95-year-old Professor on China, US and a New World Order

That is the key to a Chinese sense of history. The most important things in the Chinese heritage that there's only one China, only one sun in the sky. Only one China. It must be united. And that is the ideal position. When you're united, you can do all sort of things. When you're divided, there's chaos.

Meet Wong Gong Wu, a Singapore-based professor and world-renowned expert on China history. He studied in the UK and has taught in Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia. The professor shared how Chinese history still shapes modern leaders' thinking. How choosing between the American and Soviet models influenced China's future and why many Chinese accept fewer freedoms in exchange for stability and growth. I'm Max Chernov, your insider to global life. So speaking of China today, what's the biggest misconceptions about China in the world right now? And what do we know? Maybe the second part, what do we have to know about Chinese history to understand China and Chinese foreign affairs? Right now.

I think we have to go back a little bit to say that by 1900 or so, the Chinese elites had become aware, especially after their defeat by the Japanese in the first Sino-Japanese war in 1894. By 1900 or so, they were more or less aware that the Chinese empire, the Qing Empire, Chinese civilization itself was under threat, whether they could survive or not. So by the time they created the Republic of China, the first revolution, there was a political revolution without the dynasties, setting up a republic, the model of which was France and the United States. No monarchy, a president, a republic, and we will become a nation-state. They had already decided they would become a kind of nation-state but inheriting the borders of the Qing empire as China. I would say that the revolution was unsuccessful. All that happened was the country was divided into different warlords, and for about 15 years, the warlords were fighting each other to become the president of China. It became primarily a war between the nationalists and the communists. A civil war in which the Soviet Union was, at least under Stalin, giving some support to the Chinese Communist Party, and the Americans and the British were supporting the nationalists. The Russians took over Manchuria. They took over all the Japanese arms and factories and everything. They used that to help the Chinese Communist Party, and it is from Manchuria that they finally started their victory southwards into China. So when you look at it that way, the Chinese situation was one of how do you save China in the middle of all that?

And the nationalists were trying, never really had a chance. By the time the nationalists set up their government in 1928, the Japanese were already challenging the nationalists to join them to fight the communists. And Chiang Kai-shek knew what they, what the Japanese wanted. They had taken Manchuria. They set up Manchukuo as a vassal state of the Japanese. Really, a puppet of the Japanese. You hear Manchukuo and Manchuria was already Japanese, and they were marching down from Manchuria. And so Chiang Kai-shek was aware that what the Japanese really wanted was to dominate China in the name of fighting the communists together. They were really dominating when they took over China. So Chiang Kai-shek did not want to start a war with Japan because he didn't want to fight Japan when the communists were still fighting them. He wanted to concentrate on fighting the communists. So you can see all that made the Chinese people all feel that China was in grave danger of disappearing altogether, and the Chinese civilization was already out of date, completely obsolete, and we have to learn from the West. Who decided to let them learn from the West is hard to pin down. Many people were advocating it. But how much of the West to learn was always a matter of debate. And then, of course, this is something where people forget. As far as the Chinese were concerned, there were two Wests. Both were West. One West was facing the Pacific, the United States, representing the West, the Anglo-American power. The other West was socialism of the Soviet Union, that was also the West because, in the eyes of the Westerners, of the Americans, the Soviet Union is Asiatic. It's not European. Somewhere in Asia. It's not genuinely Asian. So to Asia. So they always think that the Russians and China are more or less alike because they're Asiatic. But that's nonsense. What the Russians inherited was straight out of Karl Marx and Enlightenment French philosophy, and the Chinese recognized that they had a choice. If we are going to westernize in order to modernize, which one do you choose? And the nationalists chose the one with the Anglo-Americans, who were already controlling the seaports, and the Chinese communists inland turned to the Soviet Union. But they were both openly saying, "We must learn from the West." So there was only, to them, each one has only one West. West one and West two, but each one chose only one West.

So that was the notion. So like China was losing its identity? Yes, they were willing to give it up to save China, and one will learn from the capitalists, and one will learn from the socialists, and the question is which one will win. Then we have to fight each other. But at the same time, of course, you can say that among the majority of the ordinary people who are not ideological and didn't find all this very meaningful to them, they were very traditionalist, and they still had very old-fashioned ideas of what is the heritage, the Confucian values, the family values, the peasant values of a peasant rural society. And that rural economy was still fundamentally what China was about. It was a peasant economy. And that is why, in the end, Mao succeeded. In 1945, when the nationalists, backed by the Americans, defeated Japan and became the legitimate government of China, that they should lose to the communists. I think everybody was surprised. Why did they lose? So we look back, they were corrupt. They completely failed. But by their corruption and their failure to solve some of the fundamental economic problems, they caused a terrifying inflation comparable to that of Germany after the First World War. Then, as a result of which, everybody was poor, so poor, struggling to survive, the whole of China, and the people were no longer, no longer supported that regime. So when the war was actually fought on the battlefield, the morale of the troops could not be relied on, and in the end, the communists, as they won in Manchuria and they pressed down, they were in a much more triumphant position, and they kept on winning. And before they knew it, they reached the Yangtze, and Nanjing was open to the communist victory, and by 1949, almost within a year or two of arriving at the Yangtze River, it was over, and Chiang Kai-shek had to escape to Taiwan. And then, bit by bit, the Communist Party took over the rest of China, took over Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia. Mongolia, they didn't touch because Mongolia had already gained its independence with Russian support. And so, but the rest of China. So within four or five years, that Communist Party under Mao had actually unified all of China. And that is the key to a Chinese, you can say, a Chinese sense of history. The most important things in the Chinese heritage that there's only one China, only one sun in the sky, only one China. It must be united. And that is the ideal position. When you're united, you can do all sorts of things. When you're divided, there's chaos. So this is security and safety, stability versus chaos, rebellion, and poverty. Sovereignty based on the borders, which is a modern concept, became now the fundamental of the foundations of a new China. And that new China was now united under one leadership, the Chinese Communist Party. And I don't mean Mao, the Chinese Communist Party, the head of which is Mao. And so the Chinese Communist Party, in that sense, in the eyes of the ordinary people, could be said to have the legitimate emperor of China. They've taken over. It's like a new, a new, a new China, I think, a new dynasty called the Chinese Communist Party. And this is what is still there. This is what made China successful, even after the terrible mistakes that Mao made in the Cultural Revolution that damaged the economy and caused tremendous hardship to vast numbers of people. Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution. Despite all that, they survived all that, and things changed. Deng Xiaoping came up and opened up, opened up, but not entirely, but open up enough to learn from capitalism on the basis of a very Marxist argument that unless you have capitalism, you can't have socialism. This, in that order. You have to try and skip capitalism to move from a feudal peasant society to socialism was not what Marx talked about. Capitalism was actually an essential part of it all. And to put it very simply, capitalism knows how to make money. Wealth can be created through capitalism. Nothing wrong with that. And only when you have that wealth can you have socialism, because what do you distribute if you don't have wealth? You redistribute wealth. That is socialism. But you must get to wealth first. So Deng Xiaoping's kind of logic was going back to Marx to say, "We have to go through this capitalist stage, and we will go through it, and then when we have succeeded and China is prosperous, then we can really have socialism." But then with the additional, with Chinese characteristics, and that's quite important, because the Chinese characteristics part means that you're not just copying somebody else's thing. You are still distinctively and identifiably, recognizably Chinese, that you can still be proud of. It's still part of the tradition, and it's not just a kind of show. It is meaningful because you look at it, you say that liberal democracy through kind of elections of the United States doesn't suit China because it is essentially allowing the capitalists to run the elections, and it's money politics that determines those, those liberal democracy. It's an extreme form of money politics, which doesn't match the Chinese idea of what a good government is. A good government is a caring government. A caring government, consisting of people who are trained, dedicated, chosen by performance, a kind of meritocracy to become a Mandarinate, whether you call it a Mandarin or a party cadre, but a Mandarinate who have been promoted based on performance and ability to rise to the top and to care for the country, for all, serving the people, you know, "waiting for the people to serve the people" is very traditional because the traditional idea of the Son of Heaven who has the Mandate of Heaven is someone, a ruler who cares for the people. And so, as long as he cares for the people, the people will love you in return and respect you in return and support you. When you stop caring for the people, they will rebel against you and overturn the dynasty and produce a new dynasty. So these are the kind of inherited political norms which they found had worked for so long. We should think about that. Why should we go through this every four years, picking somebody who never had any political or administrative experience, just because he's popular or he's got money behind him and he wins? That's not the way we want to go. This is how they, and they may exaggerate and overstate the position, but their idea is that we don't want to go in that direction. Our direction is towards a caring government that can actually show and perform and actually produce a society that is more stable, more secure, more safe, more harmonious. And that's the idea we want. And any government that is actually dedicated to that and a very well-disciplined ruling elite, we can accept that. So the idea that we must have four-year elections and regular sort of change of government and two-party systems and so on, fighting each other all the time, is to them an advance, as it were. It's too much politics all the time. Whereas this is a different kind of politics, the politics of management and administration and demonstration of performance that helps the people get better lives and more peaceful lives. That kind of politics is administrative politics, you might say, as compared to party politics, campaign politics, electoral politics, and money politics.

That's how they would see the world now. Divided. And here is a world in which that model has been set on, given to everybody. And what a mess it has created in most countries. And there's enough proof to say that that system has not worked very well in most countries.

Some people, maybe some more Western-oriented people, would argue, "Yes, but are people like restricted, like feel restricted and feel like very controlled living in China?" I think they are quite right that people are under control. They don't have the freedoms that are shared in the West. But what the Chinese, how the Chinese would position it is that actually, as long as you're just doing what you are supposed to do, you are free. Nobody bothers you. The only thing that you are not free to do is to say what you like about politics. That's the only thing that is not free. And that, in broad sense, that is probably true. Normally, what you do, who bothers what you do? In fact, if you look at the things that the Chinese people do, a lot of petty crimes, corruption, a lot of abuse, abuse of wives, abuse of children, and all kinds of things. That's just like any other society. I mean, they're not different. The Chinese Communist Party can't stop that, and they don't prevent anything. That's not what the point is. What they are preventing is that if you're against the party, you're against the stability of a system which must be disciplined to show that they are doing good. So if you're preventing, if you're going against us, that you are not free to do. But in your lives, they can't be bothered. And if you ask the Chinese people, they are actually totally free in their ordinary lives. It's only when you want to talk politics, you want to say, "I don't like Mr. Xi Jinping." You cannot say that. Not in public, anyway. You can say that in private, but you can't say that. You can't print. You can't go out to print on that. But so now, in social media and so on, you can't do that. You do it in social media, immediately that is blocked. That is the one thing that they definitely don't have. And the West is quite right to say that they don't have that. But to most Chinese people, that's actually not terribly important, because not everybody is interested in just scolding the leaders and saying rude things about politicians and so on. Because in many ways, if you look at electoral politics, you can say it's actually a good show. It's like watching a football game, or they're fighting each other, calling each other names, and you win an election. Every year, somebody's winning and losing. It's like watching a football game. You know, at the end of it all, somebody wins, somebody draws, somebody loses. And it's quite entertaining sometimes. It can be also very distressful, but it can be very entertaining at other times, because you just say, "Oh, I don't like him, and he lost." Good. So, my favorite club is this one. My side, he won. Good. So, everybody's happy. But is it that important to everybody? Who knows? I mean, so in one society, you say that is very important, the most important thing is the freedom of speech and the right to vote. And the other side says, "Is it true? Is that true? Do we feel that that is absolutely necessary?" Actually, I'm not so sure that the Chinese, that ordinary Chinese people are that concerned with that particular part. What they're concerned about is, can I make money? Can I be richer, better off? Can I have a better house? Can I find a wife? Today, there are millions of Chinese males without wives because of the male-female ratio because of the one-child policy. A lot of the girls were aborted, and the boys came out. So there's a ratio, there's a big gap. So there are millions of men who cannot find their wives. That's miserable. But that has nothing to do with, you know, it was a policy mistake by Deng himself, the one-child policy. But they made it at a time for the best of intentions, but it went wrong. They were just, they were just totally miscalculated. They got it wrong, but they had good intentions. They wanted to do that so that the standard of living could be better if there were too many children. They couldn't see how they could actually satisfy the population. They thought they thought they were doing the right thing. They took captive for too long. So it's the Chinese have faced many, many problems. But those problems are to think that the only problem is freedom. I think it's oversimplifying. And you, you keep on saying you're scolding them for not having that. Of course, that is true. But actually, that's not that bad. That's if you're not interested in politics. It doesn't bother you. You go to the movies, you go watch shows, watch sports, celebrations of this kind, the other, travel. They travel around the world, and they all go home. They don't stay abroad. There's no need to run away or to escape from China. They have a very good time. The tourists are here all over Southeast Asia, in Europe, in America, and not so much now, but Europe, not so much now, but they do have a very good time buying new things, seeing Europe, going visiting all the historical sites.

What are the other misconceptions about China in the so-called West? What people in the West, maybe who have never been to China or who only read articles like from CNN, BBC, don't understand, don't get about China?

I think the Chinese themselves, I think, are very divided on that. I can't be sure about what the young Chinese generation really feel because they have their problems. They have a lot of graduate unemployment. I mean, partly because their graduate education system was so successful, so many people went to universities, and some of them very hardworking and very bright, they graduate. If you start producing 9 million graduates per year, or now it's more than 9, or more than 10 million graduates per year, how do you find 10 million jobs, new jobs for a graduate every year? A new one. So it's a problem. So many of them are really quite disappointed and unhappy. I have heard from young people, some of them who are visiting here in Singapore and others, you read about, who do feel that was all a waste of their energy and time, pointless, and they're very disillusioned. So there's all that. But do they hanker after the freedom of the West? I'm not sure. Do they believe that if they had freedom and political parties and elections, then everything would be okay? I'm not sure. So I cannot predict what will happen. All I can say is that China is not a simple place. It's a very big country, and there are lots and lots of people. How do you control that? And the different provinces are very different. In fact, it's not like the United States at all. In the United States, you can probably divide it into about two or three parts. But China actually can be divided into about 20 different provinces. And each province is like a country for a long time because they are very big. I mean, some of those provinces are bigger than the largest country in Europe, except Russia. I mean, for example, I think the province of Henan is more populated than the whole of Germany. It has about 100 million people, one province. And even others, 70, 80 million, very common, that's bigger than most countries of Europe, and just one province. So you have a central government trying to run all these on one principle. It's not really possible. They have to allow for differences and so on. And the central government does do that. In some ways, it has a sort of semi-federal system without the right to secede. But it's federal in the sense that the each party secretary appointed to a province is given quite a lot of leeway to develop the best possible way he can to make the province prosperous, and if you succeed, you get promoted. So you have every incentive to succeed. So people are doing that. So the provinces compete against each other. I mean, in manufacturing, for example, some successful product, everyone does it, and then they overproduce. Happens all the time, same with housing, cars, or whatever they do. Whatever they make, very quickly overproduce because they don't have enough consumers themselves. They all depend on selling, exporting in the globalized capitalist market. That Deng Xiaoping said, "We must have capitalism. We must take advantage of the liberal capitalist economy for China to flourish." So it's if the liberal West fails, they will be, they have to pay a price too. So they don't want the West to fail. They actually don't want to. This is a paradox. They want the West to succeed to buy their goods. And of course, the American people are having a bad Christmas now because they can't, they don't have the, they can't afford the toys because of the tariffs and so on. In the past, they were very cheap, all made in China. All the factories went there, made in China, and the American people benefited for the last 30 years. They have their cheap goods made in China. And now, when they, all the factories are gone, they blame China for everything they lost. It's not that. It's the capitalists who made that decision. It's not China that cheated them. The capitalists made more money than ever from moving their factories to China. So the rich got all that much richer, but then the middle class stagnated. The poor people lost their jobs. The factories all gone. No more unemployment everywhere. So America pays a price. But the consumer benefited tremendously. Everything was cheap. And now, of course, they're having to sort that one out. But then the Chinese are also suffering from that because once you can't sell, they're not producing as much as ever, but the market is not there, and their own consumers don't have the money, don't have enough money to consume it all. So you can see there are so many paradoxes and contradictions that both countries, both these so-called superpowers, superpowers, both of them are facing enormous contradictions that they had never faced before, at least not for a long time.

Yeah. I guess what you don't want is to oversimplify things that people tend to do. It's easier. Yeah. Say, "China is this, America is this."

Yeah. Well, I think that's quite what it is. What politicians do. They want to simplify so that the ordinary man can vote for them. So he's got to say, "That's evil. We are good." You know, they're easy. So that kind of politics doesn't exist in China. I mean, at least they don't need it because the Chinese people don't really have that choice anyway. So as far as they're concerned, China is being contained, you know, squeezed and bullied here and there, and everything is demonized. China's been demonized. And that's how it's presented to them. And that's how they see it. They can pick up what is available, CNN and all that. They, the Chinese are so good. The young Chinese, they can pick it up on social media. Whatever is available in the Western press, they can pick it up. So they know what the West is saying about them. That some of it they know is not true. So they must be, they're using these lies to find excuses to blame everything on us. It's not so simple that America is all bad. That's also the same. They, when they picture America is just all, you know, all corrupt and money and money politics, everything is all for bullying other people and trying to dominate the world and be hegemonic in every attempt, interfering with everybody's business when it's none of their business. That's so that picture of America has also been overstated. There's some truth in it, but it's overstated. And you can exaggerate to the point that they are the enemy.

So what do you think the biggest shifts are happening with America, with the United States right now?

At the moment, I think they're so divided that I don't see how their democracy can really function properly because my understanding of democracy is that democracy works best when the majority are moderate and in fact disagree only on certain fundamental principles and details of policies, but disagree on certain things. But they're basically moderate and they're willing to work with each other and have a kind of shared views about basic things. And you keep the extremists on one side, the other extremists on the other side, but as small minorities, the majority are in the middle. Then democracy works because you elect people who are one party or the other. They are different, but they're not that different. You know, the difference between the Democrat and Republican, it's very hard to put on a piece of paper. Just like in Britain, between the Tories and the Liberals in the past, the Whigs and the Tories in England, it's very hard to tell the difference between the two. All of them graduate from Oxford anyway, or something. So when people are moderate in that way, they can actually talk to each other and discuss and find a common policy for the good of the country. Then democracy works. What has happened, what I see now is that there's almost nothing in between. There's no moderate. The moderate is so small. It's either way or that way. And they don't talk to each other. They see each other as the enemy. And then it doesn't work. It's a matter of winner takes all. And if I win all, then you can do nothing. I do everything. So then someone like Trump can be a president who can say what he likes, does what he likes because there's no real opposition that can stop him. So there's no moderation. He can say one thing, he can be very reasonable and be totally unreasonable. It doesn't really matter. So because he knows he has one half of the population, or roughly 40% of the population, are more or less guaranteed to support. That's what he thinks anyway. So as long as he thinks like that, and it's more or less like that, then you don't have a democracy. So as long as you keep your 40% and not everybody votes in America, you win. And so if that continues, I really wonder how that democracy will work. How do you stop that? In American history, the closest they got to that was the Civil War in the 1860s when Abraham Lincoln fought the war over the issue of slavery, and it was also a constitutional debate between the North and the South. And millions died to find an answer to that. But of course, that didn't extreme, they just broke out completely. It was sort of different in region. This time it's not quite so clear-cut, but there's a bit of that. There's a bit of that. But the fact is that maybe they know how to avoid it now. They find some compromise. But at the moment, it doesn't look as if those two parties, the two-party system can really bring about a kind of national consensus that both sides can genuinely and legitimately support. And at the moment, it's either one or the other. So how do you get that system to gain the credibility of people respecting it and believing it that it's a good system that will be good for everybody? The world needs at the moment, I would say more and more people are less and less convinced that the Americans can provide the kind of leadership they once had. I think there, I think I can't, I think I can't think of any large group of people who really believe that America still has the right to tell the world what to do. But that was something they had about 20 years ago when they won, they won the war against the Soviet Union. They thought they really could tell the world what was right and wrong. And it didn't work. And on the contrary, wherever they intervened, they failed. Look at the way they intervened in North Africa, in Tunisia, in Libya, and so on. And then they went to Syria, they went to the Middle East, they went to Iraq and Afghanistan. Everything they touched didn't succeed by intervening, telling you what is good for you. They're not allowing you to do anything they don't like. They say, "You can't do that." And then using military means to advance your interest. But it didn't succeed. It all of them failed. In fact, the situation was worse before you than before you intervened. Look at Iraq today. Look at Afghanistan today. Is it better than Iraq before 2002? I mean, you know, I don't know. So, so where is the credibility of this superpower? Number one superpower. So I think these are probably more permanent than we like to know, like to believe, that loss of credibility, and added to that, a loss of confidence on the part of the Americans. I feel that the American leadership don't have that kind of confidence they used to have when they were so sure their intentions are good. They meant well. They were trying to save the world. They were trying to bring peace and happiness to everybody, prosperity, and so on. Actually, they believed it for a long time. They believed it. Now, I'm not sure that the Americans themselves believe that. And if they don't believe it, who else will believe them?

What are the other like big shifts that you see in the world, like tectonic changes that are happening in the world right now?

Let me say that I think there is a question of where people make continue to make decisions despite the fact that they know that the world has changed, and they make it according to their national interest alone. Then I think the world is in big trouble. Everybody working only for their national interest. I think then we are heading towards something that would completely undermine the kind of stability that we have been used to for so long. You just say, "This is my interest," and you, whatever you are doing is against my interest, I have to fight for my own interest. Then I think the road is a very slippery one towards total disorder. But I'm not that pessimistic. I'm a natural optimist. So I do feel that there are ways where the top leaders in the world can be rational and work out compromises. And one of the things that does look possible is that, and if I'm correct, both the United States and the Chinese don't want to fight. They would avoid war at all costs. Let that assumption. If you start with that assumption, which I have reason to believe is a reasonable assumption, if you start with that assumption, I would say there are possibilities for working out a system whereby you continue to contend through economic competition. You contend through technological competition. You challenge each other to be better and produce a richer economy, more successful one, and people are better off. And everybody knows that you are better off and you are losing ground on that one. That will satisfy me. Both sides work towards improving their economic conditions and technological superiority, and to at least equality, to be able to continue to survive confidently because they're not getting poorer and they're not getting weaker, but they're still capable of competing almost on equal terms in terms of economy and technology, science and technology. I think it is possible to envisage that kind of world appearing when both sides say, "If we're not going to war, this is the way we will fight. We will fight on the economy and technology. We will compete, and I will defeat you, and I'll be better than you. You will have to acknowledge that you always have to be in a position lower than mine." That will satisfy me. And if both sides can work towards that end, you could have peace for a long time. No guarantee that we have forever, but at least you overcome this period when there's such a sense of insecurity and fear, especially when it's a fear and insecurity growing in the number one superpower. When the number one superpower is no longer confident, that is the danger. It has become very dangerous. But if I'm rightly say, dangerous, but not going to war. They don't think a military solution would solve anything. So in that case, if we avoid that, how do we do that? So you can use, as they're still doing now, already using allies and partners or whatever they use the terminology differently, but they use them to ensure that there's a kind of economic balance, making sure that neither is too powerful. And if they can feel reasonably confident that neither side will be overwhelmingly powerful, they could continue for a long time, like they can live with each other for a long time.

But will they? I mean, do you see that? You said you're more positive about life in China?

I think it's not impossible because the leaders may, if they once agree then they're not going to fight. If they really think definitely rule out fighting, I mean, they won't say it publicly, but both sides are agreed and they are making that crucial foundation for all their policies. It's not, we're not going to go to war. If you take that as a beginning, then all the others are negotiable. There are, there's room for finding ways whereby we can compete. We can show that I'm competing. I'm not giving in to you, but neither side will give in. I'm going to do this. You're better than that. I'm trying to catch up. You're better than this. I'll catch up. And both sides are doing that. And in the meantime, benefiting the rest of the world, because as they compete, they are actually trying to win friends among others to their support, to support their economies, to share the kind of gains that they would make in the economic and technological world. It is possible if you minimize the politics, not to make politics everything. Everything is political. Everything is military and political win, and it's winner takes all. It's a zero-sum game kind of. If you, if you remove your framework from that zero-sum game set of calculations, there are many other possibilities. And I think in the economic and technological areas, there's room to be competitive, to be fiercely even nationalistic without endangering the world, the world order, because in the nationalistic terms of economic competition is much safer than in other areas. In technological terms, even as long as it's not aimed entirely in political and military supremacy. So I think that's that's that's what I, at least I think it's possible. And I don't think you should rule it out. At least this is my, in my mind.

Yeah. Some people say if the war can start if China invades Taiwan. Do you think it will ever happen?

I don't actually believe that the Chinese want to take Taiwan by force because they don't want to just kill a lot of Chinese. Why? Why have to do that? What they really want to do is to be absolutely sure that Taiwan will not allow itself to be used as a base to attack China. I mean, that's what they want to be sure of. That the Taiwanese will never be an ally of the enemy like Japan or the United States. If Taiwan and the Taiwanese are not stupid, and the Taiwanese leaders, I think amongst them, they're also aware that if they can continue to do well economically and technologically and never show enmity towards the PRC and are prepared to talk and discuss matters of common interest, but without giving up their friends like Japan or the United States, but not expecting them, not expecting to be allies of them if they were to come into a conflict with China, and not be used by them as a base for attacking China. If all this somehow could be assured to the government in Beijing, I think they can live with the present, with the status quo for a long long time, because then it's in principle, except the fact that the Republic of China is also China. There's only one China, but they argue about which China. But the Republic of China is also China. You are People's Republic. We have Republic, but we are China, and there's only one China, happen to be under two regimes, but we're not enemies. The civil war is over. We're not going to fight anymore. Is it possible? I think it's possible. But if there's any question of people like Senator Pelosi visiting the Taiwanese and you know, inviting the Taiwanese to do the same and generally pretending that Taiwan is actually an independent state and treating it like that and so on, then it's provocative. So I would say that that's what the Chinese are deeply insecure about and dislike is what the provocative acts that make China look as if they've lost Taiwan, and Taiwan is, and treating Taiwan like an independent state, completely separate from the PRC, not China anymore, they're two Chinas in that sense, you know, and that this other China is pro-America and pro-the West, and supported by the whole West. All that, of course, China would not accept. So can that be avoided? I don't know. But I mean, I wouldn't rule it out completely. I can't see that everybody would want to make work so hard to treat Taiwan as an independent nation and work for Taiwan to be a member of the United Nations or something like that. So if you don't do that, every country is committed to the idea of one China anyway, theoretically. If you accept for about 20, 20 countries or less than 20 now are committed to the idea of one China. So if you follow these things logically and legally as well, it is possible to get to a compromise that doesn't entirely satisfy everybody, but is good enough because it keeps the peace and maintains a condition that makes people feel secure and feel safe, and nobody gets killed.

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Why is Taiwan so important for China? Let's say there are so many Chinese people, ethnically Chinese, living in Indonesia, for example. But there are no problems with Indonesia, I guess.

Well, no, but that's because Taiwan was always part of China, as far as the Chinese are concerned. That was in the map of China. The map of China that the PRC inherited in 1949 includes Taiwan because the Taiwanese agreed to that. Taiwanese always said there was one China, just that their one China is in Taipei. Capital is Taipei. And in the United Nations, there was only one China. Even when the when the General Assembly voted for the PRC to be admitted to the United Nations, they could have admitted two Chinas. They could have said, "All right, you give the Security Council position to the PRC, but the ROC is a member of the United Nations." They could have come to some, it could have happened. I mean, I know it didn't happen because Chiang Kai-shek refused. Chiang Kai-shek, actually, the Americans, the Americans actually offered the nationalist, the ROC in Taiwan, to support them for the place as a member state of the United Nations, and Chiang Kai-shek said, "No, there's only one China. We are the China." And that remained for another, until Chiang Kai-shek died. It continued until the end of the century under the Kuomintang, that was the position they took. They were the China. That's not a China. So since 1945, in fact, since Taiwan became officially a province of China in 1880 something, it became officially a province. Before that, it was part of Fujian province. Then in 1880, forgotten, we became a separate province of China, and then the Japanese took it in 1895. So it was the Japanese who took it, but it was a province when the Japanese took it. It was known as a province of China that was taken, given over to as a price to pay for having lost the war against Japan in 1895 in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. So that was then it began. But in 1945, it was agreed that everything that the Japanese took from China will be returned to China. Taiwan became part. Otherwise, how could Chiang Kai-shek have moved to Taiwan? So where is there any doubt legally? I mean, again, talk about legally, how can there be any doubt that Taiwan is part of China? And naturally, 165 countries in the world have accepted that there's only one China, and the province, and Taiwan is a province of China.

So your identity is like Chinese, but internationally minded Chinese, kind of thing?

I don't know how international minded I am. But let me put it this way. I do not regard national borders as being sacrosanct and unchangeable. I mean, I recognize it as a legal identity which I respect, but that's all it is. It's just by law. But it's got nothing to do with how I feel or who I am. It's just a legal statement saying I am a national of a certain country. So it's a legal identity. But a legal identity is just that. You can extend it to say it's a political identity. But there are so many identities. One's identity is not purely political or legal. I have a social, I have a cultural, aesthetic, moral, whatever it is, identity. And I, it is not, there's only one identity. Multiple identities, frankly, is a norm for everybody. I mean, you can be a Frenchman and really love English culture and so on, and you can live in France and actually everything you do pertains to England. And nobody, it doesn't matter. You have a legal identity of Frenchman, but what you do and everything, your life, you want to be identified with the British way of life, British literature, British art, theater, British culture and so on. I mean, just as an example. And it's entirely possible, if you particularly in Europe. I think people sometimes confuse it because they treat like they generalize and treat, "Okay, you have X passport, you have a Chinese passport or German or Russian passport, meaning you are this." This is a definition that only started in the 19th century. There was no such thing in the past. In the whole of mankind, nobody thought like that before. But in the 19th, after the Enlightenment, when at the end of the 18th century with the French Revolution, and I would also add the independence of the 13 colonies of the United States, they developed the idea that you have a nationality. That every citizen, the idea of a citizen, became the most important thing because in the before that, a country was the king's. Or belongs to the aristocracy or the landed property people or the archbishop or whoever they are in charge. There's no such thing as a national identity. But when you're a citizen, you're a citizen. You're a French citizen. As a Russian, you are Russian. And every Russian is Russian. And so what happened was the French Empire, which started as a kind of imperial thing belonging to the king, Louis XIV, and his empire, that became a French national empire, became the empire of every Frenchman. Every Frenchman now has a claim of all the territories that the French.

control everywhere. And the main change is that the empire itself, as a concept, changed. Before that, an empire could belong to a dynasty or a ruler. All the people in the empire, no matter who or what color they were, what religion they were, they were all his subjects. But when you have a citizen, that empire can only be run by officials who are French, who are British; nobody else can run it. But in the old days, it doesn't matter if you're a subject of the emperor; you can be anybody. And in the name of the emperor, be an official of the empire. But once it becomes a national empire, you can't. You have to be a Frenchman to be an official in the French territory. So that's a big difference, and that's a 19th-century concept. And the whole thing was really disastrous for Europe because what it ended up by being was two world wars, two, two world wars, which destroyed them. That's what destroyed all, all the attempts at national empires: German, French, the British. That's how started World War I and World War II. Russia was involved. But that was the idea of a national empire. Yeah. So it ended up with total destruction. End of national empires.

The concept of citizenship in the Russian Empire, actually, as I remember, didn't exist. So, in the beginning of the 20th century, for example, if you move from a small town to Moscow, you could get like the paper that you belong to Moscow, to the city, but you don't belong to like Russia or to the Russian Empire. Yeah. And that's why, actually, from the Russian Empire, you could go to Europe without any visa, without any documents, which now, if you think about it, is like strange.

There was, in those days, no such thing as nationality. Yes. Yes. And it was just 100 years ago, not too long ago.

And that's why I say it's such a modern concept. We now take it as if it's holy writ, holy writ. You know, it's a nonsensical thing. It's only we're trying to understand what we mean by a nation. And I can tell you, there are so many dozens of scores of versions of nation-states in the world today. I have no idea how you define a nation today.

What does it mean to be Chinese? To me, it's primarily a, there are several levels which are very difficult to separate. Sometimes there is the ethnic one, in which other people see you as Chinese, whether you like it or not. So that's another thing. But the self part is, you identify with things which you recognize as part of Chinese civilization, that is unquestionable. They can be local or borderless. For example, identify with Chinese Confucian ideas, the moral sense of the role of the family, and the kind of relationships that the Chinese place such has a great emphasis on. And you identify with that. That has no borders. And you, you can say that is, that's my Chinese ancestry. It leads me to believe that the Chinese are not particularly religious. So they don't actually have a single religion. But if you say, "I just, I'm a Buddhist," but my Chinese Buddhist, because the practices, you are different from those in Burma or Thailand, then you say, "I'm Chinese," because that's a Buddhism identity. But that's that's getting it, refining it already. It's not that important. Because if you are a Chinese who lives in Thailand, before long, he's a Buddhist like any other Thai Buddhist. It doesn't matter very much. So this idea of a very fixed identity and must be narrowly defined, and so that you must be loyal to it, to absolute loyalty, and so on, is a modern, intellectually, the narrowly defined idea, which actually has no real meaning for ordinary people in their normal lives. Yeah. To my mind. Yeah.

But then, like, why countries create identity and like citizenship and create ideas around it? Like, to, for example, if you want people to fight for your country, you need to have a big idea and you need to persuade people to do it, right? As I said, all this, all this started in the only in the 19th century. Yeah. Before that, you did that because your king told you to do that, or your local law, feudal lord says, you know, I need so many men to fight. You have no choice. You may be a serf or a slave, and so on, or you just work for your feudal lord, and he says, "I got to go and fight the other feudal lord." You go and do war. You got nothing to do with nationality. Your loyalty is to, not even a loyalty. You just have to do it.

And what we are trying to do is, is really a post-1945 thing with the creation of the United Nations and the end of empires. When you say, "no more empires," every one of those colonies should now become independent. That was a 1945 decision. Yeah. After the World War II, end of all those national empires. Decolonization meant the chance for all those colonies, each one of them, to be a new nation.

So everybody was very happy. I was a young student at the time. We thought this is a brilliant idea. I mean, as an idea, it certainly was a wonderful idea, completely new, first time in history. Never been defined in that way before, that the world would consist of, at that time, 120 nations, now 180 something nations. Yeah. All of them are equal, sovereign, with clear borders. Mhm.

But in our case, as a colonist, as you know, all our borders are not drawn by us. These borders are all created by the colonial powers. But who lived within those borders is a different matter. To what extent were they nationals? What kind of nation were they? It was not their borders. Now you're telling them, "These are your borders, and you, who everybody who lives in those borders must be loyal to that country." It takes time, takes a long time. And at the time when this idea was introduced, I think most of us, young and idealistic, we didn't realize how long it would take and how difficult it could be. That people look at each other. "You're not quite the same as me. How can you and I be nationals of this same country? What have we got in common?" You maybe we went to the same school. Yeah. Or maybe we live in the same neighborhood for a while. We can speak to each other, one common language, lingua franca. I speak my own language, you speak your own, but we have a lingua franca. Yeah. Which we talk. So we have a little bit in common, but that's only the beginnings. It takes a long time, maybe a few generations, before you feel that you can be a nation.

So what happened is that we didn't have nations. What we had, we had states. We inherited colonial states, and the states were given the responsibility of shaping that nation. So what happened was, in most countries, the people who controlled the state then decided what kind of a nation it's going to be. Yeah. And who deserves to be a nation, who deserves to be a national, who doesn't. The state decides because the state controls that border legally. Again, this is a legal thing. Yeah. And so on. But the actual feeling of Ukraine loyalty or to fight and die, of that you have to draft him into the army to make him feel like that. You train him to shoot and kill on behalf of your country.

So then you get the feeling of the enemy out there, and you have no choice. "He's not my national. I can kill him." But that is a matter of national policy. The state tells you who's the enemy. Yeah. And who are you be trained to kill, if necessary, if they attack us. So these are all new things, and we had to learn. Of course, we can learn, and we have learned. Many nations have done that. But if you ask everybody within any one of these countries, in the neighborhood, are they all the same? Do they feel the same? It's still work in progress. I think. And it's something important. I, I actually strongly support the idea, but I think we mustn't pretend that it is all done. Yeah. And they're very easy. Yeah.

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If you summarize, what's the identity of Singaporean like? Because in Singapore, Singapore is a new country, relatively. Like, what's the identity that was been shaped and created through these 60-plus years? You see, one of the worst things that could happen to us was when all the colonies were decolonized and said that, "You, from today onwards, the imperialists will go home, and you take over. It's your nation." The model that they were given were European nations, and European nations at that point were defined, especially Western Europe, where where they colonial, colonial government had first started. And the most of them were defined in very simple, the most common terms that I remember was one language, one religion, and a shared history. This is the most common thing that was the European model. And so that meant, if you followed that model, you look around and say, "Who's the majority, and who are the minorities?" And the minorities must all give up their own thing and become like a majority. Then we become one nation. Yes. You must, but you must be like the majority. That was a British thing. For example, you give example like, "You must have one religion. You can't have two religions." Of course, it's not two. In real life, it's not like that. But that's how it was defined.

When he first started the nation, for example, the best example between the Dutch and the Belgium. I mean, they were Netherlands. They were part of the Spanish Netherlands. But what happened was that they speak the same language and, uh, what happened was they didn't have the same religion. They spoke the same language, but they didn't have the same religion, but they all spoke Dutch. But the Dutch became Protestants. And the Catholics, the Catholic Dutch were then separated from the Protestants, and eventually became the country called Belgium. You see. And in the case of Belgium, very complicated. The other French-speaking Catholics who were living there became Belgium. So Belgium became a Dutch and French country. But they didn't have one language, but they compromised. It was religion was more important than the language. So what model should we be following as the new state? Should we be creating? So many of the states took the model of conforming to the majority. The majority decides what is a nation to be. The rest of us must conform. Singapore, this is the exception. One of the reasons why Singapore separated, as you know, from this albatross file that is now being exhibited, which is a big story these days. Yeah, that separated because this, there was a different understanding of what Malaya was supposed to be. The way the British understood it was, there was no majority in Malaya. In Malaya, the Malays were something like just under 50%. If you include Singapore, it'd be less than 50%. So there were Chinese and Indians and others. And there's no majority. So it should be a plural society. Everybody should live together. Yeah. Without anybody conforming to one particular ethnic group.

So it's one lingua franca, but not shared history and not shared? No one religion. Several religions. Numerous languages. And before, yeah, numerous. And no shared history was so brief, under British protection, yes, which is less than 50 or 60 years old. So the conditions for building a nation were, I would say, very, very poor. But anyway, that was the reason why Singapore separated. Was that the Malay, they were not quite a majority, but they were still slight majority. By keeping out Singapore, they could say they have a majority. The Malays said, "These are Malay states. You guys are all immigrants, so you have to conform."

So Singapore was the opposite. 75% Chinese, but how do they accept that? And there were other reasons, I won't go into the details because it's a complex story, but they separated. So what Singapore's separation then was based on the idea that we are different from there. We don't expect the majority to determine the national, the ethnicity of the nation. We accept the plural society principle. So it was unique in the region for not using the majority as a base. Otherwise, everybody should be Chinese. On the contrary, the leadership persuaded the Chinese community not to deter, not to say, "This is your Chinese country." This is not a Chinese country. This is everybody is equal. And then they had these categories of Chinese, Indians, Malays, and others, and so on. But everybody was equal, and different religions, and so everybody keeps his own language, his own religion, and his own culture, and they're equal in the law, by law. A plural society like that, very few places in the world where you had that idea. In fact, I would say so few that there are none of them have been successful. Singapore, by comparison, is the most successful, if not the only successful example of a plural society, still after 60 years, still maintained as a principle of nationhood. That's most unusual and successful in a way which I think no other country can really boast of in the same way.

I mean, there is the United States, which is like seen as an immigrant society. So different ethnicities, different religions, shared one language and shared one history for the last like 250 years. But then you see, in itself, there is also always the assumption that it was a white man's country. Assumption. Yeah. Underlying it all. Underlying. Yeah. Because the first immigrants were like from the 13. The 13 colonies. In the constitution, did not apply to anybody except the white people. The constitution did not apply to the blacks, and at that point, there were only three people, three groups in the 13 colonies: the whites, the native Indians, and the blacks. And the constitution did not apply to the other two. Only applied to the whites who defeated the English and chased the English out. So for about, even the Civil War, what was the Civil War about? It was whether the blacks are our people or not. Yeah. To they're not slaves, you see. And after the Civil War, it took them another hundred years to Martin Luther King before they gave them, gave all of them the vote and treated them at least legally equal. Not always. Legally. Say it comes back to the only the legal part. Is only the legal part. But so even the United States, can you compare with Singapore for that? I think actually Singapore is better than the United States on that one, very clearly better. Because in Singapore, the law actually makes it a crime to discriminate you if you're rude or to show racial discrimination. And anything you do is against the law, and the law, as far as I know, would act very promptly about that. And that's why it minimized the whole tensions of race and so on, so far anyway. It's always there. There's no, nobody pretends that it will go away. It'll always be there. But the management, the kind of social engineering that was set up under a legal, a very strong legal system, to some extent authoritarian system, to make sure that all these tensions would not be allowed to take over and break up the harmony of the society. Yeah. Then it is exceptional. As I said, I think it is unique. I can't actually think of another country which has done what the Singaporeans have done successfully.

Yeah. Because you have like some European nations like Switzerland, or like you have some Middle East countries like Dubai, like the Emirates, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. The majority is like one ethnic group, one religion, right? They are the only citizens. The others are working there, and you can make as much money as you like. Yes. But you are never citizens here. Here is not. It was started. Everybody was an equal citizen in the eyes of the law. That's it. And to preserve that, refine that, and made it more real to most of the young Singaporeans, I think is an exceptional achievement.

Do you think this setup in Singapore is fragile or is pretty stable and it's pretty good? Let's put it this way. It can be as strong as it can be if there was no interference from outside. But if powerful forces intervene and interfere, of course, it is fragile because it's a small country. So depends. If powerful forces from outside leave Singapore alone, I think Singapore's chances of developing a reunified idea of a Singaporean identity which was pluralistic is entirely possible. I will, I don't, it will never be secure. It always have to be managed and carefully refined and and watched and managed. You can never take it for granted. Yeah. That's why this idea of nationhood is really not a very helpful one in some ways, except that in the eyes of the United Nations, we're all equal, independent, sovereign, equal. That's the ideal in the United Nations. But the United Nations doesn't actually run anything, can do anything today. If big countries intervene, United Nations can do nothing. That's we've seen that again and again. And it doesn't matter who the big nation is, but a big nation bullying a small nation, United Nations is pretty helpless. The only time when they intervened successfully as a United Nation was really the Korean one. And in the end, it ended up with two Koreas, and they're still at war. They haven't signed a peace agreement between the two Koreas till this day.

So, United Nations as an ideal, I think, is wonderful. I mean, I, as someone who grew up believing in it, I regret the fact that it has no real power. And we should have been more realistic. It has no real power to actually make it happen. It depends really, in the end, on the few great powers that have enough power to determine that. And when the great powers are in conflict or in tension and competing with one another, then who knows what they will do.

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What do you understand about life from the perspective of being 95 years old? Well, I feel that it has been a very good century. The 20th century, the second half of the second, the first half was terrible. The second half of the 20th century was a good, good time, and the beginnings of the 21st century, we thought would be even better, but it had a very bad start, almost immediately, and a bad start. And this is why I associate it with the world order being threatened by overconfidence when the Cold War ended, because the idea that you're the number one superpower in the world really distorted the world view of the United States. And their triumphant approach they took led them to those interventionist wars in North Africa and the Middle East, which actually undermined the idea that the United States could provide leadership to the world. And to that extent, the millennium started in 2000 and 2000 badly. And by 2008, the American economy was beginning to feel troubled, because by that time, all their capitalists had already started to, in the liberal globalization, they started to invest in China on such a large scale, benefited China, but undercut the economy, manufacturing economy, anyway, in the United States. And by 2008, they were in considerable trouble. Their investment planning, and so on, of course, they managed to recover from it. That is the strength of the American economy, and that is why I would never write off the American economy. I think the capacity to revive themselves is very strong. So, but all that time, of course, was a time when the Chinese were given the opportunity to rise very quickly and become a challenge to the United States in the eyes of the United States. But the fact is, China didn't do that to challenge the United States. China did that just to benefit itself, its people, to make them raise their standard of living, reduce poverty. All these things are none of them can be described as being bad goals. They are very good goals. They are really meant to make China more prosperous and wealthy, and so on. And also, of course, they strengthen their defense, because they knew that as long as they're weak, they are always vulnerable.

That's why South China Sea, it's a big deal for them and a big, big focus, because the idea that a powerful country like the United States can park their aircraft carriers 25 miles off the coast of China freely anytime they like was unacceptable. What kind of security is that? I mean, an aircraft carrier is not a friendly ship. It's not about freedom of navigation. Merchant ships trading, everybody can do that. That's absolutely free. The Chinese would love that. But an aircraft carrier is not that. And the Chinese did that because in the 1990s, when Deng Xiaoping talked about, "Oh, after the return of Hong Kong, we now like to see the return of Taiwan and so on and so forth." The Americans sailed the Seventh Fleet through the Straits of Taiwan under President Clinton and so on, just to show, "Don't you move, you know." And so that means the fact that the aircraft carriers and the sub fleet can go up and down freely just off the coast of China, absolutely freely, it's a sense of vulnerability and insecurity. It grew out of that. Previously, they had tried to build a navy with Russian help. But with the end of the Cold War, even the Russians couldn't help them. And the Russians were not great naval people anyway, by American standards. So in the end, they had to build their own. And they, but now they're not concentrating on the navy. They know they can never match the United States Navy as a naval force. What they have concentrated on, as you know, on missiles, on submarines. In other words, defensive things. You don't come near. The missiles and the submarines will make sure that you dare not come. You at least will be very careful when you come near. So they've concentrated on that. And in the South China Sea, they started to take over some of those islands. But they were not the first. The Vietnamese have been doing that already, and then enlarging them to become airfields and so on. And in the eyes of the Chinese, that is how they see it. It's to defend themselves.

So Chinese behavior is naturally more defensive, not offensive. Some people will argue that the fact that you build an aircraft carrier, that's an offensive, that's an offensive force. Aircraft carriers are not defensive. Aircraft carriers per se is an offensive thing. Yeah. But actually, of course, the Chinese now have three. They have three aircraft carriers now, which is like compared to the US, how many? How many US have? 11, I think. Yeah. 11 aircraft, I think. So anyway, the point is that the Chinese realize they can never, if they do what the Soviet Union did and try to match the Americans ship by ship and weapon by weapon, you go bankrupt. What you concentrate on is getting good, getting rich, getting enough money, and concentrate how you defeat an offensive navy which you can't defeat by sea yourself. So I think the concept of continental missiles, intercontinental missiles, and submarines, which are nuclear submarines that go very deep underwater, I think it's a beginning of something. They have also space, using space to help the defense against any American naval force that could arrive off the coast of China. So that right now, for example, the military, the American naval force is no longer off the coast of China. They were actually down at Guam, and they come in and out to show that the freedom of navigation, but they do not come as they used to park there, you know, as they used to like the Persian Gulf, they're parked there. Mhm. In the Mediterranean, they're parked there. But the Americans no longer park their aircraft carriers inside the South China Sea. They come in and out. So that already is something, I think, that it's a bit assuring for the Chinese. So at the moment, it's not that tense because Americans are also careful. They just want to assert their right to do it, but they're not parking there. So, and they park Guam is much further away for aircraft carriers to work from there. The planes are much longer way to fly. So that, and of course, the missiles, which are specially, specially, I think, specially devised to aim at aircraft carrier teams. They're specially devised to do that. So that this is deterrence. Your aircraft team would not get any nearer because the missiles can always, you must have counter-missiles to fight a missile war. Mhm. That's so that's what they're concentrating on at a different level. So I'm very interested to see that the Chinese are at least realistic enough to know that they're not going to just match the Americans. You have one more aircraft carrier, I have another more, and this goes like the Russians did. I think they, the Russians actually made a bad mistake about that. They spent a lot of their money matching the Americans, and the economy just could not, could not develop. Whereas the Chinese are not doing that. Mhm. You can do what you like. We would find ways and means of deterring you and neutralizing whatever you develop in a defensive way. Yeah. And of course, in theory, their intercontinental missiles now can reach the United States, in theory. And of course, that, of course, so they can nuclear war could actually, both sides can use it. So that's another deterrence for not wanting to have a war. So I believe that is what all these things taken together. I think I have reason to be a bit more optimistic than I was before. That part, the Chinese are doing what I would consider to be the minimum necessary to feel secure without concentrating on matching United States military force, which I think would have been a mistake. That's how I think the Chinese see it.

From the height of 95 years old, what do you think in life matters much less than people think? There's so many things, but I think the line is that you can't take it with you. Yeah. So you learn that. Yeah. So whatever you can attain, whatever you can do, and if you do it well, you have reason to be satisfied. If you do something badly, you must learn from it and make sure that other people realize that you, you know that you have done poorly. So, I think people are very, very thoughtful and actually very understanding when you recognize it yourself. And I've been very lucky again in my friends, in my students, my colleagues, all my life. People have been extremely kind and always recognized that I did try my best. I mean, I've not been as good as I should have been, but it was not because I meant to do harm to anybody. But I always thought I was doing the right thing, but got it wrong or something like that. But in the end, I was consistent in one thing: that I was always willing to learn. And whatever I learned, if I thought it would be useful for others to know, I was always happy to teach, to pass it on. Yeah. And this is very satisfying if I can achieve that. And if I turn out to be right, and sometimes I can turn out to be right, then of course, it's even better. But even when I'm wrong, if I can recognize that I'm wrong, and other people know that I recognize that I was wrong, even that is all right. Then you've learned something. You learn that that was wrong. So that I won't do that again. I don't believe in that anymore. So that you learn, you learn from that as well. You not only learn what is positive, you learn what is negative.

And this is one of the things about Chinese historiography, which I find very interesting. The idea of history writing that we learn in the West, really, is a professional thing that started in the 19th century. There was no such thing as a professional historian before that. History was written by people who either, you know, just keeping records and knowing telling what they did and what they thought. But they were not history as a profession. Like, what is it, the famous Van Franka, Leo Franka, was a man who defined history as a search of truth, what really happened. So he was right. He had a scientific approach towards history, and he created the profession. But that was only in the 19th century. But history goes back thousands of years when people kept records. What were these records kept for? And from what I can understand, the Chinese represent that as the most continuous record by one set of people, from Sima Qian, the 3rd century BC, produced a historical record down to the present is one tradition of history writing. And the history writing is not history for its own sake. History was always, "What can we learn from the past that will help the future?" There was always a practical side to it. And what you do is, you don't try to know exactly what happened. That was of no importance. What is important is that what do you know from the documents that have survived? What documents should you preserve that would tell the future what was right and what was wrong? So you select and collect those documents that teach you what was successful and what didn't work. And you collect them, and that is what they call history. We translate the word as history, but the original meaning of it was actually documents, records. So they're not telling you this is what actually happened. They are saying, "These are the documents that have been preserved in order for you to learn." So that every dynasty, then thereafter, they became the habit, they developed the tradition of every dynasty writing the history of the previous dynasty that failed, and collecting all their documents that have survived, and selecting from those documents to show what worked and what didn't work, so that the next dynasty or the present dynasty can learn from it. And each dynasty did that for the next dynasty. And they did that for all those dynasties down to Qing, down to the Republic of China. And that attitude towards history remains. If you look at the Chinese, even down to this day, they don't pretend that their history writing is the truth. That's not the important thing. Even when they turned to rewriting the history along Marxist-Leninist terms, they, what they did was, they thought Marx was correct. Marxist view of history was correct. So they rewrote their history to try and understand how Marxist idea of progress can be demonstrated through their history. And when it didn't work, they gave it up. Now they don't write Marxist history anymore in China. Now they actually gone back to a kind of dynastic history, in which they say, "What did the previous dynasty teach us?" So what they do, write the kind of history now they're learning is, "What went wrong with the Republic of China, 1911 to 1949? They failed. We don't make those mistakes. Mustn't make those mistakes anymore. What went wrong with the Cultural Revolution? We mustn't make those mistakes anymore. We learn from each time." So, for example, a simple example, most important one to my mind is that we don't use the word revolution anymore. The revolution is 1949. We had a revolution, two revolutions, 1911, 1949. But the second revolution was successful. We don't need another revolution. What we need is to reform, to reform what was achieved by the revolution, because we made mistakes, like Mao Zedong made mistakes, or other mistakes. We learn from that. We make sure we don't make the same mistakes again, and then we progress. And we learn from everybody else. We learn from the West, West number one, West number two, examples of Japan, Korea, economic examples, and so on. Industrial development, industrial capitalism, we learn each time. We learn, we learn, and then we pass it on, and then we can develop an understanding of the idea of progress that we learn from Karl Marx.

On a level one to 10, how happy are you? I've been relatively happy. Yes, I'm happy because my, on a level one to 10, my children are doing well. My grandchildren are doing well. I'm waiting to be a great-grandfather. Yeah. But from the family side, I've been have every reason to be happy. Yeah. As I said, my wife gave me a wonderful family and provided me with a kind of support that made it easier for me to be happy. So I have no unhappiness in my own environment. What I'm unhappy about, of course, is that in large, in broad sense, political leaders are not always wise. They don't actually learn from the past, even though some of them know it. Some of them, of course, don't know it. So they make mistakes because they're ignorant. And there are lots of political leaders who are basically ignorant. But they're only clever about winning elections or winning power in a limited framework. But it hurts me to see governments fail and people suffer because they don't learn from mistakes in the past, and they continue to make mistakes, to be willful, and just in a way, just considering the interest of their own group or themselves and their own elite groups and so on. A kind of selfishness and narrowness that creates so much pain and hurt and harm everywhere. And too many political leaders like that for the human race, or the human, humanity, to really make genuine progress. It slows us down. It makes us cause a lot of harm to a lot of people, and it's happening every day today, and it's unavoidable, probably. But that creates, that gives me great unhappiness. I've never been happy with that because I see it all the time, even though I'm happy myself. I have been very lucky, as I said, I've avoided the worst of these things, but I see it happening, and I see the people suffering for it everywhere. Some for reasons which are very hard to understand. Some for historical reasons, but are they justified? I find very few of them are really justified for the kind of killing and violence and the damage they do to human lives. That is a part of our humanity that I can say I deeply regret.

Professor, you are 95. Yeah. 95. How does it feel to be 95? Well, I feel very lucky to be around. I never expected to be alive for so long. I mean, I was always regularly sick with this or that over the years. I'm not a, I'm not a particularly healthy or strong person. I don't do regular exercises or anything like that, but I always kept busy. And there were times when I was not well, often unwell, when I had to cancel all appointments and so on. But I've been very lucky that I have not, up to now, touch wood, I haven't developed any really serious illness that would take me off. But so I'm still around. But I don't know why. As they say, I guess it could be genetic. It could be. But my mother, my mother lived to age 88. My father died quite young. He was only 68 or 69. So I can't even say it's entirely genetic. But it could be because my father had a very tough childhood. And so there were other reasons why he did not live as long. But my mother lived to 88. So, and for that generation to live to 88 is fantastic. Yeah.

On a personal level, do you have any regrets in life? Oh, many, many, many, lots of regrets. But I think I, I would say that I have a very positive attitude towards those things that the mistakes I've made, the things that I've not done correctly or did something foolish and so on. I take that as lessons learned. And I don't take it too much to heart. I learned the lesson, make sure they don't do it again. And find better ways of doing things and avoid making mistakes and do my best to do all the things that would reach what I want to reach. But most of all, I think help me to learn. That's the most important. Because when I chose to be an academic, to work in a university, I recognized that I never wanted to work for any government. That's what I wanted to work for a university. And so the important thing for me is to find a university where they respect academic freedom. And I've been very, very lucky from the time I started as an undergraduate till now. I've always been in universities where elite. Not the first one in China during the civil war, I was a nationalist one, they were also quite controlled, but I didn't feel, I was too young to feel it mattered. But since I've been an academic, as a scholar working and teaching in a university, I've been very lucky. I've been in every university that I've worked for and been in, I've had the academic freedom. And that is to me absolutely invaluable, because it enabled me to learn whatever I want to learn. So, if I have any regrets, they're regrets I made when I had administrative responsibilities, and I'm not a natural administrator and don't particularly enjoy administration, whereas what I like to do is I like to learn and teach what I to teach what I learn. If I learn and I want to pass it on to others, that's my ambition in life. When I decided to win academic, that's what I wanted to do: to learn and to be able to transmit what I learned by teaching.

Are you afraid of death? That's that's the end. Can happen anytime. I mean, I never thought about it before. Now I have to think about it, because just to make sure that I don't leave a mess behind. So I like to get things a bit prepared and ready. So if anything happens, my children will know what to do, and they know what to do, and my wife and I have both feel the same way. We've never had any doubts, any worries about that. And my children are very good. They have understood what we want, and they know what to expect. And of course, they wish me well, and I'm still around. But if I'm not, they more or less know what has to be done. And that's very satisfactory. What is there to feel?