Tony Blair

Understanding China and Its Role in the World

Tony Blair

Mr. President, Ambassador, everyone, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be with you here at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies. Thank you,Mr. President for such an elegant and beautiful introduction. I hadn’t realized my career path followed that of Confucius. It’s also a great pleasure to be back in Shanghai, a city I visited for the first time over 20 years ago and which is a city that transforms itself every time. I had the great opportunity to visit the Expo yesterday. I saw the Chinese exhibition, which I think was probably the best. I also had the opportunity to see the British one as well, which was very creative, very different. And, of course,we watch everything China does very carefully now in Britain.Because you did the Olympics in 2008 in the other city and we, of course, have the London Olympics in 2012. So, you give us a lot to look up to all the time—you set the standard very, very high for these events.

Now, I’m going to give a short address and then we’ll have time for questions and maybe answers. I’m used to Prime Minister’s question time in the UK, but I hope you’re more polite than the average British Member of Parliament. I’ve got four things—principles, if you like.

The first is: knowledge is understanding. And understanding is the essential condition for relations between China and the West.I spend a lot of time trying to explain China to people in the Westand, occasionally, try to explain the West to people in China. And,to me, the single most important thing I can explain to a Western audience is that if you are in China and you visit Beijing and Shanghai, there is a danger that you think this is China. It’s like when people say, “I’ve been to America, I went to New York and Washington.” It doesn’t mean a great deal really. They’re almost exceptional rather than representative. And what I try to explain to people is that the single most important thing for the Chinese leadership, for the Chinese government, is the development of China, continuing this extraordinary lifting of large numbers of people out of poverty into prosperity—that since 1980 some 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty. That is something that has not happened in the world before, it has happened in China, but there are many people who still need the benefit of moving to a modern industrialized economy with a proper standard of living.

Now, the problem for the West is that China often thinks of itself as a developing nation, and it is a developing nation, but it is also today a world power. And here is my very crude theory of international relations: when people in the West look at a developing nation, they say, “isn’t that nice—that poor developing nation—how can we help?” But when they look at another nation and they say, “that’s a power,” then they say, “what does that mean for us?” And this is the dual situation, China is a developing nation, it is also a power. And so, when as I was asked yesterday by someone, “do people in the West regard China as a threat?” the answer is some, possibly. But for most people in the West, they just ask, “what does it mean?”

And here is where it’s important to understand, to try to personalize this, to give you an understanding of it. When I was at school studying history, the way I studied was the same way that generations before me had studied history. We studied, basically,the history of the West. So I could name you all the kings and queens of England. I could tell you what happened in France in the fifteenth-century. I could tell you about the beginning of America. But if you’d asked me back then to explain something about China, I wouldn’t have known anything. Now, a young person in Great Britain today, if they’re studying history, has to study it completely differently. So, today if you don’t have an understanding of the East, you don’t even have an understanding of history. So, the point is that, the people in the West, the key to understanding their attitude to the rise of China is that it’s mainly curiosity and anxiety, but based on “what does it really mean for me”—how is it going to affect my world. And people in the West have to get used to the concept that power has shifted to the East,because for centuries that was not the issue.

When you come then to the West’s ignorance about China,this ignorance is based on that they look at the power, but not the challenges of development. So they don’t understand that actually if you’re inside China and you’re an ordinary Chinese person,there’s a whole series of issues that mean that you’re at a very different place from say, the average person in the United States of America or Britain. So, the first principle is that knowledge is understanding. The understanding comes from you knowing how someone feels in the West and they knowing the China they see in the Beijing Olympics is not the whole of China. They’ve got to understand that, and they’ve got to internalize it, analyze it, and be able to use it to comprehend what is going on.

The second principle is this: today, we are one global economy. Now, people talk about the global economy and have talked about it for many years. The financial crisis, however, made people realize suddenly that what happened here in China has a dramatic impact on our own economic prospects. Now again, we have been used to thinking that if we want to understand what’s going on in the Western economy, we look at the Federal Reserve,the American budget, we look at Brussels, we look at the European Central Bank. Suddenly, we are aware of the fact that this global economy today is interconnected and interdependent in ways as never before. When we look at our pathway out of the financial crisis, China’s growth is important to you, it’s also important to us. Because, many people in the West would say that,in our own economies it is going to be very difficult, we need to look at the emerging markets and we need them to carry on growing. Likewise, since we are consuming your goods that you are producing, you also need us to be stable economies. So, when the Eurozone crisis about sovereign debt hits the European economy, that matters to you as well as to us. In fact, when we even look at the dollar and the worries about the dollar, that is a worry to the American economy, it’s also a worry to China,holding very large numbers of dollar reserves. So, it is crucial that America is taking the measures necessary to get its economy out of crisis and stabilized for the long term.

This fact that today’s economy is global, this second principle means that if we take measures to close off our economies to each other, either West to China or China to West, that’s going to be very dangerous for us for the future. In other words, this principle has significant policy consequences. It means that we in West, you in China, should be looking at more ways of coming together, of trading with each other, and putting aside any question of protectionism or keeping out each other’s goods in some false belief that somehow if we do that, it’s going to protect the jobs of our people. When we are here in Shanghai, which is obviously one of the great trading cities of the world, the fact is we benefit from you being open and you benefit from us being open, and that’s the way today’s economy is.

The third principle is this:that the future is political partnership based on equality and respect. This again is very hard for us to come to terms with. I mean, we have been used to the idea of America and the Soviet Union, and then America as the sole superpower. Now we have to understand that’s not the way the world can work anymore.

When I was chairman of the G-8, back in 2005, I actually really expanded that to the G-8 +5. So we brought in China, India,Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. But today I would say the G-20 is,in effect, displacing the G-8. And my argument with my colleagues at the time is, “l(fā)ook, we’ve got a simple choice, either we open the door and let china and India and others in or in a few years time we’re going to be knocking on their door. So we have a choice, I think it’s better that we open the door.” That notion of equality and respect is very important because it will matter, for example, in the Copenhagen negotiation on climate change. It is going to be important to realize that the West will have to understand that China must go through this process of development, that we cannot treat China like it’s at the same stage of economic development as the West for the purposes of this agreement.

This concept of mutual respect and a partnership based on equality will apply to issues like climate, security, and global economy. But it’s a concept that we need to really think about in order to make everything work. Because it is easy to say we should have a political partnership. It’s actually very hard to do in circumstances where we still have quite a Western-centric view of what the problems of the world are. So, in relation to issues on security, such as the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have a very particular view. But when it comes to a question like Iran and North Korea, which is very difficult, very challenging, we are going to have to understand that the only thing that will work is if we are approaching this in a genuine spirit of mutual respect and a political partnership based on equality. But it’s a big shift and a big change, and that change causes all sorts of anxieties for people.

One of the things that the Europeans are very worried about at the moment is the “G-2” idea. Every time China says and America says there’s no question of a “G-2,” the Europeans become even more worried. The fact is, the Europeans have a very simple choice in these circumstances: If you want to avoid a “G-2,”whatever people call it, make Europe strong. But if Europe is not strong, it is not coherent and it is not speaking with one voice,these guys are going to be talking with each other and picking up the phone to you as a matter of courtesy. So, “based on equality and mutual respect” is easy to say, it’s actually tough to do,because it requires not just a different attitude West to China, but it also requires within the West itself a different mental attitude.And that has to be, again, internalized and understood.

The fourth principle is this:people to people relations are as important as politician to politician. You know, one of the reasons why I think events like the Beijing Olympics and Shanghai Expo are so important is something I learned a long time ago about politics, which is rather unfortunate if you’re a politician, is that sometimes the things that make a connection with people are things that are not really about what we like to talk about as politics. I used to say to my own political party, understand this,we care about politics every day, we think about politics every day, [but] an average person out there, they don’t think like that.They look at TV every night, if they don’t like a program, they simply change channels. What does make a connection, however,with people is when they start to get an understanding of what makes the other person work. You know, one of the most frequent questions I’m actually asked about China, not by politicians, but by people, is they say, so tell me what they’re interested in? What gets them excited? Well, someone said to me the other day actually: “have the Chinese got a sense of humor?” And it’s a ridiculous question obviously, but it’s a question people wonder,they want to know what makes you laugh.

It’s a sort of strange idea that when you get to talking about how countries get on with each other and understanding being important… understanding is about people to people every bit as much as politician to politician. Now this is where I think, again,an understanding of Chinese culture, art, and tradition is very important. Here’s something that I think the Chinese leadership has started to do over these past years that I think has been very,very important. I remember my very first meeting with President Jiang Zemin back in 1997. I didn’t know what to do or expect at all.I remember getting off the boat and going to the meeting, and there was all the Chinese leadership and I was very nervous. But, I sat down and to my absolute surprise and shock, he started talking to me about Shakespeare. So the Chinese leadership over these past years have been talking about China differently. Last year, when I was here, and everyone was congratulating China on 60 years of the People’s Republic, it is very important for people to understand China didn’t begin 60 years ago. There is whole centuries and centuries and thousands of years rich in history, and when the exhibition was sent about ancient China to London, just a few years back, it made a tremendous impact because then people could go in and see that it’s not a country that’s just begun,it’s a country with this huge history. Now, it embarked on a new chapter of its history, but even this new chapter has many echoes in the past. And, the whole opening up policy was, in fact, in many ways, a recovery of the concept of a China that was open to the world that goes back many, many centuries. So this is important, that people to people, that can be understood; it’s harder sometimes to understand it as politician to politician.

So, those are my four principles with British characteristics that I’ve put before you today, and I think if we keep those thoughts in our minds, we got a chance of making sense of the twenty-first century that is upon us. Just to conclude on this point,every time I come to China, I gain a better understanding, but I’m still aware I have so much more to understand. And if that is my sentiment as someone who is UK Prime Minister for 10 years, who comes to China now very regularly, then multiply that for how most people in the West will look at this. So we’ve got a big task on our hands, and one important thing about this institute is that you, in a sense, are analyzing these questions and they are fundamental in importance because the twenty-first century, I think, will be about whether people of different cultures and backgrounds, races and faiths can coexist peacefully on the basis of understanding or whether they divide themselves from each other by using that race and culture and faith difference as a means of opposing someone who is not like you. And whereas the twentieth-century was a century of fundamental political ideology,I think in many ways those ideological battles between left and right and so on, I think as the century closed, they’ve fallen into a different category. But in a world where people are being pushed together, the danger, if we do not understand each other and through understanding gain respect for each other, is that people see difference as an excuse for opposition and then divide as a result of that. And that will be the source of tension in the modern world and the purpose of dialogue like this is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Thank you very much.

Question 1: Your Excellency, thank you for your wonderful speech. I appreciate your topic about understanding China and its role. I find now there are a lot of misunderstandings between Chinese people and Western people. In March of this year, I visited Great Britain, and I talked with a British scholar who told us that now there is even less understanding of British people to China, even less than 100 years before. In the academic circle,people reach mutual understanding often through misunderstanding. So today the Chinese government and the Chinese people would like to promote our public diplomacy in order to reduce the mutual misunderstanding and promote understanding. So, what in your mind is the major misunderstanding between Chinese people and Western people?And what’s your suggestion to our public diplomacy of China?Thank you.

Blair: First of all, I think probably for ordinary people, there is greater understanding that China has changed and opened up than you might think. I mean, the Beijing Olympics was a very big moment for people, most people would have switched on to China on the Beijing Olympics more than anything else by far.They would have seen a spectacular show but also, you know,Chinese people dressed the same as we dress. These things make a difference. In the old days, people used to think everyone in Beijing rode around on bicycles. So I would say there is probably a greater level of understanding now than before.

To speak of public diplomacy, the thing is this, there will be areas where there is disagreement or where a politician in the West will have to say certain things because that’s what their politics are. You might have a situation like Tibet, human rights,trade policy or any of these issues in which you’re going to have disagreements. I think the public diplomacy has to handle that fact without it every time becoming a crisis. If you take a situation, say the relationships between Britain and America, there are periodic disagreements. You’ve got quite a difficult one at the moment over BP, which is not very easy. But in the end-people sometimes say to me, “is this going to destroy the British-American relationship?” The answer is no. I mean, it’s not. Is it irritating and difficult? Yes. Do we wish it wasn’t happening? Yes. Is it going to destroy our relationship? No. And I think we need to find a language that allows the respect even with the disagreements from time to time.

It’s also important how you phrase your position on certain questions. You see, the policy of “One China” can either sound authoritarian, there is ONE China, or it can sound, “l(fā)ook, we are a country of many, many different parts and ethnicities and so on;actually, as we develop we’ve got to stick together as a country and that’s what ‘One China’ is about, it’s about togetherness.” If you phrase that in that way for people in the West, they say, “oh,ok, I understand.” And when you get a potential secessionist movement in Tibet, which is going to cause real tensions within the whole of the country, and you say—well, I’m just being very frank here because it’s the right place to be it—if you say about the Dali Lama, yes, this is a religious leader, but there’s also a political dimension to that leadership and that political dimension is causing tensions within our concept of togetherness, then people can understand that. Whereas, if it’s just an attack on him, then people say, well, but he looks a nice old guy. So I think the public diplomacy is also about the language, it’s about using the language in a way that allows people in the West to understand. I wouldn’t underestimate the degree to which people in the West can understand this, but it needs to be put in the language they understand. That’s my simple thing. And I would say, don’t let every disagreement be a crisis because it needn’t be. Because in the end the relationship between us is far more important than whatever issues come from time to time.

Question 2:Your Excellency, I’m honored to have the opportunity to ask you a question. I am a volunteer at the Expo and also a student at Fudan University. When I was serving, I once met a British guest and he asked me, what’s your major? I said, my major is Philosophy. Then, he said amazingly, what kind of job can you get? Now, at that time, I felt that the British father and the Chinese father have the same worry if their children choose Philosophy as their major. In your speech you talked about understanding each other, so what do you think of communication between the young people in the two countries?How do you think British young people understand Chinese young people? Thank you.

Blair:That’s a great question-because, you’re absolutely right, this is precisely what I, as a father, would ask my youngster.One of the things I did as Prime Minister was to encourage far greater numbers of students from China to come to the UK and I would like to see the two-way traffic there. I think this is very important, because once you realize that actually a young person in China has got the same interests, the same culture and taste,and you’d be listening to some of the same music, seeing some of the same movies and things. I think once that understanding is there, that makes it a lot easier. So this is why I say people to people is as important as politician to politician and that starts with young people. The young people are far more able to do this.We now have at schools in the UK, just starting really, with kids trying to learn Mandarin. It’s difficult for us. I think that, getting the language barrier, making sure… it should be possible for youngsters to come and spend a year in China and get a real sense of it, it will make a big difference. Anyway, good luck with your Philosophy major.

Question 3:Thank you very much, your Excellency. I am working in this Institute. My question is something about Africa.During the introduction from our President, he said that in the year of the 50s, you have lots of jobs when you begin to know how to run the world and so on. One of the main jobs is something about Africa, and China also has a lot to do, at this moment, in Africa. How do you think European countries, the EU as well as the United Kingdom, and China can cooperate in Africa in the future? Thank you.

Blair:I think it’s a very good question because it’s actually one of the areas where’s there the potential for misunderstanding as well as cooperation. The work I do in Africa is part of a charity that I have which is about putting in teams of young people,usually from the private sector or who have worked in government in the US or UK or Europe. Essentially, we work alongside the presidents of these three countries we’ve started with—Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Liberia, and we work to build capacity. One of the problems these African countries have is that whatever vision the president has, there is no capacity to do anything. So, you can have the money for a healthcare program,but no one can deliver it, so we try to build that capacity. My theory about Africa is that Africa’s problems cannot simply be solved by aid but have to be solved by African governments themselves, making themselves effective and capable, and also through private sector investment.

Now, I think China and the Europeans can learn from each other in respect to Africa. China has gone from nothing to probably becoming the most powerful country actually in Africa over these past 10 years or so. The Europeans are very puzzled about this—and a bit worried about it. They sometimes say to me,well, why has this happened, and I say it is very, very simple.When I talk to the finance minister of Rwanda, he spends 70% of his time negotiating with bureaucrats in the European donor community. So, if they want to do a small agricultural project here,there’s mountains of bureaucracy, he’s got to have endless meetings. The Chinese come along and say what is it we can do to help, and the president says I need to a road from A to B, and the next day someone’s there with a shovel. So that’s the difference.Now, on the other hand, I think, because it is important for resources, for the Chinese economy, but it’s also these long-term relationships that China wants to build. And my view is where China can also learn from the Europeans, is that these long-term relationships have to be stably and soundly based, you know,with countries and governments that will be taking the right measures for the future. In Africa, stabilizing, fulfilling its potential, its people becoming better off, are all in our common interests. Africa will be a major continent in the future, it’s massively rich in resources. We all need those, all of us. They need them to be developed responsibly. They don’t want them to become a source of violence and conflict; they need proper public-private sector investment, whether Chinese or American or European. They need proper systems of government. So, all of this,I think we can cooperate on. But, I think Africa is one area where it has become so clear that the power relationships have changed dramatically in the last few years that the Western people feel,“what’s suddenly happened?” Suddenly, our foreign minister is not at the top of the guest list anymore. I think the thing that the Chinese have understood is that for Africa, infrastructure is the absolute essence. And I think there are things that China coming with a new look at Africa could really teach us, but I also think there are means in which we can both cooperate to mutual benefit and I think it’s very, very important that we do it. Because,otherwise, what will happen is that we’ll get into a kind of competition in respect to Africa that I think will do the Africans no good and us no good either.

Now, my reason for being concerned about Africa is very,very simple. You know, there are just a million people who die preventatively from malaria alone. And I also think that if these countries become failed states, some of them, they will cause security problems for all of us in the future. So, I think there are very good self-interested, very good moral reasons for an approach to Africa that is based exactly on the type of partnership that I’ve been describing.

Question 4:Perhaps not so difficult-thank you, Mr.President. Again, thank you for sharing your time today, your Excellency. So, my question is related to US foreign policy in East Asia. I’m very curious about your perception, your interpretation perhaps, of recent US foreign policy in East Asia. I can be more specific in terms of US government involvement in Google operations in China, an arguably provocative response to the Cheonan incident, and Ms. Clinton’s recent comments about the South China Sea. Thank you.

Blair:You see, I think these fall precisely into the category of what I was talking about, which is that you try to get a situation where you see it from the other person’s perspective. Now, I think and believe that you’ll find a resolution on the Google thing, and,in my view, that’s in everyone’s interests. The simple thing to realize is that even if you have a partnership that’s based on mutual respect and equality, sometimes you perceive your interests differently.

Let me give you a different example. The relationship between Britain and France inside the European Union. Now we are both members of the European Union. We are both strong allies, but, so many disagreements about different aspects of European or transatlantic policy. And people used to say to me sometimes, because we were always having a row about something—it would be the common agricultural policy one day,it would be Europe’s, Britain’s budget rebate another day, it would be something to do with NATO the next. And people would say to me, you’ve got a really bad relationship with Jacques Chirac. And I would say I don’t. Actually, I have a perfectly good relationship, but sometimes our interests are different. So, if you are a French President, the common agricultural policy you support. If you stand up and say as the French President, “I don’t really care about the French farmers,” the next day you’ve got a thousand people with their tractors at your front door. Ok, so you’re not going to say that. Likewise, Britain and its rebate from the European Union budget is like a piece of theology. So, you’re not as British Prime Minister going to go up and say, I’m going to just give that away. If you do that, you know, someone else will be doing the job of Prime Minister next week.

When Hillary Clinton’s comments on the South China Sea or any of these issues that can come up at a moment’s notice, it’s not surprising people look at it from a different perspective, they’ve got their own different interests. I don’t think that’s the thing that really causes the trouble. The thing that causes the trouble is if you end up imagining that disagreement betokens some fundamental desire on the part of the other for supremacy at your expense.Now that is very easy as a fear to have. And again, to use the British-French example, we often fear this about each other, but when we think about it sensibly, we realize we’re actually both in the European Union and so on. So, in fact, Britain and France began the common defense policy of the European Union. In fact,Britain and France actually agreed on aspects of the new European constitution that the French and the Germans couldn’t agree on.So in the end, the ultimate basis of the relationship is a relationship that makes sound, objective sense for both of us.

It’s the same with America and China today. Whatever disagreements you’re having, just think of any of the major global questions: global economic crisis, security threat we face,environment, and climate change. Then think of the issues of the future—we’ve not talked much about those today—I would say food, water, and population are going to be the major questions of the future. None of those questions can be resolved without America and China working together, and Europe too. So when you analyze the fundamentals, the fundamentals mean there is no way in the twenty-first century that America’s going to get the best of China or, actually, the other way around. So, we’ll either decide we’re going to work it out—whatever the issues and whatever the different interests—or we decide that we’re going to stand off from each other and that’s going to be bad and damaging for everyone.

And I think this is my final and concluding point: I believe the fundamentals of this relationship are important, yet it has to be worked on. It can’t just be left to chance. That’s why dialogue like this is important. That’s why you actually need to have an active campaign to get across China’s case in the world. You can’t leave it to chance—there’s too much static and noise out there for these things just to be decided on the basis of whatever’s published in this or that newspaper. It needs to be worked on and it needs to be articulated and it needs to be led. When I saw President Obama shortly before he took over in the US, I said as I left that I would spend as much time on China as anything else. Because ultimately,the future of that relationship is what will determine how the twenty-first century works. So, you need that to be done.Otherwise, these issues will spring up from time to time, whoever knows where they come from. The important thing, however, is to understand the fundamental strategic significance of the partnership and to work for that partnership to be strong and strong enough to overcome any temporary difficulty. If we do that,then my kids will grow up in a safer and better world.

The Rt Hon Tony Blair is the Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. This is the transcript of his speech and Q & A at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) on July 28, 2010.