¶ Intro / Opening
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Never before in human history, ever we had two powers of the size, the scale and reach of United States and China confronting each other in the way that they are today. China has become a tiger.
Kishur Mahpubani, diplomat academic who has seen the rise of China from his native Singapore. You said, what's happening now is like the Cold War, only America now is behaving as the Soviet Union was. It's a very unflattering comparison.
The goal on my writings is not to say that China should win or United States should win. Is to say that China and US should step back and reflect whether it is in their interests to engage in such a zero sum contest.
From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. By now you've probably seen a fair amount of news emerge out of Beijing, the pictures of that summit between Donald Trump and China's Shi Jinping. It's important because face to face, one to one meetings like that don't happen very often, and yet there's a much bigger story to tell than that of these two men or
any two leaders of these two countries. Actually, the real story is an epic tale, one that has been unfolding for about thirty years, and it's about supremacy, a battle to be the world's number one power, which is why we wanted to dive into the US and China for
this weekend. The story beyond the handshake, the read out the truths, and we thought we should discover it through the perspective of someone who's neither American nor Chinese, someone who has witnessed the rise of China and its relationship with the United States from a country that is tiny in comparison, Singapore. It's Kishore Mahbubani, who was for three decades a Singaporean diplomat, rising to become its ambassador at
the United Nations. He's from Singapore's minority Indian community, and although I've known him for years, I never realized the circumstances in which he grew up in the nineteen fifties and sixties, how hard life was in Singapore at that time. He's written many books, but his most recent is called Living the Asian Century. It's also his most personal. As you listen, you might well want more on the people, the places, the most moments in time we talk about.
And for that context, have a look at Bloomberg dot Com Forward slash Michelle, because that's where you'll find this episode in written form, with my reflections and the pictures that add to the story. So here's Keshoor Malbubani in his own words, talking first about why the US and China matters so much right now.
It is by far the most important contests of our time.
¶ "The most important contest of our time"Contact The Mishal Husain Show mishalshow@bloomberg.net
And I think what most people don't realize is that never before in human history have we had two powers of the size, the scale and reach of United States and China confronting each other in the way that they are today. Because the United States is a remarkably powerful country, much more powerful than any other great power has been
in human history. And of course, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States was left alone as the sole superpower in the world, and few expected China to come up so quickly. But now China has clearly achieved near parity with the United States in the scope and scale of its power too. And therefore you notice when President Trump launched his tariff wars on all the countries in the world, only one country stood up to the United States, and that was China.
In this contest. Then do you see it as bigger than the economics of it, the desire on the part of the United States to maintain its position as the world's biggest economy. Are you talking about powers something broader than that, a quest to become the world's only superpower.
Well, you know, Joe politics has been around for about two thousand years or so, and so so there are certain habits of behavior that all great powers share in common. And the number one power of the time always wants to preserve his number one position and not give it up gracefully and say, Okay, my turn is up, why don't you take over. It's not like in the world of business, where IBM will give way to another company,
for example. But in Joe politics is a zero sum game, sadly, and so even though Washington, DC today is a very badly divided capital politically, but when it comes to China, there's a near universal consensus that it is in the interests of the United States to stop the rise of China.
¶ "It's not about personalities"
And that's why the actions against China remain consistent whether or not you have President Trump or President Joe Biden makes no difference. It's not about personalities, it's about the logic of geopolitics.
And would you say that that is a foolish desire to stop the rise of China, because this is the way the world is going, that China is on a path to become the dominant economic power and the demography is on its side.
Well, no, I would say it's not wise policy of
¶ "China can no longer be stopped"
the United States to stop the rise of China, because China can no longer be stopped. And the only way to stop China is to ask the Chinese government to stop improving the livelihood of his own people. Right, That's the only way that China will stop growing. But China still has a long way to go. It's per capita income is way behind that of the United States. There's a long way to go. So clearly the Chinese people want to improve their lives, and the Chinese economy will
keep growing. Of course, there'll be ups and downs like in any other economy, but equally importantly, and this is the key point. We live now today in a small, interdependent, fragile planet Earth, and our overall priority as humanity should be to try and preserve planet Earth before we lose it to climate change and other forces. So there is
¶ US versus China: It's a "zero-sum" game
afore a larger imperative need for the US and China to collaborate to deal with many common challenges in the world, rather than to engage in a zero sum game with each other. I've used a different analogy in a former book of mine, The Great Convergence, saying that the world has shrunk, the one hundred and ninety three countries are no longer one hundred and ninety three separate boats. The one hundred ninety three countries and hundre ninety three separate
cabins on the same vote. If your cabin on the same board, there's no point protecting your cabin if the boat is sinking. So therefore there's a common interest for us in China to come together and take care of the planet Earth, because that's far more important than whatever you gained to make in this Joe political game or one up mentioned.
Take me back to nineteen ninety three and a moment between the two countries that you saw for yourself as a Singaporean diplomat at the Apex Summit of that year. What did you see and why did it matter?
¶ Bill Clinton's first meeting with Jiang Zemin
Well, this was the first meeting. Ever, within the new President of the United States, then Bill Clinton, and the leader of China, Changsa Men. And you may recall that in the nineteen ninety two election, Bill Clinton famously stood out from H. W. Bush by saying, unlike President Bush, I will not coddle the butchers of Beijing. So there was a lot of tension in the air wondering whether or not Bill Clinton would launch an attack on President Chunkstermin.
And indeed, President Chunksirmin himself was a bit nervous because when he read out his own speech, he read it so fast that the Taiwanese delegates said to him, slow down, the interpreters cannot follow you. So there was a lot of nervousness in the air. And amidst all this nervousness, when we had a short break for coffee, the first
person President Bill Clinton approach was President Chunksirmin. And I saw with my own eyes Bill Clinton coddling Chunkstermin in a way that he said that he would never do. Because that so it was quite a remarkable and everyone in the room noticed it was watching incredible sort of relief and happiness that what could have been a painful confrontational meeting turned out to be a really remarkable breakthrough in US China relations.
And the Butcher of Beijing reference was one to Tianeman Square a few years before.
Exactly. He was referring to what happened in Tienanmen Square in nineteen eighty nine.
And what did that moment which you witnessed then lead to? What did it unlock in the years ahead?
Well, I think it enabled the renormalization of US China relations, because, as you know, Tienanmun set the China relationship back quite badly. And as you know before then, of course, during the Cold War, because the United States needed China as a counterweight against the Soviet Union, the United States would always be and over backwards to accommodate China. And I can
tell you an even more horrifying story. In nineteen eighty one, there was something called the International Conference on Cambodia, where there was a disagreement between China and the Asian countries about whether or not the government of Paul Pot should be allowed to go back to Nompen after the Vietnamese troops left Cambodia, and China took the correct position under international law, which is that when a foreign invader leaves,
Pallpot comes back. But Asian countries said, no, this cannot happen because no country will accept the return of Paulpot. And fortunately the United States intervene. So we thought the United States would of course cite the Asian countries who were calling for free elections. Instead, to our absolute horror, the United States said, don't stand up with China. We need China for our sending up the Soviet Union. So that was one of the most amazing things I saw
in my life. But that showed you how far we had come between nineteen eighty one, where China is being accommodated all the time, to the end of the Cold War, and then China was suddenly an irrelevant partner then.
But while saying that neither country should be treating it as the contest that they are, I think overall you're much more critical of US policy towards China than the other way around, aren't you. I read that you said
¶ Cold War Comparisons
that what's happening now is like the Cold War, only America now is behaving as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. That when the Soviet Union behaved unilaterally ignored international opinion, and that was the time when America acted multilaterally and marshall global opinion to its side. It's a very unflattering comparison.
Well, that has been made by other scholars to that in the contests between the United States and Soviet Union, American society was flourishing, but Soviet society wasn't flourishing. But today, in the contest between the United States and China, the bottom fifty percent of the American population, they haven't seen this standard of living improve in several decades. And indeed, as you know, the indicators of people at the bottom
are very bad in the United States. And therefore the logical thing for United States to do is to first focus on uplifting its people rather than to try to engage in a zero sum jeopolitical contests with China. But I can tell you in Joe politics, unfortunately common sense doesn't work because this desire to be number one is so somehow the deeply ingrain into the human brain. That's
very hard to persuade the policymakers. Hey step back and think, what is a better approach to take the goal of my writings is not to say that China should win or United States should win. The goal of my writings is to say that China and US should step back and reflect whether it is in their larger long term interests to engage in such a zero sum contests.
And the standard of living of the Chinese population has risen immeasurably in recent decades. There are, of course, though, rights that they do not enjoy compared to Americans' freedom of expression, the right to choose their own leaders.
Well, you're right, I mean, China has rescued eight hundred million people are of poverty. That's two and a half to three times the population of United States, and that's
an amazing achievement. The Chinese don't enjoy many of the rights that Americans enjoy, But Chinese society has got its own political DNA, which has been embedded in the Chinese society only for three thousand years, and over three thousand years, the big lesson that the Chinese people have learned is that when there's chaos in the center, in the capital, the people suffer. But when there's political stability and control
in the center, the people prosper and flourish. And when people say that the Chinese people are not free, I ask a very simple question. The Chinese people are not free? Why is it? Over one hundred and thirty million Chinese people leave China each year and then, amazingly, using their own two feet, returned to China every year. Now, if China was this harsh, dark communist gula that is portrayed in the Anglo Saxon media, the Chinese people are irrational.
They shouldn't be restarted in China. But the Chinese who are returning to China are the ones who have experienced life overseas. So China, to put it simply, is a different civilization from Western civilization. So the kinds of society that the Chinese people want at the end of the day will be different from Western society. And that's something that we got to learn to live with in the new multi civilizational world.
I hear what you're saying, and I'm also at the same time thinking of the evidence that emerged a few years ago about those re education camps in western China in Sinjiang Province, where Chinese Muslims were detained, some as young as in their teens right up to people in their seventies because the state felt they needed re educating about their beliefs.
Well, there's no question that China's internal arrangements are not the same as those of Western society. But you know, when the West raises concerns about the Muslims in China, the one comment that the rest of the world makes is that in general, the West doesn't like Muslims. In general, the West doesn't like Chinese, but for some strange reason, they love Chinese Muslims, and it's because it's a political
tool to be used to embarrass China. Unfortunately, that political tool no longer works because they're all world is saying. If you in the West are so concerned about the conditions of Muslims who are oppress, what have you said about Gaza? What have you done about Gaza.
You have seen international relations through your work as a Singaporean diplomat over many years, But I want to ask
¶ Growing up in Singapore in the 1950s
you about your life story too, because I think you have lived history in a really interesting way in that you came of age in Singapore just at the moment as it was getting its independence from Malaysia after British
colonial rule had come to an end. And when I read your book Living the Asian Century, I was really struck by the hardship that your family experienced, and that you experienced that when you started school in nineteen fifty four, you were seriously underweight and you had to be put on a special feeding program in school.
Well, looking back now, this is a strange thing to say. I feel that it was almost a privilege to have grown up in a poor Third world society. And you're right. I was put in a special feeding program at the age of six because I was technically under nourish, and I lived in a house with no flush toilet until I was thirteen years old. One of the biggest changes in my life was when the flush toilet appeared, because I felt that my sense of dignity improved dramatically. And
also my family was very poor. My father went to jail, the debt collectors came to our house to try and auction off the furniture in our house. So I went through a very rough Third World childhood. My mother was
¶ "My mother never cracked"
the one who took the brunt of all the pain and difficulties, and not one did she crack. And every time in my life I go through a difficult patch and when I feel depressed, I just think of my mother and I say, my mother never cracked under much greater pressure, how can I ever crack? So that resilience that my mother gave me was an amazing gift in my life.
She had had a narrow escape from communal violence in what is now Pakistan at the independence of India nineteen forty seven. Your father had obviously had a very difficult early life, sent from what was then British India to Singapore and starting to work manual labor at the age of thirteen.
Yes, both my parents, none of them ever went to university or not even to high school or even secondary school by the way, And my father, unfortunately it was often at a very young age, and at the age of thirteen, was sent to the British colony in Singapore and ended up quite naturally without adult supervision, engaged in several bad habits like smoking and drinking and gambling. And so my mother, who had an arranged marriage, had no idea that she was marrying an alcoholic gambler, and that,
of course was the root of our problems. And my mother too, as you said, had a close shave because she was in a train leaving Pakistan in the middle of the night in the desert when her last compartment got decoupled and if a mob had come along, she would have been killed, but she survived. So I guess our family has had lots of close shaves.
Yeah, But as you say, in Singapore too, when you were growing up, it was a poor neighborhood. Few of your peers even finished school, let alone went to university. And that description in your book of living without a toilet, it's so striking compared to what Singapore is today that each morning the night soil men went around the neighborhood.
They opened a small door in the wall of every house, pulled out a metal can filled with twenty four hours worth of feces and urine from the occupants of the house.
The sights and smells of that experience never go away. But what's amazing is that Singapores per capita income and independence was around five hundred dollars, the same as Ghanai in West Africa. But today Singapore per capita income is ninety four thousand dollars, among the highest in the world, and no country in the world has gone from five hundred dollars per capita the ninety four thousand per capita
in sixty years, or less than one human lifetime. Now that's one of the most remarkable stories of human history. And again that's been one of my great privileges to travel this remarkable journey upwards with my fellow Singaporeans.
It didn't feel that way in nineteen sixty five, did it. I think you were seventeen, still in school. Singapore left the federation it was in with Malaysia, and there's a sense of despondency everywhere about how it can possibly survive on its own.
Well, I remember the day vividly, August nine, nineteen sixty five, when Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian Federation, and no one in Singapore celebrated our independence because we thought Singapore was doomed. And there was a simple reason why Singapore
was doomed, because Singapore was a city. And when a city is cut off from his hinterland, which Malaysia was the hinterland for Singapore, he can die like taking a heart out of a body and expecting the heart to survive without the supply of blood and other materials to the heart. So we was a very difficult time and no one expected Singapore to succeed in the way he did. But of course their success was due to three remarkable jeoepolitical geniuses Lei Kwan Yu, Gokeng Swi and Raja Utnam.
One of the greatest privileges in my life is that I got to work with all three of them, and they were probably the three best tutors I ever had in my life.
Not just in diplomacy, broader than that.
Much much broader. They were big, deep thinkers, and all three of them took a long range view of history. So the reason why Singapore was economically successful, of course, mister le Kwan, you played a very important role, but the economic architect of Singapore's miracle was doctor Goking Sui. And when I sat with him, he would tell me about how the Japanese succeeded, what happened in the Meiji Reformation, the lessons that Japanese learned from the rest of the world,
and how Singapore must try to emulate Japan and therefore succeed. So, I mean, his understanding of history was amazing.
You know. I interviewed Li Kwan new once I was really early in my career. I was in Singapore and the BBC sent me to interview him, and he was perfectly civil but I think he probably felt quite insulted that someone so junior had been sent to talk to him, the senior minister and founding father of Singapore.
But mister Le Kwan Yu was acutely aware that you were with BBC, and he knew that by talking to you that he would get his views and opinions to a very large section of the human population, and so he would have been happy to talk to you.
Tell me, then, in this picture that you've painted of rising China a rise that can't be stopped. It is a country that, in its own way, has these moments where it destabilizes neighbors, for example, closing airspace around South Korea's borders, as has been the case recently, doing things that upset or worry the Philippines or Taiwan, of course Japan at times. How do these states in the region, including Singapore, fair in that Asian order.
Well, I think we have to understand that China's rice has been remarkable and dramatic. And to explain how dramatic it is, just imagine when you and I began this
¶ "China has become a tiger"
conversation a few minutes ago, there was a cat sitting next to me, and suddenly, after fifteen minutes or twenty minutes, I turned around. I noticed a cat has become a tiger. Now I was very comfortable living sitting next to a cat. I'm very uncomfortable sitting next to a tiger. Now China has become a tiger. You have to accept that it is now the second most powerful country in the world and still rising strongly, and so we have to learn to live with a much stronger power in our neighborhood.
And the idea that any power can be benevolent, the term benevolent great power is an oxymoron. All great powers will protect their interests. The neighbors of China therefore have to adjust to Chinese power. But this doesn't mean you cow tao to Chinese power, but you learn to manage it. I can tell you that the neighbors of China also
have long histories. And to give you an example, the last country with whom China had a major war was Vietnam, and in nineteen seventy nine, about a million soldiers were fighting each other in that war, and the Vietnamese were occupied by China for one thousand years. Right, but the Vietnamese have an expression, a very important expression. They say that become a leader of Vietnam, you must be able to stand up to China and you must be able to get along with China. And if you cannot do both,
you cannot be a leader of Vietnam. So countries in this region therefore are pragmatically adjusting to the emergence of China. But I can tell you in our private conversations, we do tell the Chinese, quite frankly, what our concerns are, and they do listen to the concerns. But the important thing is that remember that we are in Asia. In Asia, you must always save the face of the person you're
talking to. Please don't insult China publicly in the way that European leaders do, in the way that American leaders do, because that's not how you get to work with China.
Well, in many countries, many leaders are learning that that's also the way you work with President Trump.
Well, President Trump is definitely different from his predecessors. But I also have to emphasize that all American presidents put American interests first over the interests of other countries. That's just a fact of life. And for example, when I was in the UN in two thousand and three, so many countries Advice President George W. Bush not to go
to war in Iraq. So many countries, including some of the best friends of the United States, including France, including Germany, including Egypt, including Saudi Arabia, And you know, United States didn't listen. So it is not the case that you had American presidents in the past who would sacrifice American interests. No, they won't. And this is a reality when dealing with great powers.
So what do you think are the implications of these weeks of war with Iran? What do you think is the effect of this on China? Is there a reshaping that is taking place whereas now going to take place because of the war with Iran.
Well, I've said this to my American friends several times, and it's also the theme of my book. As China won.
¶ US war is a "gift" to China
Every war that the United States fights, especially in the Middle East, is a gift to China. So in the ten years when the United States was bogged in Iraq after the illegal invasion of Iraq by President GEORSH. W. Bush, China had its fastest growing years. It was left to grow peacefully from twenty three to twenty thirteen. So in the same way, if the United States gets bogged down and another war in Iran. Again, it buys time for China.
And this is the difference between Chinese leaders and American leaders, is that Chinese leaders, as Henry Kissinger told me, always work out a comprehensive long term strategy before embarking on a venture. And the Chinese do have a comprehensive long term strategy for managing the challenge that the United States
is posing to China. By contrast, the leaders of the United States, and if I don't mean Republicans only, by the way, it's both Democrats and Republicans have not work out an equally comprehensive long term strategy for managing the
return of China as a great power. And I try to be helpful to both sides by saying, why don't you stay a step back and understand the other side, Because, as Sunsu said, the Chinese strategists, no thine cell, no thine enemy, fight a thousand battles, win a thousand battles.
But Chinese leaders can act that way because they don't have to ever deal with an election.
That's true, but in the Cold War, a democratic United States that had elections every four years defeated the authoritarian Soviet Union, so the constant elections in America were in no way a handicap. In fact, as the architect of the success of the United States in the Cold War was a man called George Cannon, whom I met once. And George Cannon said way back in nineteen forty nine that the outcome of the Coal War would be determined not by the number of bullets or warships, or aircraft
carriers or jet fighters you have. You'll depend at the end of the day, which society creates a spiritual vitality that leads to his people flourishing and growing. So if George Kennon were alive today, he would advise the United States, don't try to get more aircraft carriers. Try to focus on improving the livelihood or the bottom fifty percent of American people. And if you succeed in doing that, that's how you win the long term contests against China.
Professor Kishour and Mabubarani, thank you so much, pleasure, thank you for having me. And that's where we left the conversation. By the way, this time the notes in my written version go from polpot and Cambodia to Singapore on that Independence Day that Kishaw remembers so well. Plus there's fact checking on the statistics that came up. You'll find it all at Bloomberg dot Com, Forward slash, michell and so to.
The team producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martineu, with guest booking by Elan Byrd, social media by Alex Morgan, and production assistance by Jennifer Seeley. Our music is by Bart Walshaw, audio mixing was by Richard Ward, and this time our video producer was Megan Olsen. The executive producer is Louisa Lewis, and at Bloomberg Weekend, Brendan Francis Neunham is director of Audio and Special Projects, and our executive editor is Catherine Bell. Until the next time you join us, goodbye,