TRIGGERnometry - Why is China Building a Massive Army？ Dr John Lee

00:00:00.320 Statistically, China is engaging in the most rapid re-militarization of any country

00:00:06.520 in absolute and relative terms in peacetime history.

00:00:15.900 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:20.380 I'm Constantine Kissinger.

00:00:21.460 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:26.920 Our terrific guest today is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and an expert on Southeast Asian affairs, Dr. John Lee.

00:00:33.020 Very warm welcome all the way from Australia to Trigonometry.

00:00:36.320 Great. Thanks for having me, both of you.

00:00:38.460 It's a real pleasure to have you on.

00:00:41.040 Some of the interviews you've done and the conversations you've had and the work you've done on these issues is absolutely fascinating.

00:00:47.560 Can't wait to talk to you about it.

00:00:49.200 But before we do, tell everybody a little bit about not only what your areas of expertise are, which I've kind of hinted at,

00:00:55.180 but also what is your personal journey through life because i think it informs some of the

00:00:59.020 analysis and the perspectives that you bring yeah i most of my career i've been in the think tank

00:01:05.220 world i spent a couple of years in the australian government as the national security advisors so

00:01:09.520 i was right in the middle of um politics and policy for a little while i still am i still

00:01:15.900 deal with governments quite a fair bit but i'm back in the think tank world the academic world

00:01:20.480 I'm almost an adjunct professor at Sydney University.

00:01:24.960 As you can probably tell from my appearance, I was born in Southeast Asia.

00:01:30.420 I was born in Malaysia.

00:01:32.560 My family migrated to Australia when I was very young, about eight years old.

00:01:37.420 I've lived in Australia.

00:01:38.840 I studied in the United Kingdom.

00:01:41.320 But most of my career has been in Australia and the United States.

00:01:45.180 and it probably informs my perspectives in many respects.

00:01:50.600 My parents left Malaysia because they wanted a better life,

00:01:57.940 as migrants do, and we went to Australia. 1.00

00:02:01.500 And that is a typical immigrant attitude. 1.00

00:02:04.200 It has largely informed the way I view world affairs

00:02:07.860 and the sorts of things that I try to advocate in my career.

00:02:12.820 And your analysis of China is absolutely fascinating.

00:02:16.480 We want to talk to you about the geopolitical situation post Russia invading Ukraine,

00:02:21.340 and we'll have that conversation in a second.

00:02:23.880 But the one thing Francis and I both were just incredibly fascinated by is some of the

00:02:29.500 things you talk about, the history of China and the recent history of China, what the

00:02:33.340 Chinese learned from what happened in Russia in 1991, what the Chinese are learning now

00:02:38.280 from what's happening in Ukraine.

00:02:39.560 Like what do we in the West not know and not understand about China that we really should?

00:02:46.180 We in the West started engaging China really in about the 1990s and particularly after 2001 when China entered the World Trade Organization and a lot of Western companies sort of rushed into China to make some money.

00:03:00.360 we thought that China would be like Japan or like Taiwan or like Singapore in a post-World War II

00:03:11.020 period that is that if we engage with China if we help China get richer and help its people get

00:03:18.680 richer they would see how they would see the superior superiority of western systems and they

00:03:26.340 would become more like us in an Asian way like Japan has or South Korea has, but that China would

00:03:31.700 essentially follow that path. I think what we didn't realise was that even though the Chinese

00:03:38.020 wanted a big slice of Western prosperity, they have pretty much rejected everything else. The

00:03:43.940 Chinese Communist Party still remains in power, not only that they have found extremely clever 1.00

00:03:50.360 ways of remaining in power while still getting rich as a country. And as a result, we find

00:03:55.720 ourselves now in a situation where China truly is the most comprehensive threat to the West 1.00

00:04:04.340 that we're facing really for two or three generations.

00:04:09.220 And John, you were talking about the ingenious ways the CCP managed to hold on to power.

00:04:14.620 What are they?

00:04:16.560 The CCP, and I have to give them credit, they're very good students of history because they

00:04:21.520 looked at what happened in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

00:04:24.480 They looked at what happened in their own country in 1989 when there were countrywide protests calling for democracy.

00:04:32.040 And what they realised was that as you get richer as a country, as you industrialise, you cannot alienate yourself.

00:04:41.060 That is, if you're a ruling party, you cannot alienate yourselves from the rising middle class elites.

00:04:47.540 In fact, if you want to remain in power, you have to co-opt to rising middle class elites.

00:04:51.960 And the lesson they learned from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and also from what happened in the 1980s in their own country, was that if you allow the emergence of an independent middle class, that is a middle class that doesn't need you, doesn't need the party for its prosperity and its security, you'll inevitably lose power.

00:05:13.780 So what the Chinese have done since really from the mid-1990s is that the party has ensured that it has become the primary dispenser of economic and social opportunity in the country.

00:05:27.900 And if you go to China today, if you deal with Chinese elites today, Chinese elites and a well-to-do are the strongest supporters of the Chinese Communist Party,

00:05:37.060 which is the opposite of what happened in the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the 1980s in

00:05:42.200 the People's Republic of China itself. The elites in China are now those who want the party to

00:05:48.760 remain in power because they're the ones that actually do best in China and Chinese society.

00:05:55.580 So from that point of view, the Chinese Communist Party has been quite clever about it. They have 0.99

00:06:01.820 engineered a situation where the future of the party is tied to the future of elites in the

00:06:07.040 country. And this is a very dangerous situation for us, because that's not what we thought would

00:06:13.260 happen when we started to engage with China. John, when I was in China, admittedly, it was

00:06:20.300 about 2006, 2007. One thing that surprised me was exactly what you were saying, which in many ways,

00:06:27.460 it's a capitalist paradise. You can go and you can go to Louis Vuitton, you can go to all these

00:06:33.660 western shops and spend all this money on luxury goods you can have almost a western life as long

00:06:40.880 as you don't criticize the party you can enjoy a wonderful capitalist life is it so that's very

00:06:47.320 much the heart of their success isn't it well uh it's more than that it's true that uh if it's true

00:06:55.460 that there is a people speak of a social compact that the middle classes can buy chanel and in the

00:07:01.620 process they don't question the political structure but it's more than that because to get rich in

00:07:06.960 china you have to be well connected to the party you know if you look at the chinese communist

00:07:12.360 party it is actually the largest membership organization in the world there's over 100

00:07:17.640 million members and there's an estimated uh 50 to 60 million people lining up to join or who are

00:07:25.360 putting applications to join now why do they do that because when you join the ccp

00:07:30.700 you start getting connections into the business world into the social world you know I've had

00:07:38.300 Chinese students who are obviously part of the elites that when they write up their CV when the

00:07:44.700 first things they put is their Chinese Communist Party membership number and they do that because

00:07:49.740 if you're a CCP member you are given more privileges more opportunities scholarships

00:07:57.960 clerkships internships into the best companies it is a paradise if you like for ccp members

00:08:05.660 but it is not a paradise for those who are not ccp members but the irony is that it's called

00:08:11.920 the chinese communist party but it is the rich in china who are joining the chinese communist party

00:08:17.880 not the poor not the peasants but once again that is a deliberate engineered social construction

00:08:25.080 in order to tie the future of these elites to the future of the CCP.

00:08:30.540 And that is an ingenious way of maintaining power

00:08:34.000 because you're not doing it through force,

00:08:36.320 which is going to upset people, anger people, and quite rightly so.

00:08:40.700 You're doing it through soft power and encouraging people

00:08:44.780 by essentially manipulating their behaviour.

00:08:48.360 Well, you're essentially aligning the interests and incentives

00:08:51.920 of the rising classes and the upper classes to yourself or, you know, that is the party.

00:08:59.420 Now, this has been done before. You know, it's not a comparison often made, but here I'm talking

00:09:06.080 just about the political economic structure, not necessarily the foreign policy aspects.

00:09:13.440 But the political economic structure of modern day China, it's quite similar to

00:09:18.960 Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany in the sense that the elites are very closely aligned

00:09:28.500 to the party, are often members of the party, and it's a very cosy arrangement at the top.

00:09:34.560 Of course, there are the majority of people in China who are not doing as well as those elites,

00:09:41.740 but they don't get a say. That's not how China works. So that is essentially how the CCP

00:09:48.600 has remained in power as the country has got richer.

00:09:52.600 It sounds like, John, it's basically a country where the ruling class have a very strong grip

00:09:57.960 on the country and are able to dictate very powerfully and very easily what that country

00:10:02.660 is going to do. Now, put that together with the comment you made only a few minutes ago,

00:10:06.800 that China is the biggest threat to the Western generations. Talk to us about that, 0.98

00:10:11.300 because you've got this gigantic country. Most of the equipment we're using to record this is made

00:10:16.800 in that country. We were all told here in the West that, you know, it's great, we're just trading and

00:10:21.880 we exchange this and that, and that's wonderful. Why do you say China is such a threat to the West?

00:10:29.700 It's a threat to the West, both in terms of its capability and its intention. If you look at its

00:10:36.180 capability, yes, we know about the growth of its military, the People's Liberation Army.

00:10:41.040 And it's, in fact, statistically, China is engaging in the most rapid re-militarization of any country in absolute and relative terms in peacetime history, right?

00:10:54.340 So that in itself should cause you to ask, you know, why are they doing that?

00:10:59.260 But China's not just a military power.

00:11:00.620 John, sorry to interrupt.

00:11:01.980 Sorry to interrupt.

00:11:02.960 Let me ask you that question.

00:11:04.440 Why are they doing that?

00:11:06.240 Well, they've told us and we should believe them.

00:11:08.280 They want to, initially it was just about taking Taiwan,

00:11:11.660 but that was a goal 20, 30 years ago.

00:11:14.340 That goal is still there, still the number one goal.

00:11:16.640 But now it's about dominating East China Sea,

00:11:21.140 which is the maritime areas they share with Japan

00:11:23.940 and a few other countries.

00:11:25.200 They claim the whole of South China Sea 0.96

00:11:27.460 and they eventually want to force, not necessarily through war,

00:11:33.080 but through other coercive means.

00:11:35.880 they want to force the United States out of East Asia. And once they've done that, 0.80

00:11:42.340 China gets East Asia to itself. And the reason why I say that is, if you look at the Chinese 1.00

00:11:47.440 military budget, it is larger than a combined budgets of East Asia, South Asia, and Oceania.

00:11:55.480 So larger than the combined budgets that all of those countries in those regions.

00:12:00.100 If the United States is not in Asia, there is no balance and the Chinese know that. 1.00

00:12:05.740 so they can count, and that's why they're doing it.

00:12:09.660 Now, why are they doing it?

00:12:10.940 That's just the goal that they've had.

00:12:12.240 They see themselves as the natural, permanent,

00:12:18.840 dominant power in Asia, and they see the Americans 0.98

00:12:23.520 who were there after World War II as the imposters.

00:12:28.500 Now, unfortunately, in Asia, there are probably 40-plus countries.

00:12:34.140 very few of those countries actually want China to dominate, which is why most of those countries

00:12:39.640 are quite happy for the United States to continue to maintain its militaries in a region. But that's

00:12:46.080 what China wants. It wants to be the undisputed number one country. And it wants to impose its 0.76

00:12:53.020 institutions and its processes and norms in the region. So that just doesn't, that is

00:13:00.880 irreconcilable with most of what we want, not just what the West wants, but what most Asian 1.00

00:13:07.080 countries want. And hence, that's why I consider China the most comprehensive and serious threat. 1.00

00:13:16.580 And before I interrupted you, you were going to talk about things other than the military

00:13:20.780 buildup. What else were you going to mention? Well, what I was going to say was China's

00:13:26.940 military buildup has been terrifyingly impressive but it's it's economic and technological

00:13:33.840 rise and I should mention on the back of western know-how and capital but it's been this economic

00:13:41.420 and technological rise which is really the source of its power because you know we can't we as in

00:13:49.860 the West or other Asian countries who fear China, nevertheless, we cannot treat China like we treat 0.63

00:13:57.940 Russia, because China is just far too important to too many countries. It's the largest trading

00:14:03.360 partner of over 100 countries. And so, you know, we want to find ways of constraining China's 1.00

00:14:12.760 options and stopping it from doing certain things. But we can't actually isolate it in the way that

00:14:19.140 we can isolate Russia as we're doing now. So that's the sort of policy and even sort of 0.94

00:14:26.260 moral dilemma as to what it is we should do about China.

00:14:31.000 And John, there'll be a lot of people going, you see, this is the problem with globalisation is

00:14:36.180 that all these interconnected supply chains, you become over-reliant on countries like China. And

00:14:42.540 when they become hostile, or if they become hostile, it means that you are vulnerable to

00:14:47.000 them economically? You know, I think globalisation really arose in the 1990s onwards, you know,

00:14:54.320 in terms of the enormous interdependence of countries, supply chains, markets, capital,

00:15:00.420 and so on. And if you think about that period of history, the Soviet Union had fallen,

00:15:05.380 there was a complacency in the West and other parts of the world that essentially ideological

00:15:10.700 differences don't matter anymore, right? So when we welcome China into the global trading system, 0.97

00:15:18.800 when we help China become such a dominant player in global supply chains, we didn't think at all

00:15:26.220 about geopolitics. We didn't think at all about a clash of values. We just assumed that all that

00:15:31.340 mattered was that if we could help the Chinese get richer, and if we could benefit from that, 0.63

00:15:38.680 then everything would be fine. So, you know, it's not that globalization has benefited

00:15:44.100 the world immensely, but we forgot to think about who it is that we should

00:15:51.820 become interdependent with. You know, who is it that we can actually trust? Essentially,

00:15:59.840 we forgot about geopolitics and geopolitics will always come back to bite.

00:16:05.180 And John, I know you watched my interview with our mutual friend, John Anderson, and I was making very much the same point that people in different countries have different values, surprisingly enough, and different agendas and different ways of doing things.

00:16:17.620 And I can speak a little bit about what that's like as someone who comes from Russia.

00:16:22.540 From the perspective of China, when you talk about ideology and ideological differences, can you explain to people what is it that the CCP want?

00:16:31.640 How are they different from us here in the West?

00:16:33.380 What is this ideology and ideological divides that you're talking about?

00:16:38.280 Maybe the best way I can sort of summarise it, and it's not a crude summary.

00:16:42.700 I think it's an accurate one.

00:16:44.660 The Chinese Communist Party is not communist.

00:16:47.540 They're Leninist.

00:16:48.860 There's a Leninist party.

00:16:50.320 And what I mean by that is, like all Leninist entities, the highest priority is to remain

00:16:56.520 in power.

00:16:57.500 And the way they remain in power is to utilise all elements of the state society.

00:17:03.380 to ensure to remain in power. So if you think of the difference between, say, a Leninist

00:17:08.340 entity compared to a Liberal or Liberal Democratic one, for a Leninist entity such as the Chinese 0.91

00:17:16.360 Communist Party, there is really no distinction between a public and a private. Every aspect of

00:17:22.700 your life, a private firm, what we would consider private activity, that is fair game. If that helps

00:17:30.080 the party remain in power then that's allowable if that uh doesn't help the party remain in power

00:17:36.000 then you know that should be banned you know in recent uh months we had sort of quite quite a

00:17:41.920 weird spectacle of uh xi jinping the chinese leader wanting to ban the interest of chinese 0.64

00:17:50.220 young um teenagers in boy bands right now why do you want to ban boy bands because he thought it

00:17:58.080 was making the Chinese male youth soft and unprepared for war, right? And the point I'm 1.00

00:18:06.580 trying to make is, you know, what I was saying, there is no distinction in a Leninist mindset

00:18:11.420 between the public and the private. Everything you do in what we would consider our private lives,

00:18:17.060 our private businesses and so on, that's relevant to whether the party remains in power or relevant

00:18:22.800 to whether the party loses power.

00:18:24.760 So essentially, that's what modern day

00:18:28.000 Chinese Communist Party actually is.

00:18:31.300 And, you know, I know to a lot of people

00:18:32.620 who've been brought up being told

00:18:34.780 that the CCP ideology doesn't really matter.

00:18:37.620 They really just want to get rich.

00:18:39.700 You know, don't take my word for it.

00:18:41.520 I invite anyone, and it's quite accessible now,

00:18:45.140 read party documents that are now mandatory learning

00:18:48.540 for all schoolchildren in China.

00:18:51.820 they've gone in the very leninist direction um and in a sense that's kind of what their roots

00:18:57.020 were they've just returned to those roots you know and that in itself makes them makes the ccp 0.98

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00:20:51.020 But authoritarianism brings its own advantages, doesn't it, when it comes to running a country?

00:20:57.480 Can you explain why in many ways, although the human rights issues and everything is obviously awful,

00:21:03.620 actually the way they run the country it has certain advantages doesn't it

00:21:09.280 the authoritarian approach um and most people you know most people sort of attribute

00:21:16.140 chinese authoritarianism or the advantages of chinese authoritarianism to in in the economic

00:21:22.540 space it now if you're a poor country and you need to uh uh modernize and industrial industrialize

00:21:31.220 quickly, then yeah, if you want to put human rights aside, if you want to put land rights and

00:21:35.720 other rights aside, authoritarianism for poor countries, it works, right? In the sense that

00:21:42.100 you can force a farmer to give up your land so you can build a road. No need to go to courts

00:21:46.900 and compensate that farmer, right? So you can do all those things. But the problem is that when

00:21:52.020 society gets richer and more complex, when the economy gets more complex, that's when

00:21:58.060 authoritarianism suffers. So if you look at China's challenge now, and this is the way they 0.96

00:22:03.600 view their own challenge, they've gone from a low-income country to a middle-income country.

00:22:09.160 They want to become a high-income country. Now, to become a high-income country, you can't just

00:22:15.120 get by on cheap labour or cheap land. You know, that largely doesn't exist in relative terms in

00:22:21.320 China anymore. So what do you have to do? You have to innovate. You have to allow people to

00:22:26.640 experiment. You have to allow freedom of association. If I want to start a business

00:22:31.880 with Constantine rather than you, I have a right to because Constantine's a better fit.

00:22:36.680 But if a government tells me I can't do that, then obviously there's actual cost to that.

00:22:41.800 So the point I'm trying to make is authoritarian countries at the early stages, even in economic

00:22:46.860 sense, there are advantages. But as you sort of get more complicated as an economy and society,

00:22:54.380 that's when they really struggle um and the last thing i'd say about the supposed authoritarian

00:22:59.140 advantage i mean look at covid you know when covid first happened forget about you know the

00:23:04.300 release of covid whether it's intentional or not you know when when covid first spread throughout

00:23:10.680 chinese society we saw these really extreme lockdowns and a lot of people to my concern 1.00

00:23:16.120 in the west said oh wow look how great the chinese are doing why can't we be like that and a lot of

00:23:21.400 Western countries actually tried, you know, to their shame, they actually tried. Now look at,

00:23:26.880 look at, look at the situation two years later, you know, over time, over the, we've had debates

00:23:35.480 in, in UK, where you are in Australia about, you know, how, how to best manage this. Over time,

00:23:41.740 we've cobbled together some way of living with COVID. Authoritarian countries like China still 0.99

00:23:47.460 haven't done that. You know, they're still basically living as if they're in the first

00:23:52.320 two months of COVID in 2020. And a point I'm trying to make is that authoritarian societies,

00:23:58.900 they don't tend to adjust, they don't tend to recognise mistakes, because no one tells the

00:24:04.220 government they've made a mistake. People just have to grin and bear it. And sometimes by pure

00:24:10.340 luck, the people get a good deal. But over the course of history, we find that authoritarian

00:24:17.300 current countries, they are the ones that make massive mistakes inflicted on the population

00:24:24.740 because they don't self-correct in the same way. And the point that I thought, I mean,

00:24:30.240 that was a great point, number one, the point that I thought that was very interesting was when you

00:24:33.440 talked about innovation. And to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, John, but to me, free speech and

00:24:38.660 innovation go hand in hand, because it's that ability to question, to challenge, to play with

00:24:44.420 accepted norms that's what really leads to true innovation isn't it it does a china has poured 0.88

00:24:51.500 billions of dollars into trying to create you know a chinese silicon valley for example it hasn't

00:24:58.720 worked and why hasn't it worked because um they always try to pick winners it's always top down

00:25:06.280 at bottom up you know there there is you don't have the you don't have the same creative destruction

00:25:13.040 in an economic sense in Chinese societies

00:25:17.520 like you do in Western societies.

00:25:20.180 And part of the reason linked to your free speech comment

00:25:22.900 is that you don't, even in a business context,

00:25:26.380 you know, put aside a human right through a social context,

00:25:28.920 in a business context in China,

00:25:30.980 you don't really have the same encouragement

00:25:34.520 or sometimes even right to question the business strategy

00:25:38.500 or the corporate strategy once it's been determined on high

00:25:42.400 by political operatives, right?

00:25:44.440 So that's just not a particularly good way of innovation.

00:25:49.300 Even in terms of the flow of capital in China,

00:25:54.240 there's the mass misallocation of capital

00:25:56.420 because governments are constantly trying to pick winners

00:25:59.740 and throwing money at them.

00:26:01.660 And when they get it wrong,

00:26:03.280 those companies are not allowed to fail.

00:26:04.840 They just throw more and more money at those companies.

00:26:07.560 So I'm not denying that the Chinese

00:26:08.860 have achieved quite a fair bit,

00:26:10.160 But when it comes to those higher end, higher value added areas of even just economy, China does nowhere near as well as Western and open societies.

00:26:28.560 And John, coming back to the geopolitics side of this for a moment,

00:26:32.040 you talked earlier about China and the CCP particularly learning lessons

00:26:36.120 from the Soviet experience and the protests that they saw in China itself in the 80s.

00:26:43.960 What is the situation with China vis-a-vis what Russia is doing in Ukraine now?

00:26:48.980 A lot of people, myself included, who are not experts,

00:26:51.800 thought that China would jump on that distraction as an opportunity to make a move on Taiwan.

00:26:56.660 One, they have supported Russia, but not as overtly as some people thought.

00:27:01.880 What has been their response?

00:27:03.300 What are the lessons they're learning from it?

00:27:04.900 And what do you think they're planning to do as a result?

00:27:08.000 If you remember, Xi Jinping went to Moscow and about two or three weeks before the Russian invasion declared a no-limits pact with Vladimir Putin.

00:27:19.620 now at the time China and Russia and the American and and Western intelligence for that matter

00:27:26.900 were off the view that if Russia invaded Ukraine would fall within three four days

00:27:32.980 right so at that time China believed that this was a real moment in history that you know if

00:27:42.600 If you look at a lot of the Chinese documents

00:27:45.780 and proclamations at the time, they were talking,

00:27:50.680 using phrases like the great unseen changes in history.

00:27:54.080 What they were talking about was that we're entering

00:27:56.120 a turning point in history where the West,

00:27:59.200 led by a dysfunctional United States, were on the way

00:28:03.800 and that the authoritarian societies who were far more determined

00:28:07.560 and organised were on the rise.

00:28:09.100 so china thought the russians would invade ukraine they would achieve victory uh relatively quickly

00:28:16.620 and then this would lower the courage and a resolve in not just the united states but but

00:28:24.400 in asian countries if china tried to do the same with taiwan now obviously ukraine hasn't played

00:28:30.300 out that way and the chinese now are quite honestly quite um stumped as to as to what to

00:28:37.260 do about it because what they've realized now is that one it's not that easy to um defeat even a

00:28:44.560 smaller enemy um who has the determination to fight because it's their existential existence

00:28:50.620 in you know in question the second thing they've they've worked out is that when you start killing

00:28:57.980 people which the russians did to ukrainians the west sometimes will actually unite now it's true 0.99

00:29:05.820 that the west hasn't you know sent any troops to to ukraine no western soldiers or american or

00:29:12.720 nato soldiers have actually died but the coordination of sanctions against russia

00:29:18.720 have shocked the chinese and unlike russia china cannot afford to have a basket case economy

00:29:26.060 if it does the regime in china falls right and china is still hugely dependent on not just western

00:29:33.260 markets and technology, but on access to Western finance and Western payment systems, the American

00:29:39.880 dollar and so on. So what really freaks the Chinese out, if you had to point to one thing 0.99

00:29:46.000 that freaks the Chinese out, it's that if the Americans decided to cut Chinese entities off

00:29:51.840 from transacting in the US dollar, the Chinese financial system would fall tomorrow. And the US

00:29:59.620 have shown that they they can do that they've done it to a limited degree with the russians

00:30:04.760 and they would certainly do that to the chinese if there was a war say over taiwan

00:30:08.600 so the silver lining i mean you know putting aside the tragedy it's occurring in ukraine and

00:30:13.860 the life lost lost there but the silver lining you know in terms of the china story is that

00:30:19.500 it has given china reason to pause and from a policy point of view i think we have probably

00:30:29.560 brought ourselves quite a few years in terms of any Chinese invasion or intended invasion of Taiwan.

00:30:36.960 And John, for those of us who are, again, not experts, I think it's not unhelpful

00:30:41.500 to understand what is the reason that China is so focused on Taiwan? Why is it such a key

00:30:49.140 core part of the plan? It almost feels like when I hear people talk about it, it's like

00:30:55.480 a deeply emotive issue for the Chinese leadership also.

00:30:59.100 Can you just delve into the history of that a little bit for us?

00:31:01.400 It is a deeply emotive issue, and it really stems from the civil war in China.

00:31:06.840 The communists under Mao Zedong defeated the nationalists who were led by Chiang Kai-shek.

00:31:12.780 Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan.

00:31:15.700 And, you know, as you probably remember, there was a period of time where the world was trying

00:31:22.660 to decide, you know, who was the real China?

00:31:24.660 Was it the People's Republic of China based in Beijing or was it the Republic of China based in Taipei?

00:31:30.860 Now, most people now recognize the People's Republic of China as, you know, the China, but nevertheless do not want Taiwan to be subjugated or integrated into mainland China.

00:31:42.260 Now, from the Chinese Communist Party's point of view, this is one of those unfinished business issues that it's somewhat irrational in the sense that the amount of resources they put into preparing to take Taiwan is irrational, even though Taiwan has huge strategic value.

00:32:01.080 But nevertheless, the fact that it's the number one priority for the Chinese Communist Party, it's one of those somewhat irrational things, but it's just stems from, I guess, the period of history of the civil war and this notion of unfinished business.

00:32:19.040 The last thing I would say is that in the 90s and early 2000s, you know, the Chinese always wanted Taiwan, but what's changed in the last 10 years is that you've now got a leader, Xi Jinping, who has staked his capacity to be president for life, amongst other things, on taking Taiwan, right?

00:32:45.040 that's never happened before you know when you look at xi jinping's predecessors they sort of

00:32:49.480 just said we want taiwan but let future generations decide you know work it out how we actually get

00:32:56.680 taiwan xi jinping's the first leader to actually say he wants to resolve the taiwan question

00:33:02.260 and and in in his time and that it cannot be left unresolved so for for a leader to stake his

00:33:10.820 his claim to be leader for life on Taiwan,

00:33:17.020 which he has done,

00:33:18.100 that's what makes it quite dangerous.

00:33:20.780 But isn't that a very high-risk strategy, John?

00:33:22.800 Because, you know, if he doesn't make that happen,

00:33:26.400 isn't that going to weaken his position?

00:33:29.000 Absolutely, which makes him even more desperate.

00:33:31.980 Look, I personally think it's miscalculation by him,

00:33:34.380 and I think it was born out of hubris, right?

00:33:36.960 I mean, he overestimated, I think, both...

00:33:40.820 both Chinese power and influence on the one hand

00:33:48.080 and the resolve of other countries on the other.

00:33:52.360 Look, I wouldn't want to be Xi Jinping.

00:33:53.820 I mean, I should say, I should step back and say

00:33:58.940 that Xi Jinping is now the most powerful Chinese leader

00:34:02.360 since Mao Zedong.

00:34:04.000 You know, he has truly centralised power around himself

00:34:07.700 and that's not what his predecessors did.

00:34:09.540 They used to centralise power around a group of people,

00:34:12.820 but Xi Jinping has become essentially a classical dictator.

00:34:20.440 Now, to achieve that, he has had to do a lot of terrible things.

00:34:26.840 For example, he's had to put, you know,

00:34:30.060 more than a million Chinese Communist Party officials in jail

00:34:34.020 who were his enemies.

00:34:35.600 You know, he's had to promise the world to the country

00:34:38.100 that he's not only taking Taiwan,

00:34:39.940 but that he would use his Belt and Road initiative

00:34:42.420 to allow China to dominate the entire region and so on.

00:34:46.900 Now, when you make those sorts of promises

00:34:48.840 and you've got a lot of people gunning for your fall,

00:34:52.140 you tend to become dangerous and desperate.

00:34:56.600 So I think Xi Jinping has certainly added an extra layer of risk

00:35:02.780 in terms of what might happen with China in the future.

00:35:06.740 and let's let's delve into the human rights issues with China because I don't think when

00:35:12.900 people who live in the west they grew up in the west really understands what it means to grow up

00:35:18.160 and live in a place like China so what is it like for people to live in China what happens if you

00:35:24.740 criticize the regime and you've used the word go to jail but what does that actually mean again

00:35:30.820 Well, I mean, you know, obviously there are the human rights abusers going against certain ethnicities and people such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans, right?

00:35:42.960 So that's just your, not to make light of it, that's your garden variety genocide, right?

00:35:51.600 Cultural genocide. 0.68

00:35:52.820 And in some cases, human genocide.

00:35:55.520 And again, John, I'll interrupt again, apologies.

00:35:58.240 But just because this is an issue we all talk about,

00:36:00.720 but we probably have no idea about,

00:36:02.640 why are the Chinese doing that? 1.00

00:36:06.640 The Chinese, when Mao Zedong won power in 1949,

00:36:12.520 within three years, he had invaded both Xinjiang,

00:36:15.780 which is where the Uyghurs are, and Tibet,

00:36:17.860 which are largely Buddhist.

00:36:20.520 The Chinese have an intolerance for differences. 1.00

00:36:24.840 And once again, it's a very Leninist mindset.

00:36:28.240 the Uyghurs want to, the Uyghurs don't necessarily want to separate from the People's Republic of

00:36:34.200 China, but they want to live life the way they want to live life. You know, they don't want 1.00

00:36:38.480 the Chinese Communist Party to be the central part of their lives, same with Tibetans. And the

00:36:44.560 Chinese Communist Party cannot tolerate that, right? I mean, it's a strange notion to us,

00:36:51.540 because, you know, for most of us living in liberal societies, we can't just say, well,

00:36:55.340 they want to live that way that's their business who cares but for leninist political organizations

00:37:01.160 they cannot tolerate um groups of people who refuse to submit to the rules that are being

00:37:08.800 imposed upon them so so so that's that's you know it's really as simple as that and and

00:37:15.000 in the same way that a lot of the um cultural chauvinistic attitudes led to uh the second world

00:37:24.900 war i mean those attitudes exist in the chinese communist party right i mean um that's just a

00:37:31.800 fact i mean it's it's documented and they're quite open about it in fact they just don't tolerate

00:37:37.260 uh cultural differences which they see as a threat to their power no one else does

00:37:42.340 but they see as a threat to the power but on the human rights question okay there's that element

00:37:47.120 but in terms of what it's like to for a normal han chinese person not in these regions but say

00:37:53.340 in shanghai or whatever um look you know normally you you sort of go about your lives

00:37:59.920 you've so you sort of know what not to talk about you've internalized you know where the

00:38:06.120 where the sort of boundaries are um and in fact you often become quite critical of those who might

00:38:12.680 want to cross those boundaries because then it disrupts the flow of things sounds like living

00:38:18.420 in the west john i'm going to be honest with you well i mean at least at least we can have podcasts

00:38:24.680 like this right yeah in the west um but i there has been a sort of more of a well and turn to

00:38:33.220 things over the last 10 years with the social surveillance you know i'm talking about technology

00:38:38.460 such as facial recognition ai being used to actually um predict or work out uh crimes that

00:38:47.240 you're about to commit um a social credit system where if you don't hang around the right people

00:38:53.320 or you read the wrong books you lose social credit points and if you lose social credit points

00:38:58.320 you know you may not actually get a spot in university or get a scholarship or um you may

00:39:04.240 not actually get that job you know at that state-owned enterprise or whatever so there has

00:39:09.480 been a sort of far darker high-tech turn to the um suppression that is going on in china um but

00:39:19.720 you know for most people i think in china they're not that they they just sort of know where the

00:39:25.280 boundaries are and they go about your lives it's not it's not necessarily that they are uh you know

00:39:31.800 chanting communist slogans every day but they just know what not to do hey francis what do you think

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00:40:47.100 Okay, so what are the rules in Communist China then, John?

00:40:49.980 If I go over there or if I live there,

00:40:52.640 what are the golden rules of what not to do?

00:40:56.600 You don't criticise the party.

00:40:58.880 You don't criticise individuals within the party.

00:41:02.240 You don't criticise party policies even.

00:41:05.520 um and otherwise everything else is fine what about jokes what about humor am i allowed to

00:41:11.100 mock them am i allowed no no no no so no you're not you're not allowed to make jokes you're not

00:41:16.660 allowed to denigrate the party or individuals within it um but you know it's it's i don't

00:41:23.380 want to give the impression that it's just about what you should not do there are still things you

00:41:27.780 ought to do. So for example, if the party says that you should buy local government bonds to

00:41:37.220 support, you know, indebted local government companies, then you're obliged to do it. Now,

00:41:42.680 if you don't do it, you don't go to jail, but then, you know, you may not actually get access

00:41:46.820 to other privileges, even in an economic sense. So it's, there are all sorts of

00:41:52.940 positive and negative rules that you have to abide by. And, you know, I guess for a lot of

00:42:01.920 Chinese citizens, they probably don't think about it anymore. They just sort of do it because they 1.00

00:42:06.820 kind of know what it is they're meant to do to stay out of trouble. Now, for a lot of people

00:42:11.660 living there, I'm sure they probably think, you know, that's, I can live with that. I mean,

00:42:16.460 that's just what, it's better than what it was, than, you know, the grandparents' generation,

00:42:21.680 for example. But for us, it's not something we can tolerate. But finally, from a foreign policy

00:42:28.480 perspective, why that matters is that China is trying to impose some of these rules and standards

00:42:35.780 on neighbouring countries. And that's kind of where the clash comes. Because, you know,

00:42:42.000 no country is really telling the Chinese Communist Party how to run their own country.

00:42:47.580 The problems are occurring now because the Chinese Communist Party are now telling other

00:42:51.480 countries how they should run their systems and political economies. So I think that's sort of

00:42:58.700 where we're at at the moment. That's why China is such a problem. Could you give an example of that, 1.00

00:43:04.180 please, John, where the Chinese are starting to dictate in their region how countries should be 0.98

00:43:09.280 run? Well, let me give you an example from my country, Australia. Australia is entering its

00:43:15.740 third year of a cascading series of economic punishments against us you know China was our 1.00

00:43:22.180 number one trading partner in fact China still is our number one trading partner now if you look at

00:43:27.640 why China is punishing Australia and the Chinese have been quite helpful because in November last

00:43:33.600 year they actually released a list of 14 grievances and the list of 14 grievances was this is what

00:43:41.840 Australia has to do for China to stop punishing your country. And if you look down the list of

00:43:47.700 the 14 grievances, nine out of 14 grievances concerned our domestic policy. So, you know,

00:43:55.340 there were foreign policy aspects like we shouldn't criticise policies in Tibet and Xinjiang and Hong

00:44:02.240 Kong. We shouldn't talk about Hong Kong anymore. We should not care about the South China Sea. 0.55

00:44:07.180 but even if we did all that most of the demands made against us were things like

00:44:13.480 the government is funding think tanks that are critical of China and that has to stop. The media

00:44:19.860 in Australia is critical of China and the government has to stop it. The government's

00:44:25.400 own internal processes for foreign investment is too harsh and needs to change. The government has

00:44:33.300 ban various companies from entering certain sectors, such as Huawei from entering our 5G

00:44:39.000 sector. And that is not acceptable to China. So this is an example where, you know, it's not just

00:44:45.700 China saying to us, shut up about Xinjiang. They're saying, in Australia, in your own country,

00:44:51.700 this is what you must do, you know, for relations to be stable and proceeding smoothly.

00:44:59.860 Australia's not the only one they've done that to.

00:45:02.400 They've done that to Japan. 0.98

00:45:07.300 They've done it, tried to Vietnam. 0.91

00:45:09.140 They tried to do it to a handful of countries in Southeast Asia.

00:45:14.800 No self-respecting country would accept those sorts of terms.

00:45:18.600 So that's what I'm talking about.

00:45:20.560 It's very interesting.

00:45:21.260 And just very quickly, we've seen the impact of Chinese power 0.99

00:45:26.680 and Chinese money beyond actually the region.

00:45:29.060 So, for example, when NBA players speak out in support of China or things of that nature, what do you make of how China is responding or playing part in the Western culture wars and all of that side of things?

00:45:45.500 when you've got Chinese kind of saying that America is a deeply racist society

00:45:51.200 while putting Uyghurs in concentration camps. 1.00

00:45:53.960 Is China playing a clever part in all of that, do you think? 0.99

00:45:58.540 Or what is your view of that?

00:46:02.280 I thought they were initially playing quite a subtle, clever game.

00:46:07.640 So, you know, examples of the NBA you gave.

00:46:12.140 I mean, other examples are, you know, Hollywood movies.

00:46:16.400 You know, you notice in Hollywood movies,

00:46:18.200 the villains are never Chinese.

00:46:19.520 They're always Russian. 1.00

00:46:21.360 And a reason... 0.94

00:46:22.640 Because Hollywood is racist against my people.

00:46:25.960 But, you know, I mean, I guess what I was saying was

00:46:28.520 in a recent past, China played a more subtle game

00:46:31.000 in just delivering economic incentives for governments

00:46:37.920 and countries to do things in a way that they wanted

00:46:40.860 without being too overt about it it's in the last two or three years where i think um that has become

00:46:48.780 a lot more chinese have become a lot more forthright so they're now um demanding things 1.00

00:46:55.180 that other governments should do you know they're now on a daily basis not daily but on a constant

00:47:00.500 basis threatening other governments the most recent example is new zealand you know you had

00:47:05.120 the New Zealand leader, Prime Minister Arden, who's currently in Washington having talks with

00:47:11.200 Joe Biden, she made a fairly standard comment expressing concern about some of China's economic

00:47:19.740 and social policies. It was nothing really that other countries don't really say. And how did

00:47:26.360 China respond? The foreign ministry basically threatened to, in their words, treat New Zealand

00:47:32.640 like we're now treating Australia, right?

00:47:35.600 I mean, that sort of heavy-handed approach, to be frank,

00:47:40.200 it's made it quite easy for leaders in the West now

00:47:44.400 to sell the proposition that China is a problem

00:47:47.620 and we need to design policies to deal with that.

00:47:52.820 And John, that posturing, is that a sign of China's growing strength 0.94

00:47:58.960 and financial power, or is it a sign of their weakness

00:48:02.920 that they feel that they're under attack

00:48:05.920 and that they need to hit back?

00:48:08.840 Look, the Chinese certainly, my view is that in the last four 1.00

00:48:15.000 or five years, the Chinese, as powerful as they are, 0.97

00:48:18.040 they've overestimated their strengths.

00:48:20.800 So they thought that, you know, I mentioned the phrase

00:48:24.960 the great unseen changes um in in in several centuries you know that's a very common phrase

00:48:31.760 used from xi jinping down to refer to great changes in the power in the distribution of

00:48:39.260 global power are happening now and it's in china's favor so for the last three or four years i think

00:48:44.120 there's been a lot of overestimation by the chinese of their own strengths and look to be

00:48:49.620 fair to them, I think they overestimate their strength because until quite recently, much of

00:48:56.380 the world really just bowed down to China every time China demanded something. You know, it's 0.90

00:49:00.980 really only been the last two years or so where countries have sort of said enough and we'll just

00:49:07.180 absorb whatever punishments that China's going to deliver to us. So China has, in my view,

00:49:14.400 China has been conditioned to behave like this and it's not working now but because they've been 0.93

00:49:22.740 doing for so long and it's actually worked for so long that's the kind of method that they know

00:49:27.760 so you know when a smaller country which is basically a real country except the United

00:49:31.480 States does something that's how China responds because for about 10 years it's worked it's only

00:49:37.220 the last two years it hasn't. And the last two years I presume that a lot of that is to do with

00:49:41.620 COVID and the Chinese attitudes to COVID and the way they've been, to put it mildly, less than

00:49:47.960 clear with what happened? I think that's created a lot of anger. But, you know, I think what

00:49:56.220 happened with COVID in terms of the spread of COVID and the deceit that tried to cover up the

00:50:02.360 spread of COVID, which, you know, allowed it to spread around the world, I think most people

00:50:07.120 understand that that's indicative of the nature of the Chinese system right I mean it wasn't just

00:50:13.300 one stuff up like what happened with COVID is indicative of how the Chinese system actually

00:50:20.460 works so I think I think that has changed views another thing that that's occurred and look I

00:50:26.300 have to you know regardless of what your viewers think of him Donald Trump had a huge impact you

00:50:32.180 You know, no president, and the American president

00:50:34.920 has the loudest platform in the world, as we know,

00:50:38.060 and Donald Trump was the loudest American president.

00:50:42.480 No American president, certainly in my lifetime,

00:50:46.560 had called out China in that way.

00:50:50.080 And even though, you know, in many ways he was a very difficult,

00:50:55.180 in some ways a poor president, he changed the conversation

00:50:59.060 about China.

00:50:59.720 you know certainly in allied countries like australia um but but i i also think in in some

00:51:05.740 parts of the world and that i won't admit it even some parts like europe for example i think it

00:51:10.720 changed the conversation like china like everyone knew china did the things that um the trump

00:51:16.680 administration accused china of doing but to call it out so publicly and make that the focus of

00:51:22.400 diplomatic conversation is actually quite a different thing um and and so i i think that

00:51:28.000 That actually had, you know, and I was in government at the time, so I could see it

00:51:31.360 from the inside.

00:51:32.280 That had quite a big impact on how the world started to speak and think about China, certainly

00:51:38.300 the Western world anyway.

00:51:40.260 And speaking of the Western world, to wrap things up before we go to our own final question

00:51:44.520 and questions from our local supporters, it's been a great interview.

00:51:47.820 Really enjoyed having you on the show, John.

00:51:49.440 I suppose the real question that we're all asking is, based on everything you've said,

00:51:53.840 what should be the West's response and attitude to China going forward?

00:52:00.140 You mentioned that we've bought ourselves a few years

00:52:02.580 or Mr. Putin bought us a few years in terms of Taiwan and putting that off.

00:52:07.520 How should the West act to have, 0.70

00:52:10.360 I think most people in the West would like to have

00:52:12.620 a constructive relationship with China if they could,

00:52:15.580 but they also don't want to expose ourselves to the same vulnerabilities

00:52:18.860 that perhaps we have done with Russia,

00:52:20.440 where we embolden somebody to feel that they can do things

00:52:24.520 that we wouldn't want them to do.

00:52:25.980 So what should be our posture?

00:52:29.260 Doing nothing or doing little will actually make things worse

00:52:32.380 because China is set on the direction that it wants to go, right?

00:52:35.720 I mean, this is not a statement of ideology.

00:52:39.360 It's a statement of observation.

00:52:41.640 and i believe what when a communist the chinese communist party and xi jinping tells you what

00:52:50.800 they want to do it's a wise thing to actually believe them and they've told us what they want

00:52:55.380 to do so my point is that the only way to to get to a relatively happy outcome is to restrain and

00:53:04.720 deter right i mean doing the opposite actually gets you to a worse position because it just

00:53:10.920 allows the Chinese to push boundaries that eventually will lead to, you know, a much worse 1.00

00:53:19.680 situation. So I think that's the way we should look at it. I mean, we are now dealing with

00:53:27.360 a large power that has fundamentally different, not just objectives, but

00:53:36.540 values and outlooks on where things ought to be than we do. And so we have to understand that.

00:53:45.280 The other thing I would say is, and I'm lucky that I'm just old enough to remember

00:53:51.580 the Cold War. You know, I was a child, but I'm just old enough to actually remember it and

00:53:57.820 understand elements of it. And there are ideological and ethical differences between

00:54:05.580 governments right and um and differences in in the sense that it it leads to the sorts of

00:54:15.600 conflicts that we read about in the history books our objective is to obviously avoid those

00:54:21.500 and if you want to be a student of history if you look at the the period leading up to the 1940s a

00:54:28.500 lot of people describe the current period as like the 1930s uh if you go back in history i mean you

00:54:34.800 know there were things that we could have done to to uh disincentivize certain governments

00:54:43.900 from doing certain things we didn't do those things i do think even though no historical

00:54:49.340 period exactly the same i do think we're in quite a similar period i'm optimistic that there's time

00:54:54.920 to actually do that and i feel much better about where things are um than i was four or five years

00:55:02.060 where I think we're sort of sleepwalking our way to disaster.

00:55:05.720 So from that point of view, I do think we do have good options

00:55:11.500 to dissuade the Chinese from doing the sorts of things 1.00

00:55:15.940 that would be a catastrophe.

00:55:19.040 Dr. John Lee, it has been an absolute pleasure.

00:55:22.500 We're going to do, like Constantine said,

00:55:24.380 our locals at the end of the interview.

00:55:26.760 But we always finish with our final question,

00:55:28.800 which is what is the one thing we're not talking about

00:55:31.240 that we really should be? Don't lose confidence in our own institutions and values. I mean,

00:55:39.700 I say this as a typical immigrant who went from, you know, I was born in Malaysia, but I say this

00:55:47.100 as a typical immigrant whose family deliberately left the country to go to what they thought was

00:55:52.780 a better country. And what makes that better country are the institutions and the sorts of

00:55:58.700 values behind it it's you know it's really frustrating for I'm talking about my Australian

00:56:05.480 experience and the American one where I spend a lot of time there it's really frustrating for

00:56:10.600 an immigrant into these societies to watch people in the west beat themselves up over

00:56:17.780 things that not just don't matter but actually create divisions when they when they when when

00:56:24.320 they don't actually exist um you know the west doesn't have a natural right to succeed um we do

00:56:31.220 have to make sure that that the basic principles of liberalism that that we um that we based our

00:56:38.740 institutions and our processes on they have to continue to remain and that's not the uh nature

00:56:46.760 of fashion right now but we do have to be careful in the west about you know where we're going

00:56:52.640 because in 20, 30, 40 years,

00:56:55.400 we don't necessarily have a right

00:56:56.740 to still be vibrant societies.

00:57:01.380 Well said.

00:57:02.500 It's something Francis and I,

00:57:04.400 in our far less articular way,

00:57:06.640 have been trying to remind people of as well

00:57:08.340 here in the West.

00:57:10.040 But we really appreciate you joining us.

00:57:11.960 Where can people follow your work

00:57:13.420 and keep up with the things

00:57:15.380 that you're putting out?

00:57:16.940 The best way is just to look at my profiles

00:57:21.280 and the Hudson Institute, and that really has most of my stuff there.

00:57:24.760 So if you look at my name, John Lee, at the Hudson Institute,

00:57:27.660 most of my stuff will be there.

00:57:29.700 Dr. John Lee, we're going to ask you some locals' questions in a second,

00:57:32.600 but for now, thank you so much for joining us.

00:57:35.080 We really appreciate it, and thank you all for watching and listening.

00:57:38.620 We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one,

00:57:41.860 or our show.

00:57:42.920 All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.

00:57:44.880 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

00:57:47.620 it's also available as a podcast.

00:57:50.020 Take care and see you soon, guys.

00:57:54.320 Identity politics is the worst thing that is happening in the West.

00:57:59.000 I mean, it is just tearing ourselves apart.

00:58:02.460 I mean, and for no reason.

TRIGGERnometry - June 13, 2022

Why is China Building a Massive Army？ Dr John Lee

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