Transcription
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Ladies and gentlemen, today's event will begin in just one minute. Please take your seats. Before we begin, please ensure that all electronic devices are switched to silent mode. We will see you in one minute. We'll go.
Let's give a round of applause to welcome our guests, Professor Saxs. Welcome, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I'm Wendy, senior manager at the HKU Jockey Club Enterprise Sustainability Global Research Institute and your MC for today. It's wonderful to see such a vibrant gathering in our community today, especially I know this is a Sunday afternoon where we wish to host everyone here. We know that there are many audiences actually online. So a very warm welcome to you all.
Welcome. On behalf of the institute, it's my greatest pleasure to officially welcome you to the institute's Impact Week, which features three week, three events in November, and today actually embarks our first event in this impact month. We are envisioning together the brightest minds across sectors, fostering dialogues that spark collaboration and also drive meaningful impact over sustainability.
So, before we begin, please allow me a few minutes to introduce our host today. The HKU Jockey Club Enterprise Sustainability Global Research Institute was established last year by HKU Business School, funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust. It is dedicated to top-tier sustainability research, education, and partnership. So, please allow me to do an advertisement and follow our WeChat account or LinkedIn account to get updated.
I know that today we have a very exciting agenda lining up, featuring a keynote speech and a fireside chat that promises to be both inspiring and engaging. So, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Hu, the director of our research institute, to deliver our welcoming remarks. Professor Hu, please.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests from Hong Kong and abroad. On behalf of Hong Kong Jockey Club Enterprise Sustainability Global Research Institute, it's my great honor and pleasure to welcome you to Hong Kong, a city, let me maybe using this mic, is it louder? Okay. The city situated at a strategic collaboration and the crossroads of global finance, innovation, as well as East and West exchange.
Today, we are very privileged to have this opportunity to host Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He's the president of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the co-chair of Council of Engineers for Energy Transition. Among his many other titles, he served as the special adviser for not one, not two, but three UN Secretary Generals. Professor Sachs is a world-renowned economist for his pioneering strategies on development, poverty reduction, economic transition, climate change, and public health. He spearheaded the UN Millennium Project and championed sustainable development, global health initiatives. His work has shaped economic reforms from Latin America to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
So, I don't want to say more about his titles and his influence, but basically, he's not only recognized as one of the most influential economists, called by, this is a quote, "the most important economist in the world" by Time magazine and The New York Times, but also someone whose thinking moves between boardrooms, classrooms, and the front lines of international policy.
Today, Professor Sachs is going to share with us his insights on world power and order. I think this is an especially timely moment to discuss this topic as the world is undergoing fundamental shifts. The old models, this is again, quote from Jeffrey Sachs. Okay. The world, the old models of Western-dominated order are giving way to multipolar realities, and we see that new power centers are emerging. Great power competition is intensifying. This is not quoted for Jeffrey Sachs. Okay, this is my understanding of what is going on. And the rules and institutions of global governance are changing. Okay. From US-China rivalries to rivalries, to the war in Ukraine, all the way to technology kind of competition between the US and China, those competitions are fundamentally shaping the new world order and power.
So today, while we see a lot of new international collaborations are forging, we also see a new risk of conflict are emerging. So this is why today we're very honored to have Jeffrey Sachs to join us for this discussion. And then let me also introduce another of our distinguished speaker today, Professor Ju Chen, who will join a fireside chat with Professor Jeffrey Sachs after the keynote. Professor Chen is requires no introduction in this classroom, as well as he's a professor in Hong Kong Business School, okay, right now. He's the chair and the Jen Yutong Professor in Finance at the University of Hong Kong. He currently serves as the director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Science and also the Center for Quantitative History. Previously, Professor Chen was a professor of finance at Yale University. So his research also spans across multiple domains from finance theory, asset pricing to Chinese economy and quantitative economic history. He's widely recognized for his work on not just on finance, but more and more importantly now on institutions, on culture, on Chinese history. Now he serves on numerous advisory and executive boards, including those of major financial institutions in China. He's also a leading public figure, public intellectual, and was named as one of the most influential political voices by Chinese major newspaper. And Professor Chen is also, as a member of HKU, a recipient of very large research funding, in which as a landmark project for the quantitative history of China. Right now, he's playing more and more important role trying to foster young scholars in this field and foster more international collaborations.
And finally, let me also introduce you some of the distinguished guests that we have today. First, we have Professor Richard Wong, the Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Hong Kong U. Professor Xiang Wang, the Vice President and Provost Chancellor of Hong Kong U. Miss Patrick P. Patrick. Yes. He is the honorary university fellow, chairman of Harvard's SCP Group Company Limited and the Shenan Charity Foundation. We also have some other guests that's coming with us. So I don't have too, I don't want to take too much of your time for the detailed introductions. So now, without further ado, let's welcome Professor Jeffrey Sachs for his keynote. Thank you very.
Thank you very, very much. What a great pleasure it is to be together with all of you and thank you for people watching online. Thank you for spending a Sunday afternoon together and in our amazing hospitality of HKU Business School. And I want to express my gratitude for all of the partnership with HKU on many, many fronts. We're trying to figure out what's going on in the world. And I think the best way to think about it is a bit like a pendulum that the pendulum is swinging in a new direction. It reached a kind of end and now it's swinging back. And I want to view that pendulum over a 600-year period, if you'll permit me, because the start of this pendulum for our world is actually 1434, which was a very important date in history for interesting reasons, you know, and for very relevant reasons for where we are in Hong Kong.
The period 1405 to 1433 was the greatest age of China's globalization, and it was of course the age of the seven great voyages of Admiral Zheng He. Surname, but in English, it is Admiral Zheng He of course, was the admiral of the Ming court who led the great naval flotillas all over the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and East Africa in seven great voyages. And China ruled the oceans. It could go anywhere, and wherever it went, hundreds of great ships that were unrivaled anywhere else in the world would visit, show China's greatness, open up diplomatic relations with local kings and emirs and sultans and other local rulers, establish a system of visits, tributary system, so-called, where other principalities and kingdoms and emirates would come and pay deference to China once a year, usually giving some gifts, and China usually giving even bigger gifts in the other direction. So the gifts were not extractive, it was respect and showing respect of the day. But these voyages were unparalleled in their magnificence. They brought back giraffes to the Ming court. And China could have gone on and might have gone on to discover the Cape of Good Hope and how to circle Africa and how to find the way to Europe. It might have explored along the Pacific and discovered that there was a route to an unknown continent, the Americas, if that era had continued. And it could have continued, but China made a policy decision in 1434, which was a bad policy decision, if you would put it in current terms. They introduced tariffs and went protectionist. Basically, they said, "We're closing down. Our problems are our northern neighbor." Maybe it would be like the Ming emperor saying, "Mongolia is our 51st state." We say that about Canada today. We don't really want to deal too much with the rest of the world. We have our problems in the north. And so we will deal with the Steppeland regions which have occasionally invaded us, such as the period from around 1168 with the Mongolian court, the Yuan Dynasty. We have to deal with that. We don't really need our navy. And so the admiral died actually in 1433, and a new Ming emperor, who was the son of the deceased Ming emperor, decided with the court, with the Mandarin officials, to scrap the fleet. And China from then on never really ruled the oceans. There was still trade, of course, but there was not China's grand presence in the seas.
Now, in 1434, halfway around the world, something else was happening that was quite interesting. There was a tiny little kingdom named Portugal. And it had a ruler named Henry, that we now know as Henry the Navigator. And in this tiny little kingdom along the Atlantic, the king was trying to develop a small fleet that could sail down the coast of Africa. And in 1434, the same year that China was scrapping the fleet, the Portuguese rounded a cape called the Cape of Bojador or Bohador. And that showed, okay, we can go further down the coast of Africa. And so, China was closing its way to the oceans, and a little kingdom, Portugal, was opening the route to the sea.
I don't. Is this working? Yes. But not projecting, right? >> Okay. >> Just want to make sure. Over the next 60 years, those naval expeditions from the Atlantic continued, and there were two competing kingdoms in the west of Eurasia, a kingdom of Portugal and a kingdom of Leon and Castile, which would become the kingdom of Spain. Spain was still uniting at the time. It was a divided region. There was still a Christian war against the Muslim rulers in the south in Andalusia, which was the Islamic part of what is today's Spain. And in 1492, the last Muslim stronghold, Cordoba, fell, and Spain became united under a united kingdom of Aragon and Castile. And the royal monarchs decided that they would compete with Portugal for exploration of the seas. And as you know, a very persistent explorer and adventurer, a very persistent explorer and adventurer named Christopher Columbus, who had an erroneous calculation about the size of the earth, but he was quite optimistic that there was a westward passage to this part of the world, to Asia, finally convinced the Spanish monarchs to fund his voyage to the west. And he landed in what he thought was the outskirts of India in 1492. It is present-day Hispaniola, which is Haiti and Dominican Republic. This is how they say that they know he was an economist. Christopher Columbus did not quite know where he was going. He didn't know where he was when he got there, and he did it all on a government grant. So this is 1492, but it was a fortuitous discovery.
And six years later, in 1498, the competitor kingdom of Portugal, which later would combine into one monarchy, finally reached the southern tip of Africa, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, and with the help of Arab seamen who knew how to use the monsoon winds, was able to sail from the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa, to the coast of India. And that was of course Vasco da Gama. Those two voyages in 1492 and 1498 were called by Adam Smith, who wrote The Wealth of Nations 250 years ago next year, by the way, the two most significant events in the history of mankind, he said, because those two voyages united the whole world in ocean-based trade and ocean-based communications. And so the world was united, really for the first time since 10,000 BC, because in 10,000 BC, there was still a land bridge between Asia and the Americas, which was traversed by Asians that were then finding their way to the Americas. But that land bridge was submerged when the ice age ended. The great glaciers melted, the sea level rose, and that separated the Old World from the Americas.
So 1434 marked the end of the pendulum in China's favor and the beginning of the pendulum in Europe's favor, because Europe began its naval expansion, by the way, using Chinese technology, because it was the compass and it was gunpowder, which were the two vital technologies that enabled the European expansion, and both of those were Chinese technologies. Technologies from the Song Dynasty period, which had come to Europe, and now were coming back to Europe, but this time they were coming back basically in caravels and in gunboats, and by the time the Europeans arrived in Asia, they were coming with muskets and gunfire, which enabled them, at least, to establish a foothold in the much more highly populated region of the world, because after all, Europe was much, much less populated than Asia. Asia was consistently 60 or 70% of the world population.
When Adam Smith wrote about these events almost 300 years after they occurred, and he called them the most significant events in the history of mankind, he made two pertinent observations that are rather telling and rather prescient. One was he said that China was a great civilization and a very high order of economy. But he said that the Chinese economy was stagnant. That it had reached the highest level of affluence that it could, given what he called its constitution, its order, under the Qing Dynasty at that stage. And while this is a simplification, it wasn't all wrong. China certainly was not changing and open in the same way that it had been during the Song period. It was not the dynamic technology leader. And in fact, we know when the Jesuits came to China in the 17th century, they brought advances in mathematics and in astronomy that really amazed the court and that caused the court to listen that there's something going on in the West, in the far barbarian West, that is somehow of interest. And so we know that not only had the direction of navigation changed, but with that change of navigation had come a new openness to Western society.
I would say, to my mind, looking at this and thinking about this, the discovery of the Americas was probably the most fundamental change possible for Western society. It broke all the intellectual taboos. After all, this was land that wasn't in the Bible. This was land not predicted by the Pope. This was something that was completely not understood. It required a completely new way of thinking. It opened the idea of exploration. There was new fauna and flora. There were new food products. There was an exchange that was not so well understood. But there was a big debate: Are these human beings that we're meeting on the other side? Are they fully human beings? Do they have a soul? Should they be saved? It opened up many very big intellectual questions and cultural questions, and it also opened up an economic world that was filled with greed, violence, and global-scale expansion and production. It was the beginning of true global-scale enterprise. And of course, it was also the birth, truly, of the first international enterprises, and the most famous of which became the East India Company of Britain and of Holland. One made in 1600 and the other created in 1602.
A dynamism took place in Europe, an intellectual dynamism, a scientific revolution. And one thing that also is just worth mentioning, the Americas became completely open to the Europeans, these vast two continents, completely rich in resources, for a reason that wasn't even understood by Adam Smith, and really wasn't understood until the late 19th century or 20th century. And that was that the Europeans brought Old World diseases which killed off the populations of the Americas. The American populations fell by more than 90%. And this was long attributed to conquest and brutality, which was also part of it, but it was really even more the pathogens that were brought by the Europeans, the plague, the African diseases, malaria, yellow fever, typhus, smallpox, and many other diseases that the Americas did not know, and which there was no acquired adult immunity from having survived childhood bouts of these diseases. No population structural change in genetics after having long exposure to these diseases. So the population was basically wiped out in a hundred years, from 1500 to 1600, and that meant that the continents were wide open for European exploitation and colonization. And this was a phenomenal boost of long-term power and resources and wealth that is really incalculable in its consequence, that I think was probably the most decisive factor. Nothing of the same was experienced for Vasco da Gama's outcome, because the Europeans didn't bring new diseases to the East. Those diseases had come from the East. Plague and so forth were endemic in the East. So there was no mass die-off. There was no mass conquest. Europe just had small colonial ports, factories along the coasts of India, and then taking possession in Southeast Asia in small places, coastal areas, but not conquering large regions in the first instance.
I think the next most significant event is 1776. And there, there are a few modest-scale events like the birth of the United States, which would have long-term consequences. Probably the most important was Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations that year. So it gave birth to my profession. So I deem that as extremely important. But actually, truly the most consequential was that the steam engine became truly commercial when a tinkerer, not a tinkerer, a very skilled craftsman and a very clever man, James Watt, working at the University of Glasgow, put a condenser on the steam engine and improved the efficiency so remarkably that the commercial use of the steam engine suddenly became manifest across almost all sectors of the economy. That was the miracle technology of the 1770s, the AI of the time. And it allowed the mechanization of industry across many sectors, most importantly textiles initially, but then across almost every sector of the economy and in transport with ocean steamers and the railroad invented soon after, and of course, the advent of industrial-scale military as well. That was the great turning point for the Europe-Asia contest of power was the Industrial Revolution.
You know that in 1795, Britain sent an embassy, Lord McCartney, to the court of Qianlong. It was 1793. And the Qing court said, "What do we want from you? Nonetheless, you still are barbarians and you have nothing much to offer, and we don't want to open up to trade." And so the court was rebuffed. And the next time this happened, which was about 47, 48 years later, the British showed up right out here, in, in the harbor, and this time they had, they had the advantage on their side, and they steamed up the Pearl River, and they launched the Opium War. And that was the swing of the pendulum the other way. Europe, of course, led by Britain, which had the advantage of having knocked off Spain and Holland in their naval power, ruled the seas. Didn't quite rule Europe, because there was still France, there was still the Habsburgs of Austria, there was still Russia, but Britain ruled the seas, and that meant ruling the empires of the European world. And when they showed up and won the First Opium War in 1842, you all became subjects of Her Majesty's Government. And that was, of course, a pivotal moment in history. And the next century pretty much continued to go the same direction. China reached its lowest point about a century later, around the early 1940s, with Japan conquering much of China and the devastation of Japan's invasion of China and the loss of probably 15 to 20 million Chinese during the Sino-Japanese War. So an absolute devastation that showed that China had lost not only its century of humiliation to the West, but to the first industrialized power of the East, which was Japan.
I think we're at the end of, I think the pendulum actually probably stops swinging in Europe's advantage sometime around the handover of Hong Kong back to China, which itself was a reflection of the shifting power and the return of China to the world stage as a very active protagonist. It wasn't just the expiration of a 99-year lease. It was also the ability of China to assert its power in the world, as well as the fact that there was no British Empire anymore except in their imagination, which continues, by the way, until today, with all due respect, but there is no British Empire. It ended a while ago, but it continues in spirit, let's say.
What we're seeing now is really the pendulum swinging the other way. What was the inroads of Europe to Asia is now the outward swing of Asia towards the world. And we're seeing those events very poignantly and dramatically in this very week that we have just experienced, which is very, very interesting. I just read the conclusion of a meeting that was agreed a couple of days ago, not the meeting of President Xi and President Trump, but two countries, one of which agreed, one country agreed to invest over 10 years in the other country in profitable projects, but it said that they would make an investment. They would help the second country in developing its industry. They would give technical assistance to that country in building up its industry. You would think that the country committing the capital and the technical help, well, it would be the leader and the one recipient would be the developing country. And of course, the country that's committing to make the investments and give the technical assistance is Korea. And the country that is going to receive the capital and receive the help on the shipbuilding industry is the United States of America. So the relationship, though portrayed by Mr. Trump in True Social as a great win of the United States over Korea, is really Korean official development assistance to the United States of America. We're very thankful. We hope we can somehow begin to catch up. We're going to make a real effort at development in the next decades. We'll be good students. We will absolutely try to learn. But the United States is going to have a lot of catching up to do. And that's actually the truth. And however one looks at this, maybe the United States does or doesn't have the power to compel Korea to make investments in the United States, but it's pretty pathetic that you have to try. And that is really a sign of a developing country that needs capital and can't raise it on its own. And so it has to force another government to give the capital and promise 10 years of capital of $20 billion a year. I suspect Korea will find some useful investments. But I do regard this as quite a turn of relations and not a sign of US strength, but rather a pitiful sign, I have to say. We have a president who can turn any fiasco into a great celebration. And so he's celebrating this situation. But if you look at it objectively, this is not American strength, this is American weakness.
What we have just observed, we also did observe the Trump-Xi meetings, and that was also significant there. The story also is that the United States, of course, faces not only a pure competitor, but a pure competitor that will win if there's actually either a trade war or a hot war in this region. And the United States, I think, is somewhat waking up to this reality, although its delusions last long. And America is a delusional country that believes in its primacy, that believes that it runs the world or that it should run the world. And so there's not a lot of reality-based thinking in Washington. The idea for a long time was China can help us vis-à-vis Russia, but of course, it will be a subservient helper. So not very costly, it's poor, it's weak, it grows rice, they thought, and that it will be possible to get China's help vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Afterwards, it was a more benign view that at least China will make our flip phones and our smartphones and keep them inexpensive, but no harm done. And then starting around 2010, there started to be a rising level of anxiety. Hey, they're competing with us. They're starting to innovate. What's happening? And this began Obama's famous pivot to Asia. Around 2015, a kind of panic level arose in the United States, which said, things have gotten out of hand. China is more successful than we wanted it to be. And they have the nerve to start competing with us in actually cutting-edge sectors.
Probably the two great wake-up calls in the United States were the "Made in China 2025" policy, which was adopted 10 years ago, which was a very smart industrial policy of China, which said there are 10 sectors that will be the leading sectors of technology in the coming generation, and we need to be in the forefront of those, and the policies have been enormously successful, of course, and not only here, which is one of the beneficiaries, but next door in Shenzhen, certainly you see the fruits of this, because Shenzhen and Hong Kong together, and Guangha, if you literally, are now defined as the most innovative cluster in the whole world, Silicon Valley falling to position number three, and Tokyo-Yokohama, position number two in the World Intellectual Property Organization ranking. So "Made in China 2025" produced the world's leading innovation cluster. That's an astounding achievement. And the other great wake-up call was the Belt and Road Initiative, where China said, we will invest outward. And that was Europe's direction for hundreds of years, and now clearly Asia's direction is outward investment. Asian firms, of course, China, Japan has been doing this for decades, Korea has been doing it a little bit shorter time, and now Chinese companies will not only export to the world, but will be major outward investors and producers all over the world. And so these two policies, to use a technical term, freaked out the United States, which decided about 10 years ago that it had to contain China. Another absurdity and delusion. How could you possibly contain China? A country of 335 million people today in the United States and 1.4 billion people in China, with China producing a great deal more than the United States in industrial output, and by the correct measures of GDP at purchasing power parity, a much larger economy than the United States. There was no way to contain China. But it became US policy: tighten technology export controls, try to break Huawei and ZTE, put on sanctions, stop foreign investments, break Chinese investments in the United States, break the research linkages between the US and China, expand the military presence of the United States in the Philippines, Korea, Japan, and Guam. All of these were decided 10 years ago. They've all been carried out. The idea was that China would have to fall into line with a US-led world. Of course, this was never to be the case. It shouldn't be the case. We don't need a US-led world. We need a multilateral and multipolar world. And so the whole idea of the US of the so-called rules-based order, which means the US rules and orders everyone else around, not really any sensible set of rules, was not to be.
But I think what we saw this week was probably the end of that attempt. When Trump came back into office, well, Trump, of course, followed this playbook in his first term. He put on all of these controls, the export controls, the tariff controls, the anti-Huawei measures, and so forth. Nothing worked. Nothing really stopped China's dynamism and growth. Biden came in, just continued the same policy. There was no real difference at all between those administrations. Trump came back in and said, "I'm going to raise the stakes and raise the stakes." And that lasted for about two days, three months ago, because China said, "Well, we match you. You put on tariffs on us, we put on tariffs on you. You put on export controls on us, we put on export controls on you." This shocked the hell out of America, by the way. And within about 48 hours, the United States said, "Truce, truce, slow down. You're being unfair. You're hitting us back." And this was then leading up to the meeting that took place this week. And I think that what happened this week was basically the United States saying, "We don't want to have a fight. We can't have a fight. We wouldn't win a fight. So let's just call it off. Calm down." It's not peace. It's not cooperation. It's not the end of the tensions by any means, but it is a recognition that the United States does not have the chokehold, does not have the choke points, does not have the upper hand in this relationship. This is a relationship that if it's carried out cooperatively is a very fruitful one. If it is carried out non-cooperatively, is not one in which the United States will win any kind of trade war or technology war or finance war. And that I think is, in historical terms, we're really seeing something different now. The return of Asia to the center stage in the world, and the return of the recognition that this is not a Western-led world. It's not a US-led world. It is a multipolar world. That's all to the good, by the way, because it's a multipolar world of population, of civilizations, of cultures. No one part of the world should dominate the rest of the world. So I'm quite satisfied that this is a much better way, but I would like us to be realistic about it. Not going down fighting, but actually recognizing that this is the right approach.
Let me just conclude with an observation about what it means for this remarkable place, because I think that Hong Kong is once again right in the center of things, and this time in the center of things in a very, very positive way. I will start with the Greater Bay Area. It is notable that the GBA is the world's most productive cluster. It's 70 million people living in the single most dynamic part of the world economy. That's good. This is a very interesting, exciting place. And this is, I think, extremely positive. The dynamism of technology, in my view, is also very much in the right direction, because what is the technological lead? It is the lead in the green, digital, and information-based future of the world economy. So what this region leads in is green technologies, electric vehicles, photovoltaics, renewable energy, smart grids, digital connectivity, electric vehicles, battery supply chains, robotics, artificial intelligence, all of the critical sectors that will shape the world economy for the coming at least one generation, probably two generations. So you're in the middle of a volcanic amount of technological innovation that is really at the heart of what the world needs. And whenever you hear "overcapacity" as a term used by the West to define this situation, what you hear is pure jealousy. Oh my god, if only we had that overcapacity. There is no overcapacity here at all in the sense that China produces more than is useful. The world needs all of this. Part of Hong Kong's job as financier is to help finance all of that. So if the solar industry in China can export twice what it does right now, which it can, and if the world needs twice what it has right now in order to get on a safe climate trajectory, it is Hong Kong's job to say, "We will help double the exports by showing the financial models to make that possible." There is no overcapacity. There is just great capacity for a worldwide transformation, and you're at the very heart of that. So I believe that what we have here in this unique place in the world offers not only an opportunity for your own prosperity and well-being over the coming generation, but in a way which is going to shape the world in the way the world needs to be transformed into the kind of future economy that is environmentally sustainable and highly productive with the technologies that are emerging from HKU, from your partners in Shenzhen and Dongguan and Guangha, and throughout this extraordinarily vibrant region.
In the last two days, we've been having a meeting, HKU is lead partner, what we call the GBA ASEAN initiative, because a lot of that outward investment and productive capacity will be linking China and ASEAN. The beginning of the week for me last week was in Kuala Lumpur, when the now 11 countries of ASEAN, with a population of 700 million people, adopted policies to accelerate the energy transformation, to integrate physically more closely among the 11, and in what was an important agreement reached between China and ASEAN in what's called the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area Upgrade 3.0, to have a stronger collaboration between China and ASEAN on digital technologies, on AI, on green transformation, on supply chains, on standards, on all of the implementation of the new technologies. So this is a fantastic opportunity. And the project that we are launching here two days ago in Hong Kong with HKU hosting, and yesterday in Shenzhen with the Shenzhen city government hosting, is a program to bring academics, business, and government together to accelerate this close relationship and this exciting joint effort at transformation.
Information in the years ahead. So all of that is to say, I'm very, very optimistic. I'm a bit bemused by what happened in the last few days. I, of course, don't want to discard still risks, because delusions lead to risks, which lead to accidents. And we're not past the delusion stage yet. The changes of global power don't make the United States endangered or vulnerable. China is not going to invade the US, nor could it, nor would it ever in a million years even think of that. But in the United States, they don't know geography very well. And so there are lots of fears and lots of confusion, and we have to get past that confusion, and with partnership, we can do so. Thank you very much.
>> Thank you very much, Professor Sax. Thank you for your inspiring, informative, and also encouraging speech. Um, so to commemorate today's event, we would like to invite everyone for a group photo. Now, please remain at your seat and raise up props if you have one. I believe it will be spreaded. Yes. And look at our photographer, Bunny. If you are sitting aside, welcome to squeeze in. Okay. Smile first. One, two, three. Smile. Let's give a big thumb to our event. Sure. We will use an iPhone panel function to ensure everyone is there. >> So please smile when it turns to your direction. >> Okay. Hold still. I believe this section could be great. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. >> Sure. >> Hi there. Thank you. One. Thank you. One, two, three, four. One, two, three. Again. One, two, three. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. If you need a copy of today's group photo, please follow our social media account to obtain it.
As we are setting up the stage, let me take this chance to thank our co-organizer, Center on Contemporary China and the World at HKU, directed by Professor Li Chung. Also our close partners at HKU Business School. Thank you for your great support. November is the institute's Impact Week. So if you wish to continue the discussion of sustainability, we welcome you to join our 2025 Sustainability Forum on November the 14th and HKU Belgium Sustainability Conference on November the 21st by scanning the QR code on the screen.
So our next session, without further ado, would be a fireside chat. I believe Professor Hu has introduced Professor Chen and Sachs in the very beginning, so I will not use up your time. So let's welcome three professors to the stage first. >> Professor, stage is yours. Okay, thank you very much and thank you again, Jeffrey Sachs, for this inspiring talk. I I would start from asking Professor Chen for comments. Right. So hearing his talks, basically a review of quick review of histories, global histories, and also histories of China and some predictions in the future. What's your view on those key points of Jeffrey's talk?
>> Wow, this is a great event. I'm so happy to have this opportunity. Especially I want to thank Gun for this, for giving me this opportunity. The last time I saw Professor Sachs was about 30 years ago. So I'm so happy to see that he has not changed so much at all. And also I've been listening to his AI version, the AI version of his voice. I take it that your broadcast on YouTube is not really, it's real, your real voice, or AI? So I figured that it was not his. So for those of you who have not listened to the AI version of his voice, look for it on YouTube. On YouTube.
>> If I could explain just briefly, every day there's a new speech by me I never gave. So, so, so be very careful. Usually when it's in an interview, it's really me, but when it's just my voice, it's something a little strange. Very, very inventive, but not by me.
>> Okay. Okay. So that's not the official, officially authorized version. So I've been polluted by all the views and so on. So it's so good to actually hear the real voice from Professor Sachs. I'm really thrilled. Um, okay. So let me not spend too much time commenting or or responding to Professor Sachs' keynote speech. Let me just add two points. Maybe the first point is about the attribution or causality. You know, we economists always like to figure out what causes what. So the great economic achievement by China over the last 40 years, I would say definitely American contribution has been very, very important, has been one of the most important causal factors. You know, especially as Professor Sachs talked about the GBA cluster being the place where new innovations in many areas are taking place at such high pace and also so extensively and deeply. Um, but, you know, from my own work, I would say, you know, without China learning the American-style capitalism, it would not have been possible. I know many people would like to say that the Chinese people are smart and they work hard and so on. Believe me, that has been the case for at least the last 10,000 years in China. Okay. So why didn't China become such a center of technological innovations with so many new startups and new entrepreneurs coming up, not just in the GBA but also in other parts of China like Hono and the Yangtze River Delta region? The risk capital industry that China has learned so well has been singularly the most important factor. It's very simple. There have always been so many smart young and middle-aged Chinese people. So I'm sort of now beyond middle age. So I don't, anyway, let me not get distracted. But with so many people interested in starting their own business and so on with new ideas, even on the technology front, most often of the times they would not have money. Okay. So with the risk capital first coming from the US, actually, I, when I was a doctoral student at Yale between 1986 and 1999, there was one group of venture capitalists in Hartford, Connecticut. They actually hired me as an assistant, I think between 1987 and 89. I was helping them to translate this booklet on venture capital. So what, so one of the main things was to introduce and explain what venture capital is and what venture capital has done for the American economy, especially for Silicon Valley. And then, to make a long story short, they, the four venture capitalists at the time, because all of them actually fought in Vietnam, so they thought, we would really like to help Asia. But this may be our way, because all four of them were financiers working as investment bankers and then providing risk capital. So they, I made some arrangements for them to have meetings in Beijing and so on in the late 1980s, but at that time nobody in China really knew what risk capital was, let alone they did not know what risk capital could actually do to stimulate technological innovations and tech startups and so on. But of course, starting in the 1990s, then some of my friends and colleagues, they came, especially many of the Yale MBA graduates came to Hong Kong to bring the American-style risk capital model to this part of the world, and then China picked up so quickly. So as I travel around the world today, maybe there are only two places, not so much Tokyo, but China, especially the Greater Bay Area, and then Hong Kong, and then Silicon Valley, where you would see almost everyone talking about nothing else but only about tech startups and so on. There was the risk capital looking for new projects to support. So this is why without China being such a good student of the American-style capitalism, China would not have become so productive and so innovative. Of course, to some extent, we are kind of seeing the government in China trying to, you know, suppress financial development, because many people in Beijing thought, well, there has been excessive financialization and capitalization of everything. Anyway, so, so I would just like to add, you know, the result, or the economic miracle, if there is such a thing, in China, at least has a major part of it due to America's contribution to China.
The other point I want to add is about the interesting history Professor Sachs reviewed. So he started from 1405. Let me take all of you back by about 10,000 years. So this is positively based on my own work using archaeological data out of China. I'm the only one who has built the China Archaeological Database. So this is why my team has been doing a lot of such work. Actually, over the last 10,000 years, China has gone through many different phases of development. I would say many of the triggers for major development came from outside China. Of course, about 10,000 years ago,
Our ancestors, uh, on China's land, uh, uh, got into agriculture, settling down and domesticating, uh, animals.
Uh, but then, as uh, uh, technology was developing, of course, in those days, like between 10,000 years ago and 4,000 years ago, it was the uh, Neolithic, uh, the Chinese Neolithic, uh, uh, period, uh, with only stone tools. But as, um, stone tools became more and more sophisticated, recently, I'm working with a PhD student of mine to try to see the uh, development of stone, uh, weapon, uh, manufacturing.
Uh, the, uh, so starting, uh, about, uh, uh, 55, uh, 6,500 years ago, all the way until about 4,000 years ago, uh, there was so much specialization. So that some people would actually specialize in, uh, developing, uh, stone tools to make and sharpen other stones. As you know, you know, different stones have different, uh, mass density levels. So, you could actually use, uh, the, the more dense stones to sharpen and make other stone tools.
As a result of such, uh, uh, specialization and, uh, innovations, then, uh, uh, cities, uh, walled cities started to emerge, uh, about 6,500 years ago. So by, uh, the, uh, uh, uh, fifth, uh, by the sixth and fifth, uh, millennia, uh, BCE, uh, on China's, uh, uh, today's landmass, uh, there were almost like 200 walled cities developed.
But then came the western technology, that is the bronze technology, that came from, uh, West Asia and, uh, transmitted, uh, through the, uh, Central Asia, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, green, uh, land, and so on. And then, uh, by about 4,000 years ago, uh, it came to, uh, northern China, and then that led to a, a totally new development of phase. Uh, it led to the founding of the first, uh, uh, formal state, uh, the Xia dynasty, and then later the Shang dynasty.
For the subsequent 1,200 years, uh, there was not a really spectacular development. And then came iron technology, uh, about, uh, 2,800 years ago. Although that really started to shake things up, but iron technology initially also came, uh, uh, through, uh, the Eurasian Steppes, uh, from, uh, West Asia. So that's another sort of period of major foreign influence, uh, on China's, uh, history.
So during that period, of course, many more interesting things happened between 2,800 years ago all the way to about 2,200 years ago. Uh, one major outcome of that period, uh, during, uh, due to, uh, the wide application, wide use of iron technology, especially iron weapons, that that led to the founding, the the political consolidation, because China used to have many thousands of different pseudo-states and chiefdoms and so on. So by 221 BCE, only one state, uh, was able to, uh, survive. Okay, that's the Qin state to form, uh, the Qin dynasty.
The other major development over that period was, uh, the emergence of, uh, ideal philosophies. Uh, so in Chinese, we say, uh, "Zhu Zi". So in, in our recent work, we show that the iron, uh, uh, technology brought in from, uh, uh, uh, the west, of course, the really, uh, West Asia to China, really, uh, brought, uh, the first ever sort of, uh, bloody violence, uh, scenes, because iron weapons, uh, were the first widely available metallic weapons, uh, on Chinese, uh, land.
So, a lot of, uh, uh, uh, bloody battles were taking place. So that caused, uh, the elites, intellectual elites, uh, uh, of about 2,500 years ago to to start thinking, is this, as humans, you know, is this the way we should live with each other by killing each other using, you know, iron knives and weapons? Of course, those weapons were not as powerful as today's drones or missiles, but in, in those days, you know, that was the, the first major visibly bloody violent tool.
So, that caused, uh, um, philosophers, uh, in China, at the same time in Greece, um, in, uh, the Middle East, and then in, uh, India. So this is why the Iron Age was, uh, the, uh, uh, the period when technology really, uh, triggered the emergence of the, uh, Axial Age, with philosophers, uh, emerging across, uh, different Eurasian societies.
Uh, but, uh, of course, you know, is that really, uh, something, uh, the Chinese, uh, society, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, indeed developed by itself? No, it was all because of foreign influence, uh, from West Asia.
Then another major development, just to, then I will finish, uh, just, just right before, uh, where, uh, Professor Sachs picked up, uh, based on my recent, uh, uh, published, uh, uh, work, uh, we show that, uh, between about 700, uh, AD and 1400, over that 700-year period, most people don't realize is the Arab and Persian Muslims who came to this part, uh, of China, uh, to, uh, uh, really lift maritime trade along, uh, the Chinese coastal line to a totally new level.
To make a long story short, you know, what I, what we have found is that Islamic art, uh, led to a special preference for ceramics and porcelain. So, China was the world's factory between the seven, that's the eighth, early 8th century and the 14th century in porcelain and ceramics, you know, because as this spread of Islam was taking place across, uh, the Middle East and then all the way to North Africa and then to the East, uh, to Turkey and, uh, Central Asia, the, uh, requirements, ments, and demands of Islamic art also, uh, led to so much demand for porcelain and ceramics.
But as you know, you know, uh, all the early regions of, uh, Islam, uh, uh, Islamic influence were, uh, mostly desert, uh, uh, uh, societies. So they did not have the clay needed to make porcelain. Neither did they have, uh, enough, so much firewood, uh, to get the temperatures at least above 800 degrees Celsius, uh, uh, uh, so. And then China had all of those basic requirements, and then a lot of people. So that's why, uh, during that 700-year period, China was really the world's factory.
Okay, so over the last 40 years, we're kind of repeating that experience, of course, uh, at a new scale. Uh, but in any case, I, I totally agree with Professor Sachs' assessment that the pendulum has been swinging in different ways. Uh, but in that whole process over the last 10,000 years, China was, uh, made, uh, uh, some of, uh, the efforts were, uh, uh, indigenous and, uh, domestic. Other efforts were externally, uh, brought in, uh, to really change things. Yeah.
Okay. Thank you. >> Yes. Thank you, Professor Juan, for adding a long, another long period of history, history for us to learn. So now we all the way back thousands of years ago and to understand what is happening now. But I think the student, the audience today actually want to know more about now and the future. So let me start from one question I prepared. Both of you have written, uh, extensively on China's economic transformation. Uh, Jeffrey Sachs, you pre, you tend to emphasize, uh, basically the state planning, all those, uh, objectives you need to have, move step by step, and how that led to the success today. Well, Professor Chen, uh, you emphasized the risk of increased state intervention, uh, and you, you warned the audience many times about, uh, changes of the risk of just change, changes. I think while we see the optimistic side of China's economy, we also see right now there are a lot of challenges. We have a weak demand, right? And right now, the property sector is still in trouble. Employment is constrained, and also local government debt is increasing, right? With all those phenomena that we see right now, in your view, how do you think how to balance these two? Right. Basically, those are two major powers driving the the economy. One is government and state, uh, intervention. The other would be, uh, more kind of, uh, uh, kind of more like a market, uh, marketization and the freedom of the markets. And what, what, how do you balance the two powers? What's your view? And what is the risk if one, basically, one power dominates the other for for China's future growth?
I think, uh, uh, all that we have seen and learned, uh, not only from the US and from China, but from history, is that, um, successful economic institutions are mixed. They're partly state, they're partly, uh, market-driven. This is true, by the way, back to the Song dynasty, uh, a thousand years ago, and it is, I think, going to be true in the future. China has a, a mixed ecosystem for innovation. On the one hand, uh, you have the "Made in China 2025" policy with a lot of state instruments. And at the same time, the competitiveness of, uh, the EV market with hundreds of producers, uh, is very strong. Or the competitiveness of Shenzhen startups, along the lines that Professor Chen was talking about, with venture capital, is extremely strong. So it's both market and state. And I think, uh, getting exactly the right balance is a lot of innovation, depending on what the particular issues are. If there are risks, uh, it is that in the US system, the private sector takes over politics, uh, and if it is in the Chinese system, the risk is that politics takes over the private sector. So finding that balance is a challenge of both institutions. Right now, I would say in the United States, our politics are mainly owned by Silicon Valley. Uh, they determine who's president, they determine who's vice president, they determine what's in the laws, they determine what's regulated, they determine what's not regulated. Uh, it has a certain, uh, dynamism, and it has a certain recklessness to it. Uh, in China, we watched, uh, the government show, no, the government will be in charge. The private sector will, uh, uh, play within the government's rules, not the other way around. And so when some big tech firms in China started to develop a very big scale, the Chinese government said, "Remember, we're in charge, not you." And so, uh, this is, uh, true in both sides to avoid, uh, the extremes.
Well, I think there are many philosophies that tell us that. Confucius said, uh, to walk the middle course. Aristotle said to walk the middle course. Buddha said to follow the middle path. Uh, and Yin and Yang said you should have both state and market. Uh, as Yin and Yang, you should not have just one or the other. This is really the trick of good governance is to find that balance.
>> Yeah. So let me also add that, by by citing from history, to some extent, actually, um, as Professor Sachs mentioned earlier, you know, the Portuguese, uh, came to, uh, uh, dominate the Indian Ocean and, and at the western Pacific all the way up to, uh, to, uh, Japan, uh, between the, uh, uh, the end of the 16th, it's, uh, 15th century all the way to about, uh, uh, uh, 1730 or so. Uh, but, you know, today we don't see that much influence, uh, uh, of Portuguese origin. But instead, uh, it's the Dutch, uh, that came around 1700 to the Indian Ocean and then the western Pacific, and then slightly later, the English. They still have left Hong Kong here as it is for the most part, right? It was, uh, the British creation. Uh, in fact, you know, I have been over the last few years wondering why the, um, uh, Arab and, uh, Persian Muslims, when they had almost 700 years to, uh, restructure China and and so on. Maybe one, uh, common, uh, thing among the, uh, Muslims from the Middle East and the Portuguese, Christian Portuguese and Spanish, is that they did not have, uh, private initiative-based modern corporations. Uh, the Arab and Persian, uh, traders were engaged in smaller operations. Uh, and then the Portuguese came to, uh, this part of the world under state, uh, sponsorship and, and Christopher Columbus, as Professor Sax just mentioned, was also sponsored by the Spanish, uh, royal, uh, family. Whereas the Dutch and the British, uh, uh, business people were on their own. So they relied, the, uh, real private, uh, uh, modern, uh, corporations, uh, to, uh, engage in, in their activities. So today, I would say, as a, uh, government venture capital funds have become the most dominant, uh, venture capital, risk capital providers in China. Maybe some of, uh, some people would put it, put the, uh, government share of risk capital in China today at somewhere between 80% and 90%. And many local government officials, uh, upon introducing their venture capital, uh, funds, they would openly say, you know, we're not interested in returns, we're just interested in developing those sectors. Whenever I would hear any official saying that, I thought, gosh, they're just trying to take out the very key defining element of the American-style venture capital, that is, they're only interested in maximizing returns. And then now this officials in China would like to say, oh, we're not interested in returns. So, you know, I have, uh, more, uh, at least the more tamed expectation or somewhat negative expectation about the long-term implications of this, uh, overemphasis, uh, on government-provided, uh, risk capital. You know, I have relatives who started their own startups with funding from local government, uh, venture capital funds. You know, what those local government, uh, fund managers would tell, uh, my relatives? You can only make money. You cannot lose money because if you lose money, you know, you and your children, generation after generation, will be liable for paying back the the investment we have made in your business. So that takes away, uh, the very important, uh, uh, institutional design that is limited liability. And, you know, limited liability as the very foundation for risk capital. So, so they, I hope that more, uh, officials on the mainland can actually recognize, or realize that, you know, they're going too far, and they should really let the venture capital industry be like real venture capital, uh, not the, uh, uh, venture capital with, uh, very strong Chinese characteristics.
>> Okay. So, uh, let me, >> let me, let me, let me come back to that to defend a slightly different proposition. Um, if you go just with market signals, first of all, you, uh, destroy the planet. Second, uh, you buy the politicians, and then they help to write the rules so you can destroy the planet. Uh, you make a lot of money from, uh, military armaments, which is what Silicon Valley is doing right now. Um, and remember that the invention of the joint-stock company, the first one, the first major joint-stock company, the East India Company, had a private army and conquered India until the British finally said, "Enough, we'll take over India as a state possession," which happened only formally in 1858. Until then, it was, uh, supposedly private-driven, although it had become more and more state-regulated. So market signals are imperfect. They do generate a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm. I have no doubt about it. But energy and enthusiasm is not the same thing as well-being. It can be energy and enthusiasm that destroys countries, environment, uh, lives, uh, many things. So you have to be very careful about this, I think. And so the balance between, uh, collective, uh, choice and, uh, private choice is a complex one. When it's government, it, the big question is, government for whom? Uh, and that's been the puzzle that Confucius and Plato worried about 2,500 years ago. Remember, Confucius failed. He was a basically a political consultant, and he went kingdom to kingdom, and nobody listened. Finally, he sat down at age 70, said, "I figured all of this out, but no one's listening." And he talked to a group of of his disciples, and they wrote down the Analects, and that made a big contribution for the next 2,500 years. Um, but he failed during his lifetime. Plato, by the way, tried the same thing. Plato was a political consultant. He went three times to the state of Syracuse, which was a city-state, uh, what is now Sicily. Um, and the first time he almost got sold, uh, into slavery by the ruler who was not amused by this preacher telling him what to do. Uh, the next two times he almost helped drive the place into a civil war by siding with reformers over the state. Um, anyway, all of that is to say, political consultants and economic consultants like myself, very, uh, not consultants, but people who kibbitz, uh, don't have much success anyway, uh, even if you're Confucius and Plato. But what also I think, uh, this question of how to, uh, have the government serve the general public good is an ancient question. In, uh, the Roman Empire, they said, "Who guards the guardians?" And that was an unsolved problem. Uh, the Chinese ancient approach, which is that you must have the Mandate of Heaven, and so you must keep order. And Confucius and Mencius emphasizing order means that you behave benevolently towards your population. Mencius also was a political advisor. Don't put on taxes too much. Don't oppress the people. Um, this is all good advice, but this is a delicate question of whether you let greed or collective action be the dominant impulse in society. In our textbooks, we say let greed go harnessed by market competition. That leads to a lot of dynamism, no question, but a lot of harm. Government control, uh, can, uh, curb the harms, but it can create other kinds of harms, as you know very well. So I think we should just, how do we aim for the middle and stay in the middle?
>> Okay. Giving the time constraint, I will just ask a last question. Um, I recently read a paper about it's about the future. Okay. I recently read a paper about AI and automation. Uh, basically, the study finds that because of very fast development, automation and AI, the traditional trade framework relied on comparative advantages is changing. Now, poor countries, they can no longer compete even for labor product, even for labor-intensive industries. People can now produce those products using robots, using automation, using AI, even at lower cost. And China is losing, is not losing its industries to other even poorer countries, not because they are, China's labor cost is not high enough, it's really because it's the scale of capacity of production and also automation make everything to be very cheap. And then with this trend, there was a concern that basically US and and China are at least from the data right now dominating this industry. They are the major competitors, and they hold most of the innovations. What's, what's, what do you forecasting about what's going to happen in the future when those two countries are dominating AI and maybe automation technology, particularly for the rest of the countries? I do think AI is a, of course, a very big transformation, just like the steam engine. It's probably close to that or on par with that in terms of its implications. But what those implications are, uh, are not, uh, deterministic. They, uh, are really subject to a lot of choice, uh, and of course, a lot of uncertainty. One thing is true. The old route of development of poor countries as, uh, using labor-intensive industry as the stepping stone to advancement is over. So Hong Kong once had apparel and textiles, and it was very poor, and it used low wages as the way forward. That path of development is gone. That doesn't mean that development is gone, however, because actually many aspects of development are now much easier with AI than they used to be. So with AI, you can have universal health coverage at much, much lower cost. You can have universal education at much, much lower cost. You don't need physical banks anymore. Uh, you can have payment systems. Uh, you can have credit systems without creating nationwide physical bank branches, which are will not be necessary anymore. Many things, basically, at some level, you don't need us anymore. The machines will do a lot, and they'll do a lot of very smart things. And so the question will become increasingly, who owns the machines, and who owns the capital, more generally, because the returns to labor will not be what they used to be. I think that that is an open question, not a closed question. It could be that in the end, Elon Musk owns everything in our country. He wants a paycheck of a trillion dollars this year. He may actually get it, which is kind of the the obscenity of when, uh, business owns government because nobody should get a paycheck of a trillion dollars. But he could get a paycheck of a trillion dollars. Or it could be that everybody, uh, at their birth gets a, a Shenzhen humanoid robot as their birthday present. That means that from their birth onward, they have a machine friend who has 30 PhDs and also does the dishes and can guide them through their life with a lot of productivity. So we have a lot of choices ahead. I'm not convinced that the poor countries are out of it by any means, and I, I don't believe the US and China will own everything by any means. AI actually is replicable. It's a set of scientific and engineering principles that are quite well understood all over the world. Having the data for LLMs right now is, uh, is, is quite concentrated. But, um, the knowledge of how to use these systems will be very widespread. And China's doing a huge favor in making an open-source system, which is the right strategy if you're following along a proprietary leader. You make your system open-source. So China's going to be the baseline system for most of the world. But that also means an open-source system for much of the world. So I think this question, to my mind, I'm still on the optimistic side that this is going to be a leapfrogging technology rather than an impoverishing technology. But what I am saying to developing countries is educate your kids at all costs right now, as fast as you can. Don't delay. And don't expect that you're going to, that that you're going to use the old path of development. I'm also saying, don't let anyone steal your natural resources, your, your minerals, your other commodities, because that's what you're going to be selling right now to get what you need. And don't let King Donald or anyone else sweet-talk you or threaten you into any deals. By the way, the United States is so desperate for resources, maybe it's going to invade Venezuela tomorrow. That is, if it does, that's a war for oil, nothing more than that. And that's another sign of desperation of the United States, not of power.
>> Um, okay, yeah, I, I agree with, uh, Professor Sachs on, on all these points. Um, to some extent, a somewhat more pessimistic view about the future impact of AI. You know, one of, um, my favorite lines of research, uh, has been by, um, archaeologists, uh, led by Tim Kohler and and others. They have shown that over the last 10,000 years, every time there was a major technological breakthrough, wealth inequality, income inequality would only have, uh, the upward movement to go to, not going down. So this time it's not going to be any different. Actually, it's going to be even more so. Uh, AI will make, uh, wealth inequality, you know, the Elon Musks in the future garner much more, uh, wealth in human societies. Um, but, but this will make, uh, the governance of human societies much, much more challenging. If we complain, I mean, I have been complaining to all my colleagues that, you know, uh, Trump has been so crazy, or maybe the American society has been so crazy to elect someone like Trump as president, uh, but don't be surprised by even crazier things that will happen in the, uh, in the future because it's very simple. I mean, the, um, uh, the, uh, extreme, uh, compartmentalization, uh, of, uh, views and perspectives, uh, among citizens in the US and other, and also in China, has gone to a totally new level. It used to be the mainstream, uh, newspapers and TV media that would more or less allow, uh, people, or elites like Professor Sachs, to express their views and teach everyone how to think, what to make out of all the developments. So that made, uh, the degree of, uh, uh, difference in opinions much, much more manageable. But today, you know, different groups with various views would not talk to each other. So as a result, someone, uh, uh, some populists like Trump would be able to exploit that situation to, especially take advantage of the American one vote, one person, one vote system to directly elect the most populist, uh, uh, candidate to be the president. So, so I, I think going forward, the governability challenge of human societies will reach a new level. Of course, in that process, I, I do see that the government should play a major role in terms of providing for those unfortunate people and and those who were, who happen to be, uh, uh, not so educated, who could not go to Columbia and so on. But then, then, you know, they can still live, uh, uh, life, uh, in a, uh, decent way. Yeah.
>> Thank you very much for the inspiring sharings. They have agrees and disagrees, and we think we from both sides, we learned a lot. Okay. Given the time constraint, I have to apologize. We don't, we don't have time for more Q&As. Jeffrey is extremely busy. He's basically have multiple trips every day. So he's heading to his next destination. So, again, let's give him a warm welcome and thank you for joining us. Thank you. >> We have actually prepared two gifts to send to Professor Sachs. >> Okay. >> Shall we actually, shall we actually invite Professor Retra Wan, Professor Wan, and Mr. Patrick Pun to the stage to take a final photo? >> So, Professor Sax, we wish the lion will remind you of all our memories today. >> Thank you very much. >> Please be seated. Now, we understand Jeff has another commitment and will need to depart. So, please join me in giving him a final and heartfelt thank you and a warm send-off as he make his way out. Okay, thank you very much for joining our program today. >> And wish you have a great evening. >> Professor Sax will need to depart now. So please help us make the way for him.