Speech- George Yeo On China pt2

China and India in that comparison- China is not India. China has a very different sense of itself; its deep internal construction is very different. Superficially there are similarities, as there is between China and the US and China and Europe. But if you look into it's deep construction, it is very different. When we talk about China's future and China in the 21st century, how China will behave in a world community, China's attitudes towards democracy, towards law, towards social justice. It is important first to look into this deep construction because that is their nature. Naturally we should not be deterministic, there is nothing inevitable in human history, but when we understand its nature, it becomes easier to anticipate its moves and you'll be less suprised by its actions.

A few years ago, the Chinese government embarked on a major project which is its dynastic duty- to write the history of the Qing dynasty, the Manchus, from 1368 to 1644. Ever since the Han dynasty, roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire, they developed a historiographic tradition of each dynasty writing the history of the previous period. So Sima Qian of the Later Han wrote of the earlier Han and the entire period before that; then later on they wrote about the Later Han, Jin wrote up the Three Kingdoms; Ming wrote up the Yuan. The Yuan, which was Mongol in its origins wrote up the Sung. Sung wrote up the Tang dynasty which was the Classical Period. The last dynasty, the Qing, collapsed in the Republican Revolution of 1911; this is now 2007. I think in 2003, they embarked on this project, 'The Official History of the Qing dynasty'. When the former Vice Premier Li Lanqing was in Singapore recently, I asked him about it. He said "we told the scholars not to rush this project". I asked him how long it would take to write this history. He said it would take many years, easily 10 years. I said, "have you collected the material?" He said yes. I asked, "external sources?" He said yes, external sources too. All the countries, the Vatican, European countries, the whole lot; all assembled - 24 official histories, this would be the 26th. And Li’s instruction to them was not to be too quick to draw conclusions!

Now Mao Tze Tung was a revolutionary, he was a great revolutionary. He overturned everything before but he knew his history, he read the 24 histories, and not only did he read them, he annotated them. But he wrote with a terrible, illegible scrawl, so scholars had to decipher those scrawls. Then they wrote commentaries on his commentaries and now it's all published. It is very difficult for the Chinese to depart from their own history because it’s the same great plains, the same mountains more or less, the same neighbours more or less and they have seen the same patterns recur. So a long time ago during the Ming dynasty they wrote up the romantic period of the Three Kingdoms. The first line said: "Below heaven, great movements, great currents, long disunity leads to unity and long unity leads to disunity." So they accept as a part of their own deep nature that there are cycles in their civilisation; that they have ups and downs. In recent years, when you visit them, you could sense them feeling their own re-emergence, it’s a bit scary. In the initial years, they were lacking in confidence, they asked many questions, but now they know that there is an organic vitality. It is like an adolescent who watches his own development, and conscious of it. I say scary because for those of us who live on the periphery of that empire, what happens there will radiate its influence on us and eventually, to a greater or lesser degree envelope us.