Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 3, Episode 10: Jean Dong, Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World

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Season 3, Episode 10: Jean Dong, Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Today I'm absolutely delighted to be joined in conversation with a scholar, a policy expert, and the author of an absolutely wonderful and very important book for our time.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be with Jean Dong, who's a research fellow at the Center for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Jean has written a fantastic 2023 book, which I want everyone to read because it's really important.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it is a book that helps us to understand how China views the world so that we can more accurately also view and interact with China looking from outside, from the United States, or from where Jean Dong lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, Jean, thank you so much for being together with us and congratulations on an absolutely wonderful book.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Jeff.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's my great pleasure to join your book club and then talk about my book.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like people to know the book and I'd like people to know you.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're a rising very talented scholar.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you are Chinese-born living in Australia, and maybe you could tell us uh how you got there.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm Chinese Australian.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: I was born and raised in a small city in China called Kaifung, which was the capital city of the Northern Sun Dynasty about 1200 years ago.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: I came to Australia when I was 18 years old, and I pursued my university education and professional life here since then.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I consider myself very fortunate.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: I had the opportunity to witness and participate in China's development in my teenage years.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then I also had the opportunity to observe China objectively from the outside when I developed into my professional life.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: So those experiences have helped me to have a more comprehensive and multidimensional perspective and understand China.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: But I think more importantly, helps me to understand the origins of many different viewpoints about China and also to think about how I can help bridge those differences.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is fantastic because I would say on so many issues in the world, issues of war and peace, issues of climate change, issues of economic development, a good, strong, cooperative, of course, sometimes competitive as well relationship of China, the United States, Europe, where you are, Australia, is going to be extremely important.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: There aren't so many people like you, expert, knowledgeable, a student of history, and knowing very well both Chinese civilizational history and Western history.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And as you say, it's been kind of half and half in your lifetime.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's uh notable for everybody listening in.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Jin Dong tells us she was born in Kaifeng of the Northern Song dynasty, Northern Sung more than a thousand years ago.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just for me uh the point of China.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: China as a civilization is 2,200 years old as a unified state, roughly 10 times that of the United States or Australia for that matter.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of history.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the world's great civilizations.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And understanding that long, long perspective, I think is really vital to understanding China today.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I like your book so much, because your book is not about uh what happened last year, although it has that too, uh, but it's uh about how the long history of China has shaped China from an intellectual, ideological, political, economic, military point of view.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And this is something extremely important because I would say almost nobody in Western leadership really knows these things.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So they have to read your book as a first primer.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, before everybody does that, uh we're gonna talk about it so you can introduce the main themes.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the book opens, were, by the way, I really love analytically to open.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: You call it the grip of geography.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: China has a distinctive geography.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's different from United States geography, it's different from Australia's geography.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, in what way is China gripped by its geography that shapes how Chinese leaders and Chinese culture understand the world and interact with the world?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Jeff.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: So um, you're absolutely right.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think to understand China from a long history perspective, it really helps me to unpack many of the new perspectives.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: What I found is when I delve into the long history and particularly to identify what are the fundamental factors that have shaped the China and this thinking being really helpful because I think it's not helpful just to say China has done X because it has always done so.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's very important to look into the long history to identify what are the enduring patterns and what are temporary transitions.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: So, in this way, it helped us to distinguish between short-term tactics and the long-term strategy in dealing with China.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I found geography is one of those long-term, enduring patterns that shaped China's statecraft.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: I was really intrigued by the well-known British historian uh Joseph Needham.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: His research, so he said in his research, um, China's is located in a very unique monsoon climate zone.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: And this climate zone has left China very vulnerable to natural disasters.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: And across China's 2,000 years history, there were no fewer than 1,621 floods and 1,392 droughts reported.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: And that's on average one major disaster in each year.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: And more importantly, those natural disasters very often have caused very severe famine.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: And that famine has contributed to five out of China's 17 dynasties collapse.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: And also, in addition to those natural disasters and famine, um, China also has a very long and complex border, which has consistently exposed the country to external invasions.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: The Chinese central plain has been conquered by the nomads at least eight times in history.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: So all of those geographical conditions have shaped China's core interest and the priority of its statecraft.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: As we can see, China is incentivized to preserve domestic stability, to avoid collective destruction that's posed by nature.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: And also, they want to pursue economic growth for national resilience and prosperity, and they want to strengthen their military capability for national defense.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: And what is more interesting is that those historical geographical conditions still apply today.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at China now, China still grapples with many and frequent floods and droughts every year, and structural food security challenges and an intricate and sometimes very antagonistic border with 22 neighboring countries.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: So if you look at the whole history and the geography, it really has been one of the enduring factors that has shaped the consistent Chinese priorities throughout history.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's very uh important for us to understand uh these special features.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to uh underscore uh a few points for people listening.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Think of the difference of Great Britain, an island nation which went out to colonize other nations, so relatively small place, and then it uh sent out its uh navy uh and it sent out its uh explorers and it sent out its settlers to uh conquer and uh settle other lands.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: The United States, a continent surrounded by two large oceans, uh not endangered by invasion from outside.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: China is very interesting because on the one hand, in a way, it's protected on at least two, maybe three of its four sides, because uh China on the west has the Himalayan mountains, China on the east has the ocean, China on the south has the tropical rainforests that separate China from uh Southeast Asia.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: China on the north has uh the plains and the steplands, the grasslands, I should say, which means that it can be invaded from the north.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think of China roughly as a rectangle, uh, the north is a problem.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and in fact, it was the place where China was invaded all the time.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: But also China's geography uh as a monsoon society, rice growing in the south and grains uh in the north, uh, wheat and uh barley and millet in the north means a quite dense population, so a lot of people to feed, way back when, uh, hundreds of millions of people, uh always a large part of the world population, but highly vulnerable, as you say, to uh the natural elements, uh, massive floods on the Yellow River all the time, and great losses of life, drought, and so on.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think uh, as you put it, uh you call it an isolated agrarian society and the struggle uh to avoid invasion from the north and to keep the society together and uh with enough food to eat.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a country in its long history that has gone out to conquer the rest of the world, to go uh through naval voyages to make uh overseas empires, for example.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a country that has, from its unification more than 2,000 years ago, mainly looked to be unified internally, not to go out and conquer new lands outside.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a fair summary?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, Jeff.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: I see the geography does not only shape China's priority for the Chinese statecraft, and to your point exactly, it actually constrains China's ambition and also compels China to make trade-offs.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: As we can see, China grapples with this land border security constantly.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: So even now, as China's maritime ambitions increase and now seems to project power beyond the Pacific and Indian Ocean, this land border vulnerability will constrain China's ambition because it immediately creates this two-front security threat from both the sea and the land.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: And also, you just gave the example of when China faced the threat from the nomads from the northern frontier, China always has to balance its ambition.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: During the Ming dynasty, China has to give priority to the land security over the sea expedition.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: And also in the late 1960s, when Mao Zedong actually adopted a dual adversary strategy against the US from the sea and the Soviet Union from the land.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: That experience really taught China about the existential threat of picking two fights at the same time.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the geography is actually a very vital factor that constrains China's ambition.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's interesting for people to know it's uh one of the most remarkable moments of world history, in fact, not just China's history, but in the Ming dynasty in the early 1400s, from uh 1405 to 1433, the uh Ming court sent out great uh naval expeditions uh under this admiral, Admiral Zheng He, and uh China ruled the seas.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if China had been Spain or Portugal in its outlook, it probably would have gone to conquer and settled colonies all over the Indian Ocean or East Africa.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it would have circled the Cape of Good Hope and South Africa and discovered the sea route to Europe or even the Americas, who knows?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: But in 1433, the Ming court said, that's enough.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're threatened by nomads from the north over land.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Why do we have this big expensive fleet?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, they grounded the fleet, they disbanded this world's greatest ocean-going fleet, hundreds of years ahead of what Europe could produce.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: But China unilaterally disbanded it, really left the oceans for a very long time, for centuries, basically left it to Europe.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a moment of history, but it's exactly what you said: the fear of two fronts.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, China said we have to confront uh the nomadic incursions from the northern steppe regions, the grasslands.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: We can't afford an expensive fleet on the ocean.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: And today China still faces this challenge.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: China left the ocean for centuries, not until the reform and opening up, you know, when Deng Xiaoping initiated and then to really engage in the coastal city development.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: And then China started to re-engage in the maritime trade.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: As we can see now, China has transformed beyond a single continental power into a country that has both continental power and maritime power attributes.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: And this data shows that now Chinese maritime trade has accounted for 95% of this total trade and almost 45% of its total GDP.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: So now we can see, you know, China has really transformed.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: But I think right now we see maritime military still very much around to defend the maritime transport, the transportation line, rather than offloading the imperial ambition.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this is very uh important.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: China was uh very much an agrarian and very poor country throughout its history.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: It fell far behind the industrialization process uh of the Western countries uh and its neighbor Japan, which I think was especially annoying for China because Japan, in a way, was supposed to be following China, and then Japan became the uh industrial power of East Asia at the end of the 19th century and invaded China.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that wasn't that was doubly unfair, I would say, in that sense.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: But when in the last 45 years China reformed its economy, became outward-looking, by the way, with the big encouragement of the United States, uh joined the world economy, uh, and the wisdom of China's great reformer of that period, Deng Xiaoping, China began to trade on the oceans and it became a great trading power.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it also means that China's very dependent on its sea lanes now.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's dependent for its food supply on the sea, it's dependent for its energy, especially from the Middle East to oil carried by tanker, and China fears that the United States has choke points on these sea routes.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: So China looks at this and says, well, we want to be internationally engaged, but we also have concerns.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: So can you explain what those concerns are?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because you discussed them at some length in the book, uh, the first line and the second line.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And what is this issue?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because the US interprets every move China makes as aggressive, but I think your book explains it's quite from a defensive point of view, not from an aggression point of view.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: So as you just mentioned, Jeff, now China is very concerned about its maritime security from both the economic perspective and the geopolitical perspective, because really the oil transportation is China's lifeline.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: So if we look at, you know, for example, Taiwan, as we can see, China now starts to take more assertive stance towards Taiwan.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, there are strong political reasons and also the nationalistic concerns.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: But beyond that, if we look at it from the geopolitical perspective, then Taiwan is located as the midpoint of the first island chain.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, in wartime, the first island chain could block China from its transportation line and also cut off China's international trade.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's one of the key concerns for China, because in a competitive global world, secure and constant access to maritime resources is critical for many, many countries.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: And just the fear of losing the access itself could lead to war that we can see in history.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Japan was one of the examples.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so you see China now start to take more assertive stance towards Taiwan.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: And also in order to reduce its fear around the blockade around the first island chain, we see China now start to project power in the South Pacific.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's primarily aimed at neutralizing the first island chain and hope to project power beyond the second or third island chain to deter potential opponents.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: And also, we see China's continuous military buildup in the South China Sea.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: That's because the South China Sea is very important to China's two ocean strategy, which is for both Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember renowned geopolitical expert Robert Kaplan made a really good point.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: He said, you know, if you think about the greater Indo-Pacific as the Mediterranean Sea, the South China Sea is located at the heart of the whole region.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: And while China faces more firm US allies and partners in the East, for example, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, the Southeast Asia countries, and also South China Sea seems to offer more freedom to navigate for China to access both Indian and Pacific Ocean.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, that's where I see some of those underlying motives behind China's action.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, this is not to say we have to agree or endorse China's action.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: This is more to understand the complex interplay of those motives.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: But like I said, those military buildups, you know, it's very concerning, and we have to acknowledge that.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: But one important angle to look at is that the motivation behind those actions is for determination, not desperation.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: So is China being determined to compete for a relative gain with the United States and other countries to secure maritime, the economy, and also geopolitical security to overcome disadvantage, rather than say, engage in imperial ambition and reckless actions, responding very negatively to impact on the global order.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a very relevant concept here, and I think your analysis is spot on.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: My late colleague at Columbia University, Robert Jervis, who was an expert on international relations, coined the term security dilemma.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what he meant by that was a psychological idea that what looks uh to one country like an aggressive move actually could be really a defensive move by the other side.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the other side doesn't even want to declare it as a defensive move because that in itself shows a vulnerability.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: But when China strengthens uh its uh Navy, for example, or its military presence in the South China Sea, uh, the United States jumps up and down and says, you see, China's threatening the countries of Southeast Asia, it's threatening the world, it's threatening our allies.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas uh China's view is this is defensive.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: The U.S.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: has surrounded us with military bases uh in Korea, in Japan, with an alliance uh with Australia, with military bases uh in Southeast Asia, all along our trade route.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Are we supposed to just sit there and be vulnerable to the United States?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so what looks to the US like China being the new aggressor or threatening the international order to China looks like a defensive action.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where your long history is really helpful.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: If China had a 2,000-year history of overseas empire, that would be one thing.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: But China has never had an overseas empire.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know of a single case, by the way, of China having uh an overseas empire in its 2,000-year history.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: I may be wrong, but I can't recall a single case.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: No, I don't think so.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um and also I know right now China's aggressive military buildup caused many, many concerns.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think it's quite important to understand to deal with China nowadays, we need a multifaceted approach.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: That means I don't deny the importance of And the necessity of the economic and also even military deterrents to counterbalance China's influence in this region.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: But just in this age of uncertainty, and also the global world is filled by this distrust, as you just described, just relying on the short-term tactics that could be falling into the Hasidides trap, where this conflict between rising power and the established power become inevitable.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: And in the age of nuclear weapons, we have to approach this risk with utmost caution.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: In my book, I call for a multifaceted approach to deal with China.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: In addition to military deterrence, we also need to include institutional engagement and also other means to address the China challenge.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: We ensure we have more safety and resilience in addressing the China challenge.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like all the listeners to understand your reference to the Thucydides trap, which is a term that's now being used and is the title of a book by a former colleague of mine, Graham Allison at Harvard University.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it refers to the great history by the Greek historian Thucydides of the Peloponnesian War, which was a war between Sparta on the one side and Athens on the other, between 431 BC and 4 BC.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the claim of Thucydides is that the war arose because the dominant military power of the age, Sparta, was threatened by the rising military power of the age, which was Athens.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: They went to war.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was a prolonged war.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think the main lesson of history, I'm not sure that either Sparta or Athens knew it at the time, but the main lesson of history is that they both lost by that war.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Even though Sparta won the war, so-called, in 404 BC, it didn't really win the war because Sparta disappeared essentially from any kind of leadership in the Greek world in the next century.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: Athens was also weakened.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was horrible for both of them.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the real lesson is that both the rising power and the leading power should have avoided that disaster.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in the time in the uh 5th century BC, they didn't have nuclear weapons.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the consequences were to be bloodied by this, but not to be destroyed.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now the stakes are so much higher to avoid this kind of trap.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that can only come from understanding and diplomacy.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the main themes of your book, all the way through, is not only how geography and the realities of vulnerabilities of China shape China, but also how ideas shape China, just like they shape uh any of our societies.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the idea of harmony seems to me to be a key part of Chinese ideology dating back to Confucian thought, especially in the Han Empire, so 2,000 years ago.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you could say something about this idea of core ideology, mandate of heaven, the need for a statecraft uh that works for the people, the role of uh these traditions in China today.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in my perspective, I see contemporary China as a hybrid model.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: So whereas Marxism seems like acting as a national ideology, but I think the underlying statecraft is heavily influenced by the Chinese traditional philosophical thinking.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: The Zhou dynasty, the rule of ritual, and the Confucius, the rule of virtue, and also the legalism, which is the rule of law.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really those combined, those different philosophical thinkings that have shaped how China approaches its statecraft.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: And as you said, Jeff, harmony is a very key idea.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: China, I see as a secular culture, it's very pragmatic just because it grapples with so many internal challenges and external challenges, it cannot afford to make many mistakes.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: So it has to have these very cautious approaches to address the challenges.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: And harmonization is one of the key things that could bring people together, particularly during the Zhou dynasty, where you founded the philosophical thinking of China.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's because when the Zhou dynasty overthrew the Shang dynasty, the Zhou dynasty has to rule a very big country and a very big population with a relatively small population.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: So at that time, they already realized relying on force and deterrence cannot be the most effective and a sustainable way.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: They have to think about what are the innovative institutional means and also values, ethics they could inspire to bring people together.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that inspired this Zhou dynasty rule of virtue.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then later on, Confucius, his whole life's effort to restore the Zhou dynasty to a rule of virtue, he also tried to develop a very strong understanding of the Confucian thinking.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's a historical sort of inertia, not relying on force and deterrence, rather thinking about institutional ways to address challenges.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's really wonderful.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh again, I think maybe the saddest part of the ignorance that I find in the United States and in other places, when we hear about China in the United States, we always hear Chinese Communist Party, Chinese Communist Party.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in the US, the word communist triggers all sorts of strange associations anyway.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh just the emotionally the most negative word in uh the American political lexicon.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been used for fear.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: It has always been a word that is viewed in the most extreme negative way.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: And our politicians tend to view China through that word.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: They don't understand at all what it really means right now.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's a historical word.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a party that unified modern China and uh created the People's Republic of China.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: But like you say, it's a very pragmatic, very pragmatic party.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it doesn't hone to any strict ideology.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's created this market economy, which is completely different, for example, from the communism of the Soviet Union, couldn't be uh more different.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the word itself, you know, conveys this uh incredibly negative light.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: But when I look at China, that's not the word that I start with.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: For me, China has this very deep persistence because China looks to me a lot like the Han Dynasty, a lot like the Qin dynasty.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same geography, it's a centralized administrative state, uh, it has a very sophisticated bureaucracy, which has been the tradition of China for 2,000 years.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in this sense, I see more continuity than a word of communism or a particular party.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: I see a lot of continuity in China.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: And incidentally, my own experience having worked all over the world is that political cultures are very deeply continuous, even when economies change.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: Russia to me looks a lot like the Tsar still.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it looks a lot like the czarist regime.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, which had its strengths and uh its very different political culture, but there's a persistence in this that we should appreciate and not simply put very simple-minded labels to it.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: But I like the emphasis because I think it's exactly right, Jean.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: What you say is pragmatic and cautious.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this is also how the reforms have been extremely intelligent, but very practical.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the most famous expression of the greatest reformer Deng Xiaoping is it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the ultimate in pragmatism, and uh don't put labels on things.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the other famous expression is cross the river, stepping one stone at a time.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: So be cautious.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no uh, you know that you have a firm footing underneath you as you cross the river.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that this is a very uh, very important point uh of all of this.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: You say that in your conclusion, after you've looked at uh the issues of geography, the uh traditional ideas, uh the way that the political system works, the current military buildup and its nature, you you then say that we are at a crossroads.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I don't think you use that, but you say we're at uh the confluence of two long cycles of state power and of technology.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Could you explain that concept?
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think that's also very, very important and correct.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Jeff.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think you just explained the Thucydides trap.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I know you, like many people, seem to understand China-US relation from that angle.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I also know sometimes people use Cold War or even World War analogy to describe where we are now.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think they are probably not accurate and not sufficient.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: I think the world we are living in now is fundamentally changed.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: So it's beyond ideology.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think that angle actually highlights an embedded danger in the current global state of affairs.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: That is refusal or failure to acknowledge the changing conditions of the global landscape and the genuine conflicts and changes arising from that, and just simply disguise them as ideological clash.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think that thinking would probably encourage more excessive conservatism and also maybe misguided problem-solving efforts.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: So the way I make sense of the world is to go back to a long history looking at cycles.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I see we are currently really in the phase of transition.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, on the technological cycle, we are transitioning arguably from the third industrial revolution, marked by information technology, the internet, to the fourth industrial revolution, marked by AI, quantum computing, and new materials.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: And from an energy perspective, we transition from the fossil fuel age to a renewable energy age, hydrogen, solar, or even nuclear energy.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then from the geopolitical perspective, we are transitioning from a US-dominant world order to a multipolar world order.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I think those transitions have brought a significant change to the world we are living in.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: Now it brought us to the world of polycrisis where we must navigate many unprecedented and interconnected changes: climate change, AI, societal transformation.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: It also brought us to the age of known unknowns, which we know those changes will significantly redefine who we are and the world we are living in.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: But the full extent and the details of those changes are unclear, let alone any effective solutions to address those challenges.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: And also it brought us to the age of surprise, you know, the pandemic, the Russian invasion in Ukraine, and many other black swan moments that could catch us completely off guard.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I think, you know, as we can see and history shows, when an international system grapples with limited economic growth and great uncertainty, it's the very dangerous transition point.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: It often leads to short-term thinking, zero-sum thinking, and also a very pessimistic understanding of the world.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: So now we're witnessing, you know, the great power rivalry of the imperial ambition fighting over resources from an economic perspective.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: The seemingly rational global economic environment now is being replaced by these far more complex, systematic rivalries between the entangled nations where those values and the self-interest have overtaken commercial calculation.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I think right now I see it's really the time we need the leadership.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: We need the courage to undertake some bold reform that could really boost productivity, income gain, and also inspire a new global governance model that could help us smoothly manage this current phase of transition.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it enable us to imagine and hopefully build a radically different role by enabling paradigm shift.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I see China and the US to compete on this front.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: Competition itself is not enmity if there are clear frameworks to guide, you know, diverse political systems to be competitive without confrontation and identify this new path of shared prosperity.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think we should encourage China and the US to compete for the future to see which system could help us to develop these new values and ethics that could bring people together.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's what I'd like to see.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you very much.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Very well put.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: And let me add, on the political cycle, I think there are three time dimensions of this that we should note.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: One is that the time of uh the US basically almost unrivaled leadership has ended.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's been roughly 75 years since the end of World War II until now.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's been about 200 years of, I would say, Anglo-Saxon leadership because before the United States the dominant power was Britain.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: Britain uh, of course, invaded China in uh 1839 in the first opium wars.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: It gave China a very hard time for a very long time.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: It owned uh or operated Hong Kong, after all, off the coast of China as an imperial possession for a long time.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been 200 years of Anglo-Saxon dominance, and I would say it's been around 500 years of Western ascendancy or control, because it really was when China withdrew from the oceans and uh Europe entered the oceans at the beginning of the 1500s that really changed the balance of power between Europe and Asia.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it was, of course, in the 19th century that Europe became so dominant and in the 20th century the United States so powerful.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: And all of this is now changing to a true multipolar world where China is absolutely one of the great parts of the world, and from my point of view, wonderfully so, because it's one of the great civilizations of the world as well.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it brings me to uh your final point that competitiveness without confrontation.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is a wonderful, wonderful observation.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say that one of the lessons of history looked for a long period is that innovation and learning has flowed both ways from east to west and from west to east.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: And in a long period, from roughly 500 AD to 1500 AD, it was definitely from China to the West that the technology flowed.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: Your birthplace, uh Kaifang, capital of Northern Song, that was a time of incredible flowering of technology and learning.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the Song period gave so many remarkable things to the world, but especially technologies to Europe.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: Then after 1500, and especially after around 1700, the technology started to flow the other way.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: The lessons flowed the other way, mainly from Europe, and China struggled to catch up and fell behind.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you talk about that.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: You have a section called You Will Be Beaten If You Fall Behind, because that was one of the lessons of China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: But now I'm convinced we're going to learn in both directions.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I think China has an enormous amount to teach the United States.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's China's 10 times older and a lot wiser in many ways, in my view.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: I hope the U.S.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: can be a good student as well.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure that there will continue to be uh good ideas flowing in the other direction.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: And as you say, competition without confrontation would allow for that mutual learning, a mutual advance, each one playing uh its part.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think your vision is uh extremely correct.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: The book is really wonderful, Jean.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: I want to congratulate you, and uh I think it's very, very timely.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm afraid our time is up right now, but again, for all the listeners, please get a copy of uh Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World by Jean Dong.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: Really learn about China's long history.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: It will take away many of your fears.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: It will greatly increase your understanding, and it will greatly uh raise the likelihood of a very constructive interchange of East and West in the 21st century.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, Jean Dong, thank you so much for being with Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs today.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's been great to be with you.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fantastic book, and I look forward to uh more wisdom uh coming from you and coming from your research.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Jeffy.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's my great honor.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 40:24
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