Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Wang Gungwu: Why the World Looks Like the World Today?

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Pre-order Gita Wirjawan’s book, “What It Takes”, NOW:https://sgpp.me/what-it-takes-ytWhat makes civilizations rise, thrive, and sometimes vanish? How do geography, language, and ideas shape the destiny of nations? In this sweeping conversation, historian Wang Gungwu takes us on a 2,000-year journey—through the birth of the nation-state, the paradoxes of Southeast Asia, and the making of modern China.From the Abbasid Golden Age to Mongol conquests, from India’s gods to China’s bureaucracy, from Indonesia’s “miracle” to Singapore’s unlikely success—this is history as a map for the future. We talk about borders, culture, and the problem of succession; why civilizations fail when they can’t communicate; and how Southeast Asia can lead without imitating China or the US.It’s a masterclass in how the past shapes the present—and a call for the next generation to learn, adapt, and imagine a better world order.#Endgame #GitaWirjawan #WangGungwu__________________________________________________About Professor Wang Gungwu:Prof. Gungwu is a renowned historian and scholar of Chinese history and the Chinese diaspora. He is University Professor at the National University of Singapore and Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University. He has served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong and Director of the East Asian Institute at NUS, and is widely recognized as a pioneer in overseas Chinese studies and a leading voice in the study of China’s place in the world.About the Host:Gita is an Indonesian entrepreneur and educator. He is the founding partner of Ikhlas Capital and the chairman of Ancora Group. Currently, he is teaching at Stanford as a visiting scholar with Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy; and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.____________________________________________You might also like:https://youtu.be/rc5MI1qSMBUhttps://youtu.be/YvjuMn5XvZ8https://youtu.be/bh8l-nPH19wExplore and be part of our communityhttps://endgame.id/Collaborations and partnerships:https://sgpp.me/contactus

You can only have socialism after you've had capitalism. Yeah. Capitalism knows how to make money. Socialism does not. Socialism's idea is that when you have the money, you distribute it fairly. So that nobody is too rich and nobody is too poor. And that's what socialism is good for. But if you have no money to new wealth to begin with, what do you distribute?

What's the point of distributing poverty? Yeah. That is Deng Xiaoping's genius. You can't have socialism without prosperity. Hi, friends. Today we're honored to have the presence of Professor Wang Gungu, who is a historian. And he is from Southeast Asia, but he's spent and traversed through many parts of all. Professor Wang, thank you so much.

It's such an honor. Pleasure. You were born in Surabaya because your father, was supposed to be teaching there at a local Chinese school, but you moved on to different parts of Asia in Malaysia, China, Singapore. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you grew up and what shaped you into what you have become.

Well, I was a clear example of what might be called a sardner. I mean, my parents came out not intending to settle in Southeast Asia. My father was given a job to be headmaster of the first Chinese high school in Sorabaya. So he was very honored and very proud to be there. But of course, his timing was very bad. He arrived just before the Depression started. And I was born in 1930, where the Depression was at its worst. So his school ran out of money. So he didn't stay as long as he intended to. And two years later, he could, without funding, he resigned and look for another job. and somebody in Singapore, Malaysia,

helped him find a job in Ipo. So we found our way to Ipo. But the reason he went to Ipo is not because he was going to Ipo, it was nearer to China, because his school had no funding even to send him back to China where they recruited him because they had no funding. They paid for his way there, but couldn't afford to send him back.

So he had to find a way halfway there. And in the meantime, hoping to earn him, enough to go back to China. So the essence of there lies in the fact that we were sageness with no plans to settle. And so I grew up in an atmosphere of waiting to go home to China. So that was how I saw the world. The world was just there. China was there.

And we were just waiting for the right time to go and see my grandparents who had never seen me. And that was how my parents transmitted those values that they had brought from China and tried to pass on to me somehow while we were waiting. But as it turned out, the Japanese war in China, my grandparents told my father, you've got a good job there, you might as well stay on because if you come back to a war in China, you're not likely to get a decent job. So my father stayed on and lo and behold the Japanese came to Malaysia and they took over so as you can see it delayed for us

for another 10 years that war delayed us another 10 years so it was not until after the war it's later as 1947 before we finally had the chance to go back to China and of course by that time the reason why I delayed

was because I needed a certificate from a high school so that I could apply to go to a university in China, and that is why I stayed on to 47. So these are, you can see, they all linked to going back to China as my home. So the Sajed-ding thing was basically the pattern of my life until I was 17 years old.

So to cut the story short, arriving in China in the middle of a civil war, which we didn't expect, the communists to win and then to find the commonists of the verge of victory and then returning in the end returning to Malaya

because that was not what my parents wanted to return to then I found myself having to start again but this time this time not as a Sajana now this time recognizing the fact that we may have to

settle in Malaya and that as it turned out we did settle in Malaya and it so happened I was fortunate that the Federation of Malaya as a country had just been created. And I had lived long enough in the Malay state of Perra to qualify, to apply to be a citizen as a naturalized citizen. So I was very fortunate. So I applied. And because I applied and I got to citizenship, I was able to go to the University of Malaya,

which is right here on this campus, and which had just been founded in 1949. So I came here as a freshman to a brand new university, and I started afresh as a settler. What piqued you or evoked you with respect to history? Was it your parents or just whatever was going on around the world that aroused your interest in history? You see, my formal education was very pity.

I mean, I was sent to an English school to start with when my father was waiting to go home because he thought since we're in Malaya with an English school there. Instead of sending me to a Chinese school, he thought he could teach me Chinese and I could learn him English. And this would be an advantage for me when we go back to China. So I went to an English school with Chinese education at home. And at home, he spoke only Chinese. So I was living in two worlds, even though. from the beginning.

And the fact that we had, I had at least some idea of having a colonial subject of the Dutch, and then of the British, and then of the Japanese, you know, one after the other, and followed by the return of the British. All this made life very uncertain.

Who are you and what, what is the world like? When it's one regime after the other, each one, you know, unthinking and uncaring in its own way, brutal in some ways, and living through that, one's expectations were very low. The fact that you could survive in that series of uncertainties was good enough.

What else can you hope for? So to actually see the Japanese defeated, we had no role to play in that, we couldn't do anything without help of the great powers that Japan would have been succeeded, who was successful and would have been brought up as Japanese subjects. I mean, that's how we were prepared to be as up to 1945. So with that kind of uncertainty, the return of the British was pretty unreal.

We knew very well that they weren't going to last long, that they had been defeated, and they lost everything in Europe, and the empire was dismantling, and they had to go home. So that's only a transition period of, trying to build a Malayan nation while waiting for the British to leave and all that. So there's a transition period of trying to discover what it was like to be somebody who's part of a new nation yet to be born. Most of us didn't know what Malaya was going to be like.

It was a pretty mixed up place with a small majority of Malay people who called themselves Malays, a small minority of Indians. in between a very large minority of Chinese. How would this be the basis for a new nation or something which we were very puzzled by, but fascinated at the possibility? And we looked around and were quite envious of the fact that our neighboring countries like Indonesia had a sense of nationality almost immediately. You could have an Indonesian revolution, and you had the kind of Bangsa Indonesia, which we didn't really have. So that kind of comparison that the Filipinos had their sense of nationhood, the Vietnamese

had theirs, but we didn't. And so it's in that kind of uncertainty again, to participate in the shaping of a new national identity was exciting, but actually very challenging and to some extent mystifying. We didn't really know what we were doing. All we know was that we wanted to be independent. We were looking forward to independence with a new sense of identity. But exactly what that identity was was a question of it. I'll get back to a number of the points you raised,

but I want to pick on a topic of history. It is my observation that the young generation today They spend so much time on their mobile phones, eight, nine, ten hours a day. They seem to be able to only communicate with themselves, as opposed to communicating with their predecessors. There's eight billion people on Earth, but their predecessors amount to about 125 billion. I call that history. Is there a concern that there might be a rising degree of historical amnesia? that might be a discount to humanity going forward?

I don't actually sense that. I feel that every generation has its own or had its own aspirations. I mean, the equivalent of your playing with computers today, I'll be playing with my tops and spiders or fighting, that's better. Finding games to play with as children. and we were, you can say we didn't care two hoods about the past. We were just enjoying ourselves, learning ourselves,

and as we grew up, we would just pick up the next set of games to play, the next set of things to enjoy, and we're open to films or other things. So whether there was any better sense, our ancestors, our earlier groups, had any better sense of history or not, to me is questionable. I think all young people share that sense of just learning to grow up and to learn about your environment, who are your neighbors, who do I play with, who shall I be friends with, and what's my school like, my teachers like.

These are quite natural. And playing with this computer is a slightly variation, but essentially that's interesting in a way going up. Who am I and what am I to be is now being learned through a computer instead of playing marbles in the shed with other kids. So maybe it takes a different form. But I think ultimately, as you grow up, you have more and more memories. Your own memories of your own past would remind you that what you can remember can help you. And gradually, as you go older and more mature,

you recognize that the events outside also have their own past. And if you didn't know the past, if you were ignorant of the past, you actually find the present incomprehensible. So you want to understand it better. You just got to know a little bit about the past. And sooner or later you realized that everything has a past. Nothing is without a past. I mean, even the wisest man, the cleverest man,

If he didn't have the past, he would not be where he is today. I mean, we look at the brilliant technologists and scientists today. They would not be where they are today, if not because of the work done, earlier work done by their predecessors. And they had actually built their knowledge upon what they had done 500 years ago, 300 years ago, 10 years ago. And all that cumulatively has made them brilliant or with brand new ideas and some new imaginative. creative way of looking at the world again. So, sooner or later,

you will realize that your memories and what you can remember helps you and what you can learn from books about history or whatever where you learned it from

all adds up to your better understanding of your present and the possibilities of the future. That sort of follows. And I'm optimistic in believing that most people at some time or the other would realize that.

And it would start to affect the way he behaves, the way he thinks, and the way he looks to the next step in what he wants to do with his own life. You aptly pointed out that you're a born optimist. Is it your optimism or even conviction that history will catch up with people, eventually or inevitably? I think I was a born optimist simply because I had a very happy outlook as a child. And I was very lucky not to be,

not to have suffered any great tragedies or anything like that. So that made my life quite cheerful and I grew up very happy, as a happy child. But the optimism also comes on the fact that the more I learn about the past,

about history, I'm really impressed by the human being over the millennia, how we respond to our environment, how we respond to changes in conditions under which we live, how to respond to tragedies and opportunities, and how creative and how adaptable people are,

how quickly they can see a way out of a dilemma that they are facing. Not everybody is successful, but more people are successful than you realize, and that is because, some way they find a way to deal with their problem and they will look out for every possible way to deal with their problem. That is most people do that.

That is what we mean by being adaptable. You change your way of doing things and where you think by looking at the environment and saying, how can I overcome this particular problem and reach the next stage. And so having seen that over the centuries and stories from history, confirmed that people had borne through terrible tragedies

and emerged victorious or at least surviving pretty well and then ready to move on to a next stage. Plenty of stories that confirmed that. So that makes me more confident that being optimistic is not entirely a foolish thing but actually has basis from our experiences as human beings from way back to the present. And we're still like that.

We haven't changed. In my own lifetime, I've just seen people respond to their difficulties and their tragedies very successfully and overcome their fears and regain confidence and deal with life in the end successfully. That's reason for optimism. You know, having gone through long,

tumultuous periods. You witnessed right around 1945 and shortly thereafter the establishment or construction of new nation states from around 70 countries to more than 100 countries in different parts of the world. How did you see that being similar or different to your earlier construct of nation states under the Westphalian concept in 1648? The human beings organize themselves very differently at different times. Initially, I suppose, the most fundamental unit

is the family. Your own family, you, your wife and children, the basic unit, extended family, and then many, several extended families living together in a village or in a particular terrain,

becoming a tribe, sharing cultural values, sharing, you know, successes and failures and surviving things together, working together, and learning to cooperate and realizing that only by working together can you overcome some of the greater difficulties. So over time, millennia, we've learned to, we evolved from that simple unit to larger and larger unit. But as each unit grows, it requires different ways of organizing the unit to make sure that it is peaceful. People live harmoniously, that they're socially compatible, that they share values,

and really understand how to live happily with one another and always help each other, you know, Gortem-Royon kind of society. How do you achieve that? And that took probably a long time. But this organization, starting from the family, blood kinship into marriage, skinships, extend it further and further

until you share something like one language, a set of beliefs, a set of values, about how you relate to one another, and then you become a cultural unit. You actually develop a culture. We don't have nations.

That cultural unit sharing a way of constructing the society to enable it to survive all kinds of difficulties and to fight against the next tribe who wants to take your territory or wants to expand at your expense. So you learn to deal all that,

deal with all that. So that took again millennia. And eventually we come out with larger and larger units which people getting cleverer at organizing bigger and bigger units. And eventually you get to an idea of a state where you have a political leader who leads many tribes,

not just one tribe. He provides leadership, for a number of related tribes who find that they do have something in common against another set of tribes who have a different background. And then that leadership forms, it begins to structure the whole thing with institutions, with structures, with officers and soldiers and who does what, and if I have a specialization of labor. You do the farming, you do after the cattle, you deal with the camels,

You make weapons and, you know, and somebody does the fighting. And you do that. So everybody does that in one way or the other. And then sometime along the way, a group of people emerge who say, we are more than just tribes and so on. We are wonderful people. We believe in God. We believe in spiritual things.

We have more, we are more than just eating and eating. sleeping and working, we have ideas about the future. As we're now human beings, we have a language, we have now, I see, some of them have started to have writing, we have literate, we can actually transmit our ideas by writing it down and sharing our views through reading the same literature, same language. And out of it, you come ideals about our human beings,

how we can be better, how our lives can be better, how we can even determine what we can do after death, as it were, after life. So we start to think beyond all that into our spiritual needs, our intellectual needs, and then you get something what we will call civilization. And where that culture emerges to become civilization is because you have overcome your cultural boundaries to reach a set of ideas which can be shared beyond your own culture

because they are so striking and so universally applicable and attractive to other people as well who say that you have a set of ideas that I don't have, I would like to select that to be used by my people. So then borders are crossed. The values can cross borders

and best done if you have a literature, if it's literate, because I can read what you have discovered and your spiritual ideas on paper, and I learn your language, I can master it, and make your values part of my own, select what I want to be part of my own. Then you go to the next stage, not just a group of local cultures and so on,

but combining to be a civilization that can be shared, with other people who don't belong to your culture, but who see something in your civilization that is so worthwhile, so valuable, and something they, they themselves lack, and I would take from you, and you want to share with me, that borderless set of values

becomes, I believe, the basis for civilization. So over the millennia, many civilizations emerged, But some civilizations survived better than others. So we know over history that there were civilizations that emerged and disappeared because they failed to communicate successfully all. Their values weren't attractive to others, and they were taken over by other people. Or other civilizations drew their people in a different direction.

But in the end, we had over the last few thousand years about six or seven major civilizations and some of them are still with us. But how they relate to each other, of course, involves both sharing and sometimes competing. Not always happy. That's a whole semester lecture on nation states. But in my simple observation, any civilization that's been more lasting than others would have been one that would have been able to make. maintain a combination or a good combination between the force of preservation and the force of

innovation. And that, to me, intuitively, requires open-mindedness. And open-mindedness seems to be something that's ingrained within the cultural equation of any society, community, family, institutions, or what. tell us how do you differentiate between civilizations and cultures and how do you suggest that civilizations continue to show open-mindedness by way of the enrichment or the continuous enrichment of the culture this is actually related to your earlier question about nationhood because nation is one of the latest stages of their tribal development of grouping

grouping until we had the idea of nationhood. A nationhood is just another way of organizing effectively and efficiently a group of people to draw borders and they will defend those borders. So essentially, the borders were always there because in the most primitive tribe has a border between one tribe and another tribe. And we have enough studies by the anthropologists and ethnologists, and ethnologists, to know that two tribes next to each other, just with a valley, with a mountain in between,

when they meet each other, they are hostile. And they're suspicious of each other, and they're even prepared to kill each other, because this is my terrain, this is my border, my culture, your culture is different from mine. Your language, your spoken language, is different from mine. I don't understand you, you don't understand me. But as these problems are overcome by larger and larger group, your local cultures become

different kinds of localities. There could be several valleys and then another river valley further away, so the distances are greater. But the borders remain. There will always be borders when you claim that my culture is different from your culture. and respecting my culture, I have to defend it against your culture because yours is different. To get over that stage is not easy.

People have not always been successful in doing that. And that can go on. So over time, these tribal things become states. This states become empires because the way you organize yourself is how powerful can you get. So if you're organized, you have a successful state is one that can make its people prosperous. There are surpluses.

You use the surpluses to develop weaponry, attack offensive weapons, which you use to expand your territory at other people's expense. So you're better organized you are. The more power and wealth to have, you can start to take over other people's territories who are not as powerful and not as wealthy as you are. So power and wealth becomes the next stage of expansion of territory. And so you move from a local, bordered culture to an empire. You have a state powerful enough with a head, powerful leader,

with his army, well-equipped and enough wealth to take on another state and win. and if you win and expand your empire, you're more powerful. So empires, before there were nations, there were empires. Empires were just different groups of cultural groups taking over from each other. Whoever is stronger wins. So before long, you have a series of empires. Based on different things. Some empires are based on agriculture, agrarian empire.

Some are based on horsemen, tremendous mobility, and the horses become like, you know, the tanks of today, they just say they are tremendously useful for taking you fast and taking people by surprise and using the horse as part of the weaponry against people who are on foot and that sort of thing. So methods of fighting, all these are technological improvements

to enable one group to win over another group. So the incentive to learn more, to build better, to have better technical skills is very great because if you can do that, you can win. If you fail to do that, you fall behind and the other guy who has better weaponry and did better technologically and has more wealth and power wins over you. So you know that. That becomes the secret of success and victory. So everybody starts doing that.

So you create little empires. Almost all the states that we look at, ancient states, were little empires. Some very small, some bigger, and they are constantly shifting their borders, trying to expand their power. So that has been our experience for a long, long time. And then in the name of God's God and the name of some superior being,

you start to have a reason for killing somebody. virtuously. You feel that you have the moral superiority because you have a God behind you against somebody who doesn't have one or has a wrong God and you can justify it in higher terms. So you start to imagine an outer world which justifies what you do. It makes what you do not wrong but actually right, not just winning because you're more powerful, but my power comes from the fact that I'm a better person, because of a better God, a stronger God. All these things start to evolve. And so these empires get justifying themselves in different terms, and they become very big. I mean, you look at some of the early empires. Many of them

were just simply power and wealth. Others were in the names of God, of superior, some superior being that has guided them and enabled them to win. And you might, you might be. may have different reasons, but you've built empires. Your empire's, Ashoka's empires can be drawing upon Buddha, but Alexander's empire has got multiple gods that helped him conquer half the world at that time. And then you have the Greek, the Roman Empire, your Persian, the old Persian empires.

All this began to evolve. And so many, you go back to, even further back to Egypt and Assyria, all that, they all started that, way. In the name of some superior being, you capture other being to serve you, become your slaves, and work for you.

So all that went on for a long time, and all in the name of empires. But somewhere along the line, and certainly a very good example of that is the way the Christians and the Muslims

fought in the Mediterranean. They were that they believed in the same God their beliefs came from the same book they read the same book they had the same origins as it were and yet they came to different conclusions about who is right and who is wrong

and one side won the other side had to fight to defend themselves and try to defeat the other side so you had the Islamic Empire and the Christian crusaders facing each other for nearly a thousand years without changing the borders because it was such a powerful side on both sides.

That's so much power on both sides. They just kill each other without gaining much, neither side gaining much. But in the course of that, one side, both sides actually, began to kill each other within itself between different groups of the Muslims, and different groups of the Christians, the Catholics and the Protestants,

and out of that group, they kill each other so much in the 30 years' war, that decided that we can't go on like that. So the Treaty of Westphalia was really an admission that we've gone too far. We can't go on like that. It'll never end. We'll go on killing.

So they sat down not to resolve their religious differences because they couldn't do that, but to say we will no fight anymore by drawing borders. That's an interesting thing. The concept of a physical border was what was the product of the Treaty of Westphalia. You and I have borders,

and we then respect each other's borders. I will not cross your borders, not with arms anyway, and you will not do the same to me, and then we will have peace. And they did have peace. They did have a peace for about 100 years, but a little bit of porthaling here and there,

but they had a peace, but they didn't still develop a nationhood idea. That came actually after the Crenshaw Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, that the idea that all these borders should not be controlled by kings, by priests, by soldiers, by aristocrats, and so on, but these borders should be represented the whole citizenry within those borders. That was a brand new idea, never existed before. And the first country really to achieve that was France, but followed by the United States. But it didn't mean that it were entirely equal or idealistic in every respect.

But they created the idea that within the borders, people belong to a nation. And everybody in their nation is a citizen, a citoyen with equal rights. And then the idea of freedom, equality, and fraternity emerged as the foundation for the nation of citizens. And out of that, one, France and the United States followed and the Dutch followed, these three expanded and everybody else began to start thinking about it because they found that when you organize yourself very well as a nation, you can be more powerful. Because then your soldiers are not fighting just for mercenary or because of feudal,

obligations, but you're fighting because it is your country. I'm a citizen. I'm loyal and proud of being a citizen of France, and in the name of France, I will fight and sacrifice my life, my country, right or wrong, you know, kind of thing. All these evolved out of that, and what we developed was a brand new kind of empire. Up to that point, all empires were feudal empire, kings, aristocrats, priests, and so on. But out of that came the national empire. We used nation and empire as if they're separate words, but they were not. They were one thing to start with.

National empires, the national empire of Napoleon's France is one example. So once you had that, then in the name of your nation, you build an empire. And the first two countries to achieve that power were France and Britain. Of course, the Dutch also, but they were weaker, a smaller country. But that power created the idea of a nationhood as a foundation of a really powerful empire. That could, between the two of them, they realized that they were fighting each other unnecessarily. The world was so big, you take one half and I take the other half and then we don't have to fight each other. So, in fact, the Anglo-French power system dominated the world.

for 100 years. And so in the end, the Germans got jealous, the Italians got jealous, and then they found that the only way they could fight back was to create nations. Because the Germans were not a nation. There are numerous principalities in little kingdoms and so on. But they said the only way to fight these British and French is to become a German nation. So you have Prussia producing, you know, Bismarck to create a German nation. And Italy finally caught up. So everybody wanted to be a nation. Why did they want to be a nation at that time? They wanted to be a nation because that can make them powerful

and they can have national empires of their own. Why should we let you two countries share the world? We want our share. So the Germans jumped in, the Italians, and the Russians jumped in. And the Russians had an advantage because the land part, nobody else was interested. The Germans and the Italians were fighting in the Mediterranean and at sea.

And at sea, of course, they face a British Navy. And that was the most powerful Navy in the world. So we had the first and second World War because of that. But as a result, that was the end of national empires. Everybody decided no more empires. We have nation states instead. Now, whether that was the right decision or not, looking back, we're not so sure or not.

But at the time, when I was a young boy, when the United Nations was created, That was a fantastic idea. Doesn't seem that way now. That all our colonies can have become independent, sovereign nation states equal in the eyes of everybody else in a United Nations organization. Unbelievable idealistic in many ways. But that's how our nation state emerged. But it's been a testing time.

And trying to build a nation state turned out to be much more difficult than people realized. Some people were lucky. The Indonesians, I don't know how you all did it, but the Indonesians did that. We've been lucky. They were very lucky. But they took over the whole of the Dutch Empire to become one nation state. Absolutely incredible.

The Indians couldn't do it because the British didn't allow them to do it. But at least the Dutch were not strong enough to stop it. Well, thanks to the Americans. And thanks to the Americans. But the Americans, why did they do it? That's another reason. another set of circumstances. Professor, I want to, you did your thesis on the power structure in the five dynasties of China.

I want to start talking about China. Tell us your views about how civilizations have changed in China during those five dynasties by way of the power structure, but some of the cultural elements that have remained or state consistently all throughout. I think I can best talk about China by comparing ancient China to what we

call India today, ancient India, because by contrasting the two, we can understand China better. Because India was a powerfully civilization with brilliant ideas which were recorded

in what we have now in the Ramayana, the Mahabata, and all those Rick Vedder's texts and so on, which we still preserved in Sanskrit, a very ancient set of ideas that emerged out of a group of, various groups of people who didn't do it together. They didn't do it as it were as a state.

They had different philosophers and thinkers whose imagination led them to devise different ways of looking at the world. and they did it essentially in the Ganges, Ganges Valley, but some in the south, some of the north. But China developed in a completely different way. They also developed on the river system, the yellow river, but from the very beginning, they found that they had tremendous challenges

in a river that constantly flooded. And they had to find a way of survival. when the rivers flooded. And they did it by organizing themselves in very structured ways of dealing with the floods. And then they created, in a way, a bureaucracy to deal with a common problem.

When I look at the history of the Ganges or the Indus, they never flooded in the same way that the Yellow River flooded. There were planes. Whenever it flooded, it really destroyed millions of lives who caught in that flood. This is not true in India.

So the Indians never faced that problem. They could deal with each problem separately. The Chinese couldn't. They had to find one solution to this and they created a civilization of highly skilled and trained engineers in a way, hydraulic engineers to deal with water.

And that, it gave them, basis of an administrative structure, which we now would call a bureaucracy of officials who were selected because of their skills in dealing with a water flooding situation. And over time, they grew into a large organization because the river is such a long river and because they deal with the whole length of it and was constantly flooding and they didn't know how to do it. Otherwise, they created a system which depended on a unitary state, one powerful one after the other. And eventually that one was brought together in the third century BC into an empire, the Qin Han Empire. The Chin Empire brought together a number of states

all very similar, but all producing the kind of skills which control a state bureaucracy to deal with their flooding problems in their particular area. The details are too complicated, but the essential message is that out of very different systems that produce different civilizations. The Indian one was always open

to different ideas. The wise people wandered around, sharing the ideas, referring to different gods, drawing upon the gods, as it were, to explain their life on earth. The Chinese didn't. didn't fight to do that.

They didn't seem to need that kind of spiritual help from God's. Instead, they develop a kind of a Tien idea. There's a kind of superior natural order, a power

they call heaven, we translate it as heaven, which you draw upon, which is nothing to do with God, and they actually has got a will of its own, but they provide. provide the framework in which you could develop your human values and develop them in such a way that they will provide for everybody by wise leaders who are all thinking of how to better the societies that they are responsible for, and then they select among themselves, educate and train them to do this in an orderly way. So the sense of unitary order and the sense of continuity, the sense that every dynasty or every king or every administration has lessons to teach the next administration was valid.

So you develop a sense of history that everybody learns from the past. So the Chinese actually developed that and used their writing to transmit the lessons. from one generation to another. And that sense of history became one history, continuous, basically continuous, for now 3,000 years. India had nothing like that. The opposite, India does not believe in history.

There are words of wisdom which come from the great classics of literature and religious and spiritual life, and they've inherited that and interpreted that in different ways in the names of different gods. Your Vishnu, your Krishna, your Shiva, provides different inspirations for how you interpret it.

It was not one single religion in a way, it was a body of different religious responses to the demands of life, which created a great civilization. But because it was an open civilization, it was easy to learn from it. And when their merchants and priests came to Southeast Asia, The Southeast Asia at that time had not yet developed their own civilization, but found

this very acceptable that these people have thought through many things and they selected from that to take into their own culture, inserted into their own culture, and integrated it into something that they own. So they began to share almost all the same values for probably something like that. 2,000 years from the earliest, we don't have clear record, but from the earliest context between South Asia and Southeast Asia, the spread of these ideas had already gone to Nusantara and even on the mainland. And it was tremendously, attractive, it was open. And people all learn how to be open in the Indian way. So you don't talk about borders.

The Indians have no real concept of borders of any kind, and neither does Southeast Asia, to begin with. They have mandalayas. You can see that that attraction of an openness that Indian civilization represented was very attractive in Southeast Asia. And so very quickly, all the Nusantara and the mainland areas had taken on these spiritual, aesthetic, literary, including the language and so on, and into their way of life. So that for the next thousand years, 1,500 years,

it emerged as part of Southeast Asian civilization. In fact, almost shared whether on the mainland, whether it's in Java or in Khmer Empire, you shared a lot. They didn't have names for it. Today we call them Hinduism and Buddhism. In those days, they didn't have those names. They only shared what was coming out of the ideas

that the priests and the merchants brought to them. Extraordinary. And out of that, when the Chinese civilization spread southwards towards the South China Sea, they met. And then the Chinese discovered that actually they shared the same interest in Buddhism because they had got their Buddhism overland, but they found that when they went south, overseas, these people were also familiar with the same ideas that Buddha represented,

or for that matter, the Hindu priest represented. There was no real borders between them. And the Chinese said, we can reach India by sea. And Southeast Asia became their route to do that. So all the trading and all that was going on before that for material goods and commercial goods now became focused on goods which are related to the religion. So, for example, the major commercial products that the Chinese were involved in in Southeast Asia were essentially to do with Buddhism, ideas that coming from India, and the Buddhist use of Southeast Asian spices and all kinds of material, the kinds of things that you got out of Southeast Asia, natural to Southeast Asia, all became

the crucial products for China. They were import them. So that trading system became tremendously successful during the period, I would say, from roughly the fifth century to all the way down to the, for a thousand years. And Buddhist, Chinese, Buddhist monks, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Buddhist monks would come to Palembang and to Sri Vigaya. Orientation, before heading out to Nalanda. Learn their Pali and Sanskrit to go to Nalanda to go to the Buddhist University and learn the sutras directly to learn to read the sutras themselves. Instead of depending on Indian or Central Asian priests bringing the message, now they can

actually read the sutras themselves and retranslate them into their own language. which is tremendous revolution of ideas. And that was that thousand years. And that was tremendous. And in the middle of all that, of course, Islam came as traders. I mean, from the Red Sea, Gulf of Persian Gulf, the Saudi Arabian Oman and all that, they came out and joined in in the trading that was going on.

And most of the trading had to do with. spices and what they call it, incense and all the things, had very religious significance too. One of which was Nudmake. And all that. Professor, you know, the latter part of the first millennium seemed to me as being incidental or coincidental that we had a Southeast Asia that seemed so open-minded, India that was so open-minded, And at that time, the Tang Dynasty, that was so open-minded, but also west of India was the Abbasid Empire that showed great degree of open-mindedness where technological innovation, economic innovation, social, cultural, even geopolitical innovation, innovation took place. It just seemed a little too coincidental at that time for two to 300 years towards the latter part of the first millennium.

You mentioned that the Abbasid, the Caliphate, inherited the great science and the technology of the whole Mediterranean civilization before that. And they were the successes. They had a brilliant, all those wonderful scientific texts of the Greek or Roman period were taken over and they were used very successfully by the Abbasid leadership. People say that they lost it only after the invasion of the Mongols. that the Mongol conquest destroyed their confidence in the secular way of dealing, more secular way of dealing with the world. And they then retreated into a very Quranic, limited Islamic world and then abandoned a lot of the scientific inquiries that they had been making before that.

And those texts were then, after the fall of Consadinople, actually spread back to Europe. and the Europeans picked it up, whereas the Islamic world, in a way, abandoned it, gave it away, because they then concentrated on the Quranic way of dealing with the universe. So, I mean, I don't entirely accept that, but I think there's an element of that, in the turning point in which they lost that confidence in the technological and more materialistic approach

of dealing with the universe, and the Europeans picked it up. But let me put it this way. To me, to go back to this peculiarity of the Chinese state was that its language was not alphabetic. I know this has been much speculated on, but I think it is a crucial differentiation of the Chinese state. Because it was not alphabetic,

it was possible to unite multiple cultures who spoke different languages didn't understand each other because they could read the same text in ideographic text and not have to depend on how you pronounce it

didn't matter how you pronounce it when you read it is the same meaning same word, everybody understood the language you use that made it possible for this civilization to bring to probably dozens of different cultures to be part of one civilization based on the fact

that they all now use this geographic language which everybody could understand. All you have to do is learn to read it. Of course, literacy rate was not high, but if you understood your leadership all read the same books, didn't speak the language, but you could write to each other. in the same way, they could deal with Japan and Korea and Vietnam, didn't understand the language at all, but they used the same script. So that was not happening elsewhere. When it was alphabetical, then what you do is you try to write in the way you speak. And by so doing, you formalize and in fact freeze the language into the written word. And they create different language.

then drawing borders between the languages and creating the 20-odd different states in Europe, for example, that created a nation-state idea. Because one of the key to the nation-state idea was that it was based on one language. That is, to the Chinese mind, it was incredible. If you were based on that, China would have been 25 different states today, because they are 25 different or more.

different languages in China. But the unity of the script enable the aristocracy or meritocracy to actually ensure that all of them share the same values because you read the same text. That's what China is a peculiar and unique civilization because of that.

But today you're facing a different problem. The problem is today is that that language has become the national language of one country. Because the Vietnamese no longer use it. The Koreans don't use it anymore. The Japanese use some of it, but they've created other Katagana, Hiragana, ways of getting out of it.

But only the Chinese now use that language. So it has, in a way, created borders for itself. Now their problem is to make sure that everybody within those borders, use the same language, which creates a different set of problems for themselves. So you can see how the modern China, by inheriting that past, has actually forced them to face a different kind of challenge, which other countries don't have. In that sense, very interesting.

It took a long time for the Han ethnicity to be consolidated. Well, it was consolidated eventually, if I may come back to the point when they all learn the same written language. Because the moment you accept that same language, you inherit the whole body of literature that is written in that language, it becomes part of your heritage. And if you share that heritage, you become Han. It doesn't matter about your ethnicity. It's what you share in that language and the language. body of ideas and literate texts that come with the language. Once you share that, that's what makes you harm.

And what makes today, what is the Chinese of the PRC, that's what they share. And that is also, you might say, consolidated by that sense of history. Because from the beginning, you started to record it in the same way, in that same language, one language, no matter who conquered China, it could be Turkic, Mongol, Manchu, whoever conquered China. The fact that they use that language, they all become Han.

Because that language determined their identity. Professor, you've talked about this earlier, but I want to hear again the transition from the Manchu or Qing Dynasty to a nationalist China. thereafter to a communist China. How is your view about this, you know, three episodes that I thought would have... It's part and parcel of this oneness of China.

You see, when you are united in that way as a unit, no matter who rules, at that time it was ruled by Manchu's. But the Manchus, by that time, all had learned Chinese. Right. And without even thinking about it, they have become Han. because that's their common language. They no longer use Manchu, except among themselves. Nobody else learned Manchu, but every Manchu learned Chinese language

in order to deal with the Chinese, who are the majority. So they become Han. So how do you distinguish by that time? But the fact was that it was European, you might say, introduction of the idea of national empires that made the Chinese conscious of the fact that these Manchus are not us.

They are not Han. They are invaders from outside who conquered us. And in the name of the National Empire, to restore our nationality, we must drive them out. So this is how Sun Yatzen started. And most of the southern Chinese,

particularly south of the Yangtze, were most anti-manchu because they were treated the worst by the Manchu's. Manchus had a lot of trouble. They were fighting the Manchus longer and the Manchus treated them badly. Whereas in the north, they were so close to the Manchus, they operated quite closely and they were not so hostile to the Manchus, but the southerners were. So Sun Yat-San and all these leaders of that rebellion against the Manchus were in the name of the Chinese nation as opposed to the Manchu nation.

even though in fact they all knew that the Manchu's are all using Han and using Chinese, when they're dealing with, especially when they're ruling China. So in that context, Sunat's only way of dealing with it was to take up the European idea of nationhood and use the nation state as his base for fighting the Manchu's. and it had to be in the name of the Han nation against the Manchu's. That's how he started. But at the same time, because the dynasty was a Manchu dynasty and they wanted to get rid of the Manchu's,

the idea developed that, do we need an emperor? So Sunat-Sem's most radical, more radical supporters said, we don't need an emperor. The Japanese have an emperor, the British have an emperor, but the French don't have an empire. You don't need an emperor. The Americans don't have an emperor. You don't need an emperor.

A republic is good enough. So gradually, they came round to the idea that when we get rid of the manchus, we get rid of the idea of an emperor at the same time. But if you do that, you're actually breaking with the continuity of Chinese history. Because all that continuity was based on dynastic leadership of emperors one after the other.

Now you say you get rid of the emperor, you start with the republic. How do you begin when the vast majority of the Chinese people never heard of the word republic, didn't know what he meant. So he had to sell the idea and he found it very, very difficult. And one of the famous things that Song Yat-chan said was, the Chinese have no sense of nation. They were never a nation. They were subjects of an emperor.

So under the Ming, the subject of the Ming, under the Qing, subjects of the Qing, whether they were Han Chinese or Manchu's were less important than the fact that they were subjects of the emperor. Now you're telling them there's no emperor. There's a president. Who is the president? A republic. What's a republic? So as you can see, that first revolution in nine years,

2012 ended up very badly. Nobody knew what to do with the republic. So all these military people started to fight each other in the warlords, trying to be president. And some of them wanted to be re-emperors, but they were uncertain what they wanted. Essentially, then the westernized Chinese, they said, the only way to save China is not to save China as a nation. That is not enough, you've got to save Chinese civilization. Because it is tied to the civilization if you want to be Chinese. It's not that nationhood is not meaningful to the Chinese, but what they shared was a civilization. So if that civilization dies, where's the Chinese? Who is the Chinese? So in a funny sort of way, they were tremendously impressed by what we call social Darwinism.

by interpreting Darwin among human beings Darwin was talking about evolution of species but you translated to human beings you say that the survival of the fittest meant that if you're not fit to survive

you're finished, you're gone so social Darwinism began to be interpreted that the greatest powers deserve to survive and if you lose you deserve to die. Your civilization die will die. So then they saw themselves as Chinese civilization defeated by Western civilization. How do you save that? So then the

idea was we have to learn from the West. Taking the Republic is only just a beginning. We have to learn everything from the West. So in the Mayfoss movement some of the brightest intellectuals of the time said that China China could only be saved by adopting two things, science and democracy. This is a Shandu Shuo. He identified that, and the whole generation of the 1910s and 20s adopted that as their slogan, science and democracy was the only way to save China, both of which are learned from the West. Neither science nor democracy had existed in China before, not in that form anyway.

So they were prepared to go all the way, be westernized. But then, as it turned out, this is where the communists come in. The communists identified because of the ideas from the Soviet Union, the success of the Russian Revolution, meant that the Chinese said there's no one way of westernization. That is also westernization. So you might say that as westernization one and westernization two, why do you choose westernization one?

Does it suit us? And Malthe Dome said, we're 90% peasantry. Capitalism doesn't suit us. And to have the capitalist rule over us is against everything that is Chinese. We've never had a Chinese dynasty or world ruled by businessmen. We've always been meritocracy

of people who are selected for their skills and so on and their wisdom, whereas the Soviet revolution identified idealist, political, imaginary people who imagine it, imagine a better world called socialism or communism, internationalism, whatever it was,

you call it, not at the expense of the poor, but to lift up the poor against those capitalists who are exploiting the poor. So if you put it in very simple terms, Martin deung could tell the peasantry to say,

we don't want that West, which would be dominated by capitalists and businessmen. And in the Chinese context, the businessmen were the lowest of the social strata. They cannot be trusted because they only make money for themselves, never for the country. This is how he's interpreted. Selfish, money-making, money-grabbing,

you know, this is the prejudice is built into the Chinese system for thousands of years. So now these are people of idealists who want a better world in which the poor would be taken care of and the rich should be put in their place, so to speak. This is Westernization 2. It's Westernization 2. And they said, we choose Westernization 2.

And then they started a civil war, which is not so much between Chinese as between Westernization 2. one and Western two. And Western two, to everybody's surprise, won. Done. How it won, there's a long story, but that actually tells

in a way the story of the Chinese civilization. In the end, Mao Zedong was able to say, if you have 90% peasantry, if I rouse a peasantry to take Western two, Western two will have a chance to win. And you, as capitalists, cannot win over the

peasantry because you only have the support of the landlords, you lose. You only represent less than 10% of the country. So the numbers, we have more than you. Then they won. So in that sense, they've reinterpreted the whole of Chinese history using the Marxist categories to talk about capitalism, socialism as a kind of stage in history. But in effect, they didn't quite know how to do it and Mao Zedong made a mess of it it took a long time to sort it out they needed a second revolution

to work it out I want to pick up on that talk about his notion of this need of continuous or perennial revolutions please elaborate well that is actually Mao broke up a phrase which exists

in Leninism somewhere Stalinism all had that word continuous revolution but they never really believed in it. Moultadoum had some crazy idea that he could actually make that into a dynamic force for change in China by continuous revolution. Never give up the idea of revolution. Always be prepared to change to be better. In fact, of course, it never had a chance to work. Life is not like that. In the end, people want stability and one certainty. You have a revolution because he was necessary.

You have no other solution. You have a revolution. But after the revolution, you want to get back to normalcy, stability, and harmony and all the other things. But he didn't believe in that. He believed that if you don't have

continuous revolution, all these new elites, the new elites will become elites. The new leaders of the Communist Party would become like the Mandarin's and like, in a way, in a way like the capitalists, they've been corrupted by power,

and wealth and they like to have their family stay on top and the poor will always remain poor. So Maltredome sold the idea that the only way to prevent that from happening is to have continuous revolution, constantly making sure that nobody will set will develop an elite system on top. He may have something to it, there's some truth in that, but the thing is that you cannot build a society or a country, a successful country. or successful economy based on continuous challenging, fighting each other all the time. So the whole thing collapsed because economically,

it just couldn't survive. It was a total failure. And you needed someone like Deng Xiaoping to come. But what did Deng Xiaoping represent? What he said was very simple. We've had our revolution. We need reform. And what reform meant was not to reform little, little thing.

The reform is to consolidate the revolution, to make sure that the revolution, to make sure that the revolution, revolution that we had now works actually succeeds in producing the stable, prosperous society that makes socialism attractive. This is the Zhevins formula. So he replaced revolution with the word reform and particularly emphasize economic reforms because he recognized another thing, which was very interesting. He took the Marxist thing seriously to say that you can only.

have socialism after you've had capitalism. And since China never had capitalism, you had to go back to capitalism because capitalism knows how to make money. And socialism does not. Socialism's idea is that when you have the money, you distribute it fairly. So that nobody is too rich and nobody is too poor.

You make the distribution more fair. And that's what socialism is good for. But if you have no money to know wealth to begin with, what do you distribute? What's the point of distributing poverty? So you have to distribute wealth. And to do that, you have to create the wealth. And the only way to create the wealth is to make use of the capitalist system. So he essentially opened the door to capitalist enterprise, but under the Communist Party.

The Communist Party is there, but they know that you have to go. through a capitalist stage before you can really have socialism. That is Deng Xiaoping's genius. And he used reform to make the revolution is to create the conditions to enable this to happen, but we need reform to make sure that each step of the way, we are adopting the correct methods of creating wealth that makes socialism attractive so that socialism can occur, can happen. You can't have socialism without prosperity.

Food on a table. Professor, you know, since 1978, it's striking and kind of an ostensible observation that China, whatever it calls itself, an autocracy, socialism, non-democracy, it's been dogged in democratizing talents. Paradoxically, many democracies around the world have not done a good job in democratizing talent. I mean, China has been a lot more visible in selecting talent more based on meritocracy

as opposed to loyalty and or patronage. What's your view on this? the juxtaposition between an autocracy like China that's been able to better democratize talents versus democracies around the world that have not been doing as good a job in democratizing talent. If you're neutral in using these political terms and not taking sides, I think you'll have to say that both democracy and autocracy are different ways of trying to build a better society for the people to have a more stable. harmonious and successful and prosperous lives.

Both of them have the same goal. One is using democratic methods, the other is autocratic method. Less control, more control, more freedom, less freedom. But they're both meant to build a better society. So if you start with that, no biases. Start with that. Then I think the major difference in my view is that how do you make sure of the succession system in the system to make sure that the succession

produces the same results one generation after another, continue to do that. And what happened is that in the whole of history, political systems have had to face this problem of succession. And in ancient times, the tribal leaders usually pass it on to his son. That's one alternative. The other alternative is you pass it on to the next brave, strongest man in the tribe. Then he has to prove that he's the strongest man by having to kill all the others less strong.

So you have a succession problem which is violent. The strongest man wins or the most popular man wins. Or pass it on to your son, no argument. My elder son is my heir apparent. His son will be his apparent, and then you create a dynastic system. You look around the whole of world history. For 90% of world history, systems of succession have been based on dynastic succession, farther to the son, because it avoids a lot of problems.

You don't have to argue. I'm the king. The next king is my son. So you know you don't have the problem. So you solve the problem of succession. So if I'm autocratic, I can remain autocratic. But I have to be, I have to show, demonstrate that I care for the people and I can provide the people with good governance.

Because otherwise, you wouldn't accept my son. If I'm a bad ruler, you wouldn't even accept my son. If I'm a good ruler, you accept my son and go on and my grandson and so on, until one of them is a bad ruler, then you throw him out. Then the people have the right to rebel. This is Mencius, right? He said it long ago, people have the right to rebel against bad emperors. And when they rebel, and they produce a new emperor with a new mandate,

the mandate of heaven, a new mandate. So that is already built into the system. But the system is dynastic. until somebody is a bad emperor, then you chuck it and you replace the dynasty. The democratic system is another way of saying, we don't want this dynastic system. This idea of father, son, aristocratic and so on,

is bad. So ever since the Enlightenment with a nation state, with citizenry, we are all citizens, we all can qualify to be the ruler. How do we make sure that, the right person is your successor. So, for example, after the French Revolution, first of all, they executed some of the top revolutionaries,

and they produced Napoleon. You know, they're not supposed to have an emperor. Napoleon called himself an emperor. 1804. And they have Napoleon. His family ruled France for quite a while, Louis Bonaparte and so on. So they had the problem.

they could not solve the problem of succession without the dynastic system. So the French Revolution, in a way, dragged on to the Paris revolts and, you know, Bastille and so on, the socialism, all the way to the French, all the way to the First World War. They had an empire, very powerful, but the succession system was very bad if you look at it. So in that context, the British solution turned out to be the safest. And they did it in the 18th century also by working out two parties. The Tories and the liberals, as it were, and the wigs and the Tories. Somehow they did that.

One, a little bit more aristocratic, the other land owning, property owning, all from the upper classes. but they share and they made sure that nobody killed anybody in the course of the succession. So the democracy was experimented through the Stuart Revolution,

Cromwell and all that. And finally they emerged out of the idea of liberty and John Locke and politics and so to emerge with the idea that you still keep the monarchy but you have no power. You lead that

you need two parties to do then take over from each other, but sharing each other's ideas, coming from the same background, basically moderate, not holding extreme views, and you can continue for a long time. And they spend the rest of their time in the 19th and 20th century giving more people to vote. Very gradually, slowly, not like the French, they gave everybody the vote from day one, and he created the French Revolution that ended up with Rob Speer having his head chopped off. That's how violent it became.

So, to sum up, it all has to do with how do you deal with succession. The peaceful succession to democracy is definitely better. Nobody dies. Everybody is, you vote, everybody has a vote, the citizen has a vote, and whoever wins and rules for such a time until the next vote. So it was really quite a clever system that the British actually involved. It actually nobody else had it. It was actually Britain that first had it.

The French and Germans all came much later. The Germans very reluctantly. But they came much later. The Scandinavians had it. But most people didn't really understand that. Because how do you select from these millions of people who say, I want to be president, you know? So in the end, there was always the temptation to move to a dynastic system, but then the citoyen

had rejected it. So this is what we are faced with today. What we call democracy and autocracy is democracy provides a safe and peaceful way of ensuring their succession. The other way, very uncertain, bitter fights. And the Communist Party has not solved it. So when we talk about autocracy today, autocratic systems all have this problem unless they're dynastic.

You know, the only dynastic thing going on today is in North Korea, a communist system using the dynastic system is really a comedy. It's a paradox. And these are the people who talk about socialism, inequality and so on, and their system is dynastic because they did not know how to do it. They looked at the Soviet Union. It became a mess. They looked at Mao Zedong, how dangerous it was.

And Deng Xiaoping tried to fix it by choosing his successors, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao. But he couldn't choose anymore because they're too young. So when they came to Hu Jintao, who to succeed Hu Jintao? They didn't know how to do it. They picked Xi Jinping, but who knows? And Xi Jinping, how is he going to say pick his country? pick his own successor. So it's fundamentally a kind of instability built into that system

which caused the Soviet Union to collapse, the Soviet Communist Party to collapse. And Xi Jinping is very conscious of that. When he came in, the first thing he said to his Communist Party was, look at the Soviet Communist Party. We are modeled on that and look at how they ended. It could happen to us too because corruption, internal fighting, factionism and so on.

we could easily end up like the Soviet Union. So he wanted to stop that by having more control. So the autocratic thing part became even more autocratic to try and guarantee a more stable succession, but he still can't find the answer even today. But the democracy, the other way, the other problem of democracy is that after a while, it doesn't matter whether you know anything or not.

If you're popular, you could be president. So it ends up with what you call populism. And populism means that you're just satisfying the people, giving them what they want and so on. But there's no principle behind it all. And that populism, according to their own theoreticians in Aristotelian politics, populism ends up with dictatorships. So either way has problems. but they all arise because both systems face this problem of succession. How do you make your succession always successful?

Neither side knows how to do it. Democracy has done very, very well until now, and now we're a little bit uncertain. I want to, how do you explain to a lay person like me or to the lay people out there in the context of differentiating Shigen, from Deng Xiaoping and Marjadong? I think the big difference is very obvious. Maldon was the father of a revolution. He really went through a tremendous period of challenges and difficulties, and he was creative.

In his own way, he was a political genius to make use of the conditions to build the successful PLA that won the war, a civil war. And it was a war won on the battlefield, not won by any democratic means. Battlefield. But in his mind, they won because the people were with them. So it is democracy in that sense. The people supported them.

That is how he would believe it. But that was done by a man who spent 40 years of his life fighting against his comrades as well as against the enemy to reach that position of soul control over a party and an army that won on the battlefield

in a traditional way defeating the enemy on the ground. Who else could have done that? So Marzartoum is unique in that way. Like him or not and he was a disaster in the end but nobody can deny him that victory in 1949, that was what he did.

So he deserves a particular kind of position as the man who succeeded, won the victory, won the mandate of heaven, he might say. Now, Deng Xiaoping was actually his partner. He was just a smaller figure, but worked with Mount Zodong all the way. In fact, even during the Cultural Revolution,

he never opposed Maltredong, just that Maltredong didn't trust him anymore because he was not close enough to his ideas. He put him aside, but did not kill him. And Deng Xiaoping never denied Mao Zedong. He was kept quiet and survived the Cultural Revolution. Because Deng Xiaoping actually believed in the same thing that Malzadong did, and he in a way inherited what Mao Zedong had succeeded.

But wiser than Malthedong, because he recognized that, you've got your revolution, you can't go on having more revolutions. You more and more revolutions you have, you destroy the revolution. So he cut the word revolution out, replace it by the word reform, to consolidate what you had achieved in 1949, not in the Cultural Revolution, but in 1949. What you achieve then, to consolidate that, to make sure that that CCP revolution will continue to be successful to build something that will go on,

continuity with the whole of Chinese history. That's what he offered. When he comes to Xi Jinping, how can he compare with these two men? Nothing to compare. He was basically a technocrat. I mean, his father was a revolutionary, but he was a princelain.

He was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He worked as a peasant for 10 years of his life He came out of it He went to university And he started as an official In a small town

And then became a bigger official In Shaman in the big city And then Fujian And then Zergian And then Zergian All those years He was no more than a technocrat Obeying orders from the center

Doing whatever He thought A good technocrat A good government official should be doing, then he did that. When people asked, what is Xi Jinping being achieved when he was an official in Herbe, in Chiamen, in Jiamen, in Jazejong? Nobody can point to anything that he did that was remarkable.

So the fact that he became Secretary General of the party was not his ambition. He didn't plan to be that. When his name was proposed, lots of people had never heard of him. And why was he chosen? He was chosen because he had no faction. He was merely a princely, so he had a kind of revolutionary background, his father to his father. He had done nothing wrong because he did very little,

nothing against him. And he was never showed he was ambitious, very quiet, no faction. Whereas the big challenger to Zhang Zemin, who was very powerful at the time, and Wu Jindal, was Bo Shilai, who was also a princeling, but very capable, did something in Chongqing and extremely ambitious and showed his ambition to do

something to save the Communist Party. And Zhangshamine didn't trust him, because in fact this man could destroy his faction. So again, the factionism within the party. You see, it comes back to the question of succession. Right. How do, this, because nobody was named.

Deng Xiaoping only named after Hu Jintao. No more, but after that, they had to, they had to determine who should succeed Hu Jintao. Without Deng Xiaoping's nomination, they had to make a decision. So, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jujintang had different factions, all trying to get their men into place. Hu Jintao supported Li Kachang, who was in the youth faction. Jiang Zang Zemin had his own candidate, were unacceptable. and there was Boshi Lai ambitiously trying to establish himself as the rightful heir to take over.

Then Jiang Zemin actually played the decisive role in saying, I can't have Boshi Lai. He's too dangerous and he's corrupt anyway. And his group of friends or two also corrupt. Geng Sheming himself was pretty corrupt. But he decided this quiet chap in Jha Jiang, who had done nothing much, and done nothing wrong and showed no ambition

and had no faction was safer. So he chose, he picked her, Xi Jinping, took his name up. Nobody objected because nobody could find anything wrong that he did because he didn't do much. And that's how he became leader. But he was not a stupid man. He had been observing all the time

that the Communist Party was so corrupt. The People's Liberation Army, was so corrupt that the Communist Party wouldn't have much of a chance to survive if he didn't sort that one out. So when he came in, his only program was to be anti-corruption. Most people think that, or some people think that he used that to get rid of his enemies. I didn't think that is true. The truth is that he used that as the only way to establish himself as a credible leader

to succeed and for the people to like him and he became a very popular leader. I mean, I've read, I was surprised by the number of things I've read to say that he was the most popular leader since Maldodon

and Maldodon was not popular in a way that he was popular. Maltred was feared but Xi Jinping was loved as a man who tried to get rid of all those corrupt officials and was so pervasive in the whole system that the fact that he got rid of the most obvious ones

made him into a great hero. And so he became very popular. That popularity gave him more authority. And he used that authority. And because he didn't have a faction, he couldn't trust anybody in the top leadership. He became a micro-manager. He set up all sorts of committees, active activist groups to deal with this issue, that issue. And every group was chaired by him.

So he was chairman of all these groups, micromanaging everything. He did that for a few years. And because there was nobody else anyway, all the others got rid of because of their corruption, he found himself doing too much. He didn't have any background in economics or any practical experience in making money for the country.

China was benefiting from the globalization that had been going on. It was a WTO membership and so on. So when he started to do that, when the situation changed after Trump came in and after COVID, things began to go wrong. And he didn't know how to control it.

So what I think he has done is now is to give up his micro-managing and set jobs for some of his comrades and doing less, but having the final say, but doing less and having other people do it. For example, I think it's quite significant. He's done a lot of the economic things are now passed on to Li Chang. And Li Chang actually speaks with great authority and more and more authority, but backed by Xi Jinping, but not Xi Jinping coming out himself, except saying broadly happy things, which nobody can disagree with.

So how can you compare him with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping? What has he done in his lifetime to put him in the same category? All I can say about him is that he believes in what Deng Xiaoping did. He is a follower of Deng Xiaoping. He believes in reform as a consolidation of the revolution. He also believes in continuity, the way Deng Xiaoping did. continuity, including Maoist period, into the Kuomintang period, into the Qing dynasty, into the whole of Chinese history as the guarantor of Chinese identity, that this great

People's Republic of China will always be Chinese, modernized in every other way, but still recognisably Chinese, depends on your sense of continuity with the whole of the Chinese. passed. That I think is what it's about. At least that's my understanding. Professor, in 1978, the GDP per capita of China would have been a lot less than a thousand dollars, a lot less than $1,000. Today it's around $13,000. The rise or significant rise of income per capita in China would have been on the back of this underwriting of the international order by a hegemonic force called the United States, which I think was, according to some, a hegemony of magnanimity, but it is seemingly becoming less magnanimous that hegemony.

How do you foresee China moving forward, coexisting with not only that pre-existing superpower that seemingly becomes hegemonically less magnanimous, on top of these revisionist forces that are coming from countries that would have been really tiny, but it become much larger today. I frankly don't have an answer to that very big question. But I would point to the decade of the 1990s as a key turning point to everything that happened to the last 20 years.

is the 1990s, two things happened. One was the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the United States became the sole superpower. The second was America was trying to identify, do they have any more enemies out there? They've defeated the Soviet Union. And in the calculations of the strategists in America, they came to the conclusion that there were none

except possibly, potentially, China. The only possible threat to Americans' number one sole superpower position was China. And because it was unitary, it was then under Deng Xiaoping was still alive. And Jiang Zemin, they were doing very well, picking up, learning from the West. They were sending their best students

studying in the United States, coming back to improve their economy, and they were making a difference. And the American strategists, I think, were not wrong. If anybody could ever threaten the sole superpower, it would have been China. Because looking at India, Middle East, or any other part of the world,

none of them could provide that kind of challenge. So one group already identified, identify China as a potential threat. The other group, more ideological group, I think, who not so realistic about it, thought that the Chinese economy was actually modeling itself, the kind of capitalism that Deng Xiaoping was introducing to China, was actually bothering lots of ideas from the West,

creating the kind of industries, creating the manufacturing infrastructure, to compete in the outside, in the capitalist world, what if they created, in the end, a middle class that if they're successful, would demand the kind of political liberalization that would make it more like us in the United States. And there were people who felt,

we shouldn't treat the Chinese as a threat, we should treat the Chinese as a challenge to enable the Chinese to be economically successful to the point that they actually want to copy us and recognize us as the leader of the world. I'm oversimplifying, but they were debating very much at that point. It was at that point that President Clinton

had to make a decision, and the decision was whether or not, to let China join the WTO. And I think you'll remember the details about that. And Clinton was not willing. It was very hesitant. Some of his advisors were saying, they are communists in the end.

How can you trust them to observe the rules of GATT and the WTO? They would take advantage and so. But others felt that if they succeeded in taking advantage and becoming successful as a capitalist economy modeling themselves on us, they could change.

So that made the final turn, and Clinton reluctantly, I think, agreed to let Turohmji in fact model, take the WTO rules, and Turoongi did that

to use the WT rules to change the TOR rules, to change the whole infrastructure of Chinese factory and manufacturing and so on, to follow the WTO of rules, to take advantage of the globalization that the rules allowed. And he was successful. To everyone's surprise how successful it was. That was those 10 years from Clinton letting them in to 2008 when the financial crisis undermined the American economy, Those 10 years were the best years of the Chinese economy by joining W2. We know that now for such.

But for the Chinese, it was just good luck because there was globalization at its freest. So all the capitalists in America move their factories to China as they should, according to capitalist principles, you go to where the labor is the cheapest, and the quality is maintained, you make more money. And we do know the capitalists who invested in China became the richest people in America.

The Chinese didn't make much money out of it, but they gained enough to relieve lots of people from poverty, but they didn't make that much money. That percentage of the profits were very low compared to what the capitalists were gaining. So the paradoxes, The Americans became, American capitalists became richer, but the American middle class lost

out. They lost their jobs because the factories all moved out, all the engineering and so on and the working class also lost their jobs. The working class were aspiring to be a virtual middle class in America, began to lose their jobs or lost their jobs. So next thing they knew, they started to blame China for what happened to. them, whereas in fact it was the rules of capitalist development, globalized, that made that difference.

And the paradox is that the American capitalists are richer than never, even today. With all these uncertainties that we are facing today, the American capitalists are actually getting richer. And Trump's friends and so on are actually getting richer while the rest of the American population still has to, I think, bear the burden of paying those tariffs. Because that would affect them. Their consumer prices are rising. Because if they don't get it direct from China, with a lot of tariffs added,

they're going to pay more because they can't make it themselves anymore. You take a long time for the manufacturers to actually turn up in America to recover. So the poor and the middle class are actually paying for all this where the rich are getting richer. So this is going to undermine, to my mind anyway, to undermine the stability of the American system itself. I want to switch to the place where we are called Southeast Asia. It's a region of, in my view, diversity and immensity,

but they're oftentimes obfuscated with our sheer inability to tell stories to ourselves and to the world. I'll give you some empirical evidence. We've got about 140 million books published in the last few centuries, of which only 375,000 books written on Southeast Asia, which makes up about 0.26% of all the books published. It's a bit of a mockery for, region which has 700 million people that make up about 9% of the global population being narrated

only to the extent of 0.26. What would be your advice to future Southeast Asians? To tell stories. I have to say there are a lot of paradoxes in the Southeast Asian story. Number one is that they never saw itself as a region. They didn't even have a name for itself. And the fact that we recognize it as a region today is actually because of what the Anglo-Americans decided they needed in this region. Because they wanted this area to be free from China and India. To put it very simply. Without China, without India, they still have a chance to dominate this area. So the idea of Southeast Asia is actually an Anglo-American creation.

And then the Southeast Asians were so delighted to be independent nations, they didn't worry about it. They didn't think about it. They were just concentrating their attention or building their own nation. Indonesia is a very good example. It's such a big job to make Indonesia into one nation. It's no wonder that you spend all your time thinking about how to make it work. and you have your battle between Sukarno and Suharto,

and all those forces to try and settle what Indonesia should be like. Nation building was even more troublesome in Malaysia. Other countries, Vietnam had its Vietnam War. Myanmar is still struggling. Thailand itself inside the kingdom is still turbulent, and Cambodia is still a mess. So when you think about it, this nation building business is a hard work and time-consuming,

and energy consuming. So none of them, none of these countries were really thinking about the region. So who was thinking about the region? If you look at all those books about Southeast Asia, the majority of the books

are written by outsiders. So in addition to the fact that there are very few books, most of the books are written by outsiders and mostly by Anglo-American, written in English about the history of Southeast Asia, going back to find, as it were,

justification for seeing this region as a justified as a coherent region. Mind you, there is a coherence, as we have discovered through archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and other social sciences, we have discovered there's much in common. And one of the things I mentioned earlier on about the in common was it was very open, it didn't have its borders. It didn't have a very strict idea of its own narrow concept of culture and civilization of its own. It was open to new, any new ideas that would benefit them, they would pick and choose over that whole period. But it was open and through the area, people traded between two oceans, between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. We talk about

Indo-Pacific as if it was a new invention. The Indo-Pacific has always been there. It was a terrain in which trade was unceasing and peaceful, most of the time. Very few battles here and there, most of the time, peaceful. And because everybody was open and trade was beneficial to everybody, they didn't have to fight for anything. But now that it was identified as a region between China and India, and therefore a region that the Western power,

still had room to maneuver without interfering interference by China and India, so to speak, then they want to preserve it. So the preservation of Southeast Asia is actually in the interest of Anglo-America in that tradition. So Anglo-America is a bit disappointed that the Southeast Asian nations haven't sided with them all the way as the first five Southeast Asian countries went along with Anglo-America as an anti-communist group against the others.

But when the communist groups also joined, when Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar also joined and became a single unit, actual single unit, it really tried to become neutral and try to, in a way, self-generate within itself a sense of

of identity as a region. Now this is anti the interest of the Anglo-American original idea. I mean, it has been separated from India and China, but it is not performing exactly as what the Anglo-American wanted it to be. It has now become a mixture of both the authoritarian and the so-called anti-communist groups have become one, and they're now trying to be neutral in everything. So this is now the kind of challenge that we're up against. How long this region can stay neutral? How long can it, it will take before it really becomes a region? Because it isn't. It is using the framework of ASEAN to project an image of a region. But internally, there are still so many tensions and so many disagreements and just different.

cultural and political and system. Every country is different. If you look at the 10 countries of ASEAN, all 10 of them are different, different kinds of nations, different kinds of institutions, different heritage for political heritage from the different colonial empires and so on. And yet, to everybody's surprised, up to now anyway, they have publicly presented a unitary face on statements on which they all agree when it concerns the region as a whole. They are able to somehow merge, keep the two, as it were, separate.

A kind of regional face to the world, while the internal bilateral relations and bilateral relation between each country and the outside world remains at a separate level. And the two are not quite meshing. Whether they will eventually mesh or not, I cannot say, because they're all sorts of other pressures to try and the outside factors,

powers want to make use of this region. So exactly how the regions will respond in the long run, I cannot predict. But all I can say is that this challenge is going to be there. How is going to resolve it depends on the leadership's will and their capacity to to at least talk with one voice at one level, while at another level they have to deal bilaterally. Each has bilateral relations with the outside world and with each other, how to keep this thing not in conflict,

but to integrate it together until everybody understands it. I think it's possible, but it's going to be a tough job. And a very good example, I would say, of how it might be solved is how Indonesia behaves because Indonesia being the biggest and fundamentally I would say it has a greatest opportunity

to become the most important in the whole region it is in the position of working for the region while at the same time active in larger groups outside and whether that the bilateral relations it has

with the outside world, and its bilateral relations with the inside world of ASEAN. Those two can be integrated into one vision of the future successfully, will determine the future of the region. It depends very much on Indonesia, because the others are all caught in other problems. Myanmar will always be caught between India and China. Vietnam has always been threatened by China in their eyes. The Philippines will always be closed. to America, and that leaves only Malaysia and Brunei and Thailand is sort of mixed up in between.

So Indonesia is the only country that is big enough, has the potential, and has the location of between two oceans, the range and the coverage of area and population to make a difference and to provide the kind of leadership that can enable it to serve the region to provide the region with a voice, it would speak on behalf that we could do that, and at the same time, by having its position recognized as a power in the other realms of the world,

of the global system, play a role in ensuring that this region is left intact and secure and not forced to play as vassals to other people. I would say that that is to my mind. The one big hope for Southeast Asia. So much depends on Indonesia is in my way. For small countries like Singapore, they have a different problem.

Their problem is they can only survive if they're useful to everybody. And they are trying their very best, and so far they've done quite well. And I mean when I say useful to everybody, not only within the region, useful to everybody in the world, if they have links with everybody, and everybody thinks that Singapore is a valuable asset for their purposes, and then they will want to keep Singapore, as it were, protected to some extent. That's a different story altogether. I want to pick up on two points you mentioned.

ASEAN as an organization and education. If you were to walk from the westernmost part of Myanmar, all the way to the easternmost part of Papua, That's about 5,000 kilometers worth of longitude. A good chunk of the households are headed up by somebody without a tertiary education. A good chunk of the electric would be without a tertiary education. You aptly talked about succession. We'll use Indonesia.

88% of the households are headed up by somebody without a tertiary education. 93% of the electric is head. headed up, I mean, is without a tertiary education. When we complain about politicians, we need to realize that they don't come from planet Mars. They come from ourselves, right? So I have a proposition to test with you. Singapore has done tremendously well in educating its citizenry. Within ASEAN, there is a charter or clause that talks about the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity, you cannot interfere with each member country in terms of its local matters.

But I've been thinking as to whether or not there needs to be some interference when it comes to educational attainment for each member country. Copycat, the best practice of Singapore in educating its citizenry. for purposes of our brothers and sisters and friends in Lao, Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, with perhaps differential timelines so that there is less economic convergence, less educational, I mean, less educational divergence and less economic divergence. Is that something of merit to consider, you think, going forward for ASEAN or Southeast Asia? As you probably may have noticed, I've used the word paradox in many occasions or many occasions.

And here again is another paradox. And the paradox starts right from day one of the existence of Singapore. It was never meant to be an independent country. So the paradox is that the one country that never expected to be an independent country has become the most successful. That's a paradox, a very vital. paradox. How it happened, and then we can make a list, laundry list of all the things that, you know, from foundation leaders to all the policies and its relations with the world,

long list of things which made Singapore successful. Almost none of them were done by the other countries. They were all done because this place was not expected to be independent. So they had to invent themselves from ground up on a blank sheet of paper. All the other countries had too much history of different kinds of history which held them back in one way or the other. And in fact, this is one of the decisions of the Singapore government when they came in was to diminish the importance of history. In fact, they stopped offering scholarships to people who want to study history.

they in fact try to discourage people from studying history on the grounds that if people learn their history they will all look back to where their fathers and ancestors came from and all the other histories to come and interfere with the future of nation building in Singapore so avoid history to give Singapore a chance to have a blank sheet and start afresh right or wrong that was a decision

it took another 20 years before the leaders realized that for the single people not to have a sense of history would have been a mistake so they started to bring back history again but very carefully fitted into their needs so they restored history gradually

even then there's never been confident about how to deal with it except as celebrating 60 years or whatever it is nation building which is understandable. But the paradox is that the fact that it started without expecting to be a country, an independent nation,

gave it a particular problem to solve. It's a very specific problem. Nobody else had that experience. I mean, even Brunei, smaller it is, but Brunei has a long history, hundreds of years of a Sultanate of Brunei. So every country has its long history, except Singapore.

that, curiously enough, turn out to be an advantage. It made it possible for one group of people, that top leadership at the time, to think through how to make this place a successful, thriving, port city, new nation state that also could be recognized globally. So it's got all the levels from local social harmony among the different, races and different people of different origins, all treated equally in theory by the Constitution in a plural society, to accepting how to live in the neighborhood, how to be modern, linked to the manufacturing institutional, globalized system of the capitalist system, to enable it to have

economic wealth in the end, to be able to educate the people, to one way of thinking for Singapore when they had never thought of it before to have their own soldiers for its own defense. Not a single soldier, a Singapore soldier. They had to start afresh.

Nothing was preordained, as it were. Everything had to be thought through from first principles. Exceptional. And that group of leaders, it so happened. It was just that right group which provided enough

to start it going and then drawing upon the world's resources from everywhere that they, again this openness, a kind of pragmatic approach, non-ideological, willingness to draw from anybody

who could help Singapore and then to make use of whatever they thought was really valuable and try and integrate it into a way of thinking, which was identifiably Singaporean. It took a while, and it wasn't all this easy, and it was neither liberal democracy nor the other kind of autocracy, but it was somewhere in between, and I would define it, quite frankly, as three major factors which made Singapore, at least gave Singapore that foundation.

It was that it was democratic up to a point. It was control, state central control up to a point. It was also believer in the rule of law. These three combined, I look around, is pretty unique because other countries are either too liberal or too much control or no law. But Singapore had a mixture not too democratic,

not too autocratic and rule of law. Believing in the... And whether it's called rule or law or rule by law doesn't matter. The point is that law was the most important pillar

of keeping that society as it were trusting the government that the government is not above the law but the government can make the law to ensure that the country is run well and to enable to do that they have to have sufficient power in the state

to make sure that the democracy is operated on the lines that benefits Singapore not liberal democracy but a kind of guided democracy that would serve Singapore best, and how to combine the three in such a way that people accepted it, at least most people accepted it,

and crucially, most other governments accepted and respected it. I have always been amazed by the fact that the critics of Singapore were mostly journalists and academics, and some ideologues, liberal ideologues. But as far as I know, no government leaders criticize Singapore. Most government leaders that I've ever checked on their references to Singapore tended to be very respectful and, in fact, congratulate Singapore on its amazing and surprising success. So this to me is very interesting that those political leaders who actually headed governments,

who knew what it was like, how difficult it was to produce a successful, stable, and more or less harmonious society, so that Singapore managed it in a way that nobody expected, not even starting as a nation, but starting with a plural society of great uncertain backgrounds, unclear about where it was going. and yet within a few decades, it was able to emerge, having more or less the same goals among most people, and respected by the heads of most governments, which is quite extraordinary. Wow.

Professor, I'm mindful of your time, but only with your permission, I'd like to ask you two more questions. Yeah. If I may. The last bit on Southeast Asia, I want to test a high, hypothesis with you. I've been increasingly observing that China and the West are likely to be

indispensable inevitabilities for Southeast Asia. In the context of our looking at China increasingly more for technological capital allocation and the West for economic capital allocation. Southeast Asia is filled with developing economies who earn a lot less than $13,000. they can't afford iPhones. They can only afford Opos, the phones from China, which are actually taking better pictures than iPhones, admittedly. But the West is blessed with tremendous amount of liquidity, and it's just within our vested interest in Southeast Asia

for most of the developing economies in order to move up the value chain and the global geopolitical order for them to look at China for technological allocation and the West for economic allocation. Is that hypothesis worthy of admitting? I can't see Southeast Asia as a whole taking any single model, either one of those,

because it doesn't fit. The conditions of China are completely different from those of any one country in Southeast Asia, and certainly not for the region. And similarly, the United States, United States has a very distinctive history of its own. And frankly, for the first 60, 70 years after the Second World War, the liberal ideals of America were dominant,

and most people admired it very much. And so that was the model for the future for all countries, that we were all enjoy, the freedom, the kind of a guarantee of stability and peace, and which the ideals of trying to solve every problem through rule-based order, all these ideals were highly respected. And most people trusted that the United States was out to ensure that that would be the ultimate end for the world,

and that was how the world would always be at peace. If we can all move towards that. The only people who were standing in the way of that was the Soviet Union and the Cold War. So it was over-simple, but... So when they won the Cold War, you can understand why the Americans thought, this is it.

I mean, that's why Fukuyama can talk about the end of history. I mean, they really thought that they won. I mean, just not won a battle. They won the whole war. And the world has now reached a point when everybody knows this is the way to go. It turned out not to be so. And that, I think, surprised my generation anyway, because we had different hopes and ideals from the 1945 onwards

to believe that our new nations in a world of equal sovereign, independent states, was the future. And to try and set aside all signs of inequality, as only temporary, will move towards that ideal ultimately. Well, it is not worked out like that. And when, to that extent, those people who believed in those ideals were not prepared for what happened. So in a way, when you look at the Democrats in the United States,

especially under Biden, and so, they were actually using the slogans of the past. It didn't actually carry that same credibility or even confidence that it used to have. Mixed up with it was quite a lot of fear. The fear of losing the hegemony, the fear of failing and a sense of desperation

that they're going to do something to check China, check other people who were creating trouble, not following their rules and so on. But it became very negative instead of something positive offered to the world, it became something negative.

If you don't do this, you mustn't do that. And so, and ultimately, nothing worked. Everything that they tried to do after they won the Cold War failed intervention in the Mediterranean state, into Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the others. Every single one of them ended up with no real achievements, no step forward to a better world but every time

losing credibility and making the world even less certain including the United States itself and when the United States lost its own confidence and became fearful

of the world that they now could not control and which they had created and did not understand why they couldn't control it that has now added to the world's the whole world's uncertainty

because a given system has been shown to be deficient and not able to provide the kind of things that they promised us. So those people who have believed them, who actually had faith in them, are now very disillusioned. And that itself is a bad sign. Because when people lose their sense of idealism or their hopes and no longer expect the world to be better, then the world will get worse

because you need people to still want the world to be better to have a chance at all. Mind you, I'm as an optimist I believe these people still exist and they will appear. But we're now going to a stage when we don't know who these people are,

how they're going to achieve that breakthrough to come out of this uncertainty and create a new way of looking at the world or new kind of order which we can live with. we're not sure about that, but we are going to a very testing stage. And I think the generation, not mine, but the generation below me and below that, that group of people with new technology, new ways of looking at the world,

new ways of reaching out, they have to find some way of restructuring a world which could have a better chance. Professor, this is my last question. On a personal note, you're 95 years old this year. I'm a lot younger than you, and most of humanity are younger than you. What would be the advice to the younger generations to stay physically youthful and cognitively alert

other than with just optimism? what would be your advice? I have only one simple thing is that to always want to learn, to be always curious, to be always willing to share what I know and what I think is important and to be hopeful that some of what I have learned,

and some of what I know would be useful to the people to come and that not all of it is just past and of a different age but still have some validity for future generations if that was possible

I would be most satisfied but to to be able to learn is really the secret of everything and to want to learn to be able to learn, to be able to share what you have learned is a great privilege, and I have been very fortunate. Thank you. Wow. Professor, it's a real honor and privilege.

Thank you. That was Professor Wang Gongwu, a legendary Asian historian. Thank you.