What inspired you to write this book?
Professor Kishore Mahbubani:
Well, I see a great tragedy coming and it's a completely unnecessary tragedy. This coming geopolitical contest between the United States and China. And the basic message of my book is a very simple one, which is that a geopolitical contest between the United States and China is both inevitable and avoidable. So I try to explain in the main part of my book why it's inevitable and why also the United States should really think very hard and deep before it plunges into this geopolitical contest with China.
What I try to point out in the book is that there are lots of misconceptions that Americans have about their own strengths and about China's weaknesses. It is taken as an ideological certainty that when a thriving democracy takes on a geopolitical struggle against the communist party system, the thriving democracy will always win as it demonstrated in the first world war against the Soviet Union. But then if you dig deeper and you try to understand what is the core situation of American society today and the core situation of Chinese society, you discover that the United States is actually having to deal with some major structural challenges.
One of the key structural challenges is that the average income of the bottom 50% of the American population has been sliding down over a 30-year period. And as I try to analyze in the book, this is not just an accident. This is a result of deep structural forces in American society that have moved America away from being a thriving democracy towards becoming a plutoaucracy.
And by contrast, China in the 30-year period where the average income of the bottom 50% in America has been sliding down, this in the same 30-year period, the bottom 50% in China have had their best 30 years in 3,000 years. So at a time when the Chinese people are experiencing the most amazing improvements in their standard of living, you must remember also for most of Chinese history, the bottom 50% struggle to survive. They would die in famines and civil wars and they had a very rough life and the last 30 years they have access to education, housing, health care, travel in a way they never ever had before in their lives.
So after China has gone through the best 30-year period ever under the Chinese Communist Party, the United States is telling the Chinese people, why don't you get rid of Chinese Communist Party? And the Chinese people are scratching their head and say, "Excuse me, you know, I've had the best 30 years." And the Chinese Communist Party is succeeding because while in theory it is still a Communist Party, it is a Communist Party that is the exact opposite of the Soviet Communist Party because the Soviet Communist Party was run by all apparatchiks.
The Chinese Communist Party may possibly be the most meritocratic political party in the world and the selection process results in the best minds running China today. You met somebody you know you know Wangi Shan you know how brilliant these people are. So by by going into this old ideological reflex and saying hey democracies can always overcome communist parties. The United States hasn't done a deeper analysis and realize that this is not a contest within a democracy and a communist party system.
It's a contest between a plutoaucracy and a meritocracy.
<Johnson>
You talked about it being a party of representation, how that is maintained, whether that is stable. It is still true for the last 30 years.
<Mahbubani>
You see at the end of the day, running China, keeping a country of 1.4 billion together every day is a massive challenge. Which is why for most of Chinese history, China has more often been divided than united. So the periods like what China has experienced in the last 30 years with the strong central government delivering phenomenal improvement in living standards to its people is very rare in Chinese history.
And so if you compare the record in governance of the Chinese Communist Party especially after Deng Xiaoing launched his four modernizations 40 years ago in 1979. It's quite amazing what China has accomplished and the Chinese must always measure the record of their governance not against what other countries have achieved but what has been achieved in Chinese history. And no Chinese government ever in Chinese history has improved the living standards of the Chinese people as much as the Chinese Communist Party has.
And you're right, I call it the Chinese civilization party because the main goal of the Chinese Communist Party is not to promote or to export communist ideology. The main goal of the Chinese Communist Party is to revive Chinese civilization and bring it back to the to the standing and respect that it used to enjoy in the world for over 2,000 years. And the key driving force in the Chinese mind which I think every American should be aware of is that the Chinese are acutely aware that they went through something like maybe 150 years of national humiliation starting from the opium war of 1842 probably you know going up to the Japanese occupation.
So they've gone through a lot of humiliation and their desire therefore is to regain the respect that China used to enjoy and it is somewhat sad that just at the moment when the Chinese people feel that hey we are now finally achieving something meaningful that's the time when America decides to slap China and for them the only thing they remember is you see they're trying to humiliate us again. Well, I think you know the the the reason why I encourage uh Americans to think deeper is that if they look very carefully at the track record of what China is doing and what the Soviet Union is doing?
It is actually quite shocking that in the geopolitical contest today between China and United States instead of China behaving like the Soviet Union it is the United States that's behaving like the Soviet Union because I explain in the book in one chapter I asked can America make U-turns.
So for example the contest between United States and China will not take place in the military sphere. It will be in a nuclear war with the United China. There will not be a winner and a loser. There'll be a loser and loser.
So logically, it should be in the interest of the United States therefore to reduce its defense budget and take the money and invest in R&D because that's where the real contest is. But the United States cannot reduce its defense budget because no matter how brilliant a defense secretary you have whether is Ash Carter or General Matters because the process of deciding where to spend money is locked in by the US Congress and allocations are made to each constituency by the congressman and therefore the defense budget is large, irrational and unnecessary. If the United States was serious about taking on China is to cut his defense budget into half but that's impossible and in that sense it's like the old Soviet Union that also couldn't cut his defense budget.
So in that sense the United States hasn't thought very hard and very deep about how different this contest with China is whereas by contrast the Chinese are quite happy. They're growing their defense budget but at a fixed percentage of their GNP and not increasing it.
And the Chinese are very happy that America has 13 aircraft carrier fleets because each aircraft carrier fleet is draining millions of dollars away from the US Treasury every day. And paradoxically in military terms an aircraft carrier today is a sitting duck. And as an American professor, Tim Cotton of Harvard told me, it just takes a $100,000 hypersonic missile to bring down a billion dollar aircraft carrier. So it doesn't make sense anymore.
So clearly you need to have a fundamental strategic reboot in American thinking. And I'm in that sense, I'm trying to be helpful to America. I say think very hard about what are the big changes you need to make.
