China's Inevitable Rise In The New World Order - Professor Wang Gungwu

Wang Gungwu is an internationally renowned historian famed for his scholarship on the history of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, as well as the history and civilisation of China and Southeast Asia.

In his illustrious academic career, Wang has held eminent appointments in various universities and organisations around the world.

He was a history professor at the University of Malaya (1963–68) and the Australian National University (1968–86), and the vice-chancellor at the University of Hong Kong (1986–95).

He is currently a professor emeritus at the Australian National University and a University Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the highest academic title conferred by NUS.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Trailer
01:03 The Importance of Understanding China's Rise
08:27 Navigating A Chinese Political Identity
20:03 Mao Zedong's Misunderstood Legacy
25:27 The Role of History in Chinese Nation-Building
31:52 Comparing Xi Jinping And Mao Zedong
32:48 Xi Jinping's Influence
37:03 Modernity with Chinese Characteristics
40:46 Balancing Political Stability and Economic Growth
45:52 ASEAN's Role in a Multipolar World
48:59 Maritime Power Dynamics in South China Sea
54:44 Avoiding Conflict In The US-China Rivalry
01:03:30 Lessons for Future Leaders
01:07:23 Advice For Fresh Graduates

Keith 01:03

Professor Wang, you're one of the most eminent historians in Singapore and Asia and it is my tremendous privilege to interview you today. My first question is a little meta. I would like to situate the context. So the first question I had was, why should we as Singaporeans care about China?

Prof. Wang 01:23

Well, you should care about China, even if you're not Singaporeans, because you're located where this place is Southeast Asia, just across the South China Sea. China and India, the two biggest countries nearby, and we should be very attentive to what is developing there.

Singapore is very special. The majority of the people are of Chinese origin. Many are still very closely linked to their families in China, so the cultural connections are fairly firm. As Singaporeans, if you're a national citizen of Singapore, your loyalty in political terms is to the country. China is not your country, Singapore is your country, then you're concerned about the relationship between the state of Singapore and the state of China.

Singapore's economic and political connections with China matter a great deal to the state itself and to the region as a whole. Singapore cannot see itself purely as one country. It is a number of things all at once. It started off as a port city. It is now a nation state in the making. It has a kind of national consciousness and awareness, which I think is very real.

At the same time, it has to be based on being globally useful to everybody. Acting as a global city makes different demands on a state. The nation state itself has to adapt itself to a different role if you're at the same time a global city. When you are acting at different levels, your cultural identity as someone with ancestral origins, your ethnic origins, and yet at the same time, you are a nation in the making, building up a nation state which is independent and sovereign and has to defend itself against potential enemies.

And at the same time, you're economically successful by being one of the most extraordinary global cities the world has ever known. That makes it very special for Singapore. In all those contexts, China is relevant. China's related to each of those levels. That is why Singapore must pay attention to what is happening in China.

Keith 04:27

Singapore has a majority of ethnic Chinese and in theory, it sounds easy to kind of draw a line between the political and cultural identity. But even as China reconnects itself to the world or develops or is part of this new world order, that line is actually really blur. Is it actually possible to kind of draw a line between your political and cultural identity?

Prof. Wang 04:50

If you take a strictly political point of view, recognizing yourself as a nation state, then the distinction is extremely important. The political identity as a Singaporean is a different person from a person who's ethnically connected with friends, relatives, and other people who come from the same part of the world originally.

From that point of view, you can separate it. Your political identity, your political loyalty, the country that you identify with, which you are prepared to defend and fight for and die for, is different from whoever it is that you are related to and you feel affection for, or you feel that you are connected to in all sorts of ways.

Sharing certain values, sharing certain festivals, certain practices, certain rituals and ceremonies, including things like religion and spiritual matters, moral codes, ethical values, all these things demand a certain separation from purely political identity.

In today's terms, at least since 1945, when the world announced that this is the end of the age of empires. All countries of the world should become nation states. And these nation states are all members of a united nations organization in which each state is sovereign and has its place in the world as an equal state to every other state. These are definitions which came out of 1945.

Before that, there was no such concept. So we're dealing with a very modern concept. And so the fact that we are in Singapore trying to be a nation state is in that context of post-1945. In the case of Singapore, not even 1945, it's post-1965. Because before that, Singapore did not expect to be a nation state. It was supposed to be part of Malaya. But it so happened, separated from Malaysia, and suddenly found itself independent. Then it has to establish its position, its legal right to be independent and be recognized as sovereign and therefore respected by all other states as equal to everybody, every other state.

That's a very big step. And we are still in the process of trying to grasp that. Not only Singapore, every country in the world has to deal with the problem of what is national interest and what does national interest mean in the context of a globalized world in which we're all related and we share many problems together, especially economic relationships, social and cultural context and so on.

All these things demand that we be more open-minded and yet the nation state almost by definition says we have borders and beyond those borders are different interests. Our interests are primary and must be seen as having a priority over all other interests. These are definitions which we have made ourselves. So it's not a question of how you feel. These are realistic, practical definitions of what a state is and what a citizen is as compared with what a human being with family, relatives, friends and other things.

Those are different social and cultural relationships, they can be distinguished. It has to be distinguished.

Keith 08:50

Following 1945, there is this emergence of a new conception of a state. If you look at a country today like China, that's actually like, I think what you pointed out in your book, it's an extremely foreign concept. And it was one of those concepts where, because they failed to maybe adapt in the late Qing, especially when we consider how Japan was able to navigate that changing international order and China didn't, that led to its failure, to its collapse. If you were to look at some of the fundamental tensions that China had to navigate as it became a nation state, maybe from an empire or republic, what would they be?

Prof. Wang 09:30

You see, when the nation state was created as a concept and as a goal for all political leaders to aspire to, it was created in the late 18th century and was created in a context in which certain countries, certain states were already mostly nationals. In other words, the majority of the people within that state speak the same language, have the same historical context, and probably share the same religion as well. So the elements that make for a nation are already there. So to turn that nation into a state is relatively straightforward.

In Asia, there were no such thing. There were no nation states. Nation states came out of colonial states, which is a peculiar way of developing a nation. Peculiar to the 19th and 20th century, after the Western empires had created all these colonies by different countries. We are, for example, a nation that was more or less artificially created by the British, whereas Indonesia was created artificially by the Dutch. There was no such nation before.

But what happened was when we decolonized, we took the borders of the colonial state and made that into the basis on which you build a nation. You nation build with the borders of a colonial state. But that colonial state was not thrown up with any nation in mind. It was entirely for the interest of the imperial power. So those borders are not natural. They therefore include very different kinds of people living within those borders.

Therefore, the effort to make a nation out of that mixture of people living within those colonial borders is a very different kind of effort from the creations of, say, Belgium or Netherlands or Denmark or countries in Europe, which already had a more or less similar history, culture, language, religion to start with.

Very few countries in Asia had that background. Japan happens to be one of them, largely because it was a set of islands. It had been more or less separate from the mainland for centuries and developed by itself so that its sense of identity as a people under the emperor of Japan came more naturally. It was already there. So to transform that into the idea of a Japanese nation state, was relatively straightforward, not that difficult.

China, on the other hand, never saw itself in that way at all. It was always a kind of civilizational state in which people who shared the same cultural and civilizational values identified themselves as sort of Chinese. But what does Chinese mean is never clearly defined. It had no clear borders because the borders moved around largely because there were no natural borders.

Borders were how much territory can you control and you have enemies on the other side and people who are quite ready to invade you and take your territory and this is happening all the time throughout history. So whatever territory you can control becomes a basis of your empire. The Chinese had an empire.

Historically, in the 19th century, it was a Qing Empire. And the Qing Empire was not Chinese in origin. The dynastic house came from Manchuria. They were Manchus, very distinctive, distinct from the Chinese. They had their own language, their own culture before they came to China. But they invaded China in the 17th century. They won, they conquered all the Chinese territories.

But at the same time, they also conquered other territories. They were partners with the Mongols and were kind of lesser partners in the empire building with the Manchus providing the leadership. And they went on to extend their control over Tibet and Xinjiang. Nothing to do with the Chinese. This is a part of the Manchu Qing Empire spreading itself across.

So by the 19th century, they had a sort of Empire which was very inclusive of, as they describe it today, something like 55 different nationalities inside that empire. So when you start like that, then how do you become a nation state? This is not colonial, you're not under some other empire. This is under the Manchu Empire, which by that time had been sufficiently sinicized in the way they ruled over the Chinese.

The Han Chinese people were already ruled by the Manchus as if they were the Chinese dynasty. So that added to the blurring of what does a state mean. Was it a Manchu state? Not quite. Was it a Chinese state? Not quite. It was a bit of both.

Now, in that context, the legitimacy of the Qing state being transferred to the Republic of China in 1912, was a political revolution. It was a totally different historical moment for this part of the world. For the Republic of China, the Chinese people didn't know what a republic really meant. They had been used to dynastic empires for thousands of years, and they had to learn how to be a republic.

And where did the republic idea come from? It came from Sun Yat-sen who modeled the country on the United States and France. These were the two models. They were the two great successful republics at that time. All the other countries were monarchies of one kind or the other, but these two were successful republics. And Sun Yat-sen admired them and felt that this was China's future should be in that form, in a form of a republic.

The consequences of producing such a political revolution among the Chinese people was a major problem. Who are the Chinese? Because during the Manchu time, the Qing Dynasty, the Manchus distinguished themselves as the Manchus and the Han. And to the rest of the world and to the Chinese themselves, Han meant the Chinese, but not the Manchu.

The 1911 revolution persuaded the Chinese Han people to overthrow the Manchu dynasty and get rid of the Manchus and replace it with the Chinese system of government, with Chinese running the country. But now they call it a republic with a president and ideas of democracy, a constitution, nation, national borders and so on, all had to be digested in a way by the new leaders as to how that would work.

Because they've inherited not only the idea of China as a historical entity, but they've inherited the borders of the Qing dynasty when the Qing handed over legitimacy to President Yuan Shikai to be the first president of the Republic of China. Having done that, that meant that the whole territory that the Qing dynasty represented now became the borders of the Republic of China.

That has never been so in the past. But the Chinese historical tradition has always been that whatever the emperor controlled is China. So they assumed constitutionally the Republic of China would have all those borders, which meant that all the people living within those borders were Chinese.

Politically Chinese, legally Chinese, citizens of the Republic of China. But they are actually different nationalities, speaking different languages, having different religions. So the task of making that group of people within those borders into one nation that is Chinese and identify only with the Chinese is a massive task. And I would say that they're still in the middle of doing that.

They are nation building at a different scale from Singapore and other smaller places with the colonial state to begin with. This is different, they took over an imperial state and to try to make that into a nation. And the job is a very difficult one. And you can see them struggling right through the Republic to 1945 and invasion of Japanese, the long story.

And then when the communists took over in 1949, the People's Republic of China still had to face the same problem. They still had to create this so-called China of the Chinese people. And they invented the term Zhonghua Minzu, which of course never existed before. This is a completely new category. It's like Singaporean never existed before. In 1965, you created that.

In 1949, they created the Renmin Kung He Guo and therefore talked about the Chinese. But actually Sun Yat-sen had already invented this term, Zhonghua Minzu, to try and say that all these 55 or more nationalities are all part of Zhonghua Minzu. And Zhonghua Minzu are the people of China. Everybody of Zhonghua Minzu is a Chinese.

But in practical terms, this is much more difficult, much more sensitive and culturally divisive and culturally tense situation within the country. So that is still a problem for the Chinese government.

Keith 20:34

When Deng Xiaoping came to Singapore, I think he remarked that when he looked at how Lee Kuan Yew was building Singapore as a nation state, he remarked that I think if he had the whole of Shanghai, he would have done it much faster, but he had the whole of China to contend with. And that was a very gargantuan task.

If we go to 1949, when Chairman Mao was at Tiananmen Square, he had this idea of the China Dream. It was like the birthing of a new nation or an attempt of trying to birth a new nation. What is it about Mao Zedong as a national leader that the typical media interpretations of him get wrong?

Prof. Wang 21:15

Mao Zedong's position, almost godlike position in China, comes from the fact that he was a man who enabled the People's Liberation Army to win the war against the nationalists of China. And he brought about the possibility of a unification of all the territories that was part of the empire that became the Republic of China in 1912 and is inherited by the People's Republic of China in 1949.

That is a continuity. That territory is China. And the People's Liberation Army under Mao Zedong was able to take back and control that territory, with the exception of Mongolia, which Mongolia declared its independence and with Soviet help managed to keep its independence. But everything else became part of a united China.

And he was the first of all the political leaders to actually succeed in doing that. By 1959, within 10 years, all of that territory, except Mongolia, was united. And except for Taiwan, which the Republic of China had moved to, the rest of it was united. And that unification was regarded as a greater success of Mao Zedong.

So he was seen as a kind of the great hero who brought about the unification of China. And that gave him immense power. And he had tremendous skills of his own to dominate the Chinese Communist Party and try to steer the Communist Party towards his ideal of what this future People's Republic of China should be like.

And at that point, his model was the Soviet Union because they took it from the communism that Stalin and Lenin had created. And the Communist Party was modeled on that. But in his own mind, it was not Chinese enough. So in a way, he was trying to create a Chinese version of that revolution.

And in the end, of course, it turned out that he was disillusioned by the Soviet decision after Stalin's death and considered them to be revisionist by being more Western and less and less able to be independent in developing a separate kind of people's revolution that he imagined.

So in his own mind, he was trying to create a new kind of revolution, what he called continuous revolution, that ultimately took the shape of the great proletarian cultural revolution, which turned out in the end, as we all know, to be an economic disaster. And the whole Chinese economy just essentially diminished its value and credibility thereafter.

So it took a different move by Deng Xiaoping to try and restore that. The difficulties of trying to create a nation state based on a different set of ideology, different set of ideals and Mao Zedong imagined it should be the future of China. It didn't work. That's fundamentally true. It didn't work.

So Deng Xiaoping came along to try and make it work. And that is Deng Xiaoping's creation. He did not deny the communist revolution. He accepted it. He thought the Maoist revolution was successful, just that Mao himself had made terrible errors and therefore led to the failure of his experiment.

But Deng Xiaoping was really going back to what the Communist Party really achieved in 1949 and the early 50s, and to go back to what the Communist Party really stood for, which was to make a successful, powerful, recovered, revolutionary state which has Chinese characteristics, as he uses the phrase. So that's the new phrase. But Deng Xiaoping never really rejected Mao's goal that there's a Chinese revolution based on the peasantry created out of Chinese conditions should have a distinctive revolution which would stand by itself. And I think that's what the Chinese people are still thinking about.

Keith 25:53

And throughout modernity, maybe following their independence or the birth of the PRC, we see this constant grappling with history or the concept of history itself. You kind of detail it in your book where there was this idea of the need for history to look back at the past, to reflect on the past. Maybe the earlier stages, there was kind of a certain disillusionment as well that they had to grapple with. How did the Chinese Communist Party or the CPC use history as a way to kind of build the nation state?

Prof. Wang 26:30

This is much more complicated process even for them. They themselves didn't really know how to do it. Because when you had a revolution, and one of the goals of your revolution is to overturn the past, during the May 4th movement, for example, after the republic was created, was to do away with the Confucian state. This has failed. We must now learn from the West.

And they did. They set out deliberately to learn from the West. But what they discovered was the West was much more complicated. There were actually more than one West. There was a West of what might be called a liberal economic West that represented by the capitalist system and the European socialist West that was adopted, was succeeded by the Russian Revolution under Lenin and Stalin.

But they both come from the same source. They come from the same enlightenment project. When the enlightenment created the two revolutions, the American and the French revolutions, they set up, you might say, three ideals for this new world in which there's liberty, equality, fraternity, to put it very bluntly, in the simplest terms.

And then the revolution would then completely destroy all these old monarchies, church-based authority of the pope and all the other religious-based principles and aristocratic feudal systems of the past replaced it altogether. Marx did not deny the role of capitalism. Marx actually praised capitalism as a necessary step before you achieved socialism. So Marx actually was quite clear about that. Just a question of timing and who wins in the end kind of thing.

So it became an ideological battle in the West. So there was actually two Wests. The West represented by the capitalist side, and the West represented by the Russian revolution side, which might be called a socialist side or communist side.

And the Chinese people, when they say learn from the West, in the end, were two Wests to learn from. And part of the leadership took West One, I would call it, which was the liberal economic capitalist side, the coastal Chinese more or less followed that model led by the nationalist leaders from Chiang Kai-shek onwards, whereas the peasants did not appreciate that.

And Mao Zedong, drawing from Chinese history, drawing from the fact that he came from a rich peasant background and understood the nature of the peasantry, he said the majority of the Chinese people, probably 90% of the Chinese people were peasants. If you want to have a revolution, they must be involved in that revolution. You cannot have a revolution led by a bunch of intellectuals and capitalists living on the coast of China. The interior of China was just as important, if not more so, because they are the majority.

So within China, the civil war between those two forces developed gradually by adopting West One and West Two as the ideological base to fight each other with. But underneath it all, it was a division within the Chinese society itself of highly elitist Shidaifu class and merchant classes, and then the vast majority peasantry with some artisan people supporting them.

And Mao Zedong's great success was he was able to mobilize and win over the peasantry, largely thanks to the Japanese invasion actually, it helped him a lot because during that period, they were able to stand up against the Japanese in the rural areas in a way which the Kuomintang wasn't able to do. So they won.

And having won, then he pointed that this is the road to the revolution. But this is nothing like the Soviet revolution. The Soviet revolution was workers of the world unite. They were depending on urban workers forming trade unions and from there to start the revolution. There were no urban workers to speak of except along the coast and there were too few of them anyway to start any revolution.

So the revolution in China was peasant revolution. Therefore, it draws upon the Chinese tradition of peasant rebellions, which had been going on many, many times, hundreds of times throughout Chinese history. It was drawing upon that inspiration, including, for example, the Taiping Rebellion.

The Taiping Rebellion was very much a peasant rebellion with an ideological thing which derived from the West of Hong Xiuquan being the son of God, the brother of Jesus Christ. These were extraordinary things, not Western or Chinese in particular. They were peasant creative, imaginative way of justifying their rebellion against the Shutai Fujiaji.

So Mao Zedong would say, that's a class struggle, a class rebellion. And he was inspired by that. And in that sense, it was within the Chinese tradition. In other words, the Chinese revolution led by Mao Zedong was part of that tradition of the peasantry determining the nature of the rule of a country. But without an emperor, the Chinese Communist Party has now become the Emperor.

Keith 32:26

It's interesting because when you think about your book about China reconnecting, it's on one hand reconnecting to the world but it's also reconnecting with itself. As it kind of marries both worlds, one as what you said the West one and West two, Mao drawing from the West, he is also drawing from the rich intellectual tradition or rich tradition that China came from as well.

So if we were to fast forward to today where we have someone like President Xi Jinping, right? When someone from the West kind of draws that comparison between President Xi and Mao Zedong, they say that maybe China's returning to this autocratic regime. Seems to me that they're missing, they're having a low fidelity representation of what's happening. Would that comparison be incomplete or at least incorrect?

Prof. Wang 33:21

I think you're quite right to say that it's not a comparison because Mao Zedong was a father of a revolution. He had actually created something completely new. Xi Jinping is not. Xi Jinping has inherited a system which as a filial son, he followed his own father as a revolutionary. He believed that the People's Republic of China was the correct thing to have happened in history. This was right.

But he saw the Chinese Communist Party going downhill, being corrupt and utterly lost his sense of direction and purpose. And he was very concerned. He was from his background, he was just a very, very well-trained technocrat who succeeded within the Communist Party to rise at different positions, but he never had a faction. He never aspired to be the leader of the country. Nothing in his career suggests that he was ambitious in that way at all.

What he observed was the loss of purpose and direction of the Chinese Communist Party because the leaders all become corrupted by the adoption of capitalist methods that made China so successful under Deng Xiaoping's reforms. He never rejected Deng Xiaoping's reforms. I think he stands for Deng Xiaoping's reforms. He's still a follower of Deng Xiaoping's reforms.

But what he thought was that the party leadership had lost that control, that discipline that the party needed to become a strong party. This is what I think he believes in. And as a young man growing up under Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, he actually, I think, believes in some of the ideals that Mao Zedong had for the Chinese modernity, a Chinese revolution, which is not a model, not copying the Russians, and certainly not copying the West, but a Chinese one.

But at the same time, rejecting the Chinese tradition represented by Confucianism and all the earlier ideologies of the past. So it must be based on modern progressive ideas inspired by Marx. I think that generally, in that sense, he's a Marxist. He believes in progress.

And that idea itself, progress as an idea is totally un-Chinese. Because everything in the Chinese tradition is to say the past was glorious. And our job is to keep that past, be keeping it glorious and be like the past. Don't lose sight of it. Progress, that the future can be better than the past, never occurred to the Chinese, not in the Chinese tradition at all.

Karl Marx is the part of that enlightenment project that stood out to say, this is how progress takes place historically, and with the system and so on. Whether Marx is right or wrong is beside the point. But Marx believed that there was progress from the days of slavery to feudalism, capitalism to socialism, is material progress. The world and humanity will benefit, will get better and better as we go along.

I think Xi Jinping would agree with that. This is part of that Marxist heritage. But what he's at the same time recognizing, and I think this is crucial, that you cannot do away with the past. All these Chinese people that form the bulk of the peasantry of the Chinese carry that heritage very deeply.

And they haven't changed. The peasants that helped Mao Zedong's success haven't changed all that much. Some of them have become urbanized. But in the end, they still have a sort of commitment to the traditions that they've inherited. And they don't want to be imitation Westerners. They're not imitation Americans or Europeans. They feel that is not what they should be doing. They should remain Chinese while becoming modern.

Now, how do you do that? And I'm not sure that they themselves know how it can be done, but they are trying very hard. And that is the Chinese dream, you might say. The Chinese dream is to try and achieve a modernity that is as good as anybody else's modernity, but it's still identifiably Chinese.

Keith 38:06

It's clear that you can kind of point at what socialism with Chinese characteristics are. But one of the questions on my mind today is that what does modernity with Chinese characteristics look like? Because I think that is a grand project that they're on. In your view, what would that be?

Prof. Wang 38:21

The modernity part in terms of science and technology, in terms of finance and economics that the capitalist system had evolved, that part is easy to learn. The Chinese have made great efforts in the last, ever since Deng Xiaoping came, his form started, have made great efforts to master all the methodologies associated with science and technology of the West and the finance and economic systems of the capitalist system.

The fundamental idea that Deng Xiaoping has clearly enunciated is that socialism cannot afford to be poor. Socialism must also be rich. In other words, being a socialist doesn't mean that you have to live in poverty. You can actually create wealth and become a wealthy socialist state.

That itself is a big challenge. The capitalism has shown that it makes wealth, it creates wealth very successfully in the last 200 years. Socialism has not done as well because socialism places a lot of emphasis upon equality, distribution, sharing of wealth and so on, and therefore often pulls back at the wealth-making to make sure that there's equality in distribution of wealth.

So that tension remains. And I'm not sure that the Chinese know how to overcome that problem. Because at the same time, Xi Jinping says, if you just go after wealth, your Communist Party will be ultimately corrupted and will self-destruct. And in the end, they will just be just like any other political party. That's not the future that will save China.

China can only become wealthy and powerful again if it remains united and under, as it were, a clear direction of change towards material progress along ways which are in conformity with the science and technology, finance and economic principles that we have mastered from the modern experiments since the Enlightenment project. We learn from all that.

But in order to remain Chinese, China must remain united, secure, safe, and internally socially harmonious. In other words, without civil war, internal fighting that would ultimately destroy whatever you've achieved. They've seen in Chinese history, wherever there's name, line, as it were, internal line disorder, the dynasty falls. Everything fails. So you must avoid that at all costs. Even if it means economically, we do do as well. This has greater priority. If you don't have that unity, you will lose everything else.

But that is very difficult, very challenging. And I'm not myself clear whether the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping's leadership really know how to do it. But what they are doing now is experimenting with different ways of balancing this question of political stability and security within, while economically still making progress, making money, making wealth for the country. How do you achieve that balance where you can have both?

Because what I see from America and the Western Europeans is that the Americans have gone to the other extreme. So much freedom for creativity and imaginative change and so on, very successful in the capitalist system. But what it creates is tremendous inequality.

The liberal global economy has meant that the rich actually get very, very much richer and the poor are not doing that well. And in particular, with liberal globalization, the Americans themselves have discovered that the middle class is not doing as well at all. They are failing, partly because they've taken on the job of policing the world, taking themselves seriously as the sole superpower responsible for how the world develops and taking on responsibilities which they cannot control themselves.

And they have failed in almost everything that they have tried to do since they won the Cold War. In fact, the victory of the Cold War gave them a sense of confidence, which turned out to be not justified.

Everything they intervene since the wonderful war has turned out to be failures in particular in the Middle East, of course, with Iraq and Afghanistan, but elsewhere to spending a lot of money and not achieving the results that the Americans want. So the people of America are also having grave doubts about their own system.

And that liberal system, even in the eyes of someone like President Trump, he said that that liberal system that created the world in which all the manufacturing has gone to places like China, and the loss of manufacturing jobs in America has created the poverty and the relative decline of the middle classes in America. We mustn't allow that.

To make America great again, you have to bring back all those manufacturing jobs and ensure that everything within America is doing well, not allowing just the rich people to become richer, because they've become very rich. American economy has grown at the same time, but grown with greater and greater inequality. This is how it is perceived now by the followers of President Trump.

Now, the Chinese are observing that very carefully. That's not the way to go. What they want is to find the right balance, the balance in which you have political control paired with economic growth. How do you achieve that?

And I think they are struggling because they were so successful because of the liberal economy, the globalized economy. They took advantage of it by joining the WTO and they've done extremely well. But now the Americans are pulling back from it. And if the world moves away from that kind of globalization, the liberal globalization, towards protectionist policies, nationalist agenda in economic behaviour across the board, then you can blocks of economic interests take over everything. Globalization comes from then.

And China's economy, which is so successful because it took advantage of these global opportunities, will now find itself struggling to do that. Everywhere, people are putting barriers, tariffs, and so on.

So we are facing a different world, not because of what is happening within China, but what is happening in the liberal world itself. The liberal world itself is changing. So what we are now facing is a very tricky problem because the question of balancing what is happening in China is not the only problem.

The problem is also in the West. How are they balancing between the amount of freedom that they want to keep and yet they want security, safety, and protectionism? They want to retain to enable the economy to thrive and so on. They have a contradiction there too. They also have to find a balance.

What I find interesting about the world today is that both sides are now facing very powerful challenges within their systems. And both sides are not yet clear how to go about it. And that is why the great uncertainty for all the rest of us. Because if either side were a bit clearer, I think we would all be better off. But because both sides are not clear and really struggling, the rest of us are really holding our breaths and saying, where do we go next?

Keith 46:55

There seems to be a trilemma that both of them are struggling to resolve. I think the trilemma between freedom, social stability and economic progress. You're always trying to find where in this triangle you should be optimally placed in and that's an equilibrium that you're always trying to be on.

The follow-on question would then be, as we head into this era of uncertainty, what should Singapore's position be in relation to this uncertainty in China and the US? And then what are the implications for Singapore and then ASEAN?

Prof. Wang 47:33

Like I said at the beginning, there are different levels at which you have to think. At the global city level, there's no question that Singapore has got to observe this with great concern and be as adaptable and as flexible as possible to respond to the changes that you observe. Global cities got to take advantage of every opportunity that allows this global city to benefit from what is happening, which is not easy, but that's one level.

At another level, as a state, you have to defend yourself. And the cost of defending yourself is very difficult to measure. At the moment, you can measure it in terms of military expenses and so on and so forth. But that is only one level of defense. Your defense is also dependent a lot on social harmony within the country and how people relate and you have, because the fact that we're a plural society, Singapore is a plural society, means that there are different peoples within the country who are related to other peoples outside. That's why we are plural. We give respect to each one of our communities as equal in the country. So each one has relations outside.

The outside developments can directly influence developments inside all the time. So how to defend yourself against all that? And the only way to defend is to be very sensitive about how the peoples relate to each other, how they trust each other and see themselves as sharing the same values, the same culture, I would call it the national culture that is evolving in Singapore. It's not yet clear. It's a pluralistic culture, but it's a pluralistic culture which has understanding and sympathy and sensitivity to each other's value systems. And then people are doing their utmost to maintain that harmony that requires tremendous effort and continual effort to make sure that we don't misunderstand each other within the society. That's another level.

So these levels have to be all operative at the same time. And that is a big challenge because it is a small country in a very volatile era in a zone which is now in a center of attention of global struggle between, for example, the two systems of the United States represented by United States and China. Singapore is related to all that. The distances are not great, particularly the distance between Singapore and China.

But more important is that the United States is a maritime power, and therefore, where emphasis upon the Indo-Pacific is absolutely vital to the future of Singapore. Because this is not continental power which used to dominate history for thousands of years. Maritime power is a recent thing over the last two or three hundred years since the British Empire created their maritime power, passed on to the Americans. And Americans now dominate maritime affairs.

And in terms of the Indo-Pacific maritime power, America is number one. The Chinese are nowhere in comparison to that. And in the middle of all that is Southeast Asia. For the first time in history, Southeast Asia is in the center of a major historical development. Never in the past, always been on the edge of the great developments elsewhere.

But today, the emphasis upon Indo-Pacific means that those lands in between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean have become central to what is happening. And in that context, ASEAN has now a role which it has never, Southeast Asia has never had before.

As you know from what I've written, Southeast Asia did not exist as a region to anybody's mind. It was just a place people passed through, trading between India and China, between the Mediterranean and China and Japan. Southeast Asia was just a transit zone and did very well out of it, drawing from everybody's interest, trading and offering services, enabling Southeast Asia to develop in itself its own national, own cultural and national identities.

But today, its importance has become more significant because the emphasis now between the US-China struggle is over maritime power. Because the Chinese would never had a navy to speak of except during the Zheng He period for a few decades, but then they gave it up. They said there's no enemy by sea. They gave it up. So they neglected the Navy.

And by the 19th century, they found themselves completely threatened by naval power, which they didn't have. They've been struggling to have a Navy for a whole hundred years. The whole of the 20th century, the Chinese didn't have a ship worth talking about. It was only in the 1990s when they had enough money and the country was sufficiently united and secure within that the Chinese began to seriously develop a naval force of some credibility.

And it's only 20 odd years. And what is a 20-year-odd-year navy compared to a 250-year Anglo-American naval maritime supremacy that's been there for so long, and they absolutely want to keep it that way?

And if they're determined to keep it that way, any challenge is regarded as a threat to their hegemony, as it were, at sea. So China's defense, which is probably what they have in mind, defense of their own territory politically and defense of their own economic advancement, because quite frankly, China's economic miracle of the last few decades would not have been possible if they didn't have access to the sea.

It was maritime trade that enabled Chinese economy to develop the way it did the last 40, 50 years. If they didn't have access to the sea, if the sea was dominated completely by an enemy, out to defeat you, out to contain you, China's economy itself would die. So this is now a matter of survival, economic survival, that they must at least have some access completely.

In fact, freedom of navigation, the irony is that Americans use that phrase all the time. But the Chinese probably need freedom of navigation more than the Americans do, because Americans already have it. The Chinese don't. The Chinese depend on Americans allowing them to have freedom of navigation, because the American Navy has the potential to stop and blockade the Chinese whenever they want to. And they are blockade areas, the Straits of Malacca, so does Straits. The South China Sea is a very good example why it is so vital, it's strategically vital. Not so much to American interests because it doesn't affect America's interests directly, but it's absolutely deterministic, existential for China's interests. So this is what we are up against.

Keith 55:18

If you take your analysis to its logical extreme, which would be then if America is determined to stay as an unrivaled maritime power and that China is eager to at least secure itself as you put it to overcome or at least manage this existential challenge of the freedom of navigation access to maritime routes, would it be very possible that a hot war would break out then?

Prof. Wang 55:47

I think I make an assumption, I hope I'm right. And I believe a lot of my colleagues share that assumption is that neither side want to fight. Nobody wants a war. Everybody is trying its best to gain advantage without fighting, to win without fighting, if possible. But nobody wants to fight.

So if that's the case, it's a question of strategic calculations on both sides. How to remain strong and more powerful without having a war. And in that sense, ASEAN can play a big role. Because if ASEAN can stay together, and the 10 countries can always show that they are valuable to both China and the United States almost equally, in different ways, but they're equally valuable to both those powerful countries, if you want peace.

ASEAN is vital. If ASEAN can continually stress on that point and stay united in wanting to play that role, to be, as it were, a means by which peace can be maintained between the two countries, then ASEAN's importance becomes very significant to both sides. It would be in the interest of both China and the United States to keep ASEAN together, leaning to neither side, to be equally important to both sides.

If they can maintain that, then South China Sea will be peaceful. And ASEAN will have a positive role in keeping the peace in our region. But that takes a lot of effort. It means that leaders in China and United States, together with the leaders of the 10 ASEAN countries, have to be continually in touch, learn to trust each other, learn to be transparent, and yet continually emphasizing that ASEAN will not take sides. We want to be equally valuable to both sides.

How to maintain that in the middle of all the other uncertainties, that is the major challenge for ASEAN. And Singapore, I believe, is very aware of that. And Singapore is probably one of most active members of ASEAN to keep this ASEAN one voice ASEAN. Together.

Keith 58:19

But it seems to me that the Americans are not that all interested in ASEAN. Maybe China is, the Southeast Asian states as constituents are, but Americans, if you look at the past decade, they haven't been, even with their whole pivot to the East kind of strategic shift in the 2010s, they just have been quite lukewarm. Is that a prospect of that warming?

Prof. Wang 58:39

I suspect that is might change because I think someone like Trump is really at least I believe this merit in that argument that Trump wants to solve the problems of Europe so that there be no fighting in Europe and Europe would take its responsibility for its security against Russia and that the Middle East will be dominated by Israel as an agent of the United States, and the Middle East can be kept more or less under control.

And then they can concentrate their attention on the place where it is the least confident at this stage, and that is Asia, the Indo-Pacific, as they describe it. And I do think that there's merit in that argument that they want to have less problems in the Middle East and in Europe so that they can concentrate on the area where they are least able to control things, because they can control Europe, they believe, and they can make the Europeans do their bit to control and bring peace to Europe. At least President Trump, I think, believes that.

And I think he believes that with his views of the agencies within and the tensions and competitions within Middle East, they can maintain a status quo in the Middle East and that he could keep that under control because he wants to concentrate on the area which is the most difficult to control and requires the greatest attention, which is Asia, especially this part of it, including India.

I always remember including India because Indian Ocean is India and China, as well as Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. All this is now where economic dynamism is at its highest and the future of economic change here is pretty good. And therefore it is vital that this part of the world is not dominated by either China or India, but dominated in the end.

The maritime control of the South China Sea, the Pacific Indian Ocean, including the South China Sea, remains in the hands of the greatest maritime power on earth, which is the United States. I think this is true. The maritime power is absolutely indisputable because America has no continental worries. It is utterly secure on the continent of North America, South America. There are no real threats to America at all. They are secure continent.

No other country in the world is secure, that secure as Americans are. No other country in the whole history of man has ever, one country, been secure continentally like the United States. Therefore, it can concentrate all its resources, all its energies and strategic thinking on retaining dominance on the sea, which will make it a global power.

And that position is America is very proud of it, has always been confident of it. They're a little bit less confident now, but they want to restore somehow, restore the position whereby they could be confident that their maritime hegemony will never be challenged by anybody.

Keith 01:02:09

And in that context, how does ASEAN strengthen its value proposition to both sides? Both to the Americans and China? What are the things that they can beef up on?

Prof. Wang 01:02:18

Well, it means continually keeping in contact, as I said, winning the trust of both countries by being sensitive to their needs and insisting on the interests of ASEAN, not just one country in ASEAN, but 10 countries in ASEAN, insisting on the interests of ASEAN and that the interest of ASEAN is in the interests of both countries.

Because as long as ASEAN itself is peaceful and working together, then there should be no conflict between the United States and China. If both sides are aware of that and actually value and recognize that value of having a peaceful ASEAN, it's actually in their own interest.

On the assumption which I'm making, which may or may not be right, my assumption is both sides not wanting to fight. That assumption could be challenged. But this is my assumption, both sides. I believe that is true. Both sides don't want war. The thing is that both sides don't want war that's been true of the earlier Cold War. They fought through proxies. But actually, both sides don't want war at all, if they can avoid it. Not even through proxies.

And if Southeast Asia says, we're not going to be proxies of anybody, we also don't want war like you. Since all you two and us don't want war, how do we work together in every way possible to avoid the war, such a war. And I think if both sides continue to want to piece a peaceful solution and a harmonious development here in which the status quo doesn't really change, I think that is possible.

I think the danger is each side saying, if I don't do this, they will gain at my expense. And so that kind of zero-sum kind of thinking is what makes it so uncertain, unpredictable.

Keith 01:04:17

It's about avoiding that prisoner's dilemma, I suppose. If you were to counsel the Prime Minister today on the future of US-China relations, or if you were to be able to dispense with him advice, what would you say?

Prof. Wang 01:04:33

First of all, let me be very clear. I'm not qualified to do that. I'm not a political scientist. I'm not a diplomat. I've never been an official of any government. I would not know how to provide that advice.

All I can do is to provide a historical background and certain realities which I recognize to be linked to that historical background, and that I believe that you cannot afford to neglect that background or to dismiss that background as being irrelevant. I think that historical background is very relevant and you have to be sensitive to how that is playing in the current affairs that happens and how people make future strategic planning for the decades to come.

All that is part and parcel and no great strategies in my mind, into my knowledge, no great strategist would dare to neglect historical backgrounds.

Keith 01:05:42

Maybe if I reframe the question, what if there was one lesson of history you hope that you could drill in the mind of leaders of Singapore, not just today, but 10, 20 years from now, what would that lesson be?

Prof. Wang 01:05:54

The post-1945 world of nation-states require all nation-states to think like nation-states. I'm not sure that that is something that will always be true. But on the assumption that that is true and that people respect the idea that all nation-states are sovereign, independent, and treated as equal to every other.

If those principles still survive, then I would say that is the key. Everybody says, this is my national interest. You respect my national interest. I respect yours. And the chances of everything being resolved and sorted out, compromises being made and so on, because we recognize and respect each other's national interests as a basis for diplomatic relations, of international relations and a world order and what they call the rules-based order, we can devise the rules to compromise where the national interests of every nation state as equal and independent and sovereign remain respected.

All that, the ideals are there. We all know the ideals. It's just in practice. We cannot quite forget the question that is on everybody's mind is might. They're determinant. Whoever is strongest dictates. If you still retain that frame of mind, it will always be dangerous.

So the one thing to avoid, now, we have the record, it's a post-1945 state. Pre-1945 was a different world. It is a United Nations world where we set out these ideals, but the ideals have not been retained. There lots of infringements and people have been ignoring it and going for national interest at other people's expense.

Now, if national interest can be defined as mutual national interest and mutual respect for each other's national interest, and it can be negotiated and discussed and debated and sorted out, I think there is an answer. The ideals are there. The principles actually are well known. It's a question of whether you're prepared to deal with it, whether the leaders are wise enough and caring enough to try and make those efforts, because it requires a lot of effort.

Keith 01:08:26

My final question, If you were to give a piece of advice to a graduating student who is entering society, what would that one piece of advice be?

Prof. Wang 01:08:36

Whatever you study, I believe, every subject that you study has a past. And I would include this among the scientists, even the best engineers, they actually learn from the past. They actually, they don't say so, but everything they do is a result of centuries of previous developments leading to what they do. And that would be true for everybody. Whoever we are, whatever we are, we're the products of the past.

So I'm not advocating the study of history as such. But I'm advocating a sensitivity and an awareness of the past and how you should look to it whenever necessary or when you think you need help, you should look to it at least for some guidance and some way of sorting out what your problems are today.

Where does it come from? I would be very surprised if they don't come from some part of the past. Almost everything you do today, all the problems we face today, have some past. That understanding, that relationship between present and past, your ability to sort out what of the past is relevant to you and that you need to know is part of the education of being a man to dealing with the future. I don't think you can separate these things. You talk about blurring of things. There are no borders between past, present, and future in my mind.

Keith 01:10:10

In a sense, the line joining a deep-rooted path to a new world order is not just a byline of a book. It's probably a way of living that we should try to emulate. Thank you, Professor, for coming on.

Prof. Wang 01:10:22

Thank you very much for inviting me.