21st Century belongs to China

[Veritas]

Here are the opening statements of Munk Debate that took place in Toronto..

Pro: Niall Ferguson, David Daokui Li
Con: Fareed Zakaria, Henry Kissenger

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Niall Ferguson: Thank you Rudyard, and ladies and gentlemen. I believe the 21st century will belong to China because most centuries have belonged to China. The 19th and 20th centuries were the exceptions. Eighteen of the last 20 centuries saw China as, by some margin, the largest economy in the world.
Let me begin with some demographics and economics: China is more a continent than a country. A fifth of humanity lives there. It’s 40 times the size of Canada. If China were organized like Europe it would have to be divided up into 90 nation states. Today there are 11 cities in China with a population of more than six million. There’s only one in Europe and that’s London. There are 11 European Union states with populations of less than six million. In just 30 years China’s economy has grown by a factor of very nearly ten and the IMF recently projected that it will be the largest economy in the world in just five years time. It’s already taken over the United States as a manufacturer and as the world’s biggest automobile market. And the
demand for cars in China will increase by tenfold in the years to come. By 2035 China will be using one fifth of all global energy. It used to be reliant on foreign direct investment. Today with three trillion dollars of international reserves and a sovereign well fund with 200 billion dollars of assets, China is the investor.
What’s perhaps most impressive is that China is catching up in terms of innovation and in terms of education. It’s about to overtake Germany in terms of new patents granted and in a recent OECD survey of educational attainment at the age of 15, the region of Shanghai came top in mathematical attainment with a score of 600. The United States came 25th with 487. You’ll be glad to hear that Canada got 527. That’s better, but not good enough.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not easy being a biographer debating against his own subject. It’s a little bit as if James Boswell had to debate against Dr. Johnson. So what I propose to do in a diplomatic way is to try to show to you that Dr. Kissinger and perhaps Fareed Zakaria are, through no fault of their own, on the wrong side of this revolution. Can I quote from Dr. Kissinger’s outstanding new book on China - page 493?: “China’s quest for equal partnership with the United States is no longer the outsized claim of a vulnerable country;
it is increasingly the reality backed by financial and economic capacities.” Or I could quote Fareed, from his excellent Post-American World: “China is a country whose scale dwarfs the United States. China is hungry for success.”
The fascinating thing is that these two great geopolitical thinkers agree that the Chinese economic challenge is also a challenge to the hegemony in the world of the United States. Once again let me quote Dr. Kissinger: “An explicit American project to organize Asia on the basis of containing China or creating a block of democratic states for an ideological crusade is unlikely to succeed.” He hopes, as he concludes in his book, for peaceful co-evolution. But he fears a repeat of what happened a hundred years ago when the rise of Germany challenged the pre-dominance of the United Kingdom.
But for me, it’s not just about China. The key to the 21st century really lies in the decline of the West. A financial crisis caused by excessive borrowing and subsidized gambling; a fiscal crisis that means the United States will soon be spending more on debt interest than on defence; a political crisis exemplified by a game of Russian roulette over the U.S. federal debt ceiling; and a moral crisis personified by a legislator named, implausibly, Weiner, sexting miscellaneous women
with pictures of his naked torso. The 21st century will be China’s because an overweight, over-leveraged, over-sexed America, not to mention a dysfunctional Europe, are on the slide.
Four decades ago Richard Nixon got this point sooner than most: “Well you can just stop and think of what would happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland. Good God, there’d be no power in the world that could even…I mean, you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system and they will be the leaders of the world.” I salute the achievement of that administration in re-opening Sino-American relations in 1972. It’s an achievement to which no-one contributed more than Henry Kissinger. So I don’t ask you to vote against him, but for his own analysis, which places him and his partner tonight firmly on our side of the debate. I urge you to support the resolution.

---------- Post added at 10:55 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:54 AM ----------

PRO CONTD..

David Li: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. As the only one from China I am extremely handicapped in this debate because in my culture and in my education, we do not advocate debates, especially debates against an elderly sage. Today I would urge you to read all the best-sellers done by my co-debaters. They are much better at explaining the huge amount of changes in China in the past decades and also even more the mountain of challenges, just as Fareed has explained to you. Buy their books - today I am advocating their points.
However, I would like to share with you three simple points, summarized by three keywords. The first keyword is energy. I would argue that the changes you have witnessed in the past decades in China at most are only halfway done. What we’re seeing is continued change in China. Why -- because there is energy. There’s new energy there in our gas tank, for continued change, whether it’s economic or political. Why -- because the changes came from a spectacular clash of civilizations between China and the West as recently as 170 years ago.
The clash was a total failure for the Chinese. It came as a big humiliation to us, lasting from generation to generation. Even today our young kids are also taking in these lessons.
And this humiliations created a huge amount of reaction and over-reaction in Chinese society, in China’s history, including the founding of the Chinese Communist Party 90 years ago almost to the day. That was more about establishing a strong and independent China than spreading a proletariat revolution all over the world. So after the founding of the Republic, 62 years ago, we’ve seen over-reactions in the Communist Party and in the government in the form of the Great Leap forward, in the form of the Cultural Revolution, none of which improved life for the Chinese, none of which advanced the interests of the Chinese. That is, until 33 years ago, when more big changes happened, which we called Reform and Opening Up.
Reform implies gradual and non-continuous improvements in our institutions, whether they are political or economic. Opening Up means learning whatever is best in the West. Initially, people didn’t believe in the message of reform and opening up, just as Fareed was saying. But our great leader Deng Xiaoping said, “No debates. Just do it.” I guess Deng Xiaoping wouldn’t be a fan of the Munk Debates. He would be a fan perhaps of Nike. Just do it. Indeed, the last thirty years of change have demonstrated the power of reform and opening up. Today I will tell you, young people are not satisfied with the progress we have made. They are eager to push for more reforms, more opening up, with the power of the Internet. That’s the first message - energy. The energy is still there, in the gas tank.
Where are we driving to? What’s the destination? The destination is the keyword revival. The destination is the revival of our great civilization 1500 years ago, the Tang Dynasty. It is not revenge against the West. It is not to emulate the success of the U.S. in the absolute dominance of the world. Rather it is revival a peaceful, self-confident, open-minded civilization such as the Tang Dynasty. That is the destination of this change, which is at most, halfway through. The second keyword is revival.
The third keyword I would like to share with you is influence. What kind of influence will China have in the world, maybe 90 years from now? I would like to argue that the influence will be multi-dimensional. First, China’s emergence has given hopes to the poor in the world, such as people in Africa and other underdeveloped regions. They say to themselves, China has been poor. China has been constrained in
natural resources. If China can make it, surely we can, as well. So we are giving hope to many of the world’s poor. That’s the first dimension.
The second dimension is that China’s emergence gives us an alternative model of social and economic institutions; different from the West, different from the U.S. In this model – compared with the U.S. and other Western models -- more weight is given to social welfare, to social well-being, to social stability, rather than pure, individual liberty.
The third dimension of influence is international relations. China’s revival of civilizations such as the Tang Dynasty is giving us a new picture of international relations in which China is looking for peace, looking for collaboration. We saw this in the past two and a half years with the global financial crisis. So overall I won’t impose my conclusion upon you. I would like to ask you to draw your own conclusions: continuous change with energy, revival of a great civilization and a positive, international influence. You draw your own conclusions. Thank you.

 

[Veritas]

CON:

Fareed Zakaria: Thank you very much. That’s a hard act to follow. My role in this debate has been to lower the average age of this debating team and I am going to try and do that as best I can without also lowering the average IQ, which I fear is also going to happen. So bear
with me and Henry will correct all the mistakes I make, including I hope, firing his biographer, which I think should be one of the first steps.
I actually was a little worried about having to debate with Henry because, you know, the man is a legendary genius, but part of debating is listening to the other side and I remember this story that I was told about Henry. It’s what journalists call “too good to check,” so I’ve never actually checked it. It goes like this: Henry Kissinger, as you know, has this legendary accent and friends of his who are German say to me, he has an accent even in German. Apparently he has an older brother who speaks normal American English. So somebody asked the brother, what explains this difference? And he said, it’s very simple; Henry never listens. So I hope this is too good to check and will crumble upon real fact-checking.
I want to make three points about China. China is not going to be the dominant power of the 21st century, the century is not going to belong to China, for three reasons: economic, political and geopolitical. Economic: one thing we’ve realized in the past decades is that nothing goes up in a straight line forever. China looks like it is about to inherit the world, but Japan looked like that for a while. It was the second
largest economy in the world; I don’t know how many of you can remember all the tales we were told about how the world was going to become Japanese. We were all going to be eating sushi -- well I guess we are all eating sushi -- but the rest of that prediction didn’t quite work out. If you think about it, most Asian tigers have grown at about 9% a year, for 20-25 years. And then they shift downward to 6%, 5%. I’m not predicting any kind of Chinese crash. I am simply saying that China will follow that law of large numbers and regress at some point to a slow growth rate, perhaps a little bit later than the others because it is a much larger country.
It is also worth pointing out that there are massive inefficiencies built into the Chinese system. They have a huge property bubble. Their growth is highly inefficient. China takes in, in foreign direct investment every month what India takes in every year and still, it only grows two percentage points faster than India. In other words, if you think about the quality of Chinese growth, it’s not as impressive as it appears. It is massive investment, a huge number of airports, eight-lane highways, a high-speed rail that’s being built and if you look at what you are getting out of it in terms of the return on investment it is not as impressive.
The UN just came out with a report indicating that China is going to have a demographic collapse over the next 25 years. It is going to lose 400 million people. There is no point in human history in which you have had a dominant power in the world that is also declining demographically. It simply doesn’t happen. And if you want to look at what a country in demographic decline looks like, look at Japan and ask yourself how powerful it is.
Even if China were the largest economy in the world, those numbers are all based on something called purchasing power parody, where China’s GDP gets inflated because the cost of a haircut in Beijing is less than the cost of one in Toronto. And international power doesn’t depend on the price of haircuts. It depends on foreign aid and oil and international investments and aircraft carriers and for all of that you need real hard currency and that adjusts these numbers slightly.
But let’s say that China does become the largest economy in the world: does it have the kind of political capacity to exercise the kind of leadership needed? Remember, Japan was the second largest economy in the world for decades and I didn’t see any kind of grand, hegemonic design. You need to have the political capacity to be able to exercise that kind of leadership. Henry’s going to talk more about these issues
but I want to telegraph them by saying this is a country ruled by a political system that is in crisis.
It is unclear whether the next succession that China goes through will look anything like this current one. China has not solved the basic problem of what it is going to do when it creates a middle class and how it will respond to the aspirations of those people. When Taiwan went through a similar process, what you saw was a transition to democracy. When South Korea went through it, you saw a transition to democracy. These were not easy periods. They were fairly bloody and chaotic ones and China is, as Niall has reminded us, a very large country and a very complex country. Imagine this kind of political instability and social instability in that process.
Finally, I’ll make one point about the geopolitics and again, Henry will talk more about this. People like to talk about the rise of Asia. I grew up in India. There is no such thing as Asia. There’s China, there’s Japan, there’s India. They don’t much like each other. And the point of fact is you are going to find that as China rises there is going to be a spirited response in India, in Japan, in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in South Korea. You already have begun to see the stirrings of this. China is not rising in a vacuum. It is rising on a continent in which there are many,
many competitors.

 

[Veritas]

CON CONTD...
Henry Kissinger: For somebody who was brought up speaking German, six minutes are barely enough to place a word. My colleagues up here have spoken of the magnitude of China. I respect its tremendous achievement. And nobody would deny, in fact I would affirm, what China has achieved in the forty years that I have been able to observe it directly.
But the issue before us is whether the 21st century belongs to China. I would say that China will be preoccupied with enormous problems domestically, and preoccupied with its immediate environment. And I have, because of this, enormous difficulty imagining a world dominated by China. Indeed, as I will conclude, I believe that the concept that any one country will dominate the world is, in itself, a misunderstanding of the world in which we now live.
China has achieved great things economically, but it has to produce 24 million jobs every year; it has to absorb six million people moving into the cities every year; it has to deal with a floating population of 150 to 200 million. It has to accommodate a society in which the coastal regions are at the level of advanced countries while the interior regions are at the level of underdevelopment. And they have to
accommodate all of this in a political system that must take care both of the economic change that is being produced and the political adaptation that inevitably has to result from the huge figures involved in the economic change.
In the geopolitical situation, China historically has been surrounded by a group of smaller countries which themselves were not individually able to threaten China, but which united could pose a threat to China. Therefore, historically Chinese foreign policy can be described as barbarian management. China has never had to deal with a world of countries of approximately equal strength. So to adjust to such a world is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has 14 countries on its borders some of which are small but can project their nationality into China; some of which are large and historically significant, so that any attempt by China to dominate the world would evoke a counter-reaction that would be disastrous for the peace of the world.
As for the quote that Niall Ferguson -- who, of course, is my biographer so he will have the last word no matter what I say here -- used about the military containment of China, I would say that one of our challenges is to accommodate the rights of China. One of China’s challenges is to accommodate itself to a world in which it is not
hegemonial as it has been for 18 of the last 20 centuries.
So if I may take the liberty of retracing the topic before us: the issue before the world is not whether the 21st century belongs to China. The issue before the world is whether, in the 21st century when China undoubtedly will get stronger, we in the West can work with China. And the issue is also whether China can work with us to create an international structure in which perhaps for the first time in history a rising state has been incorporated into an international system and strengthened peace and progress.
I say in my book that based on experience the prospects are not optimistic. But on the other hand we have never had to deal before with proliferation, environment, cyberspace and a whole set of other problems that can be dealt with only on a universal basis.
My conclusion is that the issue is not whether the 21st century belongs to China but whether we can make China belong to a more universal conception in the 21st century.

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

21st Century belongs to China.

I completely disagree.

China has neither the power, nor the intention, to become the "global hegemon" (like America currently is).

Even America today, can't claim to dominate the world, when a variety of nations can (and often do) disobey them completely. Not just large nations like China and Russia, but smaller states like Iran and North Korea do this all the time.

Look at North Korea. Testing nukes, blasting South Korean warships, firing artillery shells onto populated islands, etc.

 

[harpoon]

There are so many predictions like 21st century being a multi-polar world where US, China, Russia, India, Brazil, RSA etc will each play their respective role of regional powers. There is another in which it is said that 21st century belongs to Asia, but US will still be the dominant power, atleast for the next 100 years.But the truth is that no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy. If someone told in the early 1900s that the British Empire will disintegrate in less than 50 years, people would have laughed at him and called him insane, but the result is for everyone to see.

 

[Tractor]

Old forth script be told to us 20 years ago,just now we know the way China on is right one and most rational.

 

[Veritas]

Old forth script be told to us 20 years ago,just now we know the way China on is right one and most rational.

Except for David Li, all the members of debate of people of great stature and their commentary is worthy of attention. Every one agrees China's increased role in the world, but will China dominate? most believe NO.

 

[Tractor]

Except for David Li, all the members of debate of people of great stature and their commentary is worthy of attention. Every one agrees China's increased role in the world, but will China dominate? most believe NO.

I agree China will not be world domination,for it is too different to the else nations.