Charlie Rose

Alan Alan  06/30/2008 04:29 AM Report

This is a good interview. Kishore Mahbubani is one of the finest thinkers who understand both East and West, and can articulate his views well. But as usual, it would have been better if the interviewer, Charlie Rose, didnt interrupt and interject so much.

In response to the comment by Linda B:

I think you made several wrong assumptions. Tibet was not a 'country', as you can see from any maps including the most recent period before 1951. It is quite amazing to me, such fact is always lost to Western sympathizers of so-called Free Tibet movement. And they start to echo and accept the rhetoric and idea referring to Tibet as a country, discarding any objective evaluation of what constitute a country by definition.

With regards to Taiwan, you made a biased observation again. Many Chinese look at Taiwan as part of the nation, that is not without reason or due to 'lust'. The present condition of the existence of two different governments is an unfinished business and legacy of the past civil war. Why? Just look at the official name of Taiwan, Republic of China. What is the official map, their territory is whole of China, in fact including some additional areas than the present day PRC. So I think you can appreciate why most Chinese think of Taiwan issue as one awaiting resolution and reunification, similar to West-East Germany, which is undoubtably one nation despite the existance of two governments due to legacy war issues.

And your other comments, regarding currency, etc, I just want to say, Chinese, or any other nations in the world, India etc, they really do not wish to 'beat' or 'defeat' America, or anyone else. They mostly just want to develop, progress, and in fact, emulate the West. I think this man Kishore Mahbubani has spoken about this many times. The West need not fear or be apprehensive. The rise of Asia is good for world stability, as millions of new middle class is created and enter the world. Middle class people would want stability, peace, and predictability. They are also less likely to enter into irrational conflicts or blow themselves up. There is nothing to 'beat' and this is not a zero-sum game.

Alan.

joachim zander  03/01/2008 04:57 AM Report

Firstly: why did you cut the guest's last sentence which to me was the most interesting one of all: his thought about how to engage instead of isolate etc. (the etc.that we weren't able to hear)

and secondly: why does Mr Rose every single time somebody says anything negative about the US has to react immediately with his childish "Yes, but what about the others..." -passing on the however qualified criticism to someone else.

This I consider as immature a behaviour as that of an accused child: ("But Peter did it too, daddy!" -"Maybe, but now we are not talking about Peter, now we are talking about you, son.")

What Mr Mahbubani wanted to talk about was the US arrogance and insecurity, not anybody else's. By reacting the way Mr Rose does in these occasions, the communication about the given issue (not "problem", but "issue" -as the new fashion goes) is impeded.

Please, Mr Rose, something the US in their political communication have to learn more is to listen -so, you as the role-model that you simply are with your job, you should really improve in that, no matter how great your general skills are.

And this does not mean, that you can't talk about the other's weaknesses afterwards, as a clearly seperated next step in the conversation. Just please let go of this habit to react to every accusation with the childlike "But you...!"

Thank you.

Linda Bicksler  02/29/2008 02:08 AM Report

I have watched the Charlie Rose show regularly for some years now and, as a former community journalist, am very often interested by it. Through Rose I feel I am meeting almost first-hand the minds and thoughts of the great people of our world.

As an American born and raised in Taiwan, who lived and taught a couple of years ago in China, I would have been interested to see Rose get very specific with this Singapore leader, after the "arrogant and insecure" charge he made. His viewpoints in fact are quite typical of people in China, and I was surprised to hear how much his view touted conventional Chinese party line.

I was pleased that Rose mentioned the corresponding arrogance and insecurity of the Chinese (which the leader only acknowledged to be true of Chinese toward their "inside" people.) Rose should have asked, "What about Tibet?" -- a country that my Chinese graduate students earnestly explained had been "liberated." (Never mind all the innocents who died and didn't want to be taken over.) Liberated -- the same word we used in Iraq. While I was a little shocked by some Chinese intellectuals' cavalier attitude about our being attacked on 9/11 (the stock-in-trade view was that the U.S., a huge bully of a country, attacking a tiny one like Iraq, was simply "cruel"), I could see their point in part about Iraq -- formed years before any American even thought we had overstepped our bounds. Yet there is no application of that same thinking to the Tien An Men Massacre (which occurred while I was teaching in Taiwan), nor to China's lustful view toward Taiwan, which has operated as a separate country under a diametrically different government (now pretty much democratic), and has been separate (without ANY ties to the mainland) for 50 or more years, until the first flight (at New Year's) a few years ago. My students explained to me that Taiwan was China and had always been part of China. Yet I, having grown up in China, and having visited China before (in the 80's), knew their propogandist education didn't tell the whole story. Taiwan was owned by the Portuguese and the Japanese, and even when no one else wanted Taiwan, China didn't much want it either, seeing it as a place to put bandits and castaways. Only after land reform (which the U.S. helped fund -- and Taiwan repaid the cost of) and systematization (the Japanese built the train system, etc.) leading to an industrial revolution and modernization equalling Japan's, has this tasty, wealthy treat been pursued as an already owned possession.

So, China may not invade Iraq, but they have another scheme going -- pretending that countries that are not theirs are in fact theirs, giving them the right to invade. I say this even though I truly love China. Newsweek recently excerpted President George H.W. Bush's China diary, in which he says, to the Chinese, getting along means doing it their way. At least in the official version, this is what I heard coming through the airwaves and many people's voices (I speak Chinese.) (Even news on China's TV has pretty much one source and one spin -- all anti-U.S. They do watch our movies -- no ratings -- anything can be shown in primetime -- with rabid interest, many convinced that we fascinating but misguided barbarians (especially Bush, whom they dislike with a vengeance) all have guns in our back pocket and witness shootings daily. (They would not believe I had never seen a gun.)

The other thing you should have discussed was our sinking dollar and China's artificially low dollar. This is arrogance personnified. While China has in recent years become very visibly generous in world crises (always being very loud on TV about how much they gave and how little the U.S. gave), my students told me that many peasants in the country live and entire year on 1,000 yuan -- that is, $125 dollars or so. Not only abortions, but the hint of forced abortions and possible infanticide looms as a spectre. See China's POSTED rate of deaths per birth -- neatly four times as high as the U.S., Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong -- and the number may be higher. Many people struggle to find work, and the vast population in the country struggles with the one (sometimes two) child policy, (If there is no boy to carry on the farm or make good, since the daughter becomes part of her husband's family, then a farmer must work until his 70s and 80s, an impossibly hard life). China is right now a land of very rich and very poor -- of a jet set living the high life and owning Mercedes Benz's in Shanghai, but so many just barely making it. There is no social system to provide for poverty, joblessness, or even transfers from one college program to another. The state gives college students three choices of a major and they must choose one of them -- even if they hate all three. Test scores directly determine who gets to be upper and lower class. Those top students recruited to be Communists often do so because party membership (there is but one party) means financial stability for life. When I spent one two-hour class explaining our election and electoral college system, my students were flummoxed. They couldn't believe it. In their system, every university official, every leader in every part of the government -- anybody who is important at all -- is Communist. And there are no elections, not really, representative or otherwise. So the Singapore leader was correct when he said China had a closed system.

China's minds are open economically -- and it is a very narrow opening. It is, how can I make my own life better? @hat advantages can I get for me and mine? I did not see any openness at all when it came to giving. Many students told me, "We're a nation of one-child families, and that has made us selfish." Why would a nation of me-getters, adopting only the pragmatic sides of "free trade" for the most self-aggrandizing of reasons -- why would such a nation -- who gives for reputation's sake and not from the heart (which admittedly is better than no giving at all) -- that makes a public splash but ignores private needs -- why would this nation make a good superpower? They do not yet think like a superpower. They are still thinking, "What is good for US." China has gone hither and yon making pacts with many nations -- when I lived there, it was a pact with Russia -- that they would protect each other's backs -- pacts with South America and India and SO many countries. But the purpose of these pacts was to aggrandize China's interests. With each pact came the question, "Do you believe Taiwan is a province of China?" -- and in such a context, nearly every country answered yes. So, China is engineering and manipulating its own imperalisitc gain and I do ont agree with the Singapore leader that "invading a country" has gone out with the present era and only the U.S. has violated this rule. China still invades countries. In others (such as Burma / Myanmar), it wields power without conquering the government. But many countries, it controls by means of "relationship." I think China has probably manipulated the U.S. more than any other country -- and I think its leaders perceive themselves as very successful in manipulating the U.S. -- in telling it exactly what it wants to hear. The U.S.'s problem is that of underestimating the will, the capacity, and the animosity of China's leadership. All the while we were helping China become a great nation while imagining their potential to US economically, China has been hoarding our dollars, making loans, and keeping a very close, sharkish eye on beating us at our own game, in this economy. All the while we have benefited from cheap labor in many countries (and stateside with undocumented workers), China has been building its own pool of resources, on many fronts. If China is to be feared for a future generation (not yet -- our living standard is just simply SO far ahead of even most Chinese cities, let alone the 200-years-backward countrysides where Americans are still not allowed to travel)-- then it is I think the doing of America -- not of its generosity, but of its carelessness, and perhaps, its greed.

George H.W. Bush was right in saying it is hard to really get to know the Chinese. The westerners I worked alongside (mostly British, but also Australian and South African) noted that EVERY SINGLE TIME a Chinese person invited you to dinner, there was always an ulterior motive -- teach my child English, start a school. It was never just simply to get to know one another. It was pragmatic. The Chinese liked Bill Clinton because he, too, was outwardly smiling and friendly, and inwardly nonresentful and pragmatic. They believe he voiced a strong opinion that China owned Taiwan, and they continually quote that. (I'm not at all sure he meant what they said he meant.)

I love the Chinese people. But, I also love America, and fair is fair. Three things America has done wrong: isolated itself from the world linguistically and culturally (in China, I felt I continuously ran into all kinds of languages and cultures); failed to recognize how much the world is aware of America's every action, how closely it is watching us; and, as the Singapore leader said, believed that having been an unreachable superpower, it would always remain light-years ahead of everyone else economically -- that no other country was even capable of ever catching up. China has a long history and along memory -- and it can afford to wait. It has enough people to wait it out. It knows it will not beat America tomorrow, but it is satisfied with 50 or 100 years from now -- if that long. Meanwhile, Americans can barely think past this week.

Beyond simply math and science, America needs to train its people to survive in a global culture -- mandating langguages in a way that they would be seriously learned, expanding educational opportunities overseas to much larger numbers, pushing international business and economics courses as much as pure math/science, and somehow incorporating into high school courses a more comprehensive treatment of the world's history (not just America's, the Holocaust or ancient countries such as Greece or Rome.) Simply pushing education as it is, isn't enough. The whole format of education needs to be changed from "Americanism" to "global-ism." But most Americans in podunk USA are not prepared to think that way. I think the press could help by covering world news. I was shocked, upon first working at the Arizona Republic, a major metro daily, to see almost no world news. It was explained to me that Americans cared almost entirely about local news.

Thanks for the good work you do.

Linda Bicksler

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