Keynote speech: ‘Understanding the World Dynamics that could Impact the Rise of China Today’
1pm
The Westin Guangzhou, 6 Linhe Zhong Road, Tianhe District
Guangzhou, 510610, China
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Growing up in California with no special interest in China, one of the few things I associated with the big country across the Pacific was mix-and-match meal creation. On airplanes and in school cafeterias, you just had “chicken or beef” choices, but Chinese restaurants were “one from Column A, one from Column B” combination domains. If only in more debates on China, a similar readiness to think beyond either/or options would prevail!
I thought of this early in 2013 when I saw a January 10 Reuters assessment of Xi Jinping’s actions during his first few weeks as head of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.). The article carried this “chicken or beef” headline: “China’s New Leader: Harbinger of Reform or Another Conservative?” Previous Chinese leaders had often turned out to have both reformist and conservative sides. Even Deng Xiaoping, considered the quintessential reformer due to his economic policies, held the line on political liberalization and backed the brutal 1989 crackdown. Despite what the headline suggested, I joined with those analysts who thought it most likely that Xi, too, would end up ordering from both the reformist and conservative sides of the menu. And that’s what he has done. For example, he has instituted a dramatic change in the way rural property rights are handled, something that economist Barry Naughton, hailing it as one of several key important recent economic reforms, lauds for finally giving farmers “a clear system to support renting, leasing, and mortgaging land.” But, conversely, Xi has also done even more than his predecessor did to rein in civil society and shown an even greater penchant than Hu for celebrating traditional Confucian values.
Joe Cock
On the evening of February 22nd, Martin Jacques gave his talk entitled “When China Rules the World” at the National Liberal Club in London. The title, lifted from his newly expanded book which has sold 350,000 copies in 14 languages, is crafted to alarm Western sensibilities; not ‘if’, but ‘when’. China’s rise is far from over, but its hegemony is already considered a foregone conclusion.
The basic facts of China’s ascendancy are indeed unique in our experience of history. The USA is the benchmark of what a modern superpower looks like, and even in 1980, the USA’s economy was over twenty times the size of China’s. Yet somehow, the IMF predicts that by 2020, China’s economy will be 20% bigger than its nearest rival. Every single country in the world has had to reconsider its relationship with China in the last 25 years. To illustrate this we need only glance at Jacques’ illustration of China’s grasp on world trade today, where red signifies that China is the country’s largest trading partner, orange second-largest, and yellow third or below.
Illustration: Tom Jellett
Simon Marginson
International education in the Asia-Pacific is tremendously exciting because the region’s countries are tremendously exciting at this juncture in world history. Student mobility continues to grow. More than half of all cross-border students are from Asia and mobility within Asia is increasing. China, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and others have ambitious targets for further growth.
What explains this growth? And the equally dynamic growth of other forms of internationalisation, including movement of academics, co-publication in research, transnational education? Without fully exploring the research literature on push-pull factors, I want to put forward three explanations.
First, international mobility, cultural engagement and learning in new sites have an attraction for us that cannot be explained simply in terms of cost-benefit. It is more about possible future benefits, or even just future possibilities, than about immediate rewards. We practise internationalisation whether or not we generate revenue from students. We subsidise internationalisation heavily. We lose money on research collaboration, and staff and student travel, but we keep doing them. For their part, many international students don’t know whether their international degree will truly boost their careers, but they go anyway.
Helen H Wang
© Frank Jang
In a recent Commonwealth Club event in Silicon Valley, two prominent China experts, Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, and Susan Shirk, author of China: Fragile Superpower, had a fascinating exchange of opinions about China’s relationship with the West.
The premise of the discussion was that the United Kingdom is the U.S.’s closest ally, but it has adopted a very different policy toward China. As I wrote here, the British now call themselves “China’s best partner in the West.” Last March, the U.K. decided to join China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) despite the strong opposition from the U.S. When the Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the U.K. in November, the British government showered him with an extraordinary pageantry – a startling contrast to his treatment from the U.S. where President Obama threatened to sanction China.
“This is a symptom of the rise of China,” Mr. Jacques said. “It represents a shift in [global] geopolitics.”
George Koo and Martin Jacques
Koo: The UK and China both claim that their relationship has entered a golden era. Why do they say this? What does it mean?Jacques: Hitherto the relationship between the UK and China has not been particularly positive. Until very recently, the UK has consistently emphasized the negative aspects of China, such as human rights and lack of democracy, as much as the positive. The new relationship between the two countries represents a big shift. The UK now views China as overwhelmingly positive. It sees China’s rise as crucial to its own future. It is seeking a comprehensive engagement with China and it perceives this as central to the UK’s economic future.
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The latest update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has just been published. It contains biographies of 222 men and women who shaped modern British history and who died in the year 2012. Martin Jacques has written the biography for Eric Hobsbawm, one of the twentieth century’s greatest historians. By kind permission of the Oxford DNB and OUP you can read the biography below or at the Oxford DNB website.
‘In Focus Session: China and India’, discussion between Martin Jacques and Shashi Tharoor, moderated by Martin Soong (CNBC Asia)
11am
Fairmont Singapore, 80 Bras Basah Road, Singapore
Private event
‘When China Rules the World’
5pm
Timmy Hele Room, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, UK