RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Kishore Mahbubani, thank you for coming to Toronto to be part of this debate. It’s a real honour to have you here.
KISHORE MAHBUBANI: My pleasure.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Let’s jump right in and get your thoughts as to why, at this particular moment, tensions between China and the United States have reached this almost frenetic level over trade. What’s going on?
KISHORE MAHBUBANI: Well, it’s one of those events that could have been completely predicted in advance. It was inevitable. It was going to happen at some point in time because throughout history, the geopolitics of the time is driven by the relationship between the world’s number-one power, which today is the United States, and the world’s number-one emerging power, which today is China. And it’s always at the point when the world’s number-one emerging power is about to become bigger than the world’s number-one power that tensions escalate.
So, it was going to happen at some point or another, and you can never tell exactly how it’s going to happen, when it’s going to happen — which is why I’m actually writing a book on U.S.-China relations this year. But what caused it to happen this year was, in part, the presidency of Donald Trump, who’s got rather strange views on trade — he would not pass an Economics 101 exam on trade — and yet, despite this, everybody supports him. The only issue in America where Donald Trump gets broad bipartisan support is the stand he’s taking against China on trade.
And clearly the Chinese have made some strategic mistakes in the way that they’ve handled the United States and American businessmen, and so to some extent they’re paying a price for this too. But at the end of the day, the real issue is not trade; the real issue is something deeper. So even if the trade issue is solved today, tomorrow, or whenever, the dispute between the U.S. and China will escalate in the coming decades.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: We’re going to talk about the liberal international order tonight, which is a somewhat loaded phrase, especially because of the word “liberal” that’s stuck in there. How do you interpret the liberal international order? What are its liberal characteristics?
KISHORE MAHBUBANI: Well, you know, I have two advantages in terms of understanding the liberal international order. First, I’ve served as Singapore’s ambassador to the U.N. for over ten years, so I have first-hand experience with how the heart of the liberal international order, which is the United Nations, works.
But the more important, second advantage is that I was born into an illiberal international order. It was in 1948 that I was born in Singapore. Singapore was a British colony and, basically, I wasn’t even born a citizen; I was born a British “subject,” but more truthfully a British “object.”
So there’s a contrast with what preceded 1945, when you had in a sense a few dominant states, the colonial states, running most of the world, making decisions for most of the world in a completely arbitrary fashion with no rules whatsoever. Which is why 1945, especially with the signing of the U.N. Charter, marks a watershed moment in world history, because suddenly it is decided that from now on people can determine their own futures. The Charter delegitimized colonialism, it delegitimized foreign intervention, and it created the notion of sovereignty. And I think that’s one pillar of what the liberal international order is: you decide your own future.
The second pillar of the liberal international order is what I call the rules. And progressively, through the U.N., through other multilateral institutions, we have accumulated lots of rules on what countries can and cannot do. And the surprising thing about our world is that, most of the time, most countries obey these rules. And that’s why, for example, if you look back before 1945, wars between states were very common. In an instant, countries would go to war. But progressively, interstate wars have become a sunset industry, and the chance of a human being dying in an interstate war today is the lowest it’s ever been.
So these are the two big advances that have been made by the liberal international order: it’s allowed the people to determine their own futures, and it’s created a set of rules that all countries follow. And therefore, it’s a liberal order.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I thought you quite provocatively and rightly, in an essay for Harper’s Magazine, flagged the fact that, when it comes to understanding the impacts of two different models of economic leadership — China’s versus the United States’ — China might have a pretty good story to tell in terms of their record of economic accomplishment in contrast to the picture in the United States of stagnant wages, stagnant incomes, and growing economic inequality. Do you see part of this debate going on right now as a debate between two different economic orders? Or is there a consensus as to what the global economic order should be?
KISHORE MAHBUBANI: I think there’s nothing wrong with the American economic system, but something has gone fundamentally wrong in the American political system, because the political system acted as a kind of adjudicator to ensure that, as economic growth happened, you would distribute the fruits more or less equitably.
But one of the most shocking things about the United States is that, for reasons that we still don’t understand fully, it’s the only major developed country where the average income of the bottom 50 percent — let me repeat that: five-zero percent — has gone down over a thirty-year period. So, something has gone wrong in the balance of the society and how you allocate the fruits of economic growth.
Another shocking statistic I have in my book Has the West Lost It? is that two-thirds of American family households don’t have $500 in emergency cash. So that’s another thing that’s gone wrong. It’s not the economic system; the economy is growing. But how do you distribute the fruits? This is where fundamental issues of taxation come in.
And one of the points I’m going to make about the U.S.-China conflict is that what’s happened is that the major American political institutions have in a sense been seized or taken over by big money, which influences the institutions’ decisions. So, the capacity of government to act as an impartial referee and umpire to redistribute the fruits of economic growth has gone. And as a result, vast numbers of Americans are now suffering. And that also explains the anger that led to the election of Donald Trump.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Stepping back and thinking about some of the arguments that your opponents will put forward tonight, one of them obviously will be that China has given up on economic liberalization, that it is fundamentally an authoritarian regime that is a threat to democracy and to a capital-l Liberal vision of the liberal international order. Do you feel that’s a fair criticism of what’s happened in China?
KISHORE MAHBUBANI: I would say one has to make a fundamental distinction between the liberal international order and the liberal domestic order. And China clearly does not belong to the category of liberal domestic order. But there’s no fundamental contradiction with a country that is non-democratic, like China, behaving according to the rules of the liberal international order.
A lot of confusion is created fundamentally by the word “liberal.” I’m going to quote just two scholars in the international relations field. I just asked John Mearsheimer, the leading realist thinker in America, “John, can I quote you as saying that America is a bigger threat to the liberal international order than China?” He said, “Kishore, go ahead.” So, I have his permission.
And then look at the recent statement that John Ikenberry made. Ikenberry is probably the leading writer on liberal international order issues. And he said, “I never thought I would see the day when the liberal international order would be killed — not by murder but by suicide.” It is the proponents of the liberal international order, the United States, who are the primary killers of the order because the United States is walking away from its constraining rules.
So, the paradox we have in the world today is that China is not a democracy and America is, but it’s a democracy that is a bigger threat to the liberal international order than a non-democracy.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Just to push that line of questioning a little bit further, it is interesting to see the extent to which, at least in the Western media, we are fed a steady diet of news about China’s authoritarian sins of omission and commission — whether it’s the internment of large numbers of their Uyghur population, or the seeming adoption of a mass system of state surveillance. Are we interpreting the world through the thought categories of the past? Have we gone back to a kind of Cold War mythology — or maybe even pre–Cold War, maybe a World War II mythology — that this is somehow not just a struggle about trade but a struggle for democracy against an evil, as some people would characterize it, authoritarian regime?
KISHORE MAHBUBANI: Here’s the strange thing about Western media and thinkers becoming progressively more and more negative about China’s track record in the past few decades: If you ask the Chinese people what, in their opinion, have been the best thirty years for their country in the past 3,000 years, since Chinese history began, they will say the last thirty years. Because you’ve seen this dramatic removal of poverty, 800 million people rescued from absolute poverty.
When I first went to China in 1980, people couldn’t choose where to live, where to work, what to wear, where to study. And certainly, no Chinese citizen could travel overseas. That was close to forty years ago. Now if you go to China, you see that people can choose where to live, where to work, what to wear, where to study. And amazingly enough for a Communist gulag state — a country like the Soviet Union, which allowed zero tourists — each year 134 million Chinese leave freely and travel overseas.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: And guess what? They come back.
KISHORE MAHBUBANI: An amazing 134 million Chinese — who could choose to stay overseas — return to China freely. If you believe that voting with your feet is a very powerful voting mechanism, these people are saying, “I love this country. It’s been good for me.” And why is that so?
And so I think the fundamental problem in Western perceptions of China is that their minds have become trapped in an artificial time bubble of two hundred years of Western domination of world history, which is coming to an end, and therefore they are unable to enter into other thought bubbles that exist within very different worldviews.
From the Chinese point of view, one clear lesson from 2,200 years of continuous Chinese history is that when the centre is weak, the people suffer; when the centre is strong, people benefit. So strong leaders like Xi Jinping are popular in China. People like him. Their lives are better.
So how is it that a country like the United States of America, which has a population of 300 million-plus — one-quarter of the Chinese population — and a political history that is only one-tenth as long, how is it that this nouveau riche who just arrived on the political scene is saying, “I know what’s best for you, China. And even though you’ve had 2,000 years of history, you don’t know what’s good for yourselves”?
And I think that at some point in time, if you’re a Chinese leader you have to understand and live within your own political culture. And there are tremendous constraints in running China — because each day that China stays together, with 1.4 billion people working together, is a miracle. It’s incredibly hard work. It requires a kind of governance which is not, by the way, completely top-down; it requires an understanding of what the people can accept, will not accept, and so on and so forth.
Because if 1.4 billion people decide to rise up, no government can stop them. And so this is the Chinese political dynamic that is operating. And those of us who live outside should not presume that we know better than the Chinese what is good for them.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Final question: you come from Singapore; you’ve represented Singapore as a diplomat; you lived there. This debate is originating out of Canada. What should smaller countries, like Canada and Singapore, do to thrive — let’s hope — but maybe simply survive the clash of these two big global powers? Where is our advantage, if any, in this scenario? Or, frankly, is this going to be just an exceedingly difficult period geopolitically for middle powers?
KISHORE MAHBUBANI: I think the first thing we should remember is the wisdom contained in an old Sri Lankan proverb, which says: “When elephants fight, the grass suffers. When elephants make love, the grass also suffers.” So, whether or not the global powers fight or make love, we’re going to get into trouble.
It’s important for us, number one, to figure out what kind of environment is the best for constraining these great powers. And fortunately for us, this is where the liberal international order is so important. The United Nations has created all kinds of rules that in a sense act like constraining nets on these superpowers.
One thing that Canada and Singapore should do together, in a common interest we have, is to strengthen the United Nations as much as possible. I remember when I was ambassador to the U.N., and trying to strengthen its rules and treaties and so forth, I found that Canada was one of the strongest partners we could work with because Canada also deeply believed in multilateralism — although you went through a phase where, to my surprise, you actually walked away from multilateralism, and I was very puzzled because that doesn’t serve Canada’s national interests. But I’m glad you’re coming back to the position that you used to hold.
So I think the one thing we need to do is to realize that the post-1945 rule space, the liberal international order, is a huge gift and asset for small and medium-sized states, and we should work together to strengthen it as much as possible, knowing full well that the big powers in their own way will try to reduce it — especially, unfortunately, the United States. And in fact the conclusion of my book Has the West Lost It? is that the best way for the United States to constrain the future China is to use U.N. rules. They will be a more effective net than anything else.