Transcription
Let's continue. It's a very hard act to follow. Uh, I can't promise that I'm going to be as much fun, and uh, I'm not so good at stage as the previous panel, but I have a stellar panel, though. Uh, and uh, I'm going to introduce them very briefly. Um, you're all in a good mood having heard that. So, uh, hopefully, uh, we'll, uh, we'll cover enough, uh, ground to make you, uh, satisfied in our own way.
So, uh, with me here, Adam Tus, who is the, uh, Shelby Colum Davis Chair of History, uh, at Columbia University. So, this is his place, basically, he's at home. Uh, it is also the Director of the European Institute at Columbia, uh, and a well-known author and, uh, blogger.
Um, next to me, Manoj Kal Ramani, uh, who is also famous to a lot of us, uh, who are interested in China. Uh, Manoj is the only person I know, uh, besides a few CCP, uh, parachutes, daily, uh, thoroughly from, uh, first page to last page, uh, and who writes a report about it. He does many other things, such as being a scholar at the Takshashila Foundation in Bangalore, and he comes all the way, uh, to Bangalore from Bangalore to, to Paris. We're really delighted to, to, to, uh, have you here with us, and he can give you a lot of information about India and China.
And, uh, last but not least, Delphin Alice. I'm delighted to, uh, welcome Delin, not only because Inalco has been a great partner of Asia Society France over the past few years. Inalco is this great, uh, institute for oriental languages and civilizations based in Paris for 400 years, something like this, 250 years, uh, almost as ancient as, as the, uh, as the Chinese history, um, and, um, and Delin is a professor of, uh, is, she's the Vice President of Inalco, and she's a professor of international relations and, and political science, uh, an expert on Southeast Asia, on religion, on multilateralism, and, um, and, and lots of other things.
So, welcome all of you, and we're going to speak for the next, uh, half hour, and then, uh, we'll open, uh, for questions. And this is the panel where we're going to talk about, uh, geopolitical issues, and we're going to open up, uh, beyond China, since, uh, we have been, uh, hearing a lot about China for the past few hours, and, um, and there's a, there's a, there's a life outside China, believe it or not.
Um, Adam, let me start with you, if I may. Um, so you're based in New York, but you travel a lot. You've, you obviously, you also spent a lot of time writing about China. Um, we obviously, you know, uh, uh, the past 18 months, if you take, uh, if we take an Asian perspective, it's been, uh, an extraordinarily, uh, uh, uh, uncertain and, and troubled time with the Trump administration imposing tariffs.
Um, it's not just Asia, but obviously, uh, perhaps we could start with having a, uh, an Asian perspective from your travels, from your, uh, people you've been talking to. Um, uh, how do you think people at this very moment, uh, see themselves facing, uh, this big power competition between the US and China? Um, how do you see them? Uh, uh, I mean, uh, we're going to have major, uh, u, uh, moments with the, uh, the Party Congress in China next year. We're going to have, uh, you know, the next presidential election, but meanwhile, we still have another, uh, two years or so of Donald Trump, and, and obviously multilateralism will come to that later, later, is in trouble. So, I mean, when you speak to people in Tokyo, Seoul, wherever, Australia, how do you think they, they, they are perceiving this very moment we are in?
>> Um, well, it's a, it's a real pleasure to be here. You somewhat overestimate my, the range of conversational partners, but I'll improvise an answer. I might pick up where, um, Saul Klene left off this morning, where he simply said that this is a bad time to be American. And, um, he's right. Um, it is indeed a grim time to be American. But I think I would somewhat modify your analysis of why. Um, because it's no doubt a grim time to be American because of the shambles, the chaos, the humiliation of the Trump administration and its ramifying effects worldwide, which are indeed. We, I was talking with Jing Chen Jing over lunch. This is a historic break. One of your prompts was, "Should we expect a return to normality?" There is no return to normality after this, right? This is a fundamental break.
But as real as that is, and as dramatic as that is, it's also worth recalling that the moment of maximum tension in US-China relations, probably in all our recent memories, came not under Donald Trump, but under the supposedly rational leadership of Biden, Jake Sullivan, and the national security team, including Anthony Blinken, that we celebrate with Asia Society. Kevin Rudd and I had the privilege of attending a meeting in Hong Kong with him in early 2023. And I will never forget the urgency with which that acute China watcher underwrote and underlined the severity of the tension that was mounting after the balloon incident. The combination of Pelosi's visit, China's positioning in the Ukraine war, the escalations over Taiwan, the balloon incident, that's as close, that is the first genuine war scare of the new Cold War. And, and that, I think, is our real dilemma, which is that in Asia, Europeans should not lull themselves into thinking that the non-Trumpian, more rational side of American statecraft is a recipe for de-escalation. It isn't on the historical track record to date. And I think that's a crucial thing to understand. And it has crucial implications to come to the real burden of your point for the rest of Asia as well.
Because the extraordinary thing about the Trump administration, as far as the rest of Asia is concerned, is it's not obvious they give a damn. They just don't seem to care or know. This is most dramatic with respect to India, which after all has been cultivated. It's a generational project of American statecraft to build a bilateral strong relationship with India, to break it out of non-alignment, to break it out of its relationship with Russia, and it's just been blown up. And the difference is, of course, the Biden administration did have a project for the rest of Asia, but it was a project of block formation. It was a project of alignment. It was a project of, um, cross-hatching. Um, it was a product of building a network of relationships that was around the Quad, around green energy, around infrastructure, that was clearly a project of tight containment. And so it's not just a matter for the Europeans that there's, there's no good choice here, but I think from the point of view of the majority of Asia, the same is true. That on the one hand, you face malign neglect, frankly chaotic policy from tariffs all the way through to the Gulf War, whose major impact has been on Asia. And on the other hand, when the Biden team or their equivalents are back in power, what you face is very serious, very sustained pressure for alignment. And from the point of view of the development options of most of Asia, that's an incredibly invidious choice. They would rather avoid.
>> And if I may follow up, uh, how do you see, uh, Southeast Asia or, or the rest of Asia talking to Europe, Europeans, as, as these two sort of, uh, uh, people on the side of the US-China rivalry?
>> I mean, it's totally benile, but I just think we need to make a clear distinction between East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Those are three different arenas, and West Asia is another one again, right? And in each case, we have different alignments, and in each case, it's the regional dynamics in that region which then spiral out toward the bigger picture. And there's folks on this panel who can do this much better than I can, but there are kind of Cold War era alignments around democracy, for instance, that might ring well with the Japanese and the South Koreans, which I think are almost entirely beside the point in dealing with India, actually, though it celebrates itself as the greatest democracy. That's not really the game, right? This is a new project of state-building that the BJP has unleashed, which is incredibly formidable in its own right. And South Asia is just this mesmerizingly complex jigsaw puzzle, and getting your alignments right there, and dealing with the manifest crisis that's happening in Myanmar, which ought to be far higher on the global agenda of crisis management, because that is a zone of intense humanitarian suffering that is largely ignored, and in which China plays an incredibly destructive role. So, as I'm able to see from the outside, that requires a level of geopolitical savvy that I'm not sure I would credit the Europeans with.
>> Manoj, um, turning to you now. Um, you, you're in a unique, uh, perspective, uh, being Indian following China. I remember, uh, 20 years ago, it was really hard to find anybody in India who was calling himself a sinologist. Uh, now it's different. So, let me ask you quite simply, how do Indians see China, and how do Chinese see India these days?
>> Thank you so much. Um, I agree with you. I think 20 years ago it would have been hard. Uh, I think what's the challenge, the challenge today is that it's very difficult to find an Indian who studies America in depth. So, we need to study America much more right now, and probably bring the tools that we use for sinology or pinology to apply to America, given the nature of politics in America today.
Um, I think how India views China, um, I, I'll quote an ambassador, former ambassador, uh, when I asked him this question, when we were in this process of so-called normalization that's going on right now. I asked him about, uh, whether we are looking to normalize ties with India, and his answer to me was, India and China have been normalizing their relationship for 2,000 years. So, I think India looks at China as this persistent entity, which is a neighbor, which is today a massive global power, which wants regional preponderance, which looks at the world fundamentally hierarchically, based on comprehensive national power, and in that hierarchy, India fits fairly low. And therefore, it does not feel that it needs to take India's interests on board as much as India would desire. So, it doesn't feel that it needs to acquiesce to India's aspirations, um, of rising itself as a global power. Um, and therefore, that relationship is constantly going to be one of friction.
At the same time, it's a neighbor with whom we have a tremendous economic relationship. Um, it's tremendously lopsided. Um, part of that is the nature of the trade, structural factors. Part of that is barriers. Um, and you need to still continue to have that engagement, because at the end of the day, as much as it is lopsided, if you don't have that engagement, you're going to have a, I mean, if you don't have trade, what are you going to have with a neighbor with whom you have this historical boundary dispute, right? So, you need to have that relationship for your own development, but also need to be able to ward off potential coercion that that asymmetry in that trade relationship begins.
Finally, it's a, it's a neighbor with which India has very old civilizational ties, but yet neither of us seem to be able to cross the Himalayas to be able to understand each other. There's barely any tourism that takes place from China to India. Even pre-COVID, it was a couple of thousand Chinese who would travel to India. Um, still more Indians would travel to China. Um, but yet, it's a fairly small number. Um, so you need to have much more engagement between these two societies. Yet, that engagement is constantly stymied by the fact that there is a boundary issue, there is geopolitical friction, there is this structural challenge of can both powers rise together and accommodate each other, which makes it so that every now and then, if you're a company that's setting up shop either side of the Himalayas, if you're a student who's traveling, if you're a business who's done, who's doing trading, something flares up and everything goes for a toss. We've just emerged from a period where we've had no direct flights until late 2024 for a period of nearly five years. Um, we had to bounce across Southeast Asia to get to each other's countries. Um, and that meant that very few people traveled and understood each other. So, I think that's where both of us are, and that's how India looks at China.
>> Do you feel, do you feel this is, uh, sort of India's moment? I mean, or perhaps India's moment will take a few decades, but, um, do you, do you see a lot of people, I mean, uh, coming to India? I mean, obviously, Ed Delhi has been, uh, very popular as a destination from governments, and, uh, I remember seeing, uh, you know, at the, uh, the Raisina Dialogue, all these, uh, European leaders coming in, in line, and sometimes not gaining very much, but, you know, they have nowhere to go, I guess, right?
>> I, I think I do think so. I, I do think this is the moment for India to sort of, uh, put itself on the world stage, and I think that's happening. And that's happening in terms of the infrastructure roller that's happened in the country. It's happening in terms of the nature of trade. I mean, over the last five years, you've seen, um, India go out and sign several bilateral trade agreements. The recent trade agreement with the EU. So, I think that there is this momentum shift that is taking place in terms of India's engagement with the world. Um, India is several countries in one country, in some ways. I mean, I'm, I'm living in Bangalore today. Um, if you look at Bangalore, Bangalore is very linked to Silicon Valley. Um, Halloween is a huge deal in Bangalore. Um, Thanksgiving means that there is no traffic on the streets of Bangalore. So, I hope there's Thanksgiving frequently. Um, so Bangalore is very different. Delhi is very different. You know, Delhi's concerns are continental security, land border, Pakistan, um, China. Chennai is very different. Chennai is trading, it's manufacturing. Tamil Nadu, therefore, is completely different, right? It's a manufacturing powerhouse of India. Gujarat, accordingly, is very, very different. So, you will see pockets of tremendous growth and excellence in India. But again, it's a very, very difficult country to sort of lift together, right? There'll also be this will be accompanied by significant poverty still, uh, significant lack of public utilities. Um, and those challenges persist. So, I don't know if I can call this one moment as India's moment. I mean, as most things, India is going to be a 25-year moment of India's moment. Um, it's unlike, it's unlike China, where there is a WTO entry, and that's the turning point. Uh, I think India has several turning points, and I think part of that is the nature of the country, but part of that is also just about how democracies function, right? We tend to take two steps forward and half a step back sometimes, and then again, two steps forward.
>> I need to ask you briefly a China question. Uh, so, I mean, since you read the People's Daily, uh, very, very, very informative newspaper, right? Um, how do you envisage the, uh, the next Party Congress from your point of view? Is this something that, uh, uh, people in India are interested in? Is this something that will have significance for the, for the Sino-Indian relations, or is this something for the long term?
>> I'm truly hopeful people in India are interested. I have a book coming out next year about it, so I'm truly hoping that people in India will buy it and they'll be interested. But my sense is that, uh, there's an increasing, again, like you said, 20 years ago, if you had asked, uh, universities in India whether they are studying China, you'd have found very few people, uh, in pockets. Today, studying China, sinology is a growing discipline in India. Uh, so, yes, you see a lot of interest. Um, in terms of how I see the Party Congress, um, I think it's quite clear that Xi Jinping is going to continue at the helm of affairs in China for the foreseeable future, for as long as he lives. Um, I don't think he has any plans of giving it up. Um, so, I think a large part of what's going to happen is a done deal. I think the interesting story is whether the plan that he has for 2035, the vision of realizing basic socialist modernization, is that something that he's going to be delivering on? Um, and to me, the answer is much more complex, because there is a relationship between political control of the kind that he has, he's exercising, and economic dynamism. Um, it's, it's not to say that you can't have pockets of economic dynamism. You can create markets, and the party has shown that where it has been able to facilitate markets to do a good job, it's been able to achieve, it's been able to achieve great things. But it's very difficult to do that when you have to maintain this Leninist party state with somebody at the top trying to control as much as he can, trying to not just lay out a set of ideas and incentives for people to act upon, but also trying to talk about methods, right? Um, and there's again, it's really challenging. So, to me, that's the more interesting question of where China goes in 2035, rather than whether Xi Jinping stays and whether what happens at the Congress.
>> Thank you. Turning to Delphin now. So, Delin, as I said, I mean, you, you've been studying multilateralism, Southeast Asia, the BRICS, a little bit similar to the question I asked to Adam. I mean, how is this particular region of Southeast Asia dealing with this great power competition? Is this, can we call it a swing region, uh, between these big powers, or, uh, obviously, this is a kind of open game we are facing now. It's quite, quite, uh, uh, uncertain, and the past 18 months have been, uh, you know, brought many changes, not necessarily for the better. How do these countries, and how, how do you see the, the, the positioning of these countries?
>> Well, thank you very much, Philip, and first of all, thank you very much to the organizers. It's been fascinating and, and very inspiring to be here, uh, and to listen to the previous conversation. It's also a great pleasure to see that there are colleagues and many former students as well in the, in the room. Now, to for your question, um, well, if you look at the way, uh, the US is treating, uh, treating the region, it's very interesting to see that, uh, the closest allies to the US are being put to a lot of pressure and to a lot, a lot of testing. And I'm thinking about Singapore, for instance, uh, which recently faced higher tariffs than other re, than other countries like Indonesia, Cambodia, and Malaysia, for instance. So, there is a change, uh, in the way the US is, uh, seeing, um, the, the, the region, and to some extent, uh, again, as I said, a test, uh, to some of the countries with which the relationships has been very close, uh, in the, uh, in the past.
Um, very interestingly, your, your question about, um, whether Southeast Asia is a swing region, I think goes down to whether some states in Southeast Asia can be considered to be swing states, uh, in the relationship. The region itself is highly divided in terms of, uh, the relationships of individual states, uh, vis-à-vis China and vis-à-vis, uh, the, uh, United States. The region as a whole, you could say, uh, is under what could be termed as a form of a double bind, in a way, um, uh, in the sense that a bad relationship or a deterioration of the relationship between the US and China would be seen as destabilizing, from the perspective of Indonesia, for instance, even though at the same time, Indonesia has benefited to a large extent from this competition. It's in its own, uh, hedging, um, policy, and it's very interesting to see that, uh, Indonesia does have some, some individual leverage, when it plays this hedging game between, um, China and the United States. And if you look at, uh, a very local perspective, you see that, for instance, when it comes to, uh, Chinese and US investments, the Indonesian government and local governments are able to drive those investments depending on where their strategic or, um, or not. So, for instance, there has been massive Chinese investments on Java, um, thinking about, of course, the railroad between, uh, Jakarta and Bandung, which is now going to be, um, to be extended. But at the same time, Indonesia has been able, uh, to, um, ensure that there was less Chinese investments and more US or Japanese investments on the outer islands where there is some territorial tensions, uh, with China, and around especially the Natuna, um, island. So, it's a state which is in that position of being able to, uh, not just choose its, uh, partners, and I'm not going to, to talk about the lies here, but to drive, uh, cooperation in a way, uh, that enables it to, um, uh, to play its, uh, its own game, which is obviously not the case, uh, in neighboring countries like Cambodia or Laos, which do not have the same, um, the same leverage.
Another point which I think is, um, very important to, to mention. You were talking about, um, multilateralism, um, in the region. ASEAN is an organization that does that, that does not go, um, uh, faster than the slowest of its members, and it's an organization which is driven by states, uh, and by states that do have an agenda for the organization. And what has been very interesting in the, uh, last few years is the fact that, against all expectations, uh, Indonesia has not so much played that role. It was expected that, uh, when Indonesia was, um, chairman of, uh, ASEAN, it would play a political role in trying to, uh, federate a political message for the organization. Most of the discussions were about infrastructures, were about, uh, trying to maintain a level of, um, uh, independence and again, ability, uh, at both the national and regional level, to, um, uh, to play a game of, um, independence. And no one has, uh, been able to, um, uh, to play a political role in the organization. There has been attempts more recently, Malaysia has become more vocal about trying to, to, uh, bring ASEAN back towards a more political message, but the organization is too, um, divided by, um, conflicts within its own member states to be able to play a significant, um, uh, political, um, uh, um, dimension. And it's also interesting to see that, uh, so ASEAN, as I said, is increasingly, um, mainly, um, uh, dealing with, uh, material or organizational or, uh, infrastructural, um, u, um, issues or priorities, which is also very visible, since the 2019 ASEAN Outlook for the, uh, Indo-Pacific. And very interestingly, this is also what, uh, has been expanded at the more regional, um, uh, level. So, has been a lot of, uh, discussions about the ASEAN way becoming an Indo, an Asian way, an Indo-Pacific way, and to some extent, uh, it is now the way, uh, multilateral cooperation, I'm not talking about multilateralism, but it's also the way multilateral cooperation is driven at the, um, regional level. So, what's interesting in this, um, uh, context, I think, if we look at the way, uh, multilateral, uh, cooperation evolves at the regional, um, uh, level, again, institutions are being fragilized, definitely, even the ones, uh, that are the most ancient, and the ones that used, uh, at least to try to organize or regulate, uh, political cooperation, in the, uh, region, they have been, um, fragilized in favor of more bilateral or trilateral, um, uh, discussions, which produces, and I will end with that, because I think, uh, it's very important when we look at the way cooperation evolves at the regional, um, uh, level, this de-multiplication of trilateral or quadrilateral dialogues is putting a lot of pressure on diplomatic human resources, which I think is very important to take into account when we think about, and when we look at the strategies of medium, uh, powers or smaller powers, because it's just impossible to respond to the demands, uh, of the number of other, either big or medium powers, that would like to enhance cooperation with states that they see as, um, swing states. It's basically impossible, and it's also, uh, part of the, uh, many discussions I've had with Indonesian, uh, diplomatic staff. It's just impossible to put high quality, um, uh, diplomatic staff or military staff in front of every demand, uh, for bilateral, trilateral, or quadrilateral dialogue, which means that, even though it has not that much been the case so far, choices will have to be made when they want to enhance the level of political dialogue with certain partners.
>> So, a little bit like India, Southeast Asia is being courted, uh, by, by, by the rest of the world, by certainly by the, the Europeans. Adam, what, what do you think about this?
>> Well, I, I just literally flew in at 5:00 a.m. from Singapore this morning, and, um, one of the things that really struck me there.
>> Same, so it's same temperature. I mean, it's.
>> Exactly the same. In fact, the difference is they have air conditioning.
>> Sorry. Should have said that.
>> And, and Asia, it's not lost on Asia. All of Asia is talking about the poor Europeans who don't know how to live with.
>> We have to make ourselves different, you know.
>> Yes. Exactly. But, um, to elaborate on the point that Deline was making, what really struck me is that there's also a, a non-state dimension to this increasingly tense South Asian dimension, which of course, in Singapore, is particularly, uh, manifest, because it's a majority Chinese country, tiny city-state, rather, that that does its very best to deny the fact that it's majority Chinese, and that everyone I was dealing with in senior ranks of the Singapore administration, or at least 90% of them, are third-generation Chinese migrants. And, um, across the region, I think it's fair to say that the extraordinary growth of China is creating, reopening a whole set of questions which figures like Lee Kuan Yew did their best to bury. Um, and this is manifesting. And there's this huge hit film which is about the letters written by grandmothers back to their hometowns in China, which was a super low-budget film, which has turned into a smash hit in China because it touches this core of sentimentality about just the oceanic change that has swept through China. And here are these time capsule letters. And in Singapore, it's basically been, they, they've limited the number of times it's shown where people actually speak the Hainanese accent and dialect, which Lee Kuan Yew tried to drive out of the Chinese minority Chinese majority population of Singapore. So, at this kind of micro level of linguistic politics, culture, intra-regional relations, these issues are reopening. And as recently as the late '90s, perhaps even more recently in Indonesia, inter-ethnic violence, anti-Chinese violence was a, was a, was a constant threat, a constant reality, a constant possibility. And I think this is something that we very easily underestimate from the outside, how because of the framework of nation-states that was more or less successfully imposed, most catastrophically failing in Myanmar, more successful in other places, most artificial perhaps in Singapore. But it's, uh, there's a can of worms here.
>> I'm, I'm tempted to ask you, Manoj, about diaspora, since, uh, Adam just alluded to the, uh, the Chinese diaspora coming to Singapore. Uh, uh, how would you compare Indian diaspora versus Chinese diaspora? I mean, in Southeast Asia, for example, the interactions. I mean, I was asking some Indian visitors the other day, and they say, well, yeah, it's very sort of, uh, targeted, and, you know, they don't necessarily come back to the country and reinvest. I mean, the Chinese, I mean, I've been to Wenzhou, I mean, a lot of Chinese from Paris are in, from Wenzhou. I mean, Wenzhou without the Chinese from Europe would not be Wenzhou. So, I'm interested to, to hear your, your view when it comes to comparing India and, and, and China.
>> Yeah, I think it's, it's interesting. I think the Indian diaspora, and again, I, I, I'm somebody who grew, who was born outside India, who spent a considerable time of his early life outside India. I was born in Kuwait. Um, so, um, which makes it difficult sometimes to travel in parts of the Middle East. Um, but yeah, I, I think that, uh, the, there's been, there's been waves of, uh, diaspora movement outside India, and I think what you see today, uh, is that a lot of the first and second generation of Indians who traveled outside India and who settled, say, across the West, in Europe, in the United States, uh, in Britain, uh, in Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, um, their engagement with India has been more cultural than necessarily business investment. Um, I, I think that is partly a product of just the state of the challenges of investing in India, um, itself. Um, so, I, I think that that is true. Um, at the same time, I think a lot of these individuals settled abroad becoming professionals. So, they were doctors, lawyers, you know, working those kinds of jobs, as opposed to necessarily running businesses, uh, or establishing their own businesses as entrepreneurs. That's changed in Silicon Valley, in particularly, that's changed. And that money from Silicon Valley today comes into India to establish businesses, particularly in the tech sector. But the first generation, the second generation who went, they haven't been able to bring back the kind of wealth that one thought. In fact, the BJP, ever since it came to power in 2014, has made an effort to go and reach out to the diaspora communities, and with limited success, I would argue. I don't think it's the kind of success that say the Chinese government has had, but I think that there's a script that I think they're also trying to emulate. Um, I think recently the Indian government announced a plan which is sort of akin to the Thousand Talents Program that China had. Um, it's not a thousand, it's much lesser. Um, the aim is to try and target and bring back high-quality, high-skill talent who is specialized in particularly STEM areas, uh, and to try and, uh, bring them to India. Um, for that, what you would need to do is you would need to create, create some sort of islands of excellence where people can come and settle. The last point that I will make is that where I think some of this has worked for India is a lot of the big tech CEOs in the US and American companies and Western companies are Indian origin. So, they have been therefore favorably disposed to working within India, to sort of tap the engineering base in India, the technology base in India. So, to that extent, it's worked in India's favor. So, it's not like China. It's not exactly like China, but there are sort of pockets of success.
>> Great. Thank you. So, we have 10 minutes for questions. So, please, uh, um, yeah, already coming. Okay. So, um, um, is the framing of middle powers a plausible constellation? What institutions are necessary to enable it? Uh, that's a question for, for Deline, I think.
>> Sure. Is it?
>> Sorry, that will come to, come to Adam afterwards. There was a fascinating book, I think, about 15 years ago, by Jonathan Ping, about middle powers in Southeast Asia, uh, which was very interesting, because it completely switched the framework from a perspective in which middle powers used to be, I mean, the middle powers that were studied as such used to be Germany, Australia, and in a sense, countries like Canada, that were good students of the international system. So, states that were respectful of international law, that were more or less, uh, democracies, etc. And then Ping switched, uh, the, the perspective to look at the way states perceive themselves, the way elites perceive themselves, and the way, uh, they, uh, try to play a role again, as swing states, if I use your vocabulary, uh, in the international system. I think that, uh, framework still holds, uh, indeed, in the case of, uh, states that, uh, seek to play a role in the international system which is more than merely regional, that claim autonomy in the international system, but at the same time, that do not have enough leverage to actually frame, uh, the, um, uh, global institutions. So, I don't think, uh, it's a matter of institutional capability or, um, uh, institutional organization. It's more a matter of how elites perceive themselves, and again, a matter of course, of political material leverage.
>> You can be a big power in your region, but a middle power globally.
>> Can I just, I, I don't agree with the framework. I don't agree with the concept of middle power. Okay.
>> Um, you can't call a country, I mean, India is technically a middle power. You can't call a country which has the largest human capital in the world, which is probably going to be very quickly the third largest economy in the world, a middle power. One of the biggest armies in the world, a middle power. So, I, I think what's much more relevant is to think of it in terms of consequentialism. Is it a consequential power to certain segments of what's happening in the world, to climate change, to military development, to technology development? And can it bring those capabilities to bear to have a consequence in those domains? And I think that's where you can have coalitions of powers that can come together for purpose to effect a certain consequence. So, to me, consequential powers is much more useful than middle powers.
>> Okay, good to know. We have a TW's question. Uh, is Two's concept of the polycrisis predominantly made up of of of Western structural problems? What might the polycrisis with Asian characteristics be?
>> Well, well, since we're, we're in Paris, um, this particular summer, it's worth saying, of course, that the idea is Edgar Morin's, who died earlier this summer and was given an appropriate send-off by the French public, much to its, uh, credit. Um, just very briefly, the idea of polycrisis is the idea that that, and it's, I think it's worth thinking of it as historically contingent. In other words, the late 20th century and the early 21st century have about them that they generate situations in which extremely heterogeneous, otherwise ill-fitting types of crisis dynamics compile and converge such that the sum is worse than the individual collection of the parts. And it is indeed true that one thinks of the US or Europe in this context. Indeed, it was Jean called Jonka that took up this concept in 2015, 2016. But an answer to this question, um, is simply Pakistan. I mean, if you want to see a state in crisis, a hugely large, massively consequential chunk of the global jigsaw puzzle, it's Pakistan that is clearly facing this, this situation. In fact, in the, in the lecture I had the privilege of giving for the Swiss branch of the Asia Society a couple of years ago, I tried to map Asia in these terms. And it would seem that Pakistan and Myanmar are the two obvious cases. To just double down on the Pakistan point, we have a very large, demographically dynamic model with highly unstable politics, um, at the crosshairs of climate crisis. Remember, after all, the massive flooding that devastated Pakistan, it's nuclear-armed. Um, it, and even, even so, this, just to sort of put the icing on the cake, even the accelerated energy transition driven by cheap Chinese solar panels, which so many of us around the world celebrate as Pakistan's demonstration of the capacity to import tens of gigawatts of cheap clean power to add to its system, in the Pakistani context turns into a nightmare because it comes on top of large investments in the 2010s under the One Belt One Road program. So, it turns into Chinese on Chinese violence in the political economy of Pakistan, because as the Pakistani upper middle class opt out of the over-expensive grid for domestic and business solar, the grid is left reliant on low-income Pakistani households whose rates go up, and the grid can't service the debts it owes to China, such that the Chinese security service has to invade the infamous Chinese Pakistani security service invites Pakistani electricity executives to meetings in its basement in which they politely renegotiate the energy supply contracts. That's polycrisis.
>> Fascinating. Um, can Europe survive the hardware competition from China, Southeast Asia, and now India? Who wants to take that? China shock 2.0. Del, you know, I don't want to put you on the spot.
>> That's mine.
>> Oh, thank you.
>> That's Adam's. Yeah.
>> And the short answer is yes, if it plays it smart, but it needs to start playing smart. It needs to play saying seriously. It needs to start playing hardball. It needs to start concerting itself. It needs to, uh, reduce the number of soft points that can be taken advantage of by an uncooperative Chinese player. When I'm in Beijing and I have the chance to, uh, to speak to Chinese policymakers, I always cite the fact of the way in which Europe is what you make of it as, as its negotiating partner. Classically, Kissinger used to ask, where is Europe? What is the telephone I call? The Biden administration said, it's all of the line. She is the president of Europe. We're going to make her into the central anchor point. If China wanted to deal with Europe on a peer-to-peer basis, it can make a move. If you make a face like that, we know it's not happening. So, if that isn't happening, Europe urgently needs to consult itself. It needs to take seriously the industrial policy threat, and it needs to speak openly, as the Germans would say, but often in vizier, so with your, with your visor open, eye to eye, and actually confront China with the impact that its industries are having. The, the rest of Asia, I don't see as being in the same way a threat, um, much bigger problem for India, but as far as industrial policy is concerned, this is no longer a time for childishness. We need to be, we need to be very direct about what's going on, what the stakes are.
>> Surely, that's, that's what the EU is, is about to be doing, as you know, the EU is playing the bad cop in the good cop world, where, where probably the French government or the German government tries to be the good cop, but that's how China sees things anyway.
>> Last question is, in a multipolar world, is viewing China as a partner in the defense of multilateralism compatible with the middle power formulation? That's a very academic question. Um, um, China, multilateralism, multilateralism.
>> I'll be happy to take that.
>> Yeah, okay, go ahead.
>> Um, look, I think if you think about what the Chinese government is communicating to all of us about its intentions with regard to the international order, um, and they just recently released a white paper talking about their view on global governance and the international order. I, I think if you break it down into components, there is the international institutional system, which is the Bretton Woods institutions, the UN, and so on and so forth. And there are norms. And norms also can be broken down into Westphalian norms and, uh, whatever liberal norms are of global trade, can free trade, human rights, certain kinds of values, rule of law. And what you're seeing from Beijing, if you look at the idea of a community of common destiny, and the four initiatives that the Chinese are offering, uh, under that, all of them essentially articulate a vision where they are happy to sustain the international institutional architecture, not necessarily pursue wholesale revision of them yet, try and build parallel institutions which can be complimentary, and which can be leveraged to create small groupings which can be mobilized at the UN and other institutions. But the normative part of it is where, particularly around the liberal norms, whether it is about how do we define what are human rights, are they universal, are they particular, uh, whether it is, and to what extent does cultural and civilizational role play in how a state defines and, uh, acts on human rights, education of women, things like that, on rule of law, is it something which is, uh, a principle, or is it something which is a letter of the law, um, you know, or do historical rights matter when it comes to territorial disputes? Those are the places where I think revision is happening. Um, Beijing is very happy to say that it believes in equality of states, yet at the same time, it's not necessarily willing to adhere to that equality in all instances, whether it is in Ukraine, or whether it is on the boundaries with India and Bhutan. So, I, I think that if you should look at what China is doing with the international architecture, you will see that there is selective, but definitely quite dangerous revisionism that is taking place. Now, again, this pales in comparison to what's happening in DC, but that does not mitigate the fact that this is happening. For states, which is the question is, can you work with China, uh, when it comes to multilateralism? I think the pragmatic answer is, you will work with them where it is in your interest, um, and because for a lot of these countries in Asia, um, it's not like this international system was necessarily designed with them in mind. It was designed with them as rule-takers. Um, so they will welcome revisionism, but to the extent that it serves their interest. Um, and I think that's how they will work with China.
>> Great. Manoj from Bangalore, Delin from Paris, Adam from New York, and all of them from many other places. Thank you so much.