ladies and gentlemen thank you for coming i only have 12 minutes i'm going to spend some of my 12 minutes praising sir vince cable i can only hope he will do the same for me while he was at shell he helped to pioneer scenario-based planning this is a way of thinking which was unique at the time it's a way of thinking about the unthinkable later on the american pentagon and the cia stole this concept i myself use it in my own book the 100 year marathon the concept is devilishly simple try to think of different factors that will determine the future make a plan of where let's say four or five of them are so-called family of scenarios and then change some of the variables to see what unthinkable things might happen in the case of china as far as i know nobody in washington dc did this in 1970 1971 as kissinger and nixon were preparing to open china
if there had been a shell company scenario done at the time in 1970 and 71
and i had some input into the decision so i blamed myself in part although i blamed dr kissinger even more
the scenario could have been are we being deceived
is it not america opening up china which we thought it was is it china opening up america
for all kinds of benefits to china and at the time
a recently declassified document shows henry kissinger knew there were radicals
in china in july 1970 he received a highly classified report
that said chinese fighter aircraft have been launched and are flying out
possibly to shoot down an american reconnaissance plane by the way this is
not 1990 this is 1970. and kissinger writes a memo to nixon
saying there are apparently radicals in the chinese leadership who do not want an opening with america
perhaps we should be sure our reconnaissance aircraft don't fly too close to the china coast coast
the point here is already the american side understood there's politics
at the top in beijing there are radicals who are able to launch fighter aircraft later on
in a very famous comment chairman mao made to nixon which nixon's acknowledged he didn't
fully understand at the time chairman mao had a way of speaking almost like a poet
and he would say things sometimes his young translator couldn't accurately translate
one of the things he said to nixon was there are some people here
who didn't want you to come to china don't worry about it
the top 10 generals in china a few months earlier had been
killed or placed under arrest and would be sentenced to life in prison or execution
for opposing the opening to america more recently the chinese have released
a number of memoirs that show how it was their idea to open america
so if you have a title like mr president xia has selected dancing with the dragon
you need to understand first who invited who to dance
we always thought it was us the noble magnanimous americans seeking a program of globalization
saw this angry hostile closed china and decided to open it up
to join the world that view is now obsolete
people recognize the new chinese materials even kissinger in his book on china he says it took him
40 years to write this book he now has abandoned the story that
america opened china he now in his new book on china that's the title on china just all by it
he now says there was a parallel effort inside the chinese leadership to reach
out to us this changes the whole perception
that the west has sought to bring china into the new world order
if i skipped forward to just a couple of years ago you all know that many countries in the
world have accused china of intellectual property violations
in geneva there's an organization it's a big beautiful green and blue glass skyscraper for short among insiders it's
called wipo it doesn't sound very nice does it wipo who knows what that stands for put your
hands up oh boy five wipo is the world intellectual property
organization it's part of the family of un specialized agencies of which there are 16 which in turn go back to the league
of nations which in turn go back even further it's the idea of a world order and various functional issues like the
protection of intellectual property will be managed in a way that some that involves pooling
the sovereignty of a hundred or more nations who ran to be the new director
of the world intellectual property organization put your hands up if you think it was an english person
how about an american how about the winning vote was held by a chinese
citizen and party member it takes a lot of gall to be accused
of the biggest intellectual property theft in the world in the history of mankind and then to run a candidate to
head the u.n specialized agencies he was going to win
president trump heard about this and said wait a minute this isn't right
and consulted with a lot of others suddenly a candidate from singapore
the long history of the protection of intellectual property put his name in
and won so going back to 1970 all the way to 2020
has the american plan to dance with the dragon and bring china in to the u.n system the world order the
world bank imf has it worked you bet
is it what we plan for no and in sir vince cable's book called
money and power you will find a chapter on deng xiaoping the great chinese
leader now somewhat eclipsed by xi jinping and how he learned from his time in
russia and later on from the world bank and a nobel laureate named james tubin
he learned the plan for how to turn china into an economic powerhouse the united states and the
west and japan all help this again with the assumption dancing with
the dragon is going to be a good date no
it turned out that china with human rights practices censorship practices a permanent
one-party system the use of terror against its own people this china
the one kissinger thought about in 1970 when he mentioned the radicals or sending the jet fighter out
this kind of china seems to be the winners in beijing
and my book hundred year marathon using the scenario techniques that vince cable pioneered
says what does this mean if we were so wrong the last 20 to 40
years what exactly is the nature of china's ambition is it hitler and nazi germany taking
over poland and czech no absolutely not no indication of that kind of conduct at
all from china is it some sort of um
japan 1930s assassinating leaders trying to
set up an east asia co-prosperity sphere no no indication of that whatsoever the
chinese ambition as they themselves explain it is just to return
to how things used to be and most americans some oxford students of course know but
not all well how did things used to be and that's led to an exploration for me
in my next book on what are the patterns of ancient chinese politics that xi jinping is talking so much about
in a kind of a code he uses proverbs he uses stories about ancient
people that you think that's harmless but actually xi jinping is being quite frank
that he needs a third term he says which he may have within ours third five-year term
to complete the work he has to return china it's a term that they use kind of like renaissance fooshinger
luke how many of you here this is my last few seconds how many of you here think you
have a good picture of the kind of world xi jinping has in mind when china is
restored to its rightful place put your hand up
that means you have to buy my next book thank you very much
[Applause]
well thank you for inviting me back to the union um and it's an honor to speak after dr
palsbury who is probably one of the two or three people in the world who is most authoritative on china and is a deep thinker um and many of the things he says and writes about are wise and right um but i i sort of part company um in fact i i start to park company in the leading article in the book where it talks about china's secret strategy to replace america.
As the global superpower and then why why secret in his book dr pillsbury describes an episode where a chinese defector
comes to the united states and warns that there is a secret plan to make the
chinese economy as big as that of the united states by the year 2020 it's a
big shock you know big secret well i mean i have to tell him that 25 years ago i was sitting in a
multinational company in london uh armed with a few statistics a
calculator and a bit of common sense and you could work out um on the back of
an envelope that china was almost certain to become the biggest economy in the world by 2020.
it didn't require secrecy to understand that and there's a simple arithmetic actually
i mean there are four times as many people in china you know when china gets to a quarter of american living
standards by definition it's going to be equivalent in economic size i mean why
is that a problem i mean it should be something we welcome actually and a lot of very poor people getting a
decent living standards and you know it's basic arithmetic that when china has continued to grow as it
almost certainly will and it reaches half american living standards they will have an economy twice as big
and they're going to have to get used to it and we are and actually it's not just china by the
middle of this century india will also be a economic superpower with a bigger economy in the united states very
probably so you know there is an issue about the the current hegemon you know the
superpower getting used to the idea that there is another country which will have comparable and
potentially significantly more economic heft i mean you know britain used to be
number 100 years ago so we've had a century to get used to sliding down the league table
i think we're about now about number eight we've just been overtaken by indonesia but you know we we get used to
these things and i i think the united states the core of the problem
in many ways is an inability to get used to this basic fact and to adapt to it
and to accept that china is going to have to be integrated within the
the rules of the world system which the united states has led and led well
to our all to our benefit for the last 70 years now
this whole idea of secrecy i think cuts across the idea that many of the features of
modern china are hidden in plain sight now it's very clear what they're about
um it's not hidden um the idea that the chinese model which
was developed to the modern chinese model under deng xiaoping it was very clear from the outset that
there were two very basic principles the first was the emphasis on stability
and security after a century of chaos uh the revolution the civil war the war
mount satan's madness um security under a authoritarian wall party state was never
hidden was always absolutely clear that this was the model that they were going to pursue
and the second aspect was raising chinese living standards which was going to happen by importing
capitalism into china which has happened state capitalism a big private sector at
the top end under some state control but with very dynamic capitalist competitive system
and state enterprises with an element of market competition and the start capitalist model has worked in china
it's been highly successful it may now run into trouble um they've
got a lot of economic problems associated with under consumption corporate debt
but of course if they do run into trouble um they'll become like japan and we no
longer worry about them but actually the issue which we now face is that if the chinese model
continues to be successful this combination of
rapid growth sustained by a successful capitalist system
allied to an authoritarian one-party state what is the problem in our having to try
and live with that now some of you will say um well democracy you know we
believe in democracy why shouldn't china be a democracy well it is a different system and hitherto
you know we've accepted that there is a different system um to take a particular
issue which concerns the british which is our residual responsibilities in hong kong and people here are
routly very upset western angry that
decent people have been bundled off to prison and newspaper editors have been shut down
but i have to say the chinese always made it absolutely clear
what the red lines were in hong kong when margaret thatcher went to negotiate
with deng xiaoping 40 years ago he said look we could have dealt with
hong kong the way the indians dealt with the colonial enclaves or indonesia sent the army in problem solved in 24 hours
but they didn't they were more subtle they saw advantages in keeping this independent entity
but he said look there are certain parameters you can say what you like free speech you criticize the communist party but
if there is violent disorder we will move in and stop it and those people in hong kong who in the
name of democracy and free speech started throwing molotov cocktails at the police
and vandalizing their legislature did their little bit to kill hong kong
democracy because it was very clear what the rules of the game were and the chinese were not in any way dishonest or
inca in clear about what was permissible and i think we need to remember that and
similarly in terms of foreign policy
president g's now been there for 10 years he set out his approach very
clearly 10 years ago and we accepted it and it was set out in a statement he
made in mexico city it was asked about what's your relationship going to be with the
west you said look we're not going to export revolution we're not going to export hungry
refugees we're not going to mess with you don't mess with us
and it's a bit crude but it's very clear how to engage with china which is to
accept if you want to have a good relationship with them you respect their principle of
self of territorial integrity and non-interference and that's the basis on which they've
since conducted their foreign affairs it's why for example in the
issue of chinchilla terrible human rights abuse i'm quite sure but and the west has taken up a
strong position on it but it's very clear that a lot of other countries in the world by the chinese argument every single
muslim country of importance including those that are democratically elected indonesia malaysia pakistan
bangladesh nigeria have lined up on the chinese side so that that principle
of dealing with china engaging with china but recognizing the reality that they have a different system
and they're not going to countenance interference with their internal politics that has to be out of sheer
realism the way we deal with them so let me just try and bring to a head
where i think this leads i mean i was part of the government that where we did try to engage with china
and our primary motive was economic and we took the view and i would still
take the view that it was economically beneficial to britain and other western countries
to engage economically with china as a result of what we did we still have a british steel industry
chinese company bought out tata steel is going to close we will have an electrical vehicle
industry because the chinese are going to invest heavily in batteries in the northeast of england
land rover is a highly successful motor car industry in in the west midlands because of the profits and the
sales in china astrozenica which developed our vaccine did so on the back of profits and sales
in china british universities including this one depend very heavily on
120 000 chinese students every year paying full commercial fees
you know the british economy has benefited from our relations with china and i don't apologize for having
negotiated some of those things but it isn't just parochial there's a broader picture despite all the
complaints about chinese unfair practices they've actually helped to keep the
world monetary system stable they hold four trillion dollars worth of us assets
it was always going to be said that they would use it to sabotage the system and they were going for currency warfare
nothing of the kind has happened they've kept the basic monetary system stable and implicit partnership with the united
states the person who put the boot into the rules-based system the world trade
organization wasn't the chinese it was president trump tried to cut it off at the knees
withdrawing support for the wto and michael refers quite fairly to some
of the grievances which we have with the chinese about intellectual property rights i mean all countries coming up
developing korea taiwan japan and i have to say in its early stages
the united states which based its development stealing intellectual property from britain that
was how they got going and that's how countries start but they have now introduced
intellectual property courts foreign companies are now winning cases they're adapting to the demands of a
globally responsible economic partner we complain and we used to negotiate
with the chinese and say well you open your market show that you're willing to reciprocate
free trade and the top of the western list and the british list was always financial
services and it's worth noting that in the current flurry of uh
activity that's taking place in china on policy that one of the things that the president has done is to open up china
to financial services leading western companies blackrock jp and organ are now
operating fully on subsidiaries in china buying up chinese shares
you know they've accepted the obligations of being part of an integrated economic system but i can
conclude around that with something that's more important than international trade which is those common headaches
economies called international public goods where countries have to cooperate
you know pandemics are one example the other is in glasgow at the moment is climate change and the chinese are
currently being portrayed as the bad guys and they have very large emissions of
course but not in actually per capita terms or cumulatively but yeah
we're not going to solve the work the climate problem without chinese cooperation and they do recognize there's a problem
they've just introduced carbon pricing they've got the biggest renewable energy industry the eclipse vehicle industry in
the world um they tried to accelerate the phasing out of coal and then run into power
shortages so they've had to backtrack but they understand the necessity but the key point is we're not going to
solve this problem unless we work with them on research common standards and so on
and you can't do that in a cold war environment and
i'm just my final point and i'll just take a minute over this is the proliferation of nuclear weapons
probably the biggest danger we face at the moment and there are rogue states north korea
pakistan potentially iran china has influence with all those countries we don't know how they
exercise it but we could potentially minimize the risks associated that if
we're willing to work with the chinese and something even more serious because of the collapse
of conversations with china a sort of paranoia has now developed
which is leading the chinese to build up their stock of nuclear weapons they had a minimum deterrence policy no first
use was no threat to anybody now they fear they're going to be attacked by the united states so they're
building up their nuclear arsenal i mean you can argue about who's to blame but it's got to be stopped it's very
very dangerous and you only stop it if you talk to them nobody is now talking to them
and we have to engage for our our own sex as well as this thank you
[Applause]
so michael can i turn to you and ask a question which i sometimes think
isn't asked enough in washington dc although i suspect that you've probably asked it more than once i'm going to put it to you this way this is a trick this
is a trick question right not at all it's a question to which you as an immense expert the greatest expert in
china according to president trump no uh no less and goodness knows he went through a few during his uh his time how
is steve bannon doing but during that time a lot of questions were asked about how
can we stop china how can we contain china how can we essentially prevent china doing you know lots of things
which many people in the outside world in asia not even europeans or americans might worry about uh militarization of
the south china sea uh the question whether taiwan is vulnerable all of these debates are still very current so
those questions have been asked quite frequently the flip side question which i've heard answered much less frequently and i'll
put to you now is this what would you say is the clearly defined role that china ought to have in
its region and beyond globally because as vince has said you know it's not going to be a liberal democracy and we shouldn't
particularly expect that it will be it is a very large powerful influential country it's built up its economy to the
second biggest economy in the world it is the largest single market in terms of population anywhere in the world it has
surely a right to put forward some sort of idea about its own position that is
not purely defined by what other countries think about it so if you would agree with that premise
what is it that china's role should be in the asia pacific region and beyond if it's not the things it's doing now that
washington wants to push back against [Music] imagine it's
the oxford union 1935. that's the stakeholder i have to say and
you asked the same question about what the economist magazine referred to in those years as mr hitler
mr hitler churchill by the way is portrayed as an idiot ignoramus stupid fool in the 30s
by the economist but mr hitler was assumed to have a legitimate
grievance that he sought to rectify
and british opinion at the time was in favor of mr hitler
the versailles treaty was unfair the reparations were unfair there's quite a long list
so there were some british at the time who said hitler has legitimate goals
we can't just try to constrain him or essentially be mean to him why
he might get even nastier the this view was so wrong that it cost
the lives of millions of people and now you ask me and everybody should ask themselves what is a legitimate role
for china that we could all agree to we people we people outside china
yeah so you have a list there's actually there really is a list
and the chinese spokesman just recently referred to the list that divide the administration has
presented to china there's also a list that china presented to us
the same thing happened in the trump administration during the trade talks the chinese actually physically gave our
side a list one example is had to do with data
facilitating the chinese version of amazon operating inside the united states one of
many many almost 50 items we had our list so when you raise this kind of question
it raises the issue of what tools what steps what measures
do governments have to implement this kind of vision of what china should
be like i would think that list would include stop the so-called genocide of the
uyghurs in a verifiable way admit the program is over close the doors let the uyghurs out
this helps china in terms of values with a role that they can play in the world
we treat our muslims with respect the list could also include sir vince
mentioned i agree with him the nuclear weapons issue china was invited
june 1999 to vienna to meet the american and russian delegations to discuss a
trilateral agreement for a lower cap on nuclear weapons
china refused to attend the americans even put out chinese flags in the conference room the
russians agreed china should come to the nuclear weapons talks specifically on
strategic stability and how not to have accidents among nuclear powers china refused to
come so sir vince wants you to believe that somehow the americans are not opening up a conversation with china no
there's quite a long list of events they won't come to so their regional role right now
is very much uh a matter of controversy in all the capitals in asia
joe biden has continued most of donald trump's china policies there's a good reason for this
when he and his team got into office they examined china's record it's not just genocide against the uyghurs it's
not just intellectual property violation it's not just tripling the number of nuclear weapons
it's much more than that and our narrow selfish american view
which i don't expect anybody in great britain to agree with is we don't want to give up our primacy
and the world lightly you may all say oh let china have a chance we british had a hundred years or
more of primacy we wrote the rules of the road the americans
took were number one for a while let's give china a chance my suggestion is this is a highly
dangerous thing for everybody else but for americans in particular
giving up our global primacy a lot of americans simply won't do it
we'd fight rather than do it now there's some americans i was going to mention
uh jamie dimon head of jp chase is it i'm trying to think of
the exact way they phrase it no uh jamie dimon has said recently something
sir vince said we americans must get used to being number two to china but we'll still be
four times richer per capita i think that right now jamie dimon's view is a
minority in our house and senate you'd find very few members of congress willing to vote oh yes we need to be
number two to china so i don't expect european support for our maintaining our primacy that's our business but what
we're going to have to do may scare a lot of europeans we can't let the chinese try to match us
in nuclear weapons we can't have them flying jet bombers so-called nuclear-equipped jet bombers around
taiwan whenever their feelings are hurt so there's no clear vision to answer
your question of china's legitimate role as long as china is engaging in such
misconduct to be egregiously outrageous most people are just just to be clear
that michael in a sense the answer to my question is the role of china is still to be defined by the united states first and foremost
you're the one who raised the question asking an american what role should china have how dare i answer that
question this is for china to decide however we americans have the right to respond to what we think is happening
and we have a number of tools at work already the president biden is continuing we're going to stop
technology theft by china we're going to carry we're going to use a number of tools to slow them down in
misconduct and biden is all for this it's nothing to do with just trump
so let me turn to sir vince cable and vince you'll have heard various things that michael's put forward including parallels with the 1930s i'm sure you'll
want to address that let me put a specific question to you though as as part of that discussion which is is is
this isn't part of the problem that people have with assessing how to
engage with china to use you know the phrase that's in your book subtitle i think that let's say 30 years ago
although there were you know egregious human rights abuses against um you know many
dissident lawyers and artists and you know the tibetan population and so forth it took place pretty much entirely
within the boundaries of china but issues such as the militarization of the south china sea which is something that
you know has been happening within the last few years or the sense that china is looking to
change a whole variety of things that have issues for the global commons and i'm thinking here of internet sovereignty for instance where china has
become very powerful international organizations these are not just matters for china they are matters for the wider
world and the liberal world at the moment actually does need to say more firmly and strongly not just we have to
engage with china but actually we don't agree with your vision of the internet for instance or we don't agree with your
militarization of the south china sea and these are matters for us as well as for you well i think it's perfectly valid to
offer a different view of the internet um but no i i really found this analogy
with nazi germany quite offensive actually there's not not remotely similar situation and it's
i mean that kind of language tends to sort of poison the the whole the whole debate and isn't right
um and and similarly to say we would start our discussion of economic relationships with your question
by focusing on the issue of qin xinjiang it actually explains why we just run
into this cold war environment because you know that there is a debate about
jiu-jitsu can have it and it's probably pretty bad what's happening there but if the chinese were
to say okay we are not going to sit down with you in the united states and talk about
trade unless you repeal section two of the american constitution
that gives people the right to carry guns we in china are very upset at seeing
people being killed in in america in shooting incidents very upsetting we
don't like it it infringes our idea of human rights so you change your constitution you define human rights the
way we see it in china and then we'll talk to you about trade i mean that that is an obvious non-starter
um there is of course an issue about human rights and we we need to approach it carefully and you know we clearly
have very different values but just making this your your opening gambit which is what the baton
administration has done has effectively closed down the conversation so your question is what what are they
looking for and how do we need to respond to it it seems to me that if you have two
two countries of roughly equal economic size and that most of the current measures
the world bank imf united nations suggest that china probably is now bigger in economic terms purchasing
property then the chinese have to be given a stake in running the system
you know their shareholding in the imf in the world bank um their position in the world to trade
organization has to be treating them as an economic superpower as part of the rulemaking system and they will be
bloody minded and they will be very tough in negotiation and they will do bad things but at least they're part of
the system and that has now to be accepted and that that's the first point
sorry you're interrupting me well i was just going to ask you to expand on that for a second isn't there a difference between being in the system and actually
what is more and more evident which is china's economic weight is giving it control over much of the system you
could argue that it's china's economic weight that's given it the right to do that but the fact remains that levels of
transparency debate discussion are much harder with china than they are with
liberal actors in the system simply because there aren't questions of independent judiciaries media and so forth that whatever the
faults of the united states or the uk yes of course you exist of course it's difficult i'm not trying to pretend it isn't but that's the way
we have to see it of integrating them into the system now you chose the example of the south china sea as an
example of chinese bad behavior i didn't say it was bad or good i just pointed out well yes i mean two points
to make about it i mean first of all there is the breach of the law of the sea which they they've done they
um they would not accept the rulings in relation to the philippines um it's slightly undermined by the fact
that the philippines like sepsis has renounced its own victory in that legal case
and also the united states is not a signature of the law of the sea so slightly sort of weak territory here but
as far as militarization is concerned i mean michael is much more knowledgeable about this than i am but
the the two facts that struck me very strikingly the united that china spends
two percent of its gdp on defense which is the same as the uk it's the nato
target this is not the soviet union which was devoted its economy to militarization
you know upper volta with rockets was what it was described as that's not the chinese system
and if you're looking at overseas expansion um the united states has i think 200
international bases i don't have a problem with that they're mostly doing good
the chinese have two two you know they have one in in the indian
ocean in pakistan another in debut maybe they're getting another one i don't know but that this is not a you
know a global military expansion the chinese for the focus of all their
policy domestically is economic economics rules in china
and they they they want to be part of the world economy and we have to find a way of integrating them into the rule
system well for that to to michael in different form because a phrase that everyone now recognizes which no one
heard of 10 years ago is belt and road initiative now we all know that the chinese infrastructure project and it's
not top down in some ways it's quite provincial and has different parts to it has lots of flaws debt diplomacy many of
the projects that are sponsored by chinese infrastructure payments aren't always
either very well built or very stable but the belt and road initiative overall has
provided a whole variety of infrastructure capacities to south america sub-saharan africa and southeast
asia which the western world simply hasn't provided a sensible sort of response to so
what is there that the liberal world can say when malaysia comes along and says we want fast rail when the ethiopians
say that we want a light uh rail metro in addis ababa when the argentinians say our internet system is breaking down we
need someone to provide 5g why doesn't the west have a better answer to those perfectly legitimate questions being
asked by those countries which the chinese are answering well i answered with two points the
first is the west does have a response it's starting the belt and road initiative in itself
is not evil it's the way that the standards created whether it's labor or environmental or
other standards were built into loan agreements by especially by the world bank and the
regional banks the chinese managed to undermine all of that to use a fancy
word conditionality that had been negotiated for previous decades
they say they're sorry they didn't have time they're willing to consider putting standards in but they're really not
secondly there's only one head of state who opposed the belton road
he refused to come to the summit in beijing the americans at least sent
an nsc staff member matt pottinger do you care to answer who is the head of state who opposed the belt and road
initiative i'll give you a clue you mentioned you mentioned you're from calcutta yeah i'm guessing
i'm guessing right why did india oppose the belton road
and others have joined more quietly not publicly they want some of the money but
not to allow the violation of sovereignty that seems to go on with belt and road
loans so i mean in that sense
how does that answer the argentinians it doesn't it doesn't china is going to expand
globally with its model it's doing very well many people love it they love it
what the americans are starting to do and actually it began under president obama the americans are starting to say
no you can't do it this way you can't do it this way you're
violating too many norms too many rules that date back 100 or even 200 years
in society the chinese are saying yes we can no one's going to stop us one of my
favorite chinese expressions is the ajerbolia you cannot contain us
you don't have the power to stop what we're doing the chinese are right
the political will the self-induced paralysis the american china experts who have
these vicious fights over his china an offensive nazi germany kind of place
or no it's a dancing with the dragon is a good thing for you we have these self-inducing
paralysis debates and the result is very little is being done to stop the
implementation of the china model what has been done seems to have an effect the trade talks
chinese at first they were not coming to washington they're not going to be any trade talks
pressure was applied they came then we learned from the chinese delegation some of the american demands
are what chinese reformers themselves want to do banning technology sales in certain
sectors starts to have an effect we can begin to see looking back since the obama years there are some kinds of
pressure on china that work they understand pressure 2500 years of statecraft
but we haven't mounted enough pressure yet and the worst part of it is rana
hypo hypocritical comments if you say genocide is occurring in china you
simply can't treat the government as a normal government and go to the olympics
the guts to stop the olympics is not there so whoever started saying genocide
in the beginning that's a speaking of offensive words that's pretty offensive to say that china commits genocide
apparently nobody has a dead uyghur who is killed through some kind of
deliberate mechanism it's a re-education program that has a lot of violations of human rights
but it's not like the holocaust so why use this kind of rhetoric about china
and steve bannon by the way is one of my favorite users of rhetoric against china that it's the worst country in human
history this kind of thing by the way we invest one trillion american dollars in china
through our new york stock exchange we invest hundreds of billions in private equity
we've had almost unlimited technology transfer sales to china for 40 or 50
years this is not a hitler country or a genocide country
that's very friendly with us so we're trying to start a very low level of pressure
to see whether china will eliminate or cut back some of these egregious practices things are still at a very i
would go like this run this is the level of pressure we could apply to china this is the maximum level we're
nowhere near the maximum the chinese are already thinking gee the americans are
upset they've got some supporters here at the oxford union society
what more might the americans try and should we try to meet some of their demands so i believe we're in a
productive period now of conversation but it's very tense and when joe biden made an obvious invitation to xi jinping
look i want to meet i'm president now i'm not just vice president i'd like to meet you what did xi jinping say no
thank you although we do understand the virtual summit is now being uh cooked up and may will be happening in the next
few weeks so that may yet uh may yet change in real life is another another question i think dance with the dragon
while they're stealing your wallet well of course that wallet has been
filled with the chinese buying american t-bills for quite some decades so it does go go both ways but i think there's
a danger even a bit of agreement breaking out here let me put a uk dilemma to you if i may um vince which
combines questions of economics and values we the uk are now looking for a post-eu
future clearly there is a great deal of interest in particular in our financial services industry having connections
with china and rishi sunak the chancellor amongst others has at least implied there's an interest in boosting
london's role in this area however the example that many many people have been pointing out is that of australia like
us you know a medium-sized medium powerful liberal state in the anglophone world
and having tied a great deal of their economic style particularly in terms of uh exports to china
australia has found that its ability to say what it once at home in particular the case of scott morris and the prime
minister talking about the need potentially for a coveted investigation has led to very harsh economic sanctions
against australia as a result now the effects those haven't turned out to be perhaps quite as damaging as was
expected at the beginning but it did send a message out that essentially the price of doing a trade deal with china
is essentially that you have to shut up about china if you're not going to say something nice i'm not sure that's
something that a kind of loudmouth liberal nation like the uk could really stand do you think
well actually the first time i went to negotiate with the chinese on trade in 2010
with uh cameron and company we we met the president xu jintao
and his team and one of the issues on the agenda was tibet
um we asked the chinese say we're going to raise this people in
britain feel very strongly about it we're going to raise the issue they said fine but we'll do this in a proper way
you say something about tibet we'll say something that you don't like for five minutes um you put out your
press releases we put out ours and then we can talk business so i mean if things are done in a structured way the chinese
are perfectly able to cope with but would you tell us different from shooting pigs do clearly is a much
more confrontational sort of politician well we've struggled we don't know we haven't had that kind of exchange of
them but i but your particular question was about the uk and i would say that the fact that we
you know brexit has happened is an absolutely compelling reason why we now have to get and go to china if we
wanted to just stick with countries that have the same values and the same standards we should have stuck in the
european union but we've left i mean every everybody you know particularly the chinese just
regarded as an act of madness that the fact that we've now left means we have very little alternative
but to try and engage with the big growth economies of the future which are india china brazil possibly russia and
others uh you know we're in a new world and we have to be pragmatic um my
experience as you say is that we we have been able to talk about
human rights issues i i on the third occasion i went as a minister
in the g period actually um and i raised with ministers um
who is now the politburo the whole issue about labor rights in china and i i made the point to look you
know you're a socialist country and workers don't have the right to strike i'm i'm representing a wicked capitalist
country and our workers have minimum wages and trade unions can you explain and actually we had a very civilized
discussion for half an hour i sent him stuff on minimum wage enforcement and i noticed this under the common prosperity
of president g all these uh reforms the labour market now being introduced in china so i mean it's a slightly
satirical example but human rights can be you know you can
engage with china in an intelligent way you just shout out them of course they take offense for perfectly obvious reasons and that's why this stuff about genocide is so lethal i mean i i have no idea what's happening in xinjiang i've seen i've read the literature um there clearly is a serious abuse of human rights but i was very struck that the economist magazine in the uk which is very hot on human rights and very critical of china said we will not use the word genocide because it is clearly not applicable here it's a bad use of language the when pompeo originally made these accusations in the united states his own lawyers in the state department dissociated themselves from it so you know let's if there is evil let's use the right language for it you.
