first part<\/a>\u00a0of this interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\nGREGOIRE ROOS (GR): Isn\u2019t one of China\u2019s foremost strengths its ability to think on the very long term (2049 for that matter) and deploy a strategy accordingly, when the West (US and Europe alike) only thinks with the horizon of the next big election in mind? Whether we like it or not, China has a vision (think about the One Belt One Road Initiative, or the thought of Chairman Xi, which has been inscribed into the doctrine and the constitution of the Chinese communist party, for the first time since Mao and Deng). Do empires (China, Russia\u2026) have a competitive advantage in today\u2019s world?
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NIALL FERGUSON (NF): Well, empire is a difficult word to use in the 21st century. It\u2019s somehow become disgraced. In reality, both China and Russia are what I call \u201cempire-States\u201d [War of the World (2006)]. In the course of the 20th century, some empires (land-empires, sea-empires\u2026) were able to morph into Nation-States. That happened in Russia\u2019s case because the Soviet Union substantially homogenised the Russian Empire. And although the USSR collapsed in 1991, the Russian Federation is still a large part of what was the Russian Empire. As regards China, they are still somehow conditioned by centuries of empire, as they\u2019ve only been a Republic since the 20th century. So we\u2019re dealing here with these hybrid entities that really have the scale of empires but act like Nation-States. The Chinese will tell you that they have nothing to do with the Western concept of empire, expanding and conquering territory the way we wicked Westerners did. But that is obviously nonsense, because just look at Western China, look at the treatment of Tibet: the current territory of the PRC actually reflects substantial territorial expansion, including expansion in the Qing era. So the first thing is to disregard what the Chinese say about their own History, as it\u2019s nearly all propaganda. They are now embarking on a new phase of overseas expansion, which is unusual in Chinese history because it involves large-scale investments not only in other parts of Asia, but also in Africa and Europe. They\u2018re now investing all around the world and the One Belt One Road has become a kind of grab bag of different initiatives of varying degrees of economic rationality. And I think, having seen this playbook used before (it\u2019s quite a lot like the British and French playbook in the 19th century), we can predict with reasonable certainty that as China acquires assets in Africa and elsewhere it will acquire, whether it likes it or not, security obligations, because it will end up having to protect those assets from confiscation or just local insecurity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GR: The West should now expect China\u2019s overseas presence in military terms to grow, and China\u2019s navy will sure range further afield when Beijing has successfully developed a full network of ports that extend across the Indian Ocean.
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NF: Yes, all of this seems like a pretty predictable sequence of events. And it will also turn out to cost the Chinese more than they expect and to be less profitable than they hope. That seems like a pretty likely bet to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GR: Doesn\u2019t sound like an advantageous expansion\u2026
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NF: I don\u2019t know really. I mean in the end empire only makes sense if you can get resources more efficiently and cheaply through your expanded network of conquests than you would on the open market. In the end copper is for sale. You don\u2019t need to own Zambia to get the copper, you need to pay the price. Empire only makes sense here if you think you\u2019re going to get the copper more securely and more cheaply through some form of control. Most of History would suggest that at some point the cost of empire will outweigh the benefits, and that you would probably be better off buying your stuff on the open market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GR: But there is indeed something no empire in History has ever been able to master as deeply and opportunistically as China is today, it is technology. With the democratisation of the Internet and new technologies, many predicted that digital technologies would lead to a redistribution of power, to the benefit of society and the ordinary citizen and at the expense of the government. This has actually turned out to be true\u2026 but only in the West. For in China, new technologies have actually enabled the Party to increase its control over the population and double down on authoritarianism 2.0\u2026
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NF: Yes, I think that\u2019s right. These are the same people who predicted that the Internet would be great for democracy and terrible for dictators and then said the exact opposite in the space of less than 10 years. I wish I had that kind of flexibility. As far as I can see, the point about technology is that it doesn\u2019t really have a strong political preference; the technology can be used by both democracies and authoritarian regimes. Democratic movements probably made more effective use of the technology in the early 2000s, and now you see the authoritarians getting the hang of it, and China in particular. Totalitarianism (which I think would be a better word than authoritarianism) \u201c2.0\u201d as you say, with the Internet, with 24\/7 surveillance, with facial recognition, with AI, promises to be a more effective totalitarianism than the first edition, which \u201cjust\u201d tapped your telephone or had the secret police bug your room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GR: It\u2019s kind of beyond Orwell\u2026
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NF: It definitely is beyond Orwell, where China now has got to. And I think most people are rather appalled at the prospect of a one-party State having that kind of power, or to be more accurate that kind of knowledge about its citizens, with almost no constraints, no restrictions. I remain, however, very sceptical of the proposition that totalitarianism will win, because even AI-enabled totalitarianism still has the fundamental defect that all totalitarianism has, namely that it restricts the individual freedoms too much to be bearable, and also too much to be really efficient and optimal. The excess of centralisation of power in Xi Xinping\u2019s hands is bound to go wrong at some point, just as the excess of centralisation of power in Vladimir Putin\u2019s hands is not going very well for Russia. Because mistakes are actually much more likely to be made without the constraints of accountable Government than with them. So I think we shouldn\u2019t worry too much. The fact that the Chinese Government spends so much on keeping its own people under surveillance suggests that it\u2019s very afraid of them, that it doesn\u2019t really have a deep legitimacy and that it is therefore quite weak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GR: So just as Paul Samuelson exaggerated the Soviet challenge by asserting in 1961 that the Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States by 1997\u2026?
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NF: Precisely so! I think we\u2019re probably exaggerating the Chinese challenge today or what you called earlier China\u2019s political competitive advantage. Not in economic terms of course, because I think that\u2019s real; but in terms of the viability of totalitarianism. Ultimately, even with AI, they are bound to fail, because it is fundamentally impossible for a fifth of humanity to be governed indefinitely by a single party, with a single leader, who\u2019s not really accountable to the law or to the people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
GR: One could argue that a few more years of Xi\u2019s rule under such conditions would be enough for Beijing to become a global, almost unrivalled, economic, military, diplomatic and perhaps even cultural superpower\u2026
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NF: I think yes, they will certainly become a near equal of the United States, at least on economic terms. Conceivably, they can become a near equal of the US on military terms, although that would take longer. I think in intellectual terms, they stand no chance of catching up with the West, because anybody who watches Chinese cinema or listens to Chinese music or reads Chinese literature can tell you it is a far less creative system than that of the free societies in the West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GR: Talking of intellectual power, do the populism-fuelled victories of Brexit and Donald Trump mark the end of dialectic as a driver of political progress and collective wisdom?
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NF: Well when anybody mentions the dialectic I tend to turn to Hegel\u2026 I think we are still inclined to progress from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, much as Hegel suggested. And this is especially true in our adversarial political systems. And so we had the thesis which was globalisation, which seemed awesome, and then we had the financial crisis which suggested that perhaps it was not entirely awesome; and populism would become the antithesis. I believe the dialectic will continue with this progressive response to populism, which essentially says, \u201cActually, some parts of globalisation, especially the migration, were fine\u201d. So I think we\u2019re still trapped in that kind of a process, as long as we have adversarial politics; even with multiple parties, it feels like the discussion goes pretty much in the Hegelian way. I\u2019m lucky to have been born and raised in Scotland, and to have been given a pretty good old-fashioned education that equipped me to think critically about historical processes, and to try to understand the present and future by looking back and seeing its connections to the past. Moving to the US was a conscious attempt on my part to understand better what was happening there, which I didn\u2019t think I could do sitting in Oxford. And I\u2019ve spent quite some time thinking about American empire in the Bush years, thinking about American degeneration in the Obama years and think now about American populism and social networks in the Trump years. It\u2019s never boring. And I\u2019m happy to say that as long as we are a free society, it will never be static. There\u2019s perhaps still a lot to be pessimistic about, but I will always tend to bet on the countries with the maximum individual liberty, because it\u2019s from that freedom that innovation comes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n