Understanding China, Understanding Australia
A very warm congratulation to the Post-Pandemic China-Australia Economic Forum. It’s high time that we got together and plan for the next step of our cooperation. CIIDS is very pleased to be a partner of this forum.
To me, it’s so nice to be back in Melbourne after 36 years. Thirty-six years ago, I was sent as an intern by the Chinese Foreign Ministry to New Zealand. At that time, there was no direct flight between China and New Zealand and all passengers had to go to Sydney for transit. It was my first trip overseas, first time to fly actually. Somehow my flight was diverted to Melbourne that day. So Melbourne was the first foreign city I’ve ever been to beyond China.
At the same time, another intern of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, a good friend of mine, was sent to Africa. I wrote to him as soon as I arrived in Wellington, proudly describing to him how beautiful Australia was, and New Zealand of course; and how much I was impressed, overwhelmed actually, by their beauty and prosperity. The sky was so blue and water so clean. More than 30 years later, my friend told me that he still kept the letter and still remembered how much he had envied me when he was reading my letter, and hoping one day he could be as lucky as I was and be posted to New Zealand or even to Australia. This small dream of his came true last year in a brilliant way--he is now China’s ambassador to Australia, His Excellency Xiao Qian.
We were barely over 20 then, young and ambitious, eager to serve our country and hoping that one day China could be as prosperous and beautiful as Australia. But we were not sure how many years it would take to realize this dream because the gap between China and Australia at that time was just huge. We certainly couldn’t have anticipated that China’s economic development would be so phenomenal over the next four decades and the economic ties between China and Australia so close. When I came to Melbourne 36 years ago, there were only one or two flights each week between China and Australia, and it was all Qantas, nothing Chinese, not to mention the safe and comfortable China Southern Airlines which I took yesterday. Now, before the pandemic, there were 158 flights between the two countries every week. The flight that took me to Melbourne 36 years ago was full, but it had only three Chinese passengers on it, me with a Chinese couple, then newly appointed Chinese Ambassador to Australia Zhang Zai and his wife. Now, before the Covid, there were almost 1.5 million Chinese tourists coming to Australia every year. Thirty-six years ago, there was only a handful of Chinese students in Australia. Now, there are more than 200,000, and for every three international students in Australia, one is from China. And large quantity of Australian mineral and agricultural products are exported to China. With China as the largest trading partner of Australia, our two countries have become a community of shared interests already, highly complementary, and highly interdependent, in a good way. Australia has contributed to the reform and opening-up and the economic and social development of China over the past 40 years, and China has also contributed to the continued prosperity of Australia. We have grown up together. These are the sweetest memories in the history of our bilateral relations. It’s something we all hold very dear to our hearts. To borrow a cliche, our two countries have 1000 reasons to continue that friendship and cooperation, not a single reason to enter into confrontation.
Looking into the post-pandemic China-Australia economic relations, we have to confess that there are still some uncertainties. We have to deal with them carefully. From the economic perspective, there exist enormous opportunities for China-Australia cooperation. China has embarked on a new journey of modernization with high-quality development and higher-level opening-up as the essential requirements. And that includes institutional opening-up, which means foreign companies will be participating in the Chinese economy in a more predictable and legally-guaranteed manner. The International Monetary Fund predicted that China will continue to be the No.1 engine of global economic growth in the next 5 years, with the contribution standing at 22.6% of global growth (twice as much as that of the US). The middle-class population of China stands at 400 million today and is projected to double in the next 10-15 years. A local think tank in Sydney predicted that the purchasing power of China in the coming decade will be larger than the total of the US, Japan, India and Indonesia combined. There will be enormous trade and investment opportunities for Australia. The Chinese economy is resilient, dynamic with huge potential and looks good in the long run. Decoupling or so-call de-risking and suppression will create difficulties for China’s development but will not be able to disrupt or delay China’s peaceful rise. China is growing and will continue to grow in a big way. Anyone who ignores the new opportunities brought by China’s high-quality development and higher-level opening-up will be bound to lose the No. 1 market of the world.
As Mr Zheng Bijian, CIIDS founder and father of China’s peaceful rise doctrine has pointed out, China is committed to a peaceful rise and expects to rise peacefully together with all developing countries, and at the same time expect the developed countries to redevelop peacefully. To this end, we must build convergence and communities of shared interests with all countries and regions including Australia. This is the choice and firm commitment of China. This choice has been proven by the overall win-win cooperation of our two countries over the past 5 decades and has been reconfirmed by the ripples in our relations in recent years from the reverse side. China and Australia should make this choice because it’s the only choice we can make.
To expand convergence and community of shared interests, we need honestly seek to understand each other. Unfortunately this is where we have the largest deficit---“Understanding Deficit”.
Before I came here, I had a chat with a few European and American friends. They are all new in China, about one year or so. And they all have a similar experience: the China they see with their own eyes is vastly different from what they read or heard about before they came to China.
Before they came to China, what they read in Western newspapers was a China with authoritarian rule: people were tightly controlled, no freedom, no human rights, no democracy, no nothing! People were living a miserable life.
When they come to China, they find there the sky is blue, the water is clean, just like what I found out in Australia 36 years ago. The priorities of the Chinese people are no different from those of the Europeans or Americans: they all want better job and higher pay and to give their families a decent living. In many ways, it’s almost the same as Europe or America, a normal society, and in some respects better. You feel very safe in China. There is no district of a city that you are afraid of going to because of racism or public safety problem. And the people are very nice, extra nice to foreigners. And they are a very peaceful people: the so-called assertive or aggressive actions of China are in fact mostly reactions to provocations from outside. China is not at all the kind of place that they read about in Western media.
Then they began to rethink: maybe the Chinese have their own reasons to govern the country in their own way. Maybe there is a reason for the Chinese people to insist on having their own system and way of development. Besides, they do not export their system and do not threaten anyone. They just want to live a better life and you can’t blame them for that. And they are ready to share with others. We could well co-exist with the Chinese and live in harmony while allowing for differences. We could very well develop together, rather than enter into confrontation with one another.
These Europeans and Americans I have mentioned are highly internationalized -- diplomats, senior executives or scholars. If these well-travelled people are so limited in their understanding of China, what can we expect from other people? We all agree that it’s an honest estimate that at least 80% of the Westerners know little about China. Maybe it’s more or less the same in Australia.
This is what I mean by “Understanding Deficit”. This is why CIIDS initiated Understanding China Conference ten years ago, inviting global political, academic and business leaders to have direct dialogues with Chinese leaders every year. Mr Paul Keating and Mr Kevin Rudd have participated several times. Over the years, this conference has become one of the most influential platforms for understanding China’s development strategy.
The Australian political and business leaders and elites present here today are most welcome to join us in this grand undertaking. Economic and trade links are the cornerstones in the bilateral relations and can help stabilize and improve the overall relationship. What you say and what you do will have an important bearing on reducing the Understanding Deficit and improving Understanding of China and Australia. I’m sure that, with a better mutual understanding, Australian statesmen and elites have enough wisdom to properly handle the Australia-China relations and make choices that are in the best interests of Australia, China and the world under the ever-changing new historic conditions. This is also, I believe, why today’s forum matters.
I wish this forum a complete success!