Does the 21st Century Belong to China?

The Munk Debate on China

Henry Kissinger, Niall Ferguson, Fareed Zakaria, David Li

• Editorial: House of Anansi Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781770890633
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Globalisierung

Is China's rise unstoppable? Powered by the human capital of 1.3 billion citizens, the latest technological advances, and a comparatively efficient system of state-directed capitalism, China seems poised to become the global superpower this century. But the Middle Kingdom also faces a series of challenges. From energy scarcity to environmental degradation to political unrest and growing global security burdens, a host of factors could derail China's global ascent.

In this edition of The Munk Debates - Canada's premier international debate series - former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CNN's Fareed Zakaria square off against leading historian Niall Ferguson and world-renowned economist David Daokui Li to debate the biggest geopolitical issue of our time: Does the 21st century belong to China?

Highly electrifying and thoroughly engrossing, the Munk Debate on China is the first formal public debate Dr. Kissinger has participated in on China's future, and includes exclusive interviews with Henry Kissinger and David Daokui Li.

Does the 21st Century Belong to China?

---

Pro: Niall Ferguson and David Li

Con: Henry Kissinger and Fareed Zakaria

June 17, 2011

Toronto, Canada

THE MUNK DEBATE ON CHINA

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, Canada. We are here for the Munk Debate on China. My name is Rudyard Griffiths, I’m the co-organizer of the Munk Debates along with my colleague, Patrick Luciani, and it is my privilege to be your moderator once again.

First, I want to welcome the thousands of people watching this debate online, live on the Internet, on globeandmail.com and munkdebates.com. It’s terrific to have you as a part of these proceedings. A warm hello also to the millions of people watching, reading, and listening to this debate, everywhere from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation down under to C-SPAN throughout the United States, to the People’s Daily Online in China, and through our international media partnership with the Financial Times of London and its prestigious China Confidential research unit.

Hello, too, to Canadians coast-to-coast, who are listening and watching everywhere from CBC Radio’s Ideas program to the Canadian Public Affairs Channel (CPAC), and on the network where I host a daily television show, Business News Network (BNN). It’s great to have you as part of this debate. And finally, as I look around this hall, which is filled to capacity, I’d like to welcome the 2,700 people who have come out for a second time for the Munk Debates at Roy Thomson Hall.

Everyone associated with this project thanks you for your support for the simple idea behind this series, which is dedicated to creating opportunities like this, where we can debate the big geopolitical issues that are changing Canada and changing the world. The success of this debate series, its ability to bring to Toronto some of the world’s sharpest thinkers, would not be possible without the philanthropic creativity and generosity of two individuals. I’d like all of you to join me in a round of applause for our hosts, the co-founders of the Munk Debates, Peter and Melanie Munk. Bravo you two. We’re going to keep at this.

Now, for the moment we have all been waiting for. We have the motion before us: Be it resolved the 21st century will belong to China; now, all we need is our debaters centre stage. Let’s have a big round of applause for the two debaters who will be arguing for the motion, Niall Ferguson and David Li. Now, let’s welcome their formidable opponents, Fareed Zakaria and Dr. Henry Kissinger.

Niall Ferguson is well known to those familiar with the Munk Debates. During the first debate in 2008, he and Charles Krauthammer bested current National Security Council member Samantha Power and the late Richard Holbrooke on the motion: Be it resolved the world is a safer place with a Republican in the White House. That was a very spirited debate. Since 2008, Niall Ferguson has added to his raft of internationally best-selling books with the publication of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and Civilization: The West and the Rest. He holds a variety of prestigious professorships and lectureships everywhere from Oxford University to Harvard University to the London School of Economics. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Niall Ferguson.

Our next debater joins us from Beijing, China, where he is the director of the Center for China in the World Economy at the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing. In many ways his personal biography mirrors China’s rise. His family was displaced by the Cultural Revolution; David has memories of this, although he was only a four-year-old boy. Twenty-eight years later he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is now one of only three academic members of the Monetary Policy Advisory Committee of the Central Bank of China. One indication of the key role that he plays representing a new generation of thought leadership in China is this: David, an economist, has more than three million followers on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

Fareed Zakaria is familiar to many Canadians. He’s the host and the driving force behind CNN’s flagship international affairs program, Fareed Zakaria: GPS. You have also read his column in Time magazine, where he is editor-at-large, and he writes for the Washington Post. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed books The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad and the recently updated Post-American World: Release 2.0. As you will hear during this debate, Fareed is one of today’s most thoughtful and provocative U.S. thinkers on America’s role in the world and the effect of rising international powers. Fareed Zakaria, it is a pleasure to have you here.

Our final debater has played a central role in global affairs for the last half-century. He has been honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize for his public service, and he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is the single individual here today who can interpret China’s rise, given his unique contribution to bringing China back into the community of nations after its Cultural Revolution. And, participating in his first public debate on China or any other subject, he makes history again. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the Munk Debates the 56th secretary of state of the United States, Dr. Henry Kissinger.

Now, let’s briefly run through how the debate will unfold. Each of our debaters will have six minutes for their opening statements to make their case for and against the motion. After the opening statements, we’re going to have our debaters cross-examine each other’s views and opinions, and then we’re going to bring the audience into the conversation. We will have questions from notable people in the audience, which incudes students from the Munk School of Global Affairs, and finally we will have a raft of questions from our own web site, Facebook, and Twitter, which I will weave into the conversation.

So how did the audience vote before coming into this debate? Did you believe the 21st century will belong to China? The numbers are interesting: 39 percent believe the century could be owned by China, 40 percent voted against the motion, and 21 percent are undecided — so, there’s a swing vote in play already.

I am going to call on Niall Ferguson to get us started.

NIALL FERGUSON: Thank you Rudyard, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I believe the 21st century will belong to China because most centuries have belonged to China. The 19th and 20th centuries were the exceptions. Eighteen of the last twenty centuries saw China as, by some margin, the largest economy in the world.

Let me begin with some demographics and economics: China is more of a continent than it is a country. A fifth of humanity lives there. It is forty times the size of Canada. If China were organized like Europe it would have to be divided up into ninety nation-states. Today there are eleven cities in China with a population of more than six million. There’s only one city in Europe with a population of more than six million, and that’s London. There are eleven European Union states with populations of less than six million. In thirty years China’s economy has grown by a factor of very nearly ten, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently projected that it will be the largest economy in the world in five years’ time. It’s already taken over the United States as a manufacturer and as the world’s biggest automobile market. And the demand for cars in China will increase by tenfold in the years to come. China will be using one fifth of all global energy by 2035. It used to be reliant on foreign direct investment, but today, with three trillion dollars of international reserves and a sovereign wealth fund of 200 billion dollars’ worth of assets, China has become the investor.

What’s perhaps most impressive is that China is catching up to other nations in terms of innovation and in terms of education. It’s about to overtake Germany in terms regarding the number of new patents granted, and in a recent survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the educational attainment of fifteen-year-old students in the region of Shanghai came top in mathematical attainment with a score of 600. The United States ranked twenty-fifth with a score of 487. You’ll be glad to hear that Canada got a score of 527. That’s better than the United States, but not good enough.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not easy being a biographer debating against his own subject. It’s a little bit as if James Boswell had to debate against Dr. Johnson. So, what I propose to do in a diplomatic way is to try to show to you that Dr. Kissinger and perhaps Fareed Zakaria are, through no fault of their own, on the wrong side of this debate. Let me quote from Dr. Kissinger’s outstanding new book on the topic of China: “China’s quest for equal partnership with the United States is no longer the outsized claim of a vulnerable country; it is increasingly the reality backed by financial and economic capacities.” Or I could quote from Fareed Zakaria’s excellent book The Post-American World: “China is a country whose scale dwarfs the United States. China is hungry for success.”

It’s fascinating that these two great geopolitical thinkers agree that China’s economic challenge is also a challenge to the hegemony of the United States. Once again let me quote Dr. Kissinger: “An explicit American pro­ject to organize Asia on the basis of containing China or creating a bloc of democratic states for an ideological crusade is unlikely to succeed.” He hopes, as he concludes in his book, for peaceful co-evolution. But he fears a repeat of what happened a hundred years ago when the rise of Germany challenged the predominance of the United Kingdom.

But it’s not just about China for me. The key to China’s dominance during the 21st century ultimately lies in the decline of the West. A financial crisis caused by excessive borrowing and subsidized gambling; a fiscal crisis that means the United States will soon be spending more on debt interest than on defence; a political crisis exemplified by a game of Russian roulette over the U.S. federal debt ceiling; and a moral crisis personified by a legislator named, implausibly, Weiner, sending miscellaneous women pictures of his naked torso. The 21st century will be China’s because an overweight, over-leveraged, oversexed America, not to mention a dysfunctional Europe, are on the slide.

Four decades ago, President Richard Nixon understood this point sooner than most: “Well, you can just stop and think of what would happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland. Good God, there’d be no power in the world that could even . . . I mean, you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system and they will be the leaders of the world.” I salute the achievement of that administration in reopening Sino-American relations in 1972. No one contributed more to that achievement than Henry Kissinger. So I don’t ask you to vote against him, but to vote in favour of his own analysis, which places him and his partner in this debate firmly on the pro side of the debate. I urge you to support the resolution.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Fareed Zakaria, your opening statement, please.

FAREED ZAKARIA: Thank you very much. That’s a hard act to follow. My role in this debate will be to lower the average age of this debating team, and I am going to try and do that as best I can without also lowering the average IQ, which I fear is also going to happen. So bear with me and Henry will correct all the mistakes I make — including, I hope, firing his biographer, which I think should be one of the first steps.

I was actually a little worried about having to debate with Henry because he is a legendary genius, but part of debating is listening to the other side, and I remember a story that was told to me about Henry. It is an example of what journalists call “too good to check,” so I’ve never fact-checked it. The story goes like this: Henry Kissinger, as you know, has a legendary accent and friends of his who are German say, “He has an accent even in German.” Apparently Henry Kissinger has an older brother who speaks Amer...