The round-table conference 'CHINA AND THE WORLD: CHANGING REALITY AND SHARED FUTURE' was held online sucessufully on 31st July 2020, which was co-organized by the Institute for a Community with Shared Future (ICSF) from China, the Centre For New Inclusive Asia (CNIA) from Malaysia, and The Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute (DOC Research Institute) from Germany. Experts and reserchers from China, Germany, Malaysia, the UK, the US, Singapore, South Africa and etc. shared their perceptions and ideas with rational arguments from multi-perspectives towards the transforming world situation under both the COVID-19 pandemic and the tension of China-US relation, and then discussed solutions to expect a promising shared future for the whole humankind. The article below was compiled from some expert's speech on the conference. --Eds
Professor Kerry Brown
Director of Lau China Institute of King’s College London
Associate Fellow of Chatham House in Royal Institute of International Relations
Topic: Moving Forward: Post COVID-19 Geopolitics:
How the World will Need to Manage Duality and Avoid Conflict
Thank you very much. It's a great honor to be here today. And I'm sorry, I can't be with you in Beijing. So I'll talk for seven or eight minutes about some of the issues that have been talked about for. And very grateful to the co-organizers, a particularly communications university, for inviting me to speak. I guess I'll say 4 things. The 1st is the kind of meaning of COVID-19. The 2nd of practical issues around the kind of disagreements. Why are they happening? The 3rd is really about what is most unhappy and 4th we're gonna be about structures.
So I guess COVID-19 has meant many things. We're still obviously in the middle of it. Now the economic impact has been pretty brutal. China seems to be dealing with that economic impact effectively. The impact on the United States has been quite huge. The same with Europe and the same with the United Kingdom. So I suppose the most you can say at the moment is that everyone has found this. Very, very few have been able to deal with this issue.In fact, I think there have been no winners or losers. I think this has been a moment where we should all be quite humble. That seems a very obvious conclusion and no one has really showed that they have an effective system to deal with this enormous problem. I suppose the sort of thing that probably it has really shown to look at the practical issues, I think that we knew, but I think that they have become much more severe, a fundamental lack of trust. And we have to understand and think why that is because of our misunderstandings, because of our wish to misunderstand, you can misunderstand sincerely. Or you can deliberately misunderstand. And that's a very different kind of problem.
The 2nd is, I think, a lack of consensus, partly about what China means to Europe and America, partly about what our values are to ourselves that's in China. And it's in Europe and America, we talk about values, the kind of huge work of what those values really mean. And there is a lack of consensus. I've been going for what where we come, where we're standing, where we actually stand on certain things. I think this is obviously being very disorienting.
I suppose the final thing, although it's talked about in the previous book, and I think that it referred to this some issues of language, I suppose underneath that language is the lack of common purpose. What is the world we're building that has been built so far, I guess in sort of post well, more water as clearly, it entered a period of great challenges and questions. I suppose we now sort of faced with this issue of what is the kind of common purpose that we all have, we can say the words. But what we really mean, I suppose before moving to the kind of 3rd area about the practical areas, I would like to probably offer like one approach. I think we probably start our discussion of dialogue further than we need to. I think we start with this assumption that we need to have common values. We need to have a common idea of a common vision. I think that there has been a perpetual cause of problems. I think actually, we don't need common ideals. We don't need common values. But we do need a commitment to live with each other. I think if we go beyond that step and we're not pragmatic, we're going to have very, very serious problems.Our problems are partly because our partnership show that our ideals not shared on, our common vision is not shared. But also I think they show that we have maybe structural issues about our own values. And I again, this applies to everyone. As I say, this is a sort of standpoint where there are no winners or losers. This is kind of just being very pragmatic, may be pessimistic realist. That's my position. A pessimistic realist. If we've tried for a long long time and I was reading the work this morning from 1710, kind of stating almost sort of over 300 years before about the ideals towards China and the kind of desire for the confusion system that prevailed them to, then become a Christian system. We were kind of being tripped up by our values now, kind of ideals.So maybe we can try a fundamentally different approach where the ideals can be put aside. And we just basically focus on very, very practical, measurable things that we all in different ways feel, even if our interpretation of them may differ.
So I think those are three areas. One, very obviously, as public health, we have seen that manifested in the current issue. We do have common purpose on public health. We obviously have a common challenge. The second is climate change. And what is sustainable for our planet. It is not helped, obviously, by the divisions in some political environments, particularly United States. It is important to recognize sustainability for the planet is something in everyone's interest unless we're all nihilists, which I don't think is the mainstream view. I suppose third, which is probably a richer area to think about, discusses human well being. And a common language for that is helpful. I think we can recognize that the Chinese government's contribution to well-being, for its people, has been a significant one. And that's something that needs to be recognized. We should also recognize that there are now more complex issues of human well-being and post capitalist societies, the postmodern societies, about mental health issues around human well-being that are not easy to address, and that arise from inequalities and fundamental injustices in all of our societies. And that we need to honestly recognize those. So those three areas of health, climate change, and well-being give us, I think, a pretty non space to talk to each other without getting stuck in our kind of different list of philosophy and value systems, and whether they frame these.
The final thing, I suppose I'll address just quickly is this issue structures. If you were to arrive from another planet here, you would look at the situation. Now you would see to at least parties, the United States and China, who do not get off. And you would not want to mediate by making one side agree with the other. That's not gonna happen. They tried. And it's just not happened. You would obviously not advise those two powers then fight like hell with each other. You would say that they needed some management structures where everyone could engage in at least making a kind of administrative or a government system. They are both involved and they're both engaged. So this kind of structure, or I suppose a divine, a kind of dual track world, is a very urgent one.
How's it work? One of the mechanisms by which is gonna be created, these are the things that I think we need to talk about. Because those practical issues, I think we can talk about the underpinning visions in which we're driving to. We'll have to leave that to a future, maybe a happy day, but not at the moment. Thank you very much.
The Speaker: Kerry Brown