China in a Changing World
This session is part of Buxton Battle of Ideas festival. Find out more here.
This year, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its centenary – next year it will become the longest serving communist government in history. A communist party that has risen from a peasant economy just 30 years ago is now scheduled to overtake the US economy by 2028. A country that was just 10 per cent urban in the mid-1970s is today 62 per cent urban.
China is a country riddled with contradictions. It is a place of dynamism and restraint, space stations and rickshaws. China’s increasingly authoritarian state is introducing labour laws to protect workers’ rights. It is a country where coronavirus seems to have originated, but which now has one of the lowest Covid-19 fatality rates in the world. China is both an environmental pariah state and the world environmental leader in solar, wind, and battery technology. On top of all of that, China is also a modern society where 120million people still live on less than one dollar a day.
Recent fears of Huawei’s influence on the West’s 5G networks, its intrusive social-credit system that monitors its entire population, its profiteering reach into Africa and East Asia and recent concerns that the Chinese government is meddling in UK universities all suggest that there are issues to be contend with. That said, it is also true that China invests in the Developing World and its social-credit system is the envy of cyber and national-security experts. Indeed, the UK university sector, for example, would probably not survive without tens of thousands of fee-paying Chinese students.
As China continues to develop, is it becoming an ally or a threat? Likewise, as America retreats on the global stage, will China step into the void? And as the UK removes itself from the EU, do we have to do business with a one-party state? How can we understand China’s contradictory emergence into the twenty-first century, and what are the positive and negative implications of this arrival for education, business, culture and global power relations?
