27:42,840 from the humble origins of Zhongyuan. 310 00:27:42,840 --> 00:27:46,200 Of course this is not the case. 311 00:27:46,200 --> 00:27:51,080 China, like - I hesitate to say every empire but like a great many empires - 312 00:27:51,080 --> 00:27:58,780 I say China, that's kind of a telegraphed version of something much more complicated 313 00:27:58,780 --> 00:28:02,480 which is to say, one dynasty after another, 314 00:28:02,480 --> 00:28:09,388 but one dynasty after another in China has had a classic pair of imperatives 315 00:28:09,388 --> 00:28:13,480 that have been shared by a great many empires throughout history 316 00:28:13,480 --> 00:28:16,900 and these two imperatives are 317 00:28:17,679 --> 00:28:27,320 establishing a uniform culture and political realm within an integrally governed space 318 00:28:27,320 --> 00:28:30,120 that's number one and the other is 319 00:28:30,120 --> 00:28:37,766 defending the perimeter from attack of outsiders or rival political entities. 320 00:28:37,766 --> 00:28:47,390 When you put these two imperatives together the the sum effect is a gradual expansion of the realm 321 00:28:47,390 --> 00:28:54,380 because if you succeed in achieving cultural unity in a political space 322 00:28:54,380 --> 00:29:00,330 and you then seek to defend the perimeter beyond that space 323 00:29:00,330 --> 00:29:05,050 what usually happens in an imperial environment is that you begin to -- 324 00:29:05,050 --> 00:29:09,454 you want to create security in the perimeter and that involves 325 00:29:09,454 --> 00:29:12,720 a combination of conquest and assimilation of the perimeter 326 00:29:12,720 --> 00:29:16,660 in order to to pacify the perimeter 327 00:29:16,660 --> 00:29:22,650 and so in a series of stages you go from a small place like this 328 00:29:22,650 --> 00:29:26,970 where there are barbarians on the periphery to gradually conquering and 329 00:29:26,970 --> 00:29:33,180 assimilating those barbarians in a concentric and expansive way until you 330 00:29:33,180 --> 00:29:38,280 end up with a geopolitical space if you have been successful like China has been successful. 331 00:29:38,280 --> 00:29:49,480 So this is a kind of a very crude schematic picture of how China grew. 332 00:29:49,480 --> 00:29:55,180 China begins in Zhongyuan which is kind of in the north central part of the country that we see on the map today. 333 00:29:55,180 --> 00:30:05,240 In the Han Dynasty China begins a very long term effort to conquer and assimilate 334 00:30:05,240 --> 00:30:12,570 and these are the two tools in the toolkit - conquest and assimilation - to conquer and assimilate 335 00:30:12,570 --> 00:30:17,320 the areas in southern China what are today southern China, modern southern China. 336 00:30:17,320 --> 00:30:19,410 So if you look at the map of China I'm sorry we don't have a map 337 00:30:19,410 --> 00:30:25,440 on the wall -- it didn't occur to me to ask for one -- but roughly speaking, south of the Yangtze River. 338 00:30:25,440 --> 00:30:33,400 China has been, from the Han Dynasty all the way until the end of the Ming Dynasty, 339 00:30:33,400 --> 00:30:40,240 basically conquering and assimilating all of southern China, south of the Yangtze River. 340 00:30:40,240 --> 00:30:45,340 The conquest part is very simple. 341 00:30:45,340 --> 00:30:50,540 You send in an army and China was able to amass -- you know China has always been, 342 00:30:50,540 --> 00:30:57,800 I'm saying China, China's a modern word. China didn't exist 2,000 years ago. 343 00:30:57,800 --> 00:31:00,460 There were dynasties, one after another. 344 00:31:00,460 --> 00:31:04,660 I've mentioned the Han Dynasty. You'll hear the names of other dynasties in a moment. 345 00:31:04,660 --> 00:31:07,725 China, as I'm speaking, it is a shorthand for those dynasties 346 00:31:07,725 --> 00:31:11,920 so as not to give you a complete dynastic history or a list of dynasties. 347 00:31:11,920 --> 00:31:20,540 But dynastic China has always been the biggest geopolitical entity in Asia, 348 00:31:20,540 --> 00:31:25,830 certainly Asia east of the Himalayas. It's always been the biggest, right and 349 00:31:25,830 --> 00:31:35,440 so for conquest, dynastic China has always been, going back so far as the Han Dynasty 200 years before Christ, 350 00:31:35,440 --> 00:31:39,060 able to amass and to field enormous armies. 351 00:31:39,060 --> 00:31:43,710 If you look at, I don't know how many of you watched 352 00:31:43,710 --> 00:31:47,620 Chinese films or Chinese television but Chinese film and television, 353 00:31:47,620 --> 00:31:50,680 this is the grist of so much of Chinese entertainment 354 00:31:50,680 --> 00:31:53,580 where you have these mass TV or film spectacles 355 00:31:53,580 --> 00:31:59,200 where you see these fields filled with tens of thousands of soldiers. 356 00:31:59,200 --> 00:32:01,800 Chinese history has so many stories like this 357 00:32:01,800 --> 00:32:10,200 that it's a kind of a natural ingredient for a Chinese style Hollywood right? 358 00:32:10,200 --> 00:32:12,380 This is what epochs in China are made of. 359 00:32:12,380 --> 00:32:17,380 Anyway to conquer southern China, to give you an example of how this proceeded, 360 00:32:17,380 --> 00:32:24,340 armies beginning in the Han Dynasty of 200 to 500 thousand soldiers were fielded 361 00:32:24,340 --> 00:32:30,180 in various parts of southern China at campaigns at various times during the Han Dynasty. 362 00:32:30,180 --> 00:32:39,100 So you sent from this north central space called Zhongyuan an army of that size that far away 363 00:32:39,100 --> 00:32:42,300 to southern China. They conquered the barbarians. 364 00:32:42,300 --> 00:32:47,060 Some of the barbarians flee. In fact always some of the barbarians flee. 365 00:32:47,060 --> 00:32:51,140 The barbarians elites sometimes are captured and surrendered 366 00:32:51,140 --> 00:32:57,960 but very often the barbarian elites would flee and seek to retain power simply by shifting a locale. 367 00:32:57,960 --> 00:33:01,530 So you've knocked me off the block in what is today, 368 00:33:01,530 --> 00:33:10,244 I don't know, Fujian province or Guangxi province, and I'll go to Guangdong province or to Yunnan province right? 369 00:33:10,244 --> 00:33:12,920 These are modern provinces right 370 00:33:12,920 --> 00:33:18,920 but these processes happened all the times where the elites would flee if they were not captured 371 00:33:18,920 --> 00:33:25,660 and try to restore some sense of authority in a different place right? 372 00:33:25,660 --> 00:33:33,820 After a given campaign had succeeded the army would retreat. 373 00:33:33,820 --> 00:33:38,800 Garrisons would be left behind in a fairly substantial number 374 00:33:38,800 --> 00:33:44,560 but you don't keep a two hundred to five hundred thousand army fielded that far away 375 00:33:44,560 --> 00:33:47,130 from the political center of your empire. 376 00:33:47,130 --> 00:33:54,060 And so what China found or what Imperial China found, 377 00:33:54,060 --> 00:33:57,820 the Han and later various other dynasties found 378 00:33:57,820 --> 00:34:00,940 is that although they had a fairly easy time 379 00:34:00,940 --> 00:34:05,480 conquering the barbarians who existed in these outlying areas of the south 380 00:34:05,480 --> 00:34:05,980 that these garrisons ended up getting counter-assimilated. What does that mean? 381 00:34:05,980 --> 00:34:10,460 That means that after a while they would start marrying local women 382 00:34:10,460 --> 00:34:20,640 and they would start taking on local customs and they would not be, after a generation or two, 383 00:34:20,640 --> 00:34:23,800 they would no longer be reliably Chinese - I'm using the modern term 384 00:34:23,800 --> 00:34:28,640 but they would no longer be reliably -- their allegiance would no longer be reliable to 385 00:34:28,640 --> 00:34:31,620 whatever the dynasty of the day was right? 386 00:34:31,620 --> 00:34:36,109 And so China had to struggle to assimilate. 387 00:34:36,109 --> 00:34:40,580 The conquer part was usually reasonably easy. 388 00:34:40,580 --> 00:34:42,920 It was the assimilation part that was the struggle. 389 00:34:42,920 --> 00:34:46,060 And [China] had to struggle to assimilate the outlying areas. 390 00:34:46,060 --> 00:34:50,720 The borders - I'm going to accelerate. I don't want to give you a history of southern China - 391 00:34:50,720 --> 00:34:57,500 but there was a portmanteau term for all of the people's or many of the people's south of the Yangtze River 392 00:34:57,500 --> 00:35:04,080 which one sees of the kind of vestigial use of in contemporary China today 393 00:35:04,080 --> 00:35:08,360 but the portmanteau term was yue (越). Yue means barbarian. 394 00:35:08,360 --> 00:35:12,323 Most Chinese see the word yue, they don't think this means barbarian 395 00:35:12,323 --> 00:35:19,620 but if you do an etymological analysis of the character yue, that's what it means, barbarian. 396 00:35:19,620 --> 00:35:25,840 And so China thought -- the Empire, these north-central empires, thought of 397 00:35:25,840 --> 00:35:29,094 the southern - south of the Yangtze River - as barbarians 398 00:35:29,094 --> 00:35:33,520 and the task of empire was to assimilate them and to turn them into Chinese people. 399 00:35:33,520 --> 00:35:38,240 Well the limits of this policy of conquest and assimilation are in fact 400 00:35:38,240 --> 00:35:42,960 the modern borders of China roughly speaking. So I don't have a map here 401 00:35:42,960 --> 00:35:49,300 and I don't dare draw China but let's say this is the southern coast of China. 402 00:35:49,300 --> 00:35:57,210 Here you have Hainan and here you have Hongkong and here you have Vietnam, right? 403 00:35:57,210 --> 00:36:06,600 The border with Vietnam is where - apologies to the camera - the borders of Vietnam 404 00:36:06,600 --> 00:36:13,140 are the limits. The reason there is a Vietnam is because that's where 405 00:36:13,140 --> 00:36:20,380 this approach reached its practical ends. In other words the Chinese - the Empire - 406 00:36:20,380 --> 00:36:26,000 tried to invade the space that we call modern Vietnam many many times, 407 00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:32,460 occupied it many many times, occupied it according to the sort of standard trope of Vietnamese history 408 00:36:32,460 --> 00:36:39,100 for a thousand years and yet never managed to make the Vietnamese consider themselves to be Chinese 409 00:36:39,100 --> 00:36:48,926 and so this is what has bequeathed to the world a modern Vietnam 410 00:36:48,926 --> 00:36:53,780 and the same could be said about the Korean Peninsula. 411 00:36:53,780 --> 00:36:59,780 The Chinese fought wars of occupation and assimilation in the Korean Peninsula. 412 00:36:59,780 --> 00:37:08,350 The Koreans never really fully assimilated although the Koreans adopted wholesale 413 00:37:08,350 --> 00:37:11,619 lots and lots of Chinese culture. They never really completely bit the bullet 414 00:37:11,619 --> 00:37:13,660 and said they're willing to become Chinese 415 00:37:13,660 --> 00:37:20,320 and so a kind of system of management of relations 416 00:37:20,320 --> 00:37:26,960 emerged from these conditions and this is really the focus of what I wish to sort of end the talk with. 417 00:37:26,960 --> 00:37:38,320 This system of relations is called by Westerners and yet never by - in Chinese scholarship by Chinese - 418 00:37:38,320 --> 00:37:41,000 the tribute system. 419 00:37:41,000 --> 00:37:45,500 So in the parts of the world where China had sort of reached the limits 420 00:37:45,500 --> 00:37:54,570 of its conquest and assimilation policy. If the Chinese state - I should actually take a half step back 421 00:37:54,570 --> 00:37:57,200 and talk about how barbarians were classified. 422 00:37:57,200 --> 00:38:04,860 So in the imperial, in this dynastic long dynastic era or sequence of dynastic eras, 423 00:38:04,860 --> 00:38:08,960 a vocabulary about barbarians emerges. 424 00:38:08,960 --> 00:38:12,400 By the way every empire has a barbarian vocabulary - 425 00:38:12,400 --> 00:38:20,520 this is not simply a peculiarity of Chinese people or of Chinese civilization - every empire. 426 00:38:20,520 --> 00:38:27,900 To be a barbarian means roughly not to accept the rule of the emperor, right? 427 00:38:27,900 --> 00:38:31,020 not to get with the plan of the empire right? 428 00:38:31,020 --> 00:38:36,280 And so I don't want you to make too much of me using this word "barbarian" 429 00:38:36,280 --> 00:38:41,100 but a kind of particular vocabulary arose around barbarians in China. 430 00:38:41,100 --> 00:38:44,120 I'm giving you the example of the yue, the people south of the Yangtze. 431 00:38:44,120 --> 00:38:49,700 By the way that's the character that's used in the license plate for Shanghai even today. 432 00:38:49,700 --> 00:38:54,180 So every province in China has a one character beginning of its license plate. 433 00:38:54,180 --> 00:38:57,020 The character for Shanghai is yue, 434 00:38:57,020 --> 00:39:01,380 and I don't think any Shanghai person thinks of themselves as a barbarian 435 00:39:01,380 --> 00:39:04,620 probably quite the opposite. They think they're more fancy and sophisticated 436 00:39:04,620 --> 00:39:11,220 than most other people. Anyway the country of Vietnam's character is yue. 437 00:39:11,220 --> 00:39:17,020 So what does Vietnam mean? Vietnam is a name given to Vietnam by China. 438 00:39:17,020 --> 00:39:19,540 It means southern barbarian. 439 00:39:19,540 --> 00:39:25,269 The particular vocabulary I wanted to share with you though 440 00:39:25,269 --> 00:39:29,420 is that barbarians could be divided into three categories. 441 00:39:29,420 --> 00:39:36,800 You had the irredeemable, unreachable, 442 00:39:36,800 --> 00:39:45,662 completely, from the perspective of empire, kind of intractable, inconvertible barbarian, 443 00:39:45,662 --> 00:39:52,780 like beyond the pale and those, to be very general about this, were the Central Asians. 444 00:39:52,780 --> 00:40:03,090 The Imperial China never had the view that no matter how much they could invade or try to, that assimilation 445 00:40:03,090 --> 00:40:07,040 would never work and it's interesting to pause to think why that is. 446 00:40:07,040 --> 00:40:13,340 Why that is because they I think the main economic basis of life in Central Asia 447 00:40:13,340 --> 00:40:17,220 was so different from the main economic base of life in most of Imperial China. 448 00:40:17,220 --> 00:40:24,150 Typically we think of 449 00:40:24,150 --> 00:40:29,190 Imperial China or China indeed as having a rice kind of economy. 450 00:40:29,190 --> 00:40:33,210 Of course there was sorghum and various other things but in Central Asia 451 00:40:33,210 --> 00:40:38,821 you had nomadism and pastoralism and things like that. 452 00:40:38,821 --> 00:40:45,415 You didn't have people -- these were not economies based on fixed crop farming 453 00:40:45,415 --> 00:40:51,500 where the state could tax people and people had fixed locations and fixed abodes 454 00:40:51,500 --> 00:40:55,600 and so we think of barbarian as kind of a cultural thing. 455 00:40:55,600 --> 00:40:59,760 You're making a statement of the level of civilization and cultural terms of another people. 456 00:40:59,760 --> 00:41:05,760 The Chinese the Imperial state is actually maybe doing that but it's also actually thinking 457 00:41:05,760 --> 00:41:09,660 about the economies of these place. These places are not worth it. 458 00:41:09,660 --> 00:41:17,420 Why did China try so hard with Vietnam? Because Vietnam is a rice growing place. 459 00:41:17,420 --> 00:41:23,220 Because the economic basis of life in a place like Vietnam seemed very similar 460 00:41:23,220 --> 00:41:27,480 to the economic basis of life in most of China and therefore it made sense 461 00:41:27,480 --> 00:41:32,420 from an imperial strategy point of view to try to conquer and assimilate these people. 462 00:41:32,420 --> 00:41:44,810 As I've told you a succession of dynasties from the Han all the way to the Ming failed to assimilate Vietnam 463 00:41:44,810 --> 00:41:47,520 but they never stopped trying. 464 00:41:47,520 --> 00:41:53,260 So the three categories of barbarian are the irredeemable and then you have 465 00:41:53,260 --> 00:41:56,180 the cooked and the raw. 466 00:41:56,180 --> 00:42:03,420 So the cooked barbarians are the barbarians whose lives, whose economic life is very 467 00:42:03,420 --> 00:42:08,500 similar to Chinese economic life and who have adopted some attributes of Chinese culture. 468 00:42:08,500 --> 00:42:12,500 Maybe they have adopted the character based writing system 469 00:42:12,500 --> 00:42:16,540 or maybe they have adopted the Chinese calendar 470 00:42:16,540 --> 00:42:20,620 or maybe they have adopted certain other aspects of Chinese culture 471 00:42:20,620 --> 00:42:25,980 and the raw barbarians are something between the irredeemable Central Asians 472 00:42:25,980 --> 00:42:29,240 and the cooked barbarians like the Vietnamese. 473 00:42:29,240 --> 00:42:33,930 To be cooked means that the center - the empire - thinks that you could 474 00:42:33,930 --> 00:42:38,570 still be won over and assimilated. Anyway the conclusion of the talk, 475 00:42:38,570 --> 00:42:45,320 which is meant to help us think about where things are going in that part of the world and perhaps more broadly later. 476 00:42:45,320 --> 00:42:49,880 I'm going to step away for a second from my podium again but if you think about the southern coast of China 477 00:42:49,880 --> 00:42:57,470 and the border of Vietnam as I've drawn it for you is how does Chinese civilization deal with 478 00:42:57,470 --> 00:43:05,980 the peripheral peoples who are not irredeemable? 479 00:43:05,980 --> 00:43:11,240 And the answer was to establish tributary relations with them, this thing that we've called the tribute system, 480 00:43:11,240 --> 00:43:16,530 a system in my view is the most contentious aspect of that phrase here. 481 00:43:16,530 --> 00:43:22,070 There is no dispute about the fact that tribute relations were held between 482 00:43:22,070 --> 00:43:26,610 various dynasties and lots of peoples around China's periphery. 483 00:43:26,610 --> 00:43:31,580 However system is problematic because the nature of the relations were different 484 00:43:31,580 --> 00:43:38,960 in almost every particular instance and so you couldn't really think of it as being a uniform system of relations 485 00:43:38,960 --> 00:43:43,020 that were established on a tributary basis from country to country. 486 00:43:43,020 --> 00:43:58,600 So the first rule of tributary relations is that the tributary state must recognize China or back in the day, 487 00:43:58,600 --> 00:44:06,560 the dynasty of the day as being absolutely superior, 488 00:44:06,560 --> 00:44:13,087 that you must defer to the superiority of the center of China 489 00:44:13,087 --> 00:44:20,680 and there's a story about Vietnam from the Han Dynasty that I like quite a lot. 490 00:44:20,680 --> 00:44:30,600 When the emperor of Han named Wen Di in about the year 200 BC actually in the second century BC, 491 00:44:30,600 --> 00:44:37,860 I'm not sure the exact year, a king and Vietnam arose in this place called Yue, 492 00:44:37,860 --> 00:44:43,679 in which he decided he was going to call himself emperor, 493 00:44:43,679 --> 00:44:49,019 that he wanted to be emperor in his own land and so king was not enough and 494 00:44:49,019 --> 00:44:58,080 so he erogated to himself the title Emperor. He had a throne ceremony to be formally seated as Emperor 495 00:44:58,080 --> 00:45:01,220 and word gets back to the Han capital 496 00:45:01,220 --> 00:45:06,020 that there's this character somewhere on the periphery who thinks he's an emperor 497 00:45:06,020 --> 00:45:13,100 and Wen Di sends a delegation to see this king and to tell him 498 00:45:13,100 --> 00:45:18,200 that there can only be one sage in any given generation 499 00:45:18,200 --> 00:45:25,460 and that to violate that rule is to prove yourself uncivilized 500 00:45:25,460 --> 00:45:29,404 and there were a variety of threats that - this correspondence still exists by the way - 501 00:45:29,404 --> 00:45:35,609 so there are a variety of threats that were included with this kind of flowery language and 502 00:45:35,609 --> 00:45:39,940 the Vietnam Emperor - the king - got the point and said okay I surrender. 503 00:45:39,940 --> 00:45:45,869 I'm not going to be an emperor if you'll allow me to be king, king is good enough for me 504 00:45:45,869 --> 00:45:51,620 and so this is the first rule of being a tributary state, that you accept your subsidiary status, 505 00:45:51,620 --> 00:46:00,304 that China is number one and that you are not implicitly but explicitly inferior to China 506 00:46:00,304 --> 00:46:07,080 and that you get along within the rules of the Chinese order. 507 00:46:07,080 --> 00:46:11,800 Eight hundred years later in Japan. 508 00:46:11,800 --> 00:46:19,580 Japan had I think one of its perhaps its only female emperor - a woman named Suiko 509 00:46:19,580 --> 00:46:29,189 in - it happened to be - the Sui Dynasty in China - in the years actually the year 600. 510 00:46:29,189 --> 00:46:35,860 She was enthroned and she sent a delegation - these are called embassies - to the Sui capital in China 511 00:46:35,860 --> 00:46:44,180 to announce her taking seat as Emperor and she called herself the Emperor in the Land of the Rising Sun 512 00:46:44,180 --> 00:46:49,020 and she addressed her correspondence to the Emperor in the Land of the Setting Sun 513 00:46:49,020 --> 00:46:57,200 and the correspondence was never delivered to the Chinese emperor because it broke protocol so crudely 514 00:46:57,200 --> 00:47:01,720 that this was just simply unacceptable. You cannot have an emperor. 515 00:47:01,720 --> 00:47:05,400 Within the tribute system you can't have two emperors. 516 00:47:05,400 --> 00:47:14,780 As I said you can't have two sages in one era and threats were sent back and forth to the Sui 517 00:47:14,780 --> 00:47:22,395 and unlike Vietnam, Japan, given the fact that there's an intermediary sea, the Sea of Japan, 518 00:47:22,395 --> 00:47:28,155 between China and Japan, the Japanese persisted and they kept their emperor's system 519 00:47:28,155 --> 00:47:34,890 and because of the limits of transportation and technology back then 520 00:47:34,890 --> 00:47:44,180 China was never able to prevail in eliminating this notion in neighboring polity 521 00:47:44,180 --> 00:47:50,960 that there could be a co-equal of the Chinese emperor or another Emperor. 522 00:47:50,960 --> 00:47:53,150 And so these are the two 523 00:47:55,309 --> 00:48:02,640 extremes of experience in the Chinese world that you have smaller countries 524 00:48:02,640 --> 00:48:10,640 which must get with the program and accept their subsidiary status and live within 525 00:48:10,640 --> 00:48:16,049 the Chinese order according to the rules of the Chinese system and you 526 00:48:16,049 --> 00:48:20,676 have had, historically speaking, just one country namely Japan 527 00:48:20,676 --> 00:48:27,284 which has been big enough and far enough away and separated fortuitously 528 00:48:27,284 --> 00:48:38,660 from the point of view of Japan by water to afford it the kind of political space to maintain its own system 529 00:48:38,660 --> 00:48:43,100 outside of the tribute system. So where does this lead us? 530 00:48:43,100 --> 00:48:50,260 How does this lead us still to today and what does this mean for the future? 531 00:48:50,260 --> 00:49:00,580 I argue in the book and I believe that this notion of dealing with peripheral countries 532 00:49:00,580 --> 00:49:04,720 and especially the countries of East Asia and Southeast Asia 533 00:49:04,720 --> 00:49:09,280 on the basis of superiority is a deeply embedded Chinese preference 534 00:49:09,280 --> 00:49:20,280 that this is almost a default perspective from the point of view of the Chinese state, 535 00:49:20,280 --> 00:49:26,160 that we China are the center and that all of these other countries around us 536 00:49:26,160 --> 00:49:33,109 are obviously much smaller, much weaker, much poorer in terms of culture, 537 00:49:33,109 --> 00:49:37,440 history and in fact economics, certainly in population, 538 00:49:37,440 --> 00:49:43,920 and that the natural logic of things just as the natural logic of the communication between Wen Di 539 00:49:43,920 --> 00:49:48,400 and the Vietnamese guy who wished to name himself as Emperor is that 540 00:49:48,400 --> 00:49:55,420 if you smaller peoples will simply accept our centrality and our preeminence, 541 00:49:55,420 --> 00:50:02,800 we can shower all sorts of public goods on you and everybody will get along well on that basis. 542 00:50:02,800 --> 00:50:06,240 We will -- In early times what were the public goods? 543 00:50:06,240 --> 00:50:13,180 The public goods were Chinese science, Chinese religion, Chinese medicine, the Chinese calendar. 544 00:50:13,180 --> 00:50:17,230 A calendar by the way was not just for keeping dates. It was about 545 00:50:17,230 --> 00:50:24,580 agricultural science and all sorts of other things, Chinese philosophy, Chinese religion 546 00:50:24,580 --> 00:50:32,319 and a certain sense of order in policing the high seas and in 547 00:50:32,319 --> 00:50:39,280 the dynastic era in adjudicating succession disputes and and wars between 548 00:50:39,280 --> 00:50:43,560 secondary nations so that if you were part of the tributary system 549 00:50:43,560 --> 00:50:52,660 one of these smaller countries - their kings were invested by a Chinese Embassy - 550 00:50:52,660 --> 00:50:55,280 an embassy would come from the dynastic capital of China and 551 00:50:55,280 --> 00:51:01,900 the local ruler would receive a boost in his legitimacy by virtue of the fact 552 00:51:01,900 --> 00:51:07,579 that China was making an official show of recognizing his investiture and 553 00:51:07,579 --> 00:51:11,500 so these were all attributes of Chinese soft power in the past 554 00:51:11,500 --> 00:51:16,340 that China was bestowing to these countries as part of an exchange 555 00:51:16,340 --> 00:51:20,790 for their willingness to play according to China's rules within 556 00:51:20,790 --> 00:51:27,620 this thing that Westerners have called the tributary system or the tribute system. 557 00:51:27,620 --> 00:51:33,380 It's my view that this is a deeply embedded default kind of prerogative 558 00:51:33,380 --> 00:51:36,140 not prerogative I'm sorry, preference in terms of the way China 559 00:51:36,140 --> 00:51:40,540 organizes its outlook and perspective on the surrounding region 560 00:51:40,540 --> 00:51:49,980 and that the era of 1949 to 1982 was an aberration. 561 00:51:49,980 --> 00:51:52,950 That from 1949 to 1976 when Mao was in 562 00:51:52,950 --> 00:51:57,870 power China was deeply preoccupied with transforming its own politics and 563 00:51:57,870 --> 00:52:02,840 getting - from its perspective - getting its own house in order and 564 00:52:02,840 --> 00:52:07,980 although there's exceptions to this, not working very hard to project its force 565 00:52:07,980 --> 00:52:14,490 outside of its own borders or to be an economic player internationally and 566 00:52:14,490 --> 00:52:19,170 that in the early reform and opening period beginning in 1982 there was a 567 00:52:19,170 --> 00:52:24,840 period of -- there was enough of a window so that a pretty smart man like Robert Zoellick could think 568 00:52:24,840 --> 00:52:28,650 well we're on this convergent path and if we can simply 569 00:52:28,650 --> 00:52:33,000 find the right vocabulary we can socialize the Chinese to be responsible 570 00:52:33,000 --> 00:52:37,320 players in an American-led global order. I think that age is over 571 00:52:37,320 --> 00:52:43,000 and I don't think that the 1980s was ever really about that in the first place, 572 00:52:43,000 --> 00:52:48,280 that this was a case of American kind of naivete and self delusion 573 00:52:48,280 --> 00:52:55,740 and what was really happening in the 1980s was China was laying the basis in 574 00:52:55,740 --> 00:53:03,020 material prosperity and economic progress to return to its original impetus 575 00:53:03,020 --> 00:53:07,100 which is to say being able to organize its periphery around it 576 00:53:07,100 --> 00:53:18,030 on its terms and so what do we see when we look throughout the region? We see China 577 00:53:18,030 --> 00:53:23,220 creating what most famously there's this thing called one belt one road which 578 00:53:23,220 --> 00:53:25,980 concerns much more than the original tribute system 579 00:53:25,980 --> 00:53:29,220 that includes all of Central Asia it goes all the way to Europe it goes all 580 00:53:29,220 --> 00:53:34,260 the way to Africa around South Asia etc etc but where did this really begin 581 00:53:34,260 --> 00:53:43,050 this One Belt One Road thing? It really begins in a very intensive infrastructure and 582 00:53:43,050 --> 00:53:50,060 network building process in Southeast Asia itself which is about bringing 583 00:53:50,060 --> 00:53:54,860 these smaller peripheral tributary style States into the Chinese fold 584 00:53:54,860 --> 00:53:59,980 the moment China have the wherewithal to begin doing that it began doing that 585 00:53:59,980 --> 00:54:10,421 starting in the 1990s and accelerating in this century to the point where there is no country in Southeast Asia 586 00:54:10,421 --> 00:54:15,030 that is not heavily dependent on trade with China 587 00:54:15,030 --> 00:54:23,040 and is not deeply in sync with China in terms of politics and in terms of diplomacy 588 00:54:23,040 --> 00:54:30,040 including Vietnam which understands that as much as it would be tempted to try to play kingpin in Southeast Asia 589 00:54:30,040 --> 00:54:39,440 or strike out on an independent path of its own it will get the same kind of rebuke that 590 00:54:39,440 --> 00:54:46,530 its ruler in the second century BC received under Wen Di, that there's no 591 00:54:46,530 --> 00:54:51,720 space politically speaking, geopolitically speaking for great distance from China 592 00:54:51,720 --> 00:54:55,470 in any peripheral country. The big exception remains Japan 593 00:54:55,470 --> 00:55:01,800 so in the 6th century in the year 600 Suiko sends an Embassy to China to 594 00:55:01,800 --> 00:55:06,780 declare that she's the Emperor of Japan and China sends a rebuke and refuses to 595 00:55:06,780 --> 00:55:11,560 acknowledge her communication etc. This is where things remain today. 596 00:55:11,560 --> 00:55:17,609 Japan is the one country in the region that is big enough and that is afforded the 597 00:55:17,609 --> 00:55:25,350 geography by way of the intermediary ocean to try to defy China 598 00:55:25,350 --> 00:55:30,540 and this sense of order and I say big enough but also wealthy enough and so 599 00:55:30,540 --> 00:55:38,690 this is kind of a frontline in terms of the limit of China's 600 00:55:38,690 --> 00:55:46,480 tribute policy was invasion or conquest and assimilation in the past. 601 00:55:46,480 --> 00:55:56,020 Today Japan is the last holdout in terms of in my view China's ability to restore 602 00:55:56,020 --> 00:56:05,150 its own sense of order in the region and and in the next decade or two I write in 603 00:56:05,150 --> 00:56:09,230 the book there is a great deal this is a moment of high anxiety. 604 00:56:09,230 --> 00:56:18,050 There's a high possibility I'm not saying a probability - a high possibility that frictions 605 00:56:18,050 --> 00:56:25,120 between these two countries, the two great powers of East Asia, will 606 00:56:25,120 --> 00:56:30,950 erupt to the point of perhaps including violence between the two of them but 607 00:56:30,950 --> 00:56:35,430 that this impetus, this drive to create its own sense of structure, 608 00:56:35,430 --> 00:56:47,570 its own sense of order by China has resumed and that it won't be stopped unless 609 00:56:47,570 --> 00:56:51,700 something catastrophic happens in terms of China's economic rise which is 610 00:56:51,700 --> 00:56:55,980 something that I don't think anybody is predicting these days 611 00:56:55,980 --> 00:57:01,820 so I think I'll stop there and hopefully you guys will have a little bit of time for questions. 612 00:57:01,820 --> 00:57:06,099 Thank you. 613 00:57:14,230 --> 00:57:16,290