Professor, you said a lot of wonderful things about China, and surely they're doing a lot of things right.
But how do you reconcile the fact that to make it work for China, it seems to be based on a high level of repression?
Environmental destruction, censorship, a certain ideological stubbornness.
I mean, we've spoken about Hong Kong, the Uighurs.
How do you reconcile that, and do you think that's tolerable?
Thank you. I'm really glad you asked that question, because your question captured very well the Anglo-Saxon media's perception of China.
And I would suggest to you, very bluntly, that it's a distorted perspective of reality.
Let's take the first word you use, repression.
If the Communist Party of China only relied on repression to stay in power, it would not create the most dynamic economy in the world, right?
It is by far the most dynamic economy in the world.
It has delivered the fastest growing economy for 30 years.
And it has done this by educating the Chinese people to a level and extent that the Chinese people have never been educated ever before.
And you say it's repression? You obviously are taking the old Cold War mindset.
I was in Moscow in 1976, and I saw repression in Moscow.
And when I was in Moscow, the Soviet citizens were not allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union. That's repression.
In the year 2019, 139 million Chinese left China freely.
Guess what? Zero defectors. 139 million Chinese, right?
That's twice the population of the UK, went back to China.
So all your description, when you say environmental degradation,
China's climate change policies are far more responsible than those of the United States,
which has not once, but twice withdrawn from global environmental protocols.
Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration left eight years.
Paris Accords, Trump administration left four years.
And you know what? The reason why we're having climate change today is not because of new flows of greenhouse gas emissions from China and India.
It's because of what the Western countries have put in the atmosphere since the Western Industrial Revolution.
Get the data. The single largest contributor, cumulatively, right?
It's number one, United States, number two, Europe, number three, China, right?
And the West wants China to pay an economic price for the current flows,
but the West doesn't want to pay an economic price for what it put in the atmosphere.
You want to deprive the Indians of electricity when the United States could just, by the way,
if the United States could impose a dollar a gallon tax, that would save the world.
Cut down gasoline consumption, raise money for investment in green technology, simple solutions.
And by contrast, the largest reforestation program in the world is carried out by China.
It has already reforested an area the size of Belgium or bigger, right?
So all your descriptions capture the natural distortions of China that you get in the Anglo-Saxon media,
which violate the rules of the Enlightenment, which say that you must be rational, calm and objective,
especially in understanding your adversary.
And if the Chinese were as stupid and as incompetent as you describe them to be, don't worry about them.
But I can assure you, you are now dealing with a far more intelligent and rational actor
that doesn't fit any of the Anglo-Saxon categories that you applied to them.
Please forgive my bluntness.
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