by Ned K.
While Hilary Clinton’s visit to Adelaide in November was headline news,
there was no news coverage of the visit to Adelaide of Professor Tiejun Wen
from The University of China.
Professor Wen is, among other roles,
a member of the State Consultant Committees of Environment Protection and also
Ministry of Trade Affairs. He was guest speaker of the University of Adelaide
and Confucius Institute of the University of Adelaide.
While the focus of Clinton and the ALP
leaders with her was the naval military capacity of Port Tech near Port
Adelaide, Professor Wen’s focus was sustainability, overcoming inequality and
environmental sustainability in China. Quite a contrast.
When asked what the most important
issue is for the Chinese government and people today, he said without
hesitation “peace”. He was critical of western press reports that China was
expanding militarily; pointing out that the US has 47% of the world’s total
military expenditure.
He said the western big powers should
really look at themselves before accusing China of military expansionism. As an
example he took the audience back to the 1930’s Depression and crisis of
overproduction and asked, “How did the West recover from this? By World War 2”!
He then contrasted the response of
China to an overproduction problem at the turn of the 21st century.
Their response was a massive economic stimulus to their economy in western and
north eastern China, an economy which had by then become the industrial
workshop of the world, rather than by resorting to military solutions.
No matter what people in the West
think of China, Professor Wen said, they have a mutual interest with the
Chinese people in maintain world peace.
Building an ecological and sustainable civilisation
He said that the new Chinese
leadership at the 18th Party Congress had committed to the task
of turning China in to an ecologically sustainable civilisation. However, at
the same time it needed to maintain an economic growth rate of at least 7% a
year to prevent mass unemployment among young people. He said this was no easy
task, and China was extremely vulnerable economically because it still had
heavy reliance on oil imports from politically unstable regions of the world, in
particular the Middle East.
The question of corruption
During the session, he was asked
about the origins of bribery and corruption within the Chinese political
leadership and how, if not addressed, this would undermine or even destroy the
goal of building an ecologically stable civilisation.
He was very frank about this subject.
He traced its origins to the growth of financial capital markets in China
in the early 1990s, and the fact that the central government in China has only
50% of government budget revenue overall in China, with the balance of 50% lying
with regional governments.
He posed the question to the audience
of whether the growth of financial markets in China in the 1990’s was a
mistake. He answered by saying in one sense ‘yes’, because of the corruption
problem in the country at high levels now.
Seeing the world through Chinese eyes
Everyone in the West has their own
view about China and what China should or should not be doing. However
listening to how they see themselves and their place in the world at this time
is a worthwhile exercise.
That this visit by Professor Wen and
what he had to say received so little attention by the media or
politicians here really says it all about Australia’s subservience to the US. On
this point Keating is right, Australia needs to become an independent country
regarding its place in the world, especially in relation to Asia and China.
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