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Full transcript below

In this episode, Nick and Paul discuss:

Paul’s book Thunder From the Silent Zone, and four possible futures for China
The history and legacy of Hu Yaobang, the "conscience” of the Chinese Communist Party
The history of democracy in China, and the possibility of political reform or democratisation
Xi Jinping and his designs on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan
China’s rapid militarisation under Xi, and implications for Australia and the regional order
Exercises in thinking: adopting the world view and perspectives of Chinese communist nationalists in regard to the current geopolitical order
The Thucydides Trap, and the prospect of conflict between China and the United States
The COVID-19 pandemic and China
The diplomatic and trade war between China and Australia
Literature on the implications of China’s rise

Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.

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Dr. Paul Monk on the Rise of Xi's China

00:00 Paul: History drips with irony, often of the most savage kind, and few histories do so more than that of modern China. One is struck by it at almost every major turning point in the country's history, from the fate of political reform under the late Qing (1898 to 1911) to the death of Zhao Ziyang in 2005.

00:22 Indeed, the repetitive cycle of historical irony might best be encapsulated by drawing a parallel between the Empress Dowager Cixi placing Emperor Guangxu under house arrest for attempting political reform in 1898 and the Emperor Dowager Deng Xiaoping placing Premier Zhao Ziyang under house arrest in 1989 for essentially the same crime. What had the intervening 90 years of revolution been for, if not to rid China of tyranny and give it a fully modern constitution?

00:54 Nick: You're joining us on Bloom, a conversations podcast about anything and everything. That was Dr Paul Monk reading the opening lines from the conclusion to his pathbreaking 2005 work, Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.

01:09 That book was pathbreaking because at a time when almost all pundits were making single projection claims about China's future, Paul insisted that we had to think in terms of divergent possible futures, admit that these were path dependent, and not at all certain, and that monitoring which one might end up occurring required paying attention to numerous variables that too many pundits failed to examine.

01:30 Paul, could you explain why you believed all those years ago that different scenarios were necessary aids to our thinking on China's future and what your proposed scenarios were?

01:40 Paul: Yes, Nick. What struck me, going back to the late 1990s, was that there were a considerable amount of people - you would have to say I think that this was the consensus that had emerged in the field - that China's economic growth would continue more or less indefinitely, that there would be this onward and upward surge in China’s economic growth and that you would just get a more prosperous China that either would, for that very reason, be benign because the rising tide would lift all boats or it would remain observably the way China was which they thought was relatively inward looking and pacific, not expansionist. What was not to like?

02:19 And I felt that this was implausible in a number of ways and so I outlined four alternative scenarios. You might call them ideal typical scenarios. So, I wasn't saying that you could closely specify precisely how each of these would turn out, but they differed in kind and they presented quite starkly different alternative futures for China.

02:43 The first of these I called 'mutation' which was by far the most benign and that would be one in which economic growth in China led not simply to greater prosperity, but because of better prosperity to social change and political reform and that we would end up with a China that would be a very large version of say South Korea or Taiwan, and that indeed would be a happy outcome.

03:04 The second I called 'maturation', one in which China's economic growth continued as say that of Japan had for 30 years or so, but then it levelled out because there were obstacles to indefinite growth and there was no precedent for such rapid growth going on for more than about 30 years, and that if that occurred you would have a China in a middle income trap or plateau, but with enormous demographic, environmental and other challenges to meet, and so it would be better off than it had been under Mao, but it would be far from being rampant or taking over the world or super prosperous.

03:44 The third scenario I called 'militarisation' and that is one in which as China grew wealthier, the regime chose to pour resources into military power and internal security and that this would present a very different China to the mutation scenario and one that we might find distinctly disquieting.

04:02 The fourth scenario called 'metastasis' which was where despite the growth in prosperity, the Communist party would prove unwilling or unable to make the political and institutional changes required to keep the equilibrium an open society up and that the result would be a meltdown, a political crisis, a social crisis and a bit of a mess in China.

04:25 That was published in 2005 and at that stage I think it would be fair to say that if pundits had been asked to nominate which of these four was the most plausible, they would have said mutation.

04:37 We now know that of those four, that's actually the least likely right now, that the regime has set its face very explicitly against democratisation and political liberalisation. It has poured resources into military modernisation and internal suppression, surveillance and censorship. It's spending even more on the latter than it is on its military and it's spending a great deal on its military.

05:00 So, that's very close to the militarisation scenario and Xi Jinping is now alienating almost all his neighbours and threatening to take military action. There could still however be a metastasis. That is, because of the refusal to reform an open institution, this could all come crashing down.

05:17 So, that makes for a very interesting thinking about what's going on and what we might think of doing about it.

05:24 Nick: That book was written a decade after you had resigned from the defence intelligence organisation and from government service all together to go your own way. Tell us how you got to work in the Defence Intelligence Organisation to begin with and why you left.

05:36 Paul: Yeah, that takes us back. So, essentially, I completed a PhD in international relations in 1988 and it had been a very interesting process doing that and it had nothing to do with China, and I really needed a job the next year. So, I applied to defence thinking that at least I'll get myself a job and draw a basic income while I see the PhD through examination and then we'll see what happens from there.

06:04 Without going into chapter and verse, I had completely unexpected difficulties getting into defence at all because of security clearance problems, but once I did get in and applied to join the Defence Intelligence Organisation - then call the Joint Intelligence Organisation - I was assigned to work on East Asia and I've said tongue in cheek to quite a few people over the years it's funny how things work out because I'd done an undergraduate degree on European history, ancient, medieval and modern. I'd done a PhD on US cold war counter insurgency strategy. I hadn't studied China, Japan, Korea at all during my university years and suddenly that's what I'm asked to work on. I was given no language training, no in country experience or whatever, just asked to work on East Asia.

06:48 Now it so happened this was 1990 when I was asked to do that and Ross Garnaut, our former Ambassador of China, had just published a report called Australia and the North East Asian Ascendancy and he was saying Australia's future is strongly geared to the rising wealth in North East Asia and China will be next following Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong.

07:10 And so I thought to myself, "Well, this is where to make a career. This is an opening, this is an opportunity, so let's throw myself into that," and within two years of joining as a junior graduate analyst, I was head of the Japan and Koreas desk and I did that for a couple of years and then the position as head of the China desk came up and I applied for it and I got the job.

07:33 And so at that point I thought, "Okay, excellent, I'm on way. I'm getting dug in." I was by that stage increasingly well-known and respected across the government. However, what I discovered after two years working on China is that although I don't think you would have found anybody who said I wasn't good at what I did, I couldn't get Defence or Foreign Affairs to back me and say that "We will train you, foster you, develop you to be a world class expert on China."

08:00 I said to both departments, "Look, this country is going to need absolutely first-class China expertise for the indefinite future and you now know who I am. You know I'm good at what I do, but I don't have the language and I don't have in country experience. If you arrange those things for me, you will have a first-rate China analyst," and to my dismay they both said no. The Defence department said, "We don't send civilians to China," and Foreign Affairs said, "You're not one of us and we're not particularly inclined to hire you," and so I decided reluctantly that, "Well, there isn't a future on China for me in the Australian Government." So, I walked away, and I reinvented myself in other ways.

08:36 Nick: Yeah, right, and so what was the pathway from resigning that interesting position with a very promising future to publishing an original book on rethinking China?

08:45 Paul: Well, it's curious the way things play out. Because I'd had that job, the media, the ABC, the newspapers regarded me as a go-to man on China and so I was regularly invited to speak about China on TV and radio, to write about China in the press. I'd also made very good contacts in Taiwan and so I was regularly invited back to Taiwan and I was able to visit places most people never get to see, and so I wrote a long string of essays about China while working to set up a consulting operation who had nothing at all to do with China.

09:17 And as a result of those essays getting attention, I was then approached by Henry Rosenbloom at Scribe and asked would I write a book for him to publish about China, and I said, "Well, that's easy. All I have to do is pull together these essays I've written over the last five or six years, edit them and update them, write an introduction and conclusion and we've got a book," and that was the book that became Thunder from the Silent Zone.

09:37 Nick: Yeah, excellent, but that was 15 years ago itself when you published Thunder from the Silent Zone, and during that time you've never earned a living as a China analyst nor a professional in that field. So, why have you kept up writing and speaking about it in the news media, in parliament and at various private functions?

09:54 Paul: Yes. Well, I think it's something that's grown on itself. So, why did I do it immediately after I left DIO? Well, the short answer to that is that I didn't know quite what else to do initially and in 1999 after I'd been teaching at a couple of our universities on an informal basis, I was invited by John Fitzgerald to actually create and teach a course on modern Chinese politics at Latrobe University, and so that very much got my hand in and in fact he was so impressed by the course I put together that he said he thought he would teach my course from now on and he was the professor of Chinese history. That was very flattering.

10:32 So, I had this background knowledge and kudos for having been head of the China desk in DIO and that was an invitation that was constantly coming to me, "Write about it, speak about it, tell us what you think about it."

10:46 It was some years however before that came full circle and I had people in government inviting me back to Canberra to conferences and to address audiences and I must say that when in 2019 I was invited to give a keynote speech and indeed chair the panel at the end of the day at a newly created forum, all of government forum called the China Day, it was a very sweet moment for me because two things were evident. One is that the number of people working on China in Canberra and the bureaucracy had grown enormously since I'd left government virtually 25 years before. You could have probably counted the people in my day as perhaps a couple of dozen. I addressed an audience of 400 and they were all China hands and they'd had to lead 300 people out of the gathering because they couldn't fit them in. That's an index of how immensely our relationship with China and our trade with China has grown in that time.

11:41 And to me personally what was extraordinary was that throughout those 25 years, I hadn't been paid by anybody to work full time on China. I never had received the language training or the in-country experience and yet I had this audience eating out of my hand, and part of me was taken aback. I thought that really shouldn't be the case.

12:00 Nick: Yeah, there are plenty of similarly senior people in the bureaucracy who don't go on to do those sorts of things.

12:05 Paul: Yes, that's correct and indeed in general it's probably fair to say that most former government officials, whether they're intelligence analysts, diplomats, politicians for that matter, don't really get into the business of extensive public commentary or become media figures. Some do, but I think the difference in my case is that I hadn't really ever been a career civil servant. I'd been someone who did a PhD and then for a few years I worked in bureaucracy and my instinct was to think and write and express independent opinions.

12:39 And my willingness to do that then reinforced the inclination of the media to engage me to speak because I was seen as somebody who at least seemed to know what he was talking about and wasn't holding back his opinions out of deference to some corporate organisation/government organisation or for that matter the Chinese Communist Party.

13:00 Nick: So, tell us a bit more about the experience of speaking at the China Day. What was the audience craving to have elicited such a positive reaction from them but also now being asked to proof read a draft biography of Hu Yaobang by American China scholar and former CIA analyst, Robert Suettinger?

13:17 Paul: Yeah, that's very interesting, Nick, because basically since the turn of the century I've earned my living doing things that have had nothing specifically to do with China and yet I keep being invited back to write about, speak about China, including to government officials.

13:32 I've relished that. I have found it deeply satisfying to be respected enough to be invited to do that and what I have found is that over those years, many people who were my peers at a more junior level have risen to the top of the tree now.

13:51 An old friend from my DIO days is now Secretary of Defence. Others are senior diplomats and so forth, and I on occasions get emails from people who I didn't actually know in government but who were at the top of the tree years ago and out of the blue they'll email me saying, "I really admire your writing."

14:13 That's really satisfying in the nature of the case, and the China Day invitation was a specific case of that. As I remarked, there's this big audience in an auditorium in the ASIO building and I got a very warm reception. There was a lot of listening to what I had to say, a lot of praise for how I said it.

14:34 So, if I ever had felt - as indeed I did years ago - frustrated that the refusal of government to develop and foster me, that's greatly ameliorated by being invited back and then being so well received in stating my own opinions and not official opinions about China.

14:49 As for proof reading Bob's book, there's a background story to this. A couple of years ago my partner and I, Claudia, were in Washington and through a mutual friend we were invited to dinner by a woman called Diamond Yu who is a China analyst of Hong Kong origins, and she emailed me and said, "My husband and I would like to invite you to dinner," and they lived in DC.

15:13 So, we went to their place for dinner and the door opened and there was a male figure there and he said, "Paul, welcome. My name is Bob Suettinger," and I said, "Bob Suettinger? I know who you are. I just didn't know you were Diamond's husband." I knew him as a former CIA China analyst but nobody, including Diamond, had mentioned that he was the husband in question.

15:38 So, we had a great laugh, and we went in and Claudia and I had dinner with the two of them and we had a lovely conversation and in the course of dinner, Bob mentioned that he was writing a biography of Hu Yaobang. Now, your listeners may actually not be aware of who Hu was, but he was the single most prominent and most memorable leader of China in the 1980s who pushed for and articulated the case for political liberalisation and reform in China, for China having a democratic future. He was pushed aside because of that by Deng Xiaoping who was the boss-man. He'd died in April 1989 and that brought tens of thousands of students out into the streets in what became the Tiananmen Square protests, because they knew who he was very well, and they knew what he stood for and they wanted what he stood for and Deng sent in the tanks and this was a great tragedy of modern China's politics.

16:32 So, for the two years that passed after that dinner I was constantly going back to Bob saying, "How is your book coming along? I really want to read your book," and finally in December last year Diamond emailed me, and she said, "He's nearly finished. Would you like to proofread the manuscript?" and I responded, "I would love to proofread the manuscript," and so they've been sending me the draft chapters one after another and I've been proof reading them.

16:58 And I mentioned this on my Facebook page not so long ago and a great Chinese friend who is an ex-patriot scholar working in Chicago emailed me and said, "How did you get the interesting work of proof reading a biography of Hu Yaobang?" and I said, "Well, I was invited to and I responded with enthusiasm." So, that's where I'm at with - it's an avocation. It's not my academic specialty. It's not my income. It's just something that I very much enjoy doing and I should add of course that I enjoy doing it not least because China is absolutely the biggest game in town. These are very important issues. This is not a game.

17:28 Nick: So, to come to a couple of those issues, will there be political reform or democratisation in China any time soon and if not, what should we expect, perhaps with reference to those four scenarios you outlined earlier?

17:42 Paul: Perfect question because in fact the mutation scenario that I did outline earlier was the one of intelligent, deliberate, gradual democratisation, very much on a model of what occurred in Taiwan in the 1980s and again most of your listeners will almost certainly be unaware of this, but there was a dictatorship - a nationalist, not a communist one - in Taiwan for 30 years, 40 years almost, until the mid-1980s and at that point the deliberate decision was made by the then dictator of Taiwan, the Republic of China and Taiwan, Chiang Ching-kuo, who was the son of the famous Chiang Kai-shek who had been dictator before him and Chiang Ching-kuo had been his father's security chief. He had implemented dictatorship. He made the very deliberate decision to democratise and so there was some hope that the same would happen in China.

18:33 If for no other reason than that Chiang Ching-kuo and Deng Xiaoping had been classmates in Moscow in the mid-1920s - they knew one another. They'd both been trained as Leninists there and hope was that they would end up making a similar decision, that style and star communism/Leninism was not an emancipatory political program and that democratisation on a model roughly as pioneered in the western democracies was a better model.

19:03 That did happen in Taiwan. It hasn't happened in China. Now the question is will it happen? Well, it seems right now and for the immediate future less plausible than it did certainly in the 1980s or even a few years ago.

19:17 However it's worth pointing out that there are very thoughtful Chinese scholars in Hong Kong, in the United States, in Singapore, who, and for that matter insofar as they can keep breathing in China under Xi Jinping, in China itself who have been arguing not only should it happen, in a sense it must happen because it’s the only solution to China's institutional difficulties.

19:43 And there's a particularly good book on this subject published in 2019 in Hong Kong, more precisely published by Harvard University Press but by a scholar in Hong Kong called Jiwei Ci called Democracy in China: the Coming Crisis. Now, this was written and published immediately before the national security laws imposed on Hong Kong, but in it he argues that the case for democracy in China is not some abstract, idealistic or imperialistic one. The case for democratisation in China is because the gridlock in China, the difficulties that the party is facing in governance in China are registered by the fact that it's spending such enormous resources on repression, surveillance and censorship. If it was legitimate, if its institutions were in good working order, it wouldn't need to do that, but it constantly has to ramp that up. That's got to give. That can't go on indefinitely.

20:33 So, that's where we're at and what that means is maybe there will be a crisis which will lead to intelligent reform. Maybe there will be a metastasis, a breakdown of institutions which one would prefer not to see but it's a distinct possibility.

20:46 Nick: So, Jiwei Ci wrote that book in 2019 and the national security laws were imposed on Hong Kong in 2020. Has this already put paid to such hopes that democratisation might occur, instead entrenching authoritarian rule and subsuming Hong Kong into the People's Republic of China? What crisis did Ci have in mind?

21:05 Paul: I think that he had in mind - and it would be so interesting to interview him right now about this - the very kind of crisis to which I alluded a few moments ago. That is that the regime finds that civil society in China, despite all the repression, continues to develop. Because millions and millions of Chinese are now better educated, more affluent, more widely travelled, more conversant with what's going on in the world than they ever were in the bad old days and telling such people that they'd got to adhere closely to Xi Jinping thought and the guidance of some know it all leader in a vast and complex and rapidly changing country simply makes no sense. That system is intrinsically unworkable. That's what he's pointing to and he's pointing to it as a practical, deeply educated and patriotic Chinese.

21:57 So, this is important to realise. Some people assert that it's western ideologues or imperialists or conceited Americans who want to impose democracy on China. We're talking here about highly educated, cosmopolitan Chinese scholars who are saying, "This is what we need," in the same way that Hu Yaobang was impeccably both Chinese and a high-ranking member of the Communist party and that's where he wanted to go.

22:22 So, that's what's on the table and what remains to be worked out is will Xi Jinping and the party hardliners bring China to war or crisis before we get there? There are precedents for that in Japan, in Germany, in the Soviet Union and so the next few years are going to be a very testing time.

22:39 Nick: What precisely caused that change in the overall trajectory of China's political leadership? You think about Hu Yaobang being an intellectual wellspring of democratisation as an ideal within the Chinese Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping being a representative of economic liberalisation and political liberalisation down the track, but in the last eight years after Xi came to power in 2013, you had a very steep descent into authorisation and domestic and regional bellicosity and even tyranny.

23:07 Paul: Yes, that's absolutely true. If we go back to your question about Hu Yaobang compared to Deng Xiaoping, what you can see with Hu Yaobang is somebody who has been described even in China itself as the conscience of the party. He had always been a thoughtful, literate, sensitive kind of guy and he suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution. He was thrown out of political jobs. He was imprisoned. He was literally tortured. He was beaten up, and Deng Xiaoping was the person or more precisely Ye Jianying, one of the generals who always kept an eye on him and managed to save him and then when Mao died, brought him back and said, "Okay, we know your abilities and your integrity. We've got some work for you to do," and at that point in the late seventies and then in the early eighties, he did a series of remarkable things. He was put in charge of the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences and asked to put it on its feet again after the disasters of the cultural revolution and he did. He was put in charge of the party's central school for the training of cadres and asked, "Put that on a sound footing so we're really educating cadres instead of merely indoctrinating them," and he did.

24:13 He was then put in charge of the organisation department of the party which oversees party personnel with the mandate to rehabilitate in person or by reputation literally millions of people who had been in prison, sacked, beaten up, exiled, put in concentration camps or executed during cultural revolution and before, and he did, and then he becomes general secretary of the party and in that capacity, he starts to lead the charge. Well, it was hardly a charge - lead the slow march you might say to political and institutional reform - legal reform, democratisation within the party and then across the country.

24:51 That however seemed to Deng Xiaoping a bridge too far. He was very hesitant about that and he was at the end of the day a Leninist. He didn't really believe in democracy, even within the party. He'd made some reforms intended to modify the party's way of conducting its business so you wouldn't have a dictator like Mao Zedong. There would be limited terms for the top guy. There would be more collegiality, etc. That was at least sensible and pragmatic. Xi Jinping has thrown that out the window and we're back to where we were, except that now China is far wealthier than it ever was under Mao.

25:26 Nick: And of course, it now has a sophisticated digital totalitarian surveillance state that the Soviet Union couldn't even dream of.

25:31 Paul: Absolutely so and even George Orwell would roll his eyes in wonderment at what we currently already see in China.

25:37 Nick: Could you speak a bit more about the broader democratic traditions and histories in China, with reference to the 1911 revolution, the May 4th movement and democratic activists such as Liang Qichao who I understand witnessed Australian Federation in 1901 and took inspiration from it as a model for China?

25:54 Paul: Yes, absolutely. The Communist party is rhetoric in its narrative about Chinese modern history, basically obliterate these people and so you're offered a version of history in which it was always going to be a Communist revolution and it was the Communist revolution that defeated the Japanese, that freed China from Western imperialism, that has put China on its feet and all those things. That's a grossly oversimplified version of what's actually happened.

26:20 It is the case none the less that until the 20th century there never was a democratic tradition of any kind in China and I like to say that we would benefit in our universities, in so far as we could reform our own universities, if graduate students or even undergraduate students had available to them a seminar in which there would be a systematic comparison between the classical Greek and Roman republics to which we trace our very ideas of constitutional accountable government, what we call democracy, and on the other hand classical China where there were no republics, there were only kingdoms and empires.

26:58 When you got to the 1900s, against the odds in some ways the ageing Empress Dowager Cixi decided to actually listen to senior courtiers, who were saying that China should move in this direction. China needs a constitutional monarchy and a federal system of government and it needs democratic elections, and so she arranged for them actually to take place. Something the Communist party has never done, and we'll come back to that.

27:29 And those elections took place in 1911 and 43 [million] male propertied voters participated. Multiple parties took place, and a constituent assembly was elected in what we would rightly call free and fair elections. Not with the universal franchise but there were definitely elections.

27:48 Now that was the context in which the National Republic of China was declared by Sun Yat-sen and for a brief shining moment as we say about Camelot, it looked as though just possibly the empire would transition into a constitutional monarchy with an accountable government, a multiparty democracy, etc, but it fell apart and it fell apart because there wasn't the institutional infrastructure and the political cohesion to make it work and because an old imperial general decided to do it away and make himself the emperor and then he failed in that task and the country fragmented into warlord provinces.

28:28 There were a number of outstanding young leaders in the Guomindang in those years who had the potential to be really great Chinese leaders, charismatic and gifted Chinese leaders. One of the most notable, though very few people have heard about him these days, in a fellow called Song Jiaoren who once those elections had taken place was to be the parliamentary leader of the Guomindang in Beijing and he was set to go to Beijing from Shanghai. He was at the railway station when he was gunned down. He was assassinated.

29:01 Twelve years later when Sun Yatsen died, another very gifted polylingual, highly educated, broadly left-wing Labour leader, Guomindang leader, Liao Jukai, was sent to replace him and that again looked very promising and he was assassinated, and these are turning points in modern Chinese history because if you could have had leaders like that, young and gifted and idealistic in place, great things could in principle have been possible.

29:31 But instead what you got was warlordism. You got Chiang Kaishek taking over as a military leader of the Guomindang on the right wing of the Guomindang, linked to the Green Gang in Shanghai. You had the Communist Party forming with its cadres estranged in Moscow and advised by people from a COMINTERN and they ended up in civil war and then you had a Japanese invasion. You had a mess.

29:51 What's remarkable is that if you skip that intermedium of let's say 50 or 60 years, you never the less get someone like Hu Yaobang emerging from the ruckus still essentially saying, "Well, okay, we've had major digressions. We've had some terrible misfortunes, but let's do this," and then he gets shunted aside and you get Tiananmen.

30:11 Nick: Yeah, which is a popular sort of uprising for calling for democracy.

30:15 Paul: Well, the remarkable thing given China's history overall is that there were demonstrations by tens of thousands of students and at one point hundreds of thousands of citizens in Beijing. They wanted democracy. They wanted accountable government. They wanted to cut down on corruption and arbitrary rule. It wasn't an uprising. They weren't in arms. They weren't sacking anything, burning anything. They weren't like the red guards in the cultural revolution, but Deng set the army on them and thousands of people ended up being shot, crushed, imprisoned or fled abroad.

30:45 That's awful and whatever one says about the subsequent economic growth of China, politically that was a debacle. That was a bad day, and the truth is if you look at the documentation that was leaked from China subsequently and is available in print and which I've read personally, even the hardline senior leaders, Deng and Chiang Ching, knew that. They knew that this was a nasty thing. They just didn't know how to do it differently because all their instincts were repressive and Leninist and Zhao Ziyang who had been the premier who replaced Hu Yaobang had pleaded with him, "Don't do this. Let me talk to the students," but they dismissed him from office, and he ended up spending the last 16 years of his life under house arrest.

31:29 That's China's problem. It has found itself unable not to produce gifted and intelligent leaders, but to give them secure office so that they can implement programs and China needs for its own sake and for the sake of the rest of us to get to that point.

31:46 Nick: Is that what you've called the Dragon Culture? I think in response to Edward Luttwak's writing that China was an autistic nation with regard to its neighbours.

31:55 Paul: Yes, Eddie Luttwak has written about China as what he called an autistic culture, that it's so inward looking, so used to traditionally and conservatively to seeing itself as it the middle kingdom, Zhong Guo, it has difficulty relating on anything like equitable or honest terms with other states and we can see that in Xi Jinping. We can see it in the way China currently relates to Australia. It is autistic.

32:24 But there's a different matter at issue here when it comes to what's called for, for the sake of China, and that is that with the best will in the world, one wants to see - if you’re a patriotic Chinese or if you're a foreigner, American, Australian or whatever - one wants to see an open flourishing China that we can all live with. One wants to trade with China. One doesn't want to fight China, but under Xi Jinping we're being backed into a position where we almost feel as though that's what's going to happen. We're not being given a choice here, and that's an ominous future. That's the militarisation scenario.

33:06 Nick: As you've mentioned that mutation scenario is now unlikely in the near future, but we are seeing the militarisation scenario emerge under Xi and we could soon see metastasis. Is that right, and what does that look like in the future?

33:18 Paul: Yes. One of the people who contributed significantly to my thinking about this many years ago was a chap called William Overholt who in 1993 wrote a book called China: The next Economic Superpower. In that book he argued against many sinologists and other democratic critics of Deng Xiaoping that despite Tiananmen, China essentially had its policy settings right and that it had adopted what he called the East Asia model which had been pioneered by Japan. It had worked in South Korea and Taiwan and that if it stuck to that model, it would become an economic superpower. It would grow enormously, and of course it did and in significant measure because it had indeed stuck to that model.

34:06 However two years ago to maybe three years ago now, he published a book called China's Crisis of Success in which, without citing my scenarios, he effectively said they needed to undertake institutional reform and political liberalisation over the last ten years, and they didn't do it. They kept baulking at it and now the chickens are coming home to roost because they can't move forward in a sustainable, prosperous way without those reforms and now those reforms have been blocked and it's not clear what's going to happen and there could be a social upheaval.

34:45 And for him of all people, for Bill to be writing that, was to me very significant and I went to Harvard after reading that book and I had a long talk with him about this and I reviewed his book on its publication.

35:01 So, there's been in a sense a convergence among what I would call serious thinkers about China. He was never an academic. He was a merchant banker. He was an analyst for big banks, for Bankers Trust of Hong Kong, for Nomura in Tokyo and he knew a lot of the top people in Beijing and yet he'd reached this very sombre conclusion.

35:22 So, that's where I would say we are at and the question now is what happens next? In reviewing his book, I said what's clear based on his analysis, quite apart from that of other people, is mutation is for the moment off the table. Militarisation is occurring. Metastasis has become a distinct possibility.

35:46 Nick: How dangerous has China's military build-up now become and what, if anything, can be done to contain it and keep the peace?

35:53 Paul: Well, now we're really cutting to the chase. When we look at what China has accomplished in the military field and what it's currently doing or threatening to do, we realise that this is what I meant by the militarisation scenario.

36:10 Right across the spectrum of military capabilities, China has poured enormous resources into catching up with and seeking to overtake the United States. It used to say, "No, we're just doing military modernisation to protect our borders." Well, no. No, it's going well beyond that and this is in everything from ballistic missiles to space technologies to cyber war to blue water navy to marine, amphibious and power projection capabilities, advanced armour.

36:40 And it's worth pointing out that during the 1980s, this was on a back burner. Deng Xiaoping famously said, "We must give priority to developing the economy because without an advanced economy, we'll never be able to build an advanced military. So, it has to take a back seat until we get the economy cranked up."

36:55 Nick: Hide and bide or whatever it is.

36:56 Paul: Well, he used to talk about hiding and biding. Hiding our ambitions and biding our time. Xi Jinping isn't hiding or biding and one reason he's not is because 30 years of mega growth have persuaded him and those around him that they don't need to hide anything anymore. Their hour has come and their ambition - and they've said this very openly - is to push the US out of East Asia and the Western Pacific and become the dominant military and economic power in the world, and if that was just a matter of overtaking the US as a roughly comparable kind of state which was open and accountable and transparent and wanted collective security and so on, we might say, "Look, we can live with that," but that's not what China is. That's not what Xi Jinping is. It's a minatory state. It's a xenophobic state. It's a highly ambitious state and a deeply repressive one and none of its neighbours are comfortable with this, not the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Indians, not Australia.

38:01 But its military capabilities have become formidable and it's no longer clear - for seven years it was clear that if there was a clash, the US would clean up the Chinese air force and navy hands down, the way it cleaned up say Saddam's forces in the Gulf War. And it should be added that Chinese military observers watched very closely in the Gulf War because they thought - and they weren't alone - that the US might itself get into a stalemate against Saddam's large Soviet equipped veteran army that had fought Iran to a standstill. Instead, what the US did was assemble its forces and then it just swept the Iraqi army off the table like kids toys and the Chinese were gobsmacked. They thought, "Oh my god, look at that. That could be us. We don't have anything better than Saddam," in 1991.

38:44 So, really it was from that point that they thought, "Nobody at the moment can defeat the United States in a conventional war and so you're crazy if you try. What we need to do is develop military capabilities that will: a) deter the US from starting a war against us, b) enable us with asymmetric capabilities to cause it grief in ways that will lead it to pull back if it does start a conflict, and c) at the end of the day to develop capabilities that will put us on a par with them," but in that order and they've gone about it very systematically and now they're very close to a situation where the US might well say, "Well, we think we should defend Taiwan if it's invaded but we're no longer sure that we can prevail if we do."

39:21 And if that happens and it could happen in the very near future and the US steps back, then all bets are off as to what happens with alliance systems and security. That's how precarious things have become.

39:31 Nick: If you were to take a contrary view to your own and a lot of the thinking in the Western world at the moment and you were a conservative Chinese communist nationalist, how would you defend what Xi and others before him have done with regard to the claims of the 9 Dash Line in the South China Sea, the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong and the annexation of Hong Kong to mainland China, internment camps in Xinjiang, the tensions around the Diaoyudao-Senkaku Islands with Japan, etc. These are the policies that govern 1.4 billion people, many of whom seem to support Xi and the government in large measure.

40:05 Paul: Yeah, I'm not sure about the billion people but it's quite possibly the case. Certainly, Chinese conducted opinion polls insist it's the case, that a great majority of the people in China - in fact they go insofar as to say the whole people of China - believe in these things.

40:20 What's more significant is that if as you say you do this sort of experiment - say suppose I was myself, a Chinese military officer, a nationalist, proud of my country, successful in my career, highly intelligent. How might I look at this situation? Well, here's a parallel to build a point of view on. In 1931 the Japanese annexed Manchuria, there was a vote in the League of Nations in which the western powers said, "You can't do that," and the Japanese delegates stood up and said, "Just so we understand one another, it's perfectly okay for you, you European pals and you Americans, to have colonies and to rule half of Asia and most of Africa and the Caribbean and all those things, but it's not acceptable for us Japanese to have colonies, yeah? Well, that strikes us frankly as racist," and they walked out.

41:15 And they had a point, one has to say. If you look at it from their point of view, one might say - leaving aside whether if you're Western - one might say, "Well, it is imperialist to annexe Manchuria," and the Japanese said, "But you're all imperialists. What's your problem with us being imperialists?"

41:31 Now, using that as a way to clear the head so to speak, put yourself then in a position of these Chinese nationalists to say: ‘until European imperialists came along, we were the dominant power in Asia for the longest time, and the South China sea was to us what the Caribbean is to the United States' and nobody much challenged that until the Europeans came in and because they had superior military power, they exerted control and we couldn't do anything about it. Well, we can now, thank you very much.'

42:02 We were the middle kingdom and Japan was just a set of islands off the coast until the modern world when they jumped ahead and then they tried to take over us. Well, we saw that off. We're now resuming position which we would see as natural, as the biggest power in Asia, as the oldest civilisation in Asia and they object. Well, they're going to have to suck it up because things have changed.

42:25 Why would we even aspire to see the US pull out of east Asia? Well, because it's our back yard. If we had military bases in Canada and Mexico and the Bahamas and so on, the Americans would be uncomfortable, wouldn't they? If we even proposed that we would do that, there would be uproar in the US congress, but they think it's perfectly natural for them to have military personnel and bases in South Korea, in Japan, in Guam, in the Philippines and they object to us having bases in their own backyard in the South China Sea. Well, I'm sorry, I think there's a different way of looking at this.’

42:57 Now if we come to the question of Taiwan, we know - nobody is disagreeing about this - Taiwan was given back to the Republic of China in 1945 after the defeat of Japan. It was part of the Republic of China. There was a civil war in China which we won, the Communist Party. That meant that the whole of China became the People's Republic of China.

43:18 It just so happened that Chiang Kaishek hightailed off the mainland, took refuge in this island and then set up a regime defying the victory of the party and the US stepped in to prevent us from finishing the deal. Well, we intend to finish it and we would prefer to think that the United States will see reason and back away and say, "This is an internal Chinese affair," but they seem to think that they've got a right to intervene. Well, again we differ, thank you very much. So, it's not difficult to articulate this point of view and if you believe...

43:51 Nick: It’s even compelling in some sort of seductive way...

43:52 Paul: Precisely so and it's important to do that thought experiment. Many years ago, I was invited to give a talk at ADFA to Australian cadets about a Chinese view of the world and I did this kind of thing and I said, "Let's imagine you are a Chinese officer in the Communist army in 1950 and the party has just taken power and we're still cleaning up inside China with all sorts of bandits and reactionaries and warlords and drug runners and criminal gangs, tidying all that up. Never mind that was a really ruthless process but that's happening, and then McArthur decides not only to roll back Kim Un's North Korean armies, but he says openly onto Beijing, let's overthrow the Communist Party."

44:33 Now if you're an officer in the army that's just taken power, are you going to say, "Oh, well, he's American and they’re the good guys so I guess that's fine." I don't think so. I really don't think so and what did Mao do? He sent the people's liberation army into North Korea to confront McArthur and fought the Americans to a standstill.

44:53 If you were Chinese, if you were your equivalent in 1950, I lay odds that you would see it from that point of view and so we do have to do this kind of thinking. You have to be able to see the situation you're confronting from as far as you're able to do from the point of view of your adversary. It doesn't mean that you agree with adversary or your throw up your hands and say, "Well, you're right and I'm wrong." It means that you at least understand what drives their thinking and therefore their actions.

45:22 Nick: Sure, but does that mean we're due for an inevitable clash between the established power and its rising rival, the Thucydides trap, as Malcolm Turnbull often referred to it?

45:31 Paul: Well, what Graham Allison called the Thucydides trap is a model on the Peloponnesian war where the existing dominant land power in Greece Sparta and its allies were confronted by the rapid growth after the Persian wars of Athens and its empire, and the question was, "What do we do about this because the Athenians are threatening to sort of become the dominant power and we'd prefer they didn't?" and the long and short is you ended up with this prolonged conflict between the two and it was a big and tragic war and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War was one of the absolute classics of western literature and historiography, so Allison says, "We surely don't want that to happen in the case of Sino-American relations. How can we avoid it?"

46:16 My own view is that he got his history and his parallels muddled and one thing he significantly overlooked is that whereas in this case the rising power is China and the conservative power is America, in the Peloponnesian war it was the conservative power, Sparta, that won, not the rising power and so if you were strictly using it as a parallel, you'd say well if it comes to the it's the Thucydides trap, it may well be that the conservative party and its allies will prevail, the rising power will lose.

46:47 But that aside in terms of the parallel and the metaphor of the Thucydides and the Peloponnesian war, there is a great danger of conflict and because of the immense scale and the technologically advanced character of many of the weapons available now to both the United States and China, it could be a cataclysmic war. It could spiral out of control and the single most dangerous focus of that potential effort is Taiwan.

47:15 Now my personal view - and I've written about this for many years - is that in all of the circumstances, it would be in the interest of the regime in Beijing to say, "We don't want a war. That could go really pear shaped and it would at the very least be immensely expensive."

47:32 What we do want is we want to continue the growth of China and we want to draw Taiwan into our orbit and to see itself as part of the Chinese world. We don't want to destroy the place. It has prospered mightily, and it has invested greatly in the mainland and it's the epicentre now of microchip production. Why would we want to blister it in a war?

47:54 No, but everything we've done for decades now to insist that it become part of the People's Republic has pushed it away. That's not working, and a war is reductio ad absurdum in that respect. So, what are we going to do?

48:06 Well, the best thing that could be done - difficult as it is conceptually for say communist officials to think about this - is to say to the people of Taiwan, "We understand that you have in fact governed yourself independent of us since 1945." We've never ruled Taiwan, "And you've done very well and you're very happy the way you are. We wouldn't want to mess that up for you. We understand. We want you to prosper."

48:31 "In fact, what we hope is that we can reach such an understanding with you that you will, instead of seeing us as a threat, you will see us as your big brother, your protector, your homeland. You will look to us as a cultural motherland rather than to the west," and that's only going to happen if we say, "Relax, you're going to be okay. We're not going to invade you. We're not going to assault you."

48:56 That's the opposite of what's occurring at the moment but what it would lead to almost certainly if it occurred that way is the people of Taiwan saying, "Well, great because we aren't Americans. We are Taiwanese and we do speak Chinese and we do have a long-standing relationship with China." It goes back far before there was even a United States at all. So, if they let us breathe like that, if they let us govern ourselves, we can come to an understanding.

49:24 But what we've just seen in Hong Kong is the very opposite of that. The people of Hong Kong were saying, "Listen, we have the basic agreement on special autonomy. We want that honoured and we want more democracy," and what's happened? You've got the national security law. So, at the moment things are going...

49:37 Nick: With Xinjiang and things are going on...

49:39 Paul: It does. Things are going in absolutely the wrong direction right now and the problem is that if you're looking at this from the point of view of Xi Jinping and the hardliners around him, they think that they're on a roll. They think they're winning and so they're not at the moment getting the signals or incentives that would have them slow down and think, "Wait a minute, this could get out of hand." They're thinking, "We're going to win here." That's really dangerous.

50:02 Nick: To come to another topical scenario, we've had the COVID-19 pandemic which began in China, clearly, but even the World Health Organisation inquiry recently failed to establish how exactly it began in China. Do you have a working theory about what's happened here?

50:16 Paul: I do have a working theory, although it would be presumptuous of me to say that I am better informed than the World Health Organisation people who have just been in Wuhan.

50:25 What's striking is that after long delays in being able to go there, they were denied access to all sorts of data and they came away themselves or several members of the team came away saying, "We were denied access. We were denied data. We just think that the Communist party or the Chinese government didn't want the truth revealed." What is that telling us? Well, it's really hard to know. They're being tactful.

50:52 If the Chinese government had like the rest of us really wanted to get to the bottom of how could this have happened and how could we prevent it from recurring, they would not have withheld data in this fashion. That either means that they have a pretty shrewd idea what did happen, and they don't want anybody else to know or they actually don't know what happened, but they want to appear, for reasons of prestige, as though they're on top of their game and so they don't want the truth to come out which might show that they had no idea what was going on and it got into a mess.

51:25 Now the second is less disconcerting than the first but it's hard to see a third alternative. There is of course the persistent and residual scenario - and you get regular reports coming out of Washington - without the documentation to substantiate it, I have to say, that the virus may have originated in a virology research institute in Wuhan. Now there were two such institutes. They did do research on Coronavirus, on bat virus. They were looking at human transmissibility and their safety standards as a matter of record were known to be substandard, and I therefore am not prepared to rule out the possibility that's where the problem actually started, but precisely how it started and what the Chinese government knows or knew at the time, that's what I think they're covering up.

52:15 Nick: Right, and so the Australian government's 2020 call for an independent inquiry into this matter got an extremely hostile reception in Beijing, triggering a trade war against Australia by China which included bans on barley, lobsters, wheat, wine and coal which has all been a significant detriment to the Chinese people in many ways throughout a very severe winter. Why did our call for this inquiry trigger such a striking reaction and what should our government do that it's not already doing to handle this alarming set of developments?

52:45 Paul: It is an alarming set of developments and it strikes me as indicative of what we referred to earlier using Eddie Luttwak's phrasing that the regime in China is autistic. It has expressed great indignation at the very idea that there should be an independent inquiry into its handling of the Coronavirus, to say nothing of the actual origins of it, and I think it’s clear from a whole series of statements made long before the Coronavirus that the strategic intent of the regime in Beijing was to draw Australia away from its alliance with the United States and into China's orbit and it undertook a whole series of measures to bring this about in terms of the economic relationship, in terms of diplomatic relationships, in terms of influence operations, in terms of espionage, in terms of hacking, and I think what became clear under the Morrison government was that was simply not going to happen, that Australia was sticking fast to the US alliance, that it understood very well what China was doing and was not going to be suckered in and was not going to be subordinated, wouldn't kowtow and so the trade war by Beijing is intended at least to punish Australia to bring it to heel.

54:11 And instead of course what it's driving home to the people of Australia is this is a hostile regime in Beijing. This is not one we want to be friends with, and we will not kowtow to it. We're accustomed to be free and independent, thank you very much.

54:25 Now could this go badly, go worse? Might we end up losing this confrontation with China? Well, abstractly of course that can always happen in confrontations, but we need now to put that in the broader context in which China has been doing with variations similar kinds of things with most of its neighbours. You know, it's sent troops into India on the basis of territorial claims and there were armed clashes. It has taken over areas of the South China Sea, including oil claims that Vietnam claims for example. It has made territorial claims against Japan and sent fishing fleets and people in there to unsettle the Japanese. It has done similar things in the case of South Korea.

55:13 It's as if the regime in Beijing for reasons best known to itself has been actively trying to alienate all its neighbours and basically insisting to them, "You must kowtow because we're China." That is autistic. That is simply tone-deaf, big time. Now that's a context in which our strategic planners have been thinking, "Well, we need to think our way through this. We don't want to get hot headed and get away and precipitate an aggravation situation that we don't want, but we need to talk to the Indians, talk to the Japanese, to the Americans, the Vietnamese, the Philippines, the Indonesians about how do we handle this?" and that's a context in which something that people are hearing more and more about, the Quadrilateral Dialogue has been taking place and The Quad is India-Japan-Australia-United States.

56:06 Now if you put those four together, if those four countries, all democracies and all substantial economies - in fact, in the case of Japan and the United States, the biggest and third biggest economies in the world - you balance all these against China, we outweigh China very substantially and moreover there's a strategic perimeter around China and there's depth of strategic lines of defence outside China right across the Pacific and into the Indo-Pacific.

56:35 China doesn't want to see that coalesce but it's behaving in exactly the way it will make it coalesce and that's where really the strategic dialogue and the strategic thinking that we need to do and indeed are increasingly doing is taking place.

56:50 Nick: Speaking about strategic thinking, there have been a series of books published in Australia and abroad in the past decade about the implications of China's rise. Which ones would you recommend, having reviewed many of them in the press?

57:03 Paul: Yes, there have been a good many and one could roughly divide them into two categories: books published in Australia which tend to focus on Australia's place in its larger scheme of things, and books published outside Australia which if they look at Australia at all, put it from the other end of the picture or the other end of the telescope so to speak in that larger context.

57:25 My personal favourite among books published in Australia is one by Rory Medcalf who runs the National Defence College at ANU called Contesting the Indo-Pacific: why China will not map the 21st century, and it's an extended, beautifully articulated piece of thinking which he tells me took him 10 years to craft and put together about the strategic geography of Asia and the Pacific and where Australia fits in it and why the dialogue between China, Australia, India and Japan makes sense, has begun to occur and is going places and that it provides buttressing against Chinese ambitions that China is not well place to overcome.

58:07 I think he makes the case very limpidly and without ever getting carried away or hyperventilating - I think it's a very fine piece of work. So, if somebody was to say to me as an Australian citizen, "Which book, if I read one book on this subject, should I read to get my mind around it?" I'd say read Rory Medcalf's book.

58:26 There are a number of others which of course have made a splash and Brendan Taylor wrote a book called The Four Flashpoints it's called, or Richard McGregor has written a couple of very good books. One is called Asia's Reckoning. It's about the prospects for conflict and confrontation. These are good pieces of work.

58:44 There have been a number of people who have written books in which they have really argued, like Geoff Raby did recently in his book on Chinese Grand Strategy or Hugh White has done on several occasions, where they're effectively saying, "China is going to win, China is going to be number one and we have to come to terms with that. We don't get to set the terms of the game."

59:05 It's always troubled me that they would take that point of view. It would trouble me if I felt that nonetheless they were essentially correct. What troubles me most is that I don't think they're correct and I think they ought to know that it’s not as clear as that. So, why are they making their case? Why are they seeing it that way? I have never said to people, "Don't read these books." I've read them myself and I've been critical of them, but I do disagree with the authors’ contentions.

59:41 In the case of the broader literature - so Michael Green, I might nominate shall we say as the American equivalent of Rory Medcalf. Green is the Japan chair and a senior advisor at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington as well as associate professor and chair in modern and contemporary Japanese politics and foreign policy at Georgetown University. He has had quite a career in the National Security Council and in American defence analysis and in 2017 he authored a major book, a substantial book called By More than Providence, Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific since 1783, published by Columbia University Press. He has written other books but if I was to simply nominate one book that you might read in order to get your mind around this big picture alongside Rory's book on the Australia perspective, I'd say it would be Michael Green's.

01:00:30 It's an attempt on a substantial scale and with depth of scholarship to analyse this strategic situation which instead of painting it from so to speak the Shire perspective on Australia looking outwards, takes it from the Gondor point of view in the big picture.

01:00:47 Nick: Wonderful. Thank you very much for your time this evening, Paul. It's a great pleasure to speak to you as always.