China, Taiwan: One Future? Which Future?

Introduction for Dialogue
"China, Taiwan:  One Future?  Which Future?"
3 May 2000

Tonight, rather than a single speaker, we have two speakers.  One, Rowan Callick, is an award-winning journalist:  one of those, who, as the phrase goes, write the first draft of history.  The other, Dr Thomas Bartlett, is an academic specialising in Chinese history:  something which has gone through more drafts than just about any other history.

There is a great deal of fashionable boosting of China about:  all that stuff about if current trends continue then China will be the largest economy in the world by 2000-and-whatever.

But it was a mere 10 years ago people were talking about the Japanese challenge to American economic hegemony:  predictions which now look incredibly sad.

Trends are the result of the interaction of institutions, people and circumstances.  If we look more carefully at institutional structures, much of that China-boosting looks very hollow.

After, what is the greatest riddle of human history?  Is it why Europe and European-descended societies came to dominate the globe?  Or why China did not?  China apparently had everything going for it -- numbers, culture, technology, institutional complexity.  A Ming Dynasty Admiral, Zheng He, reached Mogadishu (in what is now Somalia) and Mombasa (in what is now Kenya) with a fleet of about 300 ships and 28,000 men 77 years before Vasco da Gama, coming the other way, went to India with 4 small ships and 171 men.  The enormous force of a mighty empire achieved far less of lasting significance than the tiny expedition of a small kingdom on the periphery of Europe.  The failure of China is as least as much a subject for thoughtful consideration as the success of Europe.

China is presently attempting a form of the capitalist road to economic development while being ruled by a regime whose mandate to rule rests on transcending and abolishing capitalism.

So we have a Great Power whose path to modernisation fundamentally undermines the legitimacy of the ruling regime.  We have been here before:  Imperial Germany before the First World War, Imperial Japan before the Pacific War.  They are not reassuring antecedents.  And China is geographically closer to us than Japan:  less than an hour's flight by missile.

Meanwhile, on 20 May, the first peaceful transfer of power in Chinese history will take place when Chen Shui-bian will be sworn in as President of what is still officially the Republic of China in Taipei on the island of Taiwan.

Our two speakers tonight are very well qualified to speak of these events of hope and portents of danger.

Rowan Callick has recently returned from being the Hong Kong-based Greater China Correspondent of The Australian Financial Review for almost four years.  He is the author of Comrades & Capitalists:  Hong Kong Since the Handover.  He has won the Graham Perkin Award of Australian Journalist of the Year, for 1995 and the Walkley Award for Coverage of Asia, for 1997.

Dr Thomas Bartlett was born in London to American parents, and was educated at Harvard, National Taiwan and Princeton Universities.  He was Director of the Chinese Language Teaching Programme at Harvard from 1989 to 1994 before moving to John Hopkins and then on to La Trobe in 1996, where his wife also teaches.  His doctoral dissertation was on late Imperial Political Thought.