Okay. I am Barbara Meade. I am one of the owners here at Politics & Prose bookstore. It's my pleasure tonight to introduce Jim Mann who has a new book, The China Fantasy. Jim was pointing out to me before that this is his fourth book and for all four books that he has had an event at Politics & Prose bookstore. He said with starting out with Beijing Jeep, second is followed by The Rise of the Vulcans followed by About Face and now the China Fantasy. So this is a real special occasion, personal occasion for Politics & Prose. It's also something that we did not plan but it's fortuitous in some ways or now there that two nights ago we had Margaret McMillan talking about her new book Nixon and Mao. Nixon and Mao is about as six times as long as this book, that's advertised us to buy this. And this - Jim said that he talked to Margaret McMillan, he told he hasn't read the book but it is a totally different take on China, our relations with China than China Fantasy is. Margaret McMillan looks upon it as just a watershed in our diplomatic relations with China well which have been non-existent in the period before 1972. It's 35 years ago that Nixon, 35 years ago this month that Nixon and Mao met in Beijing and opened a little bit of the crack in the door but it just - Margaret McMillan thought that it was just a real watershed and a welcome event. Jim Mann isn't quite so sure He will address that when he talks. Jim is an Author-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Studies. He is also I would make sure that everybody knows, just out this week, he is the lead story, in American Prospect which is about The China Fantasy. So on top of everything I think the greatest thing about Jim Mann is that everything that I read names him as really the Dean of Diplomatic Journalist for anything in the American press that has to do with our relations with China. So here is the man who we all should turn to, for his thinking and he has to going to give that to us tonight. Thanks Jim. Thank you. What Barbara was too polite to say, I not only said this is my fourth book and fourth event with Politics & Prose but you could not say that about chain, chain brand x or chain brand y. That it's something, you know, it says to me the importance of not only independent book stores but this one. I do have to - I want to correct the record before I start. I also think that Nixon's opening to China was a watershed event. It's really great for me to be to talk to a Washington crowd about this book because really this book is - it's about China but it's really more about American ideas about China and in particular Washington's ideas about China and about China's future because the book - amounts to my reflections on really about 20 years of watching the interactions between China and the United States. First as a correspondent in Beijing but then most of the time in Washington and I have been amazed to see how certain ideas and certain formulations persist. And what I wanted to do in this book was to look at them and examine, examine these ideas whether they make sense and what purposes they serve. The focus of the book is it's titled the China Fantasy, which is the idea that our trade with China and investment in China are going to lead to some profound and fundamental change in China's political system. That China is inevitably bound for some far-reaching political liberalization that will bring an end to its current one-party system or repression of dissent or to an independent judiciary. So let me just trace through what I call the three different possibilities for China's future. Where is the country headed? And I try to sketch out, in the book, three different scenarios. The first one is what I call the soothing scenario. The soothing scenario is that the current political system in China is going to inevitably change into a more open system. And just to give you a couple of - the flavor of the book, the soothing scenario has become the professed view of American Presidents, both Democrats and Republicans. Over the past decade, in order to win the nomination for the presidency in either of America's two major political parties it's become virtually obligatory to offer the American people some version of the soothing scenario. George Bush paid obeisance to the soothing scenario for China at the very start of his first presidential campaign. The case for trade is not just monetary but moral, he said. Trade free with China and time is on our side. Now in saying this Bush was really just echoing also the ideas of Bill Clinton, who had told that President of China Jiang Zemin at a press conference in 1997, you are on the wrong side of history which implied that history by itself was going to open up China's political system. And earlier that year Clinton had told, had said that the economic changes in China would help to increase the spirit of liberty overtime. I just think it's inevitable. Just as inevitably the Berlin Wall fell. Well these, this is not uniquely the last two president's either. Tony Blair was in China about a year ago and said there is unstoppable momentum. That's a direct quote towards Democracy in China. And one finds this regularly in American commentary as well. So that's one scenario. Second one is what I call the upheaval scenario which is essentially that China is going to blow up. That it can't go on the way it is now. And people who argue this point to waves of protests and strikes or problems in the banking system, all of which certainly exist. Then this point of view was encapsulated in a book a few years ago, by an author named Gordon Chang who wrote of The Coming Collapse of China. This was an interesting book. It also - it doesn't persuade me, China is a very big country. It's managed to hold itself together. That's actually without any sign of collapse. And I think now even more than in thought in 2001 that the government is strong enough to keep going. And then there is what I call simply the third scenario, which is that what we see in China now politically is what we are going to get and what we are going to get for a very long time. So I describe t, one way or another, the essentials of the current political system would remain intact. There would be no significant political opposition, no freedom of the press, no elections be on the very local level. In other words China will not change its political system in any fundamental way. Why do Americans believe that with advancing prosperity China will automatically come to have a political system like ours? Is it simply because Chinese people now eat at McDonalds and wear blue jeans? To make this assumption about China is to repeat the mistakes others have made in the past. That is to think wrongly that the Chinese are inevitably becoming like us. And I quote, there is a wonderful quote from a United States senator about 50 or 60 years ago named Kenneth Wherry, "With God's help we will lift Shanghai up and up until it is just like Kansas City." Those - that was he was talking about nationalist China at the time. Those dreams ended in disappointment and so for that matter in the early 1950s, Soviet leaders thought they were recreating a communist China that would be similar to the Soviet Union and they were wrong too. Now the question comes up, so why do our political leaders keep talking so much about the soothing scenario. And I think that holding out to the American public the idea that China is always about to change, always on the verge of change has served certain interests in Washington and in American society. And those interests of change in the at first in the late 70s and in the 1980s, the idea really benefit America's national security establishment, because at that time the United States was seeking close cooperation with China against the Soviet Union. So that the Soviet Union would have to worry about both America and China at once. And so the notion that the Chinese leadership, in this case, in the 80s leadership of Deng Xiaoping was in the process of changing the political system helps smooth away diffuse opposition to military cooperation with China. And then in the 90s following the Soviet collapse, the idea of China's political change got a new and a different constituency, the business community. As trade and investment became ever more important, American companies and their counterparts in Europe and Japan found themselves repeatedly beset with questions about why they were doing business with a repressive regime. One which had so recently ordered troops to fire at unarmed citizens. And so this paradigm of inevitable change offered companies the answer they needed, not only was China destined to open up its political system, but trade would be the key, that would unlock the door. And let me look in more detail at the arguments that are often made on behalf of, what I call the soothing scenario. And the first one which is quite common is the comparison to South Korea and Taiwan that really China will follow the same path as its two East Asian neighbors, both of which had authoritarian governments, more dictatorships until the 1980s and then opened up in the 1980s to liberalized political systems. And I find that there are really two problems with that. One of them is that both of those governments, South Korea and Taiwan were dependant on the United States for their military security, was entirely different relationship and so most dramatically in the case of South Korea you can put a date in 1987 on the point when the United States government sent a high level official to tell the then dictator in South Korea Chun Doo Hwan as there were people in on the streets that it was time for him to give way and have elections if he wanted continuing America support. It was more gradual for Taiwan, but the point is that the China will never have the same relationship to the United States as South Korea and Taiwan. And secondly China is just a much, much bigger country which is less tied to the coastal areas of East Asia than South Korea and Taiwan. I mean, if China were only Shanghai or only the Eastern South Eastern coastal areas this argument, this comparison with South Korea and Taiwan would make sense, but there is a huge hinterland which brings me to what I call the Starbucks fallacy, which is that as China develops a middle class society, that middle class is going to turn to democracy. And I am indebted to columnist Christoph for the Starbucks fallacy, because after he visited Starbucks in China a couple of years ago and wrote and this is an argument, no middle class is content with more choices of coffee than of candidates on the ballot. And the, you know, the problem with that again is that that there are huge, huge numbers of peasants and people in rural areas in China. If China would have nation wide elections and the peasants were to vote their own interests separate from those of the Starbucks sippers in the cities then the urban middle class would lose. You can add together the population of China's 10 biggest cities and you get to a number which is 60, 70 million people that's huge. So that's the paradox. The emergence of China's urban middle class is far more significant for its size when measured against the rest of the world that it is as a proportion of China's overall population. If you are a multinational company trying to sell consumer products like soap or cars or deodorant, then the rapid rise in spendable income in China's largest cities is of staggering importance. When it comes to any national elections, that new Chinese middle class, the Starbuck's clientele is merely a drop in the bucket. Those in the avant garde in Chinese cities have every reason to fear that in nationwide elections, they would be out voted and I argue that really because of the economic changes in China the urban middle class has a strong stake in preserving the political status quo. And finally there is the argument that China is already changing and it is in economic terms. And in smaller ways, in political terms but that raises the question of whether all of these small scale changes are going to lead to fundamental changes in the existing one-party political system. Now couple more things why should we care about China's political system? This isn't the question now of trying to impose our values but why should we care? Well, first of all, the reason that has nothing to do with the United States or other countries for the people of China themselves. It would be really nice if a 1.3 billion or a 1.4 billion people would have some voice, some political say. One of the cliché is it's really always bothered me for over 20 years is the one that goes people in China don't care about politics. Which I think really is stereo type and one that has and is and regularly proven false at those rare times when Chinese people are free to either, are free to speak out or demonstrate or protest. Second reason is for political stability in China. China has had a just - three or four years ago, had a fairly stable succession from one - one leader to another but to say the least, it hasn't always been that way and one of the remaining, one of the outstanding questions about China is can it manage political succession and then the third reason really does have to do with American foreign policy or Chinese foreign policy which is that it's support for undemocratic governments like that in Zimbabwe or Burma or Sudan is a problem for democratic values around the world and if democracy were to hang in the balance in Russia I think, you know, we know where China would get on the scales. And then the final point, I think, has to do with simply honesty to the American people. I mean, Americans have been told and I have watched this over and over again for 20 years. Every time China policy is up either for a voting Congress or it's an issue in presidential elections the argument is made that our policies were going to lead to change in the China's political system. That was the reason for the policies. I mean, it is a coherent point of view and I know many hold it, to be - to take the point of view of sheer realism. To say there is nothing we can do, Chinese system is going to stay the same, we have to deal with this government which is true But it's not the argument that our leaders have made and the reason that they don't make that is because they fear that they won't get as much public support as if they keep on pretending that we are changing China. Now what do we do about it? I say in the book and I am here to tell you. I don't have - I am not - I don't have a detailed policy prescription. I think we need to start thinking about China's future without illusions about political change and I think that our leaders need to stop claiming China is going to change. Or that it's current political system won't last. So I don't have a policy but I also think our existing policy has been justified to the public on the basis of a false assumption. So in that sense our government doesn't have a policy either. And then at the conclusion of the book, jury I know you will think, I have never written the book in which I hope so, fervently I would be proved wrong. It would be heartening if China's leaders proceed along the lines that America's political leaders predict. It would be wonderful if China opened up, either gradually or suddenly to a new political system in which the country's 1.3 billion people are given a chance to choose their own leaders. While wishing for such an outcome I will not hold my breath. Thank you.
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