So this is China, a civilization-state, rather than a nation-state. And what does it mean? Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications. I'll give you two quick ones. The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization-state, together.
5:50
The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I'll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them. "Window dressing. When China gets its hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case." Thirteen years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997. We were wrong. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough, in nation-state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation-state mentality. But you can't run a country like China, a civilization-state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn't work. So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response: one civilization, many systems.
7:05
Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China -- maybe not sort of a comfortable one. The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han? Now, this is completely different from the world's [other] most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil -- all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. So the question is, why? Well the reason, I think, essentially is, again, back to the civilization-state. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged -- of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity.
8:19
Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together. The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference. They really believe in their own superiority, and they are disrespectful of those who are not. Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.
8:55
Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state. Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least -- that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state. And the reason for this is because -- well, there are two reasons, I think. And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy. And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special -- it enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization-state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role.
10:15
And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state's power is continuously challenged -- I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on -- for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged. It's had no serious rivals. So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history. The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state. Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don't see the state like that at all. The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family. This is the Chinese view of the state -- very, very different to ours. It's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West.
11:41
And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we've had to think about in the past. Know that China believes in the market and the state. I mean, Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century, said, "The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe." And, apart from the Mao period, that has remained more or less the case ever since. But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state. The state is everywhere in China. I mean, it's leading firms -- many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state. And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas -- as we are familiar with -- with something like the one-child policy.
12:41
Moreover, this is a very old state tradition, a very old tradition of statecraft. I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one. But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today, which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China. So there we have three building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is China -- the civilization-state, the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society.
13:44
And yet we still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong -- our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect -- this is the reason. Unfortunately, I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality. It's kind of arrogant. It's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure. And secondly, it's ignorant. We refuse to really address the issue of difference. You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian. And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures. But it's not. In many ways, it's the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way. Whereas those cultures -- virtually the rest of the world, in fact, which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West -- have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West's presence in those societies. And therefore, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.
15:40
I mean, take the question of East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. -- a third of the world's population lives there. Now the largest economic region in the world. And I'll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia. Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid, to the present. Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning, the Goldman Sachs chart. What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world. We've seen this in terms of the G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. And there are two consequences of this. First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world. There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago -- Copenhagen, climate change conference. Europe was not at the final negotiating table. When did that last happen? I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago. And that is what is going to happen in the future.
17:00
And the second implication is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with, or conversant with. And at last, I'm afraid -- take Europe; America is slightly different -- but Europeans by and large, I have to say, are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing. Some people -- I've got an English friend in China, and he said, "The con
So this is China, a civilization-state, rather than a nation-state. And what does it mean? Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications. I'll give you two quick ones. The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization-state, together.
5:50
The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I'll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them. "Window dressing. When China gets its hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case." Thirteen years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997. We were wrong. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough, in nation-state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation-state mentality. But you can't run a country like China, a civilization-state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn't work. So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response: one civilization, many systems.
7:05
Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China -- maybe not sort of a comfortable one. The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han? Now, this is completely different from the world's [other] most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil -- all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. So the question is, why? Well the reason, I think, essentially is, again, back to the civilization-state. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged -- of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity.
8:19
Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together. The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference. They really believe in their own superiority, and they are disrespectful of those who are not. Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.
8:55
Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state. Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least -- that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state. And the reason for this is because -- well, there are two reasons, I think. And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy. And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special -- it enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization-state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role.
10:15
And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state's power is continuously challenged -- I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on -- for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged. It's had no serious rivals. So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history. The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state. Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don't see the state like that at all. The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family. This is the Chinese view of the state -- very, very different to ours. It's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West.
11:41
And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we've had to think about in the past. Know that China believes in the market and the state. I mean, Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century, said, "The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe." And, apart from the Mao period, that has remained more or less the case ever since. But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state. The state is everywhere in China. I mean, it's leading firms -- many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state. And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas -- as we are familiar with -- with something like the one-child policy.
12:41
Moreover, this is a very old state tradition, a very old tradition of statecraft. I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one. But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today, which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China. So there we have three building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is China -- the civilization-state, the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society.
13:44
And yet we still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong -- our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect -- this is the reason. Unfortunately, I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality. It's kind of arrogant. It's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure. And secondly, it's ignorant. We refuse to really address the issue of difference. You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian. And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures. But it's not. In many ways, it's the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way. Whereas those cultures -- virtually the rest of the world, in fact, which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West -- have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West's presence in those societies. And therefore, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.
15:40
I mean, take the question of East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. -- a third of the world's population lives there. Now the largest economic region in the world. And I'll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia. Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid, to the present. Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning, the Goldman Sachs chart. What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world. We've seen this in terms of the G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. And there are two consequences of this. First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world. There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago -- Copenhagen, climate change conference. Europe was not at the final negotiating table. When did that last happen? I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago. And that is what is going to happen in the future.
17:00
And the second implication is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with, or conversant with. And at last, I'm afraid -- take Europe; America is slightly different -- but Europeans by and large, I have to say, are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing. Some people -- I've got an English friend in China, and he said, "The con
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