[MUSIC PLAYING]
JAN: We're here to
welcome Rana Mitter.
He is professor of the history
and politics of modern China
in Oxford, and a fellow
of St. Cross College.
He's also a fellow of the
British Economy since 2015.
His research interests
include contemporary Chinese
nationalism, Republican
era Chinese history,
and the second
Sino-Japanese war.
He also wrote a book about
it, "China's war with Japan,
1937 to 1945: The
Struggle for Survival,"
and several other books
on topics like that.
He appeared on TV and
radio, has published
lots of research publications.
And today he's here to give
us a very short introduction
on modern China.
Please welcome with me
Professor Rana Mitter.
[APPLAUSE]
RANA MITTER: And
it's a great pleasure
to be here at Google today.
Thank you all for taking
your lunch break to come
and listen to me talking
about modern China.
And thank you to Jan for
hosting us here today.
I should start by saying that
I think although this is going
to be a talk based on a
very short introduction
to modern China,
the book, which I
think you have in front of you
or available at the front here.
It's not going to be quite
as short as the introduction
to modern China that
was given by a very
famous historical figure--
the former French president and
war leader Charles de Gaulle,
who was asked back in
the-- he was known actually
as the man who
had simultaneously
the longest nose and the
shortest temper in world
politics at that time.
And he was asked when he
was president of France
back I think in the
1960s, what do you think
about China, Mr. President?
To which he said looking
down that very long, very
distinguished nose,
and said, China
is a very large
country inhabited
by many Chinese people.
Now I could leave it
there, because after that,
what is there to say?
But I think I can probably
go a little further
than the late President
De Gaulle, great statesman
that he was, and of course
a man who re-established
full diplomatic
relations between France
and the People's
Republic of China,
and speak at a bit more length
about what it is that makes up
what is perhaps one of
the most fascinating--
or perhaps I think it is one
of the most fascinating--
but perhaps the single most
important country in terms
of rapid political, economic,
and social change on the globe
today.
Before I make any
sweeping statements
or any further
sweeping statements,
I should just find out how much
I'm likely to be rumbled today.
Have we got anyone from
China in the audience?
Yes, couple of people.
OK.
Good to hear.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
I've just told
them that if anyone
tries to leave this talk early,
then they'll hold the door
and make sure you stay for the
entire length, or something
like that.
I want to talk
about modern China,
not just in terms of
the contemporary China
that we see when
we get on a plane
and go to Beijing
or Shanghai where
I'm sure Google has all sorts
of interesting interests
these days, or Google, as of
course it's known in China.
We will talk about
that side of China--
the China that's emerging
and where it's going.
But I also want to
use the word "modern"
to try and get over an idea
of what kind of society
China is, what it has been,
and what it's trying to become,
and get the idea of what many
of the Chinese themselves--
not all of them, of
course, not universally
amongst 1.2 billion people.
But broadly speaking,
what the Chinese
themselves think
of when they use
the term "modern" to
describe their own country
and their own policy.
And I want to start
with something which
is a bit of a paradox and
have that paradox running
through what I say
today, and then I
hope perhaps fuel
a bit of discussion
about China after
I finish speaking.
And that paradox
is the following--
China is a country
which, in a sense,
is running a sort of social
and political experiment
that in terms of its
premises, in terms
of its basic
framework, combines two
things that the
modern world-- use
that term again-- the modern
world in the last 100 years
or so has not tended to see.
And that is a society
that is simultaneously
very open in all sorts of ways.
And that sometimes
surprises people
who like to think of
China as a closed society.
I don't think it is at all.
But also a society that is not
liberal in its assumptions.
So it is an open but
non-liberal-- if you like,
illiberal-- society.
And this contrasts
with the experience
that many people had
during, say, the Cold War.
A period I think for Google as
a purely historical interest,
since I know that you're
all geniuses who came here
at the age of about 12.
But a few of you may have
vestigial historical memories
of the Cold War period when the
world divided itself to some
extent into the idea of
societies in the so-called free
world that were
liberal, democratic
in their assumptions, and open
in terms of transport, trade,
and interaction,
and then a world--
the communist world,
in particular--
that was literally behind
a wall, [INAUDIBLE] Berlin,
or at least very
heavily restricted
in terms of its contact
with the outside world.
Now that latter form
of restricted society
doesn't remotely
describe China today.
China is all around the
world in all of our lives,
regardless of where
we live or what we do.
It's there in the
goods that we buy,
having become the world's most
important exporting country.
It is, of course,
in our daily lives
in terms of the tens of
thousands of Chinese students
who start degrees every year
in this country, the United
Kingdom, or indeed in
the US or Australia.
It's in the business
investors who
have meant that China
for the last few years
has had more of its capital
flow out of the country
to invest overseas than
it has attracted capital
to actually come into China.
And of course, it's there in
the numerous Chinese business
people, students, software
workers, artists, filmmakers,
and others who
are very much part
of that international
traffic that
goes between North America,
Europe, Asia, Africa,
and the rest of the world.
So definitely not
a closed society.
But at home, as anyone
will also know, a country
that takes a very different
attitude towards the nature
of state and society.
It is a society that still has
official censorship for books
that are published in China
in a way that wouldn't
happen in a liberal society.
It's a country whose
media is also restricted
in very significant ways.
And it's a country where
rights to do with law
are exercised in the context
of a ruling Chinese Communist
Party.
So you may think
that's a good thing.
You may think it's a bad thing.
But one thing it's not
is a liberal thing.
And therefore, that paradox
of being open but not liberal
runs through the contradictions,
and I would say often
the difficulties, but
also the challenges that
come from trying to make
China into a country that
sits at the forefront
of modernity
in the present-day world.
So to explain how we got
there and why it matters,
let me take you through a short
historical journey before we
get-- oh, not that short--
before we get to
the present day.
And we start with this gentleman
here, possibly, possibly
one of only two Chinese
who have world brand name
status, if that's the
right way to put it.
One of those people we'll
see a little later--
Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong--
the communist leader of China
for more than a quarter of a
century between the late 1940s
and the mid 1970s.
He's certainly a name who's
still known around the world.
But this figure
perhaps even more so.
The great Chinese
thinker Confucius.
[INAUDIBLE], the Master Kong.
The inventor of a set of
philosophical and ethical ideas
way back in the sixth century
BC, about the same time,
broadly speaking, that some of
the great Greek philosophers--
Aristotle, Plato, and so forth--
were beginning to develop
their systems of thought
on the southern side of Europe.
At the same time, some of
China's greatest philosophers
were also beginning
to think about ideas
of society and ethics.
And as it happened, this
particular thinker--
Confucius-- still known today
often as China's number one
teacher, began to put forward
a system of ethical and social
understanding of how the
world fitted together
that in many ways
still has a great deal
of valency, significance, and
power in the world of today.
Or the China of today.
So to understand briefly what
this system of thought was,
how it differs from the way in
which certain Western or North
American or indeed,
other Asian societies,
Indian societies, for
instance, have operated.
It's worth thinking
briefly what some
of the ideas that someone
like Confucius put forth
were, because they were not
just relevant to the world
of the sixth century
BC, but still continue
to have a great deal
of valency today.
They are the ideas
that first of all,
that correct and benevolent
behavior towards one another
is what makes a person
virtuous or moral.
The ultimate aim in the
Confucian system of thought
was to become a jinsa--
a gentleman, a
person of integrity--
or even a sheng--
a sage, someone who
really had the level of wisdom.
There's a famous
saying from Confucius--
not one of the ones that you
get from fortune cookies,
but an actual saying
from Confucius--
that says that it's not
until about the age of 40
that you can really
have mature thoughts.
And for many people
it's 60 you first
begin really to understand
what the world is about.
So there's another clue.
Unlike our own society
in the West, which
perhaps a little bit
too much sometimes
tends to have a sort of
cult of youthfulness,
Confucian values do value
the old, the elderly,
people with age and wisdom.
At the same time,
something else,
which again is not
very compatible
with the modern world is
the idea that hierarchy--
relationships and
hierarchical relationships--
are not just
necessary, but actually
positively important
in the Confucian world.
So that could be
the relationship
between the ruler
and the ruled; or I
have to say, between the
husband and the wife,
bearing in mind this was
a long, long time ago;
or between the teacher
and the student.
Again, that education, that
bit of learning very central
to the Confucian worldview.
In a sense, the only one of
the five great relationships
as they are called in
the Confucian world
that's purely equal--
non-hierarchical--
is the relationship
between a friend
and another friend.
And in his day,
I fear that meant
male friend and male friend,
although obviously that
would have changed during the
time when women's status rose
in Chinese society, as it
did in many other societies
around the world.
So bearing in mind that the
Confucian system of thought
for good or ill
changing in various ways
had the same sort of
cultural influence
that Christianity or Greco
classical, Greco Roman
classical norms
did on large parts
of the Western and
Mediterranean world
over the course of
some 2,500 years,
from the very, very earliest
years of Chinese history,
all the way through the
many great dynasties
I'm sure you've
heard the names of--
the Tang, the Song, the
Ming, and finally the Qing,
until the early 20th century.
But then things changed.
And this is one of the
places where they changed.
By the early 20th century,
China was not in good shape.
For several decades in the
mid to late 19th century,
China found itself for the
first time up against an enemy
that it could not
absorb or conquer.
And that was the enemy of
Western imperial power--
the British primarily at first,
but then the French, also
the Americans, and
eventually the Japanese.
These were people coming
from the powerful industrial
empires, mainly but not all
from the Western part of Europe
that brought with them gunships.
They brought with
them weapons, which
they could use to open
up and either colonize
or at least dominate the Asian
and African countries which
didn't have that
sort of firepower.
They brought with them
also two or three items,
which in a sense were
almost more dangerous
in terms of the way
they affected society
than the guns themselves.
In China, one of
those was opium.
Tragically, but I think
historically entirely provably,
one of the first major
British encounters with China
was the forcing open of
markets to sell opium
into China, which became
a huge scourge that
affected large parts of society
for many decades after that.
The so-called Opium War is a
term you may well have heard,
which still live in
Chinese historical memory
in the present day.
But also the third and perhaps
most long-reaching import
into China at that time to make
a difference-- if number one is
guns, number two is
opium, you might say,
number three was
political thought.
In other words, a whole
variety of ideas--
constitutionalism, new types
of independent thinking on law,
ideas to do with
political change that
came from parliaments,
also from the relationship
between the military and the
government, coming from places
such as the newly emergent
Bismarck's Germany,
the British constitutional
tradition, the French tradition
of law, and American
constitutionalism as well.
All of these came into a
China which was already
battered by invasion,
forcing lots of young people
in particular to think
that if they could not
beat the West by using
traditional Chinese thinking
and methods, then
they might have
to adapt the Western system,
at least for a while,
to try and fight back.
The country that actually
did this most successfully
was Japan, which in
the Meiji reforms
of the late 19th century
changed Japan very rapidly
from a traditional feudal
samurai society where
the most powerful weapon
was the sword to one
within a few decades that would
turn Japan into the fastest
industrializing country in
the world with warships,
it's own parliament,
conscript army, and eventually
colonies of its own.
And China found itself on the
wrong side of those arguments.
There were many
attempts at reform.
But many of those
came to nothing,
because the
difficulty of getting
the Chinese imperial court--
the Qing dynasty of
the time leading up
to the last emperor of China
who ruled all the out to 1912--
simply weren't able
to adapt fast enough.
And this led to a
very significant set
of political changes.
In 1912, a revolution
broke out of China
that led to the abdication
of the last emperor.
Again, about 25 years ago,
30 years ago, Bertolucci
made a great movie,
"The Last Emperor,"
which you might have
seen or choose to see,
which tells his
story in some detail.
It was very tragic.
He was only five years
old when he actually
had to leave the throne.
But even the establishment of
the Chinese Republic in 1912
did not stop the
political and social rot.
China was still being
invaded from outside.
People were still selling opium.
It was still very,
very vulnerable
in terms of global
trade and politics.
It was a country that
was being pushed around.
And the kind of
pivotal moment came
on a date which if you speak
to any educated Chinese today--
someone who's been through high
school, someone who's been-- it
doesn't even have to be
university-- and just say
one date.
[SPEAKING CHINESE] May 4.
May 4, 1919.
This is a date which has
a whole panoply of changes
in ideas behind it.
It's a bit like saying to
people of say, your parents'
generation-- the '60s,
which doesn't literally
mean in the West 1960 to 1969.
It means a moment of kind of
political change, thought,
liberation in America
and Paris and London, all
of these sorts of things.
So in a way, the May 4 movement,
the May 4 moment in 1919
symbolized a whole set
of political changes.
So just two seconds.
What happened on May 4, 1919?
Well, this happened.
This is sort of a
similar picture.
I think it wasn't actually
a picture on the day itself.
But it gives you an idea.
This building-- part of the
Forbidden City in the center
of Beijing--
then as today right at the
heart of the Chinese capital.
And in front of it,
a demonstration.
In this case, a demonstration
of young people.
4th of May, 1919.
You have 3,000 young people
from China's, Beijing's
top universities--
Peking University,
Tsinghua University--
gathering in front of the
Forbidden City in Beijing.
Why?
Because just a few
days earlier, they
had heard a terrible
piece of news from Europe.
On the 30 of April, the
Treaty of Versailles--
the end of World War I--
was signed.
Now many people
in the West don't
know that China was also
a participant in World War
I. They actually fought
on the Allied side.
If you've ever read the
stories of the trenches--
young men being killed
in Flanders Field, all
of that, the great story
of World War I in Europe--
people don't often ask where
did the trenches come from?
Who made them?
And the answer in many
cases was Chinese workers.
96,000 of them
brought from China
to these unfamiliar, cold
fields in France and Belgium
to do lots of things--
work behind the scenes--
but certainly
digging the trenches.
3,000 of them died
in the conditions
of cold northern
France and Belgium.
Their graves are
still there today.
So having made
this contribution,
the Chinese thought that some of
the imperial possessions which
had been seized by the Germans
in the late 19th century
would be given back to China
after the peace treaty was
signed.
And they weren't.
They were instead in a piece
of skullduggery handed over
to the Japanese.
And this made China's young
patriotic students in Beijing,
when they heard the news,
very, very angry indeed.
3,000 of them gathering
outside the symbolic center
of the heart of
Beijing, saying it
was time for China to take
on two ideas, two ideas which
to this day remain very
important in thinking
about what a modern China is.
And one was called in
their terms, Mr. Science.
The other one was Mr. Democracy.
In other words, the idea
of technological modernity
and the idea of
political change,
more popular participation
and democratic change.
And demonstrating
for these things
not in the crowd that
day, but certainly
nearby and taking part in the
wider political atmosphere,
was a young man called
Mao Tse-Tung, who
became one of the founder
members of the Chinese
Communist Party.
So in 1921, just two years
after this demonstration,
the small group of the first
group of communists in China
would start the journey that
would eventually lead them
towards the conquest
of the whole of China,
and indeed to become the
ruling party of China
they remain to this very day.
So May 4 demonstration,
very important
turning point in terms of young,
patriotic Chinese thinking
about why their country
was doing so badly,
and determined
that they would act
to make sure that China was not
put in that position in future.
They were drinking
in, of course,
a whole atmosphere
around the world.
This was a time in
the interwar period
when political culture
and artistic culture
was changing rapidly.
Figures like Marinetti,
the great Italian futurist,
who put forward ideas of
speed and modernity in art.
There we have one of the iconic
artworks that actually amongst
other things underpin the
eventual fascist movement that
took over Italy.
So not all of this modernity was
necessarily very progressive.
We also have the flowering
of different non-Western,
non-European people
talking to each other
rather than simply
learning from the West.
So I told you in the
late 19th century,
much of the constitutionalism
and legal change
came from examples in Western
Europe, as well as Japan.
But the interwar period saw a
great deal more conversation
between India, China,
and Japan about what they
could learn from each other.
And here actually
we have an example
of Jamini Roy, one of the
great Indian modernist painters
drawing on Indian
folk art and becoming
a great influence
on many thinkers
in the non-Western world.
This was also the era
of Rabindranath Tagore,
perhaps in some senses the
most famous artistic figure
in the world in the
interwar period--
a Bengali first non-Western
winner of the Nobel Prize,
and a figure who
was feted in Japan
and certainly treated
with great seriousness
in China when he visited there.
An example here also
of the kind of poetry
that young modern Chinese
wrote to try and express
their excitement at
the possibilities
of democratic change and
technological change that
could help modernize China.
This poem here by
the poem "Tian Gou"--
Heavenly Dog-- by
[INAUDIBLE], who
became one of the most important
poets of communist China
sums up this sort of
thought with these lines.
"I am the light of the moon,
I am the light of the sun,
I am the light of
all the planets,
I am the light of x-ray,
I am the total energy
of the entire universe!"
And in the original,
as you see the italics
there show that the
original Chinese actually
has those words in English
put into Western letters
in the middle of
the Chinese text
to give it that
sheen of modernity.
Those of you who know
a bit about poetry
will perhaps recognize these two
influences here, one of which
is the great American
poet Walt Whitman
of the late 19th century,
who very much followed
that kind of idea
of the personal
and the individual expressing
something about the wider
universe, but also
Tagore Gitanjali, one
of the most influential
non-Western poems of the time,
very influential on the
European modernists,
but also catching the eye of
[INAUDIBLE] over in China,
leading to a sort of
Indian-Chinese influence there.
So very much a
cosmopolitan time,
a time when people were thinking
of all sorts of different ways
of being modern and changing.
But the politics of China
also took a very dark turn
during this period, because
by the 1930s, the simmering
tensions between
the two greatest
nations, or at least two
biggest nations, of East Asia--
China, and Japan--
came to a head.
During the early
20th century, you
could say that in East Asia,
two rival political forces came
into conflict with each other.
On the one hand on
the mainland of Asia,
Chinese nationalism, which I've
mentioned that May 4 movement
turning into a wider
sense that China
needs to get back its strength,
its power, its sovereignty
in terms of everything from
politics to art to economics.
And Japan, yes, becoming
the most modernized nation
of East Asia, as I've
mentioned before,
but also becoming its most
powerful imperial power.
And in the context of that,
slowly but surely occupying
more and more of
Asia's territory--
Taiwan in 1895, Manchuria
in 1905, Korea 1910.
In 1931, an even more
comprehensive takeover
of the Northeast of China--
Manchuria.
By 1937, China and
Japan were essentially
poised on the brink of
war, and finally clashed--
came to arms-- leading
to an eight-year struggle
for survival by China against
the Japanese invasion.
Eventually we would come to
know this war as World War II,
since of course, the
European War had stopped
two years later in 1939.
And then with Pearl
Harbor in 1941,
the United States would come in.
The whole war would
become global.
But those eight years saw
up to about 14 million
Chinese deaths, 80 to 100
million Chinese becoming
refugees in their own
country, and the holding down
of more than half a
million Japanese troops
on the allied side.
Once again, China playing an
important but under-reported
role in terms of
its contribution
to the Second World War.
And by the end of
that time, by the end
of that devastating eight-year
war between China and Japan,
the then nationalist
government of China
essentially collapsed
under the weight
of its own contradictions,
as Marxists
might say, leaving the way for
that young, eager student who
I mentioned briefly
in 1919 having
an interesting time thinking
about politics in Beijing
in 1919.
Well, he had come a very long
way in the 25 to 30 years
after that.
He had become part of the rising
power of the Chinese Communist
Party.
And by 1949, that
man, Mae Tse-Tung,
had become the
ruler of all China.
So in doing that, he had taken
up one idea and taken it with
him, which would be very,
very important in terms
of rethinking the way that China
thought about being modern,
because when those
May 4 demonstrators--
those young patriotic
men and women--
demonstrated in front
of the Forbidden City
and started thinking about
Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy,
the one figure--
the one figure who many of
them turned against violently
was Confucius.
They saw Confucius,
the traditional sage
who for 2,500 years
in one way or another
had underpinned Chinese
thinking as not the solution,
but the problem.
The person whose
ideas of hierarchy,
of benevolence, of trying to
keep a sort of ordered society,
had held China back.
And they said, well,
if Confucian thought
gets us invaded by the West
and leads China into disaster,
then we need a very
different way of thinking.
And Chairman Mao-- Mao
Tse-Tung's thinking,
and the thinking of the
Chinese Communist Party
was perhaps the most radical
break with Confucius that
existed in China's history.
They argued that
Confucius was a purveyor
of feudal thinking,
old-fashioned thinking that
held China back.
They argued that some of his
ideas such as benevolence
led simply to a society that
could never move forward,
and that sometimes terror and
the use of violent tactics
were necessary and
even praiseworthy
in terms of creating a new
type of Chinese society.
And that tendency found
its ultimate expression
in this event that
you can see just
behind Mao's head here, which is
the Chinese Cultural Revolution
of the 1960s and '70s.
This was the culmination of the
period when Chairman Mao sought
to consolidate his own rule.
He had come to power in 1949.
And there had been various ups
and downs in China in the years
after that, including the
attempt at the Great Leap
Forward, a massive program
of economic modernization
that went horribly wrong and
led to the starving to death
of tens of millions of people.
So having seen
this go wrong, Mao
doubled down in
effect by the 1960s,
argued that what
China needed was
to overthrow every single
part of its former system
of government and
society, and instead
launched what he called a
great proletarian Cultural
Revolution, something which
would smash beyond repair
much of China's old
culture and old customs
to basically set it on a path
of a new renewed modernity.
And those who know
even a little bit
about the cultural
revolution will
know that it was a tremendously
violent, tremendously--
will know that it was
a tremendously violent,
tremendously disruptive
period in Chinese life
when many great artworks
and statues and museums
were smashed up beyond
repair because they were part
of the old culture, where
people who had education or knew
about the pre-revolutionary
society of scholars
or as academics were
paraded in public
and forced to confess
their crimes or their sins
because they were not part of
this bright new revolutionary
culture.
It was an overthrowing
of everything
that old China had been
in a desperate attempt
by Mao to try and
cleanse any remnants
of the old Chinese society.
And it was inevitable
in that atmosphere
that one particular figure
would indeed become a victim.
And that was Confucius.
So Confucius having
underpinned Chinese society
in many ways for 2,500 years
then gets a severe kicking,
intellectually
speaking, through much
of the 20th century as the
May 4 generation turned
against him in favor of Mr.
Science and Mr. Democracy.
And by the 1970s in the middle
of Mao's Cultural Revolution,
Confucius is being
condemned as a black hand,
as they put it, a
really kind of appalling
remnant of the old society
that must be driven out
to enable China to progress.
And this is a cartoon
book here from 1974,
which as the caption says, tell
the story of working people's
struggle against Confucius.
There was even an official
campaign against him.
It was actually aimed against
the then just-departed
recently killed defense
minister Lin Biao.
But it was called the
Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao
and Criticize Confucius.
So Confucius was being
put in the same breath
as Lin Biao, a man who happened
to be at that point Mao's worst
political enemy.
So absolutely the
lowest point you
might say in the 20th century
for Confucius and his thought.
That was 1974.
Two years later, Mao
Tse-Tung died after 27 years
at the top of the world's
largest and most populous
communist state.
And there was a
scuffle for succession.
But the man who
eventually came to power
was a man who would essentially
dominate Chinese politics
for the next 20 years,
well into the 1990s.
And his name was Deng Xiaoping.
Deng Xiaoping has
some claim to perhaps
be the single most
important reformer
of the Chinese 20th
century, maybe in some ways
even more than Mao, because
the China we see today,
the China that is
the second biggest
economy in the
world, the China that
has geopolitical influence, is
Deng Xiaoping's China, not Mao
Tse-Tung's China in many ways.
And that stems from
a variety of things.
But let's pin it down to
one particular decision,
because I think that's the
one we want to concentrate on.
Deng Xiaoping took the fateful--
not fatal, but fateful--
decision that China's
communist economy
could not sustain the kind of
economic growth and prosperity
which he wanted China to have.
And so he gave permission
essentially for China
to liberate its own economy,
to reintroduce markets,
to begin to shut down
the collective farms
and the state-owned
factories that
were an absolute central part
of the Chinese planned economy,
and to begin the very
long and very bumpy
road which China has by no
means finished traveling
or even now that would make
China an anomaly in that it
would be the world's
biggest country
run by a Communist Party,
which was overseeing
a system of almost
unbridled capitalism.
And that particular
paradox is one
that has shaped the
China we see today.
It's the China that
has created what
you see in this picture,
which is on the one hand
the world's fastest growing
economy in historical terms
between, let's say, about 1980
when China's economy was really
in global terms
very small, to 2010,
when you have China becoming
essentially the world's third
or second biggest economy.
You have at various points
double digit growth year
after year after year--
11%, 10%, 12% growth, even--
during those years.
And it's off the back
of people like this.
Young women, often, working in
factories producing garments,
plastic goods, toys,
you name it, furniture,
that was sold all around
the world at a time
when the credit boom
in the Western world
suddenly meant there were
lots of dollars and pounds
for people to be spending
money on Chinese-made goods.
So that led to this
huge wave of prosperity
on both sides in
the 1990s and 2000s.
Many prices were paid to
bring that situation about.
China developed what
it still has today--
a population of 150
to 200 million people
who have no official rights to
special benefits in the place
where they work because
they're migrants, internal
migrants within China.
They're not illegal.
But by moving away from
their place of birth,
they don't have the right to
healthcare, pensions, education
and some of the things that
residents in particular cities
would have.
But the pay is good enough
and important enough to them
that they move anyway.
Now that population
is obviously something
like two to three times the
size of the whole population
of the UK.
It would be a large country's
population in many places.
And yet it's only
a small proportion
of the total Chinese population.
In addition, China
over those years
has become much more
economically unequal
than it was under Mao.
In Mao's day it was poor.
But it was also
relatively equal.
Now China has one of the
highest Gini coefficients--
the measures of economic
inequality-- of anywhere
in the world.
Rural pressures
also became greater,
although China is urbanizing
fast, a few years ago--
about three or four years
ago-- for the first time
in its history,
more Chinese people
lived in cities than
in the countryside.
But that's still the best part
of 650 to 700 million people
living out in the countryside
with the need for all
the things that people
living in a modern society
desire and have a right to--
healthcare, pensions, welfare.
And providing rural frameworks
for these very expensive
public goods has
become a real problem
in terms of the Chinese
Communist Party's
current policies, because in a
society where governments have
voted en route, you obviously
have the choice of kicking out
the government if you don't
like what they're providing.
In China, much of the legitimacy
of the Chinese Communist Party
is based on its
economic performance.
As long as the growth rate
continues to bubble along,
as long as people's standards
of living continue to improve,
which broadly speaking
they have done
in the last quarter
of a century or so,
there is probably
enough residual goodwill
within the system
for people not really
to have that much concern
about the direct mechanisms
of political control.
But if those economic
benefits go down,
then the future of the system
is clearly much more fragile.
At the same time,
China has started
to develop many of
the accoutrements
of modern societies
elsewhere in the world,
even though it maintains
a very different sort
of one-party or authoritarian
political system.
So remember what I was
saying before about it
being open, but not liberal.
Well, one of the aspects
of openness-- just one--
was a willingness
to take on board
the increasingly
internationalized culture
of pop talent shows.
You may or may not have
followed the classic example
of this-- the
Supergirl [INAUDIBLE]
competition, which made a
big splash in the mid 2000s
in China.
It was won by a woman
who's become actually
a quite a big Chinese pop
star in her own right,
called Li Yu-chun, who
sang a version of "Zombie"
by The Cranberries, if you
want the details of what
she won with.
But this was a very
interesting exercise,
which wasn't repeated directly.
Because of course,
what they asked people
to do on this TV station
with all these singers
was for people to get
on their mobile phones
and text in which of the
candidates for a Supergirl
singer they preferred.
Now someone in
the Party may well
have noticed that getting people
from all around the country
to vote for their
preferred candidate
might or might not
be a brilliant idea
to put in people's minds.
So that particular system was
not repeated in later years.
But the culture that you
see here of young pop stars,
rock music, very individualized
style of clothing,
is as far from the
old Confucian norms
as you could possibly imagine.
And certainly the
individualistic style
of international
consumerism is very much
part of Chinese modernity.
We also of course-- and bearing
in mind we're here at Google--
should point out that China
has a very loud, very lively
internet culture.
And anyone who says that
political and other kinds
of social discussion
are repressed in China,
it's certainly accurate.
There is a much more
restriction of what people
say in China than in the UK.
But it would be
entirely wrong to think
that this means
that there is not
a very lively discussion
about politics and society
in general still going on.
And the place where it
goes on most strongly
is on the Chinese net.
It goes on actually also
through [INAUDIBLE], WeChat.
And it goes on through
a whole variety on QQ
and a whole variety of
different social media formats.
But basically the wired
population of China
has not only increased
hugely in size,
more than the US
population by miles--
500 million and
counting, probably--
but has also created new
forms of social engagement
that involve a different
sort of state society
relationship going on.
Just one example-- it was
slightly more of a thing
a couple of years ago.
But it's still very
much there, which
is something called [INAUDIBLE],
the human flesh search, which
I hasten to add is not some kind
of cannibal zombie Holocaust
horror.
It is, in fact, a form
of social engagement
through the internet,
in which people
put up videos about injustices
that have been created
or committed by local officials,
and ask for people to basically
have these taken to
court, or for action
to be taken against
corrupt officials.
And the central authorities
have been actually
quite lenient in many
cases about allowing
these complaints to go on
Youku Tudou, the equivalence
of YouTube on the Chinese
net, because they provide
a sort of safety
valve for people
to actually talk about
real issues, real problems
in their own lives.
And that's something that
simply couldn't have happened
in that way without the
Chinese internet being
as strongly enabled as it is.
And that goes alongside
Alibaba, Alipay,
and the whole variety
of very, very high level
internet-enabled
finance and commerce
that has become such a
mainstay of China today.
There are, of course,
though many downsides
to the development of this kind
of technological modernity.
China's environment
has now become
acknowledged by the
Chinese government itself
as one of the most
pressing problems
in terms of China's
modernization.
Yes, it's the second biggest
economy in the world.
But that produces with
it a whole variety
of problems when it
comes to actually dealing
with the aftermath
of that technology.
What I'll say at this point
is that on the one hand,
China is one of the
world's great polluters.
On the other hand, it also has
put more R&D and investment
into green energy technologies
than possibly any other country
on Earth.
And with recent
news that we've had
that the Trump
administration in the US
is cutting its engagement
with green energy issues,
it may yet be that
China actually ends up
taking the lead globally
on this question,
particularly if there's
any attempt by the US
to go back on the protocols
of the Paris climate change
accords.
So China's moment
on the environment,
although, there are too many
scenes that look like that,
may well be coming.
In addition, we
have a whole variety
of political changes
in language that
reflect the contradictions
that still sit very
much within Chinese society.
The idea that it
wants to modernize,
that it wants to be
open, that it wants
to have a technological basis,
but also that the party wants
control.
The one-party state
has no intention
of creating a liberal
multi-party democracy.
The Chinese Communist
Party rules.
And according to the Party, will
continue to rule indefinitely.
So that led under the
previous president--
you see a picture of
him here, Mr. Hu Jintao,
along with very young pioneers--
to an interesting
revival of language.
And the language came very much
from the stable of Confucius.
After half a century
or more of Confucius
being downgraded or condemned
by Mao as a feudal character,
now we're back in a world
where Confucian language--
the language of
harmony, of hierarchy,
of solidity, of benevolence--
is brought back by the Chinese
Communist Party in a big way.
So one favorite
phrase of Mr. Hu--
[SPEAKING CHINESE]--
the harmonious society,
a very Confucian-sounding
phrase,
became a standard part of
the political rhetoric.
A statue of Confucius,
you see one here.
They are now very, very
widespread throughout China.
And certainly if you go to Qufu,
the birthplace of Confucius
in Shandong Province,
you will see
plenty of memorabilia,
some of it
including things like bottles of
Confucius liqueur or Confucius
chopsticks.
But certainly, the brand
name value of Confucius
has really bounced
back in a big way.
And this is a big
shrine for those
who wish to pay respect to him.
All again very much
endorsed by the State.
We have there a picture of
a ceremony on television
commemorating or
celebrating the birth
of Confucius more
than 2,000 years ago
in a sort of TV extravaganza.
And we have here a scene
from a blockbuster movie
on the life of Confucius, which
starred the Hong Kong action
star Chow Yun-Fat, who went
from one of his earlier films
called "Hard Boiled" instead to
this idea of perhaps soft power
with Confucius being
at the center of it.
So very much back
in popular culture.
But let me finish this
thought and perhaps turn
to a bit of discussion by using
this sort of final example here
of why the revival
of Confucius both has
lots of potential in it, but
also causes difficulties.
Because Confucius, I
think, is being put forward
by the Chinese state,
both domestically
and internationally, because
he's such a useful symbol.
He symbolizes many things that
are both attractive but also
useful to the Party.
You know, nobody can be against
the idea of benevolence,
of good behavior to one
another, of a kind of sense
that an ordered society is
better than a chaotic society.
On the other hand, a
thinker who puts forth
the idea of hierarchy
and knowing your place
is obviously attractive to a
party that still essentially
rules through an
authoritarian very
bureaucratic and
hierarchical structure.
And he also gets used in
this case when China--
as is frequently the case--
becomes angry at
being criticized
by the outside world.
An example of this came in
2010 when the Nobel Peace Prize
was given to the Chinese
dissident Liu Xiaobo, who's
actually in jail in China,
but was given the Nobel Peace
Prize for his
writings criticizing
the Chinese government.
And the Chinese authorities
reacted very badly
to this award, which they
saw as an insult to China.
So they launched
their own alternative
to the Nobel Peace Prize--
the Confucius
Peace Prize-- which
I have to say in
the few years since,
has not really taken
off in quite the way
that they expected.
One of the people awarded
the Confucius Peace Prize
was that well-known
peace lover Vladimir
Putin, the president of Russia.
So I have to say the
interpretation is certainly
a bit wide in that sense.
But the symbolism is,
I think, important.
Because on the one
hand, launching
an international
peace prize is I
think symbolic of China's
increasing desire--
and I think it's
a sincere desire--
to be a citizen in world
order, to take part
in that world order
of Nobel Prizes
and international society
and the United Nations
that underpins wider society.
At the same time,
the desire not to be
told what to do by
the West in particular
also figures into it.
The idea that if the Nobel
Prize goes to the wrong person,
then you launch the
Confucius Peace Prize,
which puts forth an alternative
view of the universe.
And that I think speaks to
where I started up-- the idea
that China is an
open society, and is
engaging with the world in a
way that is serious and sincere.
But it's also not
a liberal society.
It's probably the society
in the world today
that most strongly
puts forward sets
of values that are
antithetical and in opposition
to many of the assumptions
of liberal societies
around the world.
And I say the
world, not the West,
because they are
also antithetical
to the systems in Brazil,
in India, in South Africa,
in Ghana, in a whole
variety of places
that have embedded a more
liberal, pluralist model
of politics.
By way of pointing that out,
I'm not saying this is good.
I'm not saying that it's bad.
I'm pointing out that this
is the reality of what I
think modern China has become.
And as we think of
that journey all
the way from the early 20th
century, the demonstrators
on May 4 1919 in front
of the Forbidden City,
and then think of their
sort of successors
who are the students, the
diplomats, the business
people who bring
China to the world,
and who we see when
we go to China,
I think we need to understand
that that journey about what
will make China
modern is still very
much a journey in progress,
and that all of us I hope here
sitting today may well be part
of it in one way or another.
Thank you all very much.
[APPLAUSE]
