6 November 2026
CEVRO University, Prague
It’s good to be here in the Czech Republic and in Prague. This is my first time here, and I say that with some degree of personal regret, for the simple reason that I am a student of history.
I understand the history of Czechia, the early history of Czechoslovakia, and the complex history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I understand that from which you have evolved over many complex centuries.
Having sat with your President this morning in Prague Castle and reflected for a moment on the history of this extraordinary country, the imprint of history is deep and broad and wide here in this great city.
Xi Jinping and the direction of Chinese politics
I’ve now been a student of China for 50 years. I began as a junior woodchuck at university in Australia, studying Chinese language and history, and then became a foreign service guy.
I first went to live and work in China in 1984. I’ve seen a lot of changes since then. I’ve seen China rise. I’ve seen China’s challenges, its difficulties and its self-transformation.
I’m an active student of the Chinese Communist Party. I’ve been an active student of Chinese Communist Party ideology through this period, for the simple reason that, in Marxist countries, ideology becomes very much the code language in which the regime speaks to itself.
If you study ideology carefully, the ideological debates and conclusions of the Chinese system form what I would describe as the headwaters of change. They are then often translated into strategy, then into policy, and then into changes in behaviour.
That is why I made a particular study of the ideational foundations of Xi Jinping’s China. That, of course, is why I went back to university at the tender age of 59 to do a DPhil at Jesus College on the question of Xi Jinping’s ideological worldview.
So what is that worldview? Let me put it into three phrases to try to make sense of Xi Jinping’s China.
Number one: on Chinese politics, Xi Jinping reached a decision around 2013, not long after coming to power, that he needed to move the centre of gravity of Chinese politics towards the Leninist left. I’ll explain what that means in a minute.
On the economy, around 2017, he reached a decision to move the centre of gravity of Chinese economic policy towards the Marxist left.
And throughout his time in power, what we see in Xi Jinping is a determination to move Chinese foreign and security policy towards what I would describe as the nationalist right: a more confident, more assertive China in the region and in the world.
I reach those conclusions because I’ve spent the better part of four or five years reading Xi Jinping’s literature, his ideological reflections, and the body of Xi Jinping Thought, which is alive in the ideological journals of the Chinese Communist Party.
In the Chinese system, these journals and this language—this ideological dialect of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and reflections from Chinese tradition—are not idle. They are taken seriously, and they reflect an underlying political reality.
Czechia, having come from its own experience of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, has some historical familiarity with the impact of ideology, dialectical materialism and historical materialism in shaping views of reality. That is so even though the politics of this country has changed through the events since 1989 and the history which has unfolded since then, as you have become a vibrant, open society and democracy.
First point: On Xi Jinping moving the politics of China towards the Leninist left.
When Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, he had reached a conclusion that the Communist Party had become too corrupt, that it was no longer capable of shouldering the burden of bringing China towards its modernity.
Furthermore, he had seen what had happened with a corrupt party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: its implosion and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself. This is all reflected in his writings and observations. His conclusion was: this shall never happen on my watch as General Secretary of the Party.
As a consequence, from 2015 onwards, you see a series of directions about the anti-corruption campaign within the Party, the reinstitution of ideological education and rigour, a series of widespread purges across the Party and PLA machinery, and series of new disciplinary mechanisms applying to the Chinese official media and society writ large.
In other words, Xi Jinping’s message was very clear to the Chinese body politic: the Communist Party had become too lax. We are in the business of reimposing Leninist discipline within it. Furthermore, the Party will once again be in command of all.
His aphorism in Chinese is taken directly from Mao. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about north, south, east or west; whether we’re talking about government, commerce, society or the military: the Party leads in all.
When I say Xi Jinping has taken a decision deliberately to move the centre of gravity of Chinese politics to the Leninist left, that’s what I mean.
The most recently concluded Party plenum in Beijing had one theme: the further reconstitution of Party discipline, Party ideological education, and the furtherance of the anti-corruption campaign.
The anti-corruption campaign is now into its 14th year. It is the single longest campaign in the Party’s history since the Party was founded in 1921. Xi Jinping is serious about creating a Leninist party.
The shift in Chinese economic policy
The second change we can observe in Xi Jinping’s Chinese system is his decision, since 2017, to move the centre of gravity in Chinese economic policy towards the Marxist left.
This did not happen immediately. In 2013, Xi Jinping embraced what seemed to be a broader programme of market-based economic reforms, based on what Deng Xiaoping had done over previous decades, followed by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
However, several things came together.
There were the cumulative lessons of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, where Xi Jinping and a group of conservative economic scholars said the problem with the further marketisation of the Chinese economy was that you made it vulnerable to market forces outside China, particularly international financial markets.
Hence what happened in the Asian financial crisis to the Korean won, the Malaysian ringgit and the Indonesian rupiah, bringing about radical political change in countries like Indonesia.
Secondly, there was a deeper Chinese reflection on the global financial crisis, where the then senior Chinese Vice-Premier Wang Qishan said to Hank Paulson: “Hank, we always thought, in following America as our teacher on the market disciplines necessary in an open economy, that you knew what you were talking about. With the global financial crisis, we’ve worked out that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
With the global financial crisis, you saw this eruption in US property markets and financial markets, catapulting more broadly into financial markets around the world, and then the real economy. We came to the brink of not just global recession, but the potential for global depression, in the dark days of 2008 and 2009.
I’d just been elected Prime Minister of Australia. I remember them well. That’s when my hair turned white. It used to be brown.
The Chinese reflection on the global financial crisis was that markets have limitations, and that these markets are potentially deeply destabilising for countries around the world.
China, in order to offset the impact on its real economy, then engaged in the single largest post-1949 stimulus project in its economic history, to prevent the economy from sliding into recession.
A third thing happened as well. Xi Jinping, on his own watch in 2015, saw the unfolding of a domestic financial crisis, which many of us have forgotten about.
In 2015, you saw China’s property market beginning to implode. Secondly, you saw Chinese equities markets collapsing. Thirdly, there was a quite desperate attempt by the central authorities to stabilise markets, as Chinese consumers were losing their savings right across the country.
The internal conclusion was that the domestic market was also very vulnerable and therefore was not a reliable premise.
Then there was the assertion of a new, overwhelming confidence in China’s techno-industrial strategy, to take China from where it was to becoming a world leader across the technology stack, and then the AI stack, driven by the state. The term in Chinese is “top-level design”. It’s a four-character phrase.
Another element of this shift in the centre of gravity in Chinese economic policy was the need for a greater reality of common prosperity. Income differentials, measured by the Gini coefficient in the Chinese domestic economy, had become too unequal for a socialist state and a Communist Party to justify.
Hence the measures taken on taxation and what are termed in the Chinese system secondary and tertiary forms of income redistribution from China’s most powerful corporations. These are the barometers of economic change.
A more assertive foreign and security policy
Let me conclude with the third change I referred to: the change in the centre of gravity of Chinese foreign and security policy under Xi Jinping.
When Xi Jinping looked at Deng Xiaoping’s axiom for running Chinese foreign and security policy, he concluded around 2014 that this had run its course.
Deng Xiaoping, for those of you old enough to remember, had a phrase: “Hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead.”
As a consequence, we had two generations of Chinese foreign service officers, PLA officers and international diplomats who believed that the whole function of China’s external policy was twofold.
First, grow the Chinese economy at home: unleash the factors of production through maximum engagement with the institutions of the global economy and other economies around the world, including World Trade Organization membership.
Second, look after one simple set of interests: the question of Taiwan, and China’s domestic legitimacy as challenged by human rights advocates around the world.
By 2014, “hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead” was pushed aside, deliberately, at the Party’s Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference that year.
Instead, a new doctrine of foreign policy, “striving for achievement”, was unleashed. China sought to change, through active foreign and security policy measures, its surrounding external environment in East Asia and the Western Pacific, but also more broadly in the world.
We’ve seen the outflow of that change in policy direction bilaterally, multilaterally and regionally since then. We can explore some of that in our conversation.
In sum, there are three elements of change to the ideological map of Xi Jinping’s worldview. Because he is China’s paramount leader—no longer first among equals, but the paramount leader—his own ideological conclusions on these questions permeate across the Chinese system.
As I said, they are then reflected in Chinese strategy, and then in Chinese policy behaviour in the real world.
Discussion with Richard Lui
The language of Xi Jinping
RL: Mr Prime Minister, you have actually written the book on Xi Jinping. As you were analysing his speeches and the way he speaks, how does he talk about policy in the world?
KR: I think it begins from a premise of how he sees China’s evolving position within historical materialism and dialectical materialism.
For many modern Czechs, and most Americans writ large, that is incomprehensible. But what does it mean?
In Chinese history, informed by his view of historical materialism, he sees China’s rise: the forces of Hegelian determinism are in the sails of modern Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party is the vehicle for 21st-century Marxism.
Against that, you see the internal divisions of global liberal capitalism at work: dividing the United States, dividing the United States from its allies in the liberal democratic world, and thereby creating a new set of realities to accommodate China’s rise.
Specifically, he would apply a realist worldview informed by the Chinese tradition, but influenced by Soviet thinking: a Chinese view of the calculation of the balance of power, called “comprehensive national power”.
Its closest equivalent is the old Soviet notion of a correlation of forces: military power, economic power, technological power, resource-based power, soft power, cultural power, narrative power—the totality of power.
Their calculation is that China is rising in the balance of power against the United States across all measures.
So: the winds of Hegelian history are in my sails. I am a progressive force in global history. I am the embodiment of 21st-century Marxism. I have the discipline of a Leninist party to deliver that. At a practical and realist level, the balance of power is also materially changing.
When he looks at the world, it is no longer a view, as under Deng, of being a passive actor. It is about being an active actor, shaping reality and shaping the world in a manner more compatible with China’s underlying national interests and values.
RL: What was, or is, his favourite phrase to use, and why do you think it is his favourite phrase? You broke down his vernacular; you really looked into the verbs, the subjects, everything.
KR: If it was in Australia, I’d say: “Pass me the beer.” But we’re not in Australia. When I hosted Xi Jinping in Australia, he didn’t say, “Pass me the beer.”
Mind you, I did offer him a lot of Australian red wine, but that became what I describe as the lubricant for our conversations.
RL: Beer in Prague, so beer still works here.
KR: But if I was to look carefully at the pattern of his vocabulary, which is what we studied, the phrase which has been most common and repeated most often in his speechmaking since 2017 has been: “The world is now experiencing changes not seen in 100 years.”
Chinese phraseology is not chosen randomly. 2017 was the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution, as we know, both in Leninist and Stalinist historiography, and frankly in Mao’s historiography, changed the world.
If you look at the unfolding events in history—the withdrawal of Russia from the First World War, and the subsequent unfolding of the chasm in post-Second World War Europe—it did change the world, though not permanently.
Xi Jinping’s great regret is to see the implosion of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union itself. Not just as it affected China’s internal affairs, but as he saw it: the Red Army having collapsed in the face of its great challenge in 1991, having failed to execute its proper revolutionary mission, thereby removing the Soviet Union as a progressive force in the world.
When he says, “We are now living through changes not seen in 100 years”, this is a reflection on China today and its role in the world as this new harbinger, this new source, this new driving force of change across the Indo-Pacific region and the world at large.
That is the phrase I see most often. Knowing something of his mind about what happened in 1917, his historical sentiment for the Soviet Bolshevik Revolution, and his own personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, this phrase means a lot in his political discourse.
RL: Very much a window into the way he thinks. From his favourite to his least favourite: what would you say he does not want to talk about? What are the words he does not like to use in leadership? In your analysis, you understand what drives his long view. What is it he tries to avoid?
KR: There is a deep and continuing toxicity in Chinese domestic discourse about any challenges to the political legitimacy of the Chinese regime. Of course, that was shared by his predecessors as well.
But on fundamental challenges to political legitimacy—through a domestic discussion of constitutional government, the universality of human rights, the independence of the legal system, the role of the media, or even freedom of religion and religious belief, whether Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist or Muslim—if I read his discourse carefully, these are the subjects of which he is deeply intolerant.
If you want a window into this, back in 2013 somebody in the Chinese system released a document called Document Number Nine: a categorisation of these things that shall never be permitted.
It’s quite clear that these reflect directly his own address that year to the central conference on ideological and propaganda work. These were axiomatic in his view of what was and was not possible.
Why? Because they ultimately challenge the foundational legitimacy of a political party which obtained power through the barrel of a gun in a violent revolution. That’s the history of the CCP from 1921 through to 1949, and the revolution which they won.
Australia and the Indo Pacific
RL: Mr Prime Minister, it was said earlier by Dr Langer: how much do you describe yourself as having the qualities of a leader from the Asia-Pacific, being an Asian leader, or the former leader of Australia? What are some of the styles in the way you have led, the decisions you’ve made, and the worldview you’ve taken on, despite your demotion over time?
KR: My systematic demotion. Australians are very bad at self-reflection.
RL: So let’s do it.
KR: It’s a question I’m least comfortable with. Let’s go to the next one.
We actually are not very good at talking about ourselves. Australians are very practical people. How many of you folks have been to Australia?
Did you have a reasonable time? I saw a young fellow up there. Did you drink a lot? Not enough. So much so he can’t raise his hand. He’s still recovering.
Australians are very practical folks. I grew up on a farm in rural Australia. My parents were farmers. Neither of them had been through high school, and my father was a veteran of the Second World War.
Many of us, therefore, have a naturally practical mind when it comes to the large questions of our own politics and economy, but also carving out our own future in the vast complexity of the Indo-Pacific region.
I always think of Pandit Nehru, the founding Prime Minister of India, and the movement which emerged from Bandung in 1955. He was asked: “What about Australia and New Zealand?” He said: “Well, that’s interesting. They’re not really imperial colonial powers; they’re kind of something else.”
Nehru invited us as observers to Bandung in 1955.
As a bunch of British criminals—which is what we are, if you look at the settled history of Australia—if we’re not British criminals, then we’re Irish rebels. In my family, my father’s side are British criminals and my mother’s side are Irish rebels.
It creates a certain deep pragmatism about how you navigate your future.
The view that informs a country like Australia is: here we are as a bunch of primarily European people, from multiple countries of complex origins, many refugees in the post-war period from right across Europe and the world. How do we carve out a future in a region so vastly different from what people in this room would easily call the West?
We’re 27 million people in a region of four to five billion people. We are a bunch of Catholics and Protestants. We are a country of migrants: about a third of Australians today were born overseas. We have the largest post-war migration programme of any country in the world.
We live next door to the single largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, with a population of almost 300 million. We’re in a region dominated by Mother India and People’s China.
Our security worldview was formed by Japan in the Second World War, when we became rock-solid allies of the United States.
Carving out our future in terms of where we are in the world, and sharing a continent with the oldest continuing culture on earth, Aboriginal Australians, has been complex but very practical.
What we learnt from World War Two is: never trust the British, because they couldn’t defend Singapore, and they told us that they could. British Embassy people here: I’m sorry to offend you.
Secondly, look to America. On top of that, carve out a pattern of constructive relationships with all our neighbours in Asia, so that we are part of the region, familiar with it, respectful towards it, and understanding of it.
My old university, the Australian National University, was founded under national statute in 1946, with one core objective: to train the next generation of Australians to be comfortable and familiar with the languages, cultures and countries of Asia, because we had no such capability by 1941.
That’s the worldview we have from our own experiences, animated by deep practicality and pragmatism.
RL: I want to move to Central Europe in a second, but a personal question again. As a young, reformed British criminal who was reading books on China under a tree—
KR: Who said I was reformed?
RL: What did your mum say when you said, “I want to go to China”?
KR: She was so encouraging, because my mother was self-educated. She was a nurse during the war, spending time patching up American GIs and Australian servicemen in the Pacific theatre, which was a bloody theatre, as it was in Europe.
I remember, when I was young, her coming into my room one day, carrying the newspaper, and the headline was “China enters the UN”. As a self-educated woman who never finished high school, she simply said this to me: “This will change your future.”
That’s all. So I read the article.
She was a smart woman. A lot of those working-class people—farmers and nurses back then, self-educated—had to understand, in a very practical way, the environment in which they were working.
The Second World War was existential for Australia as well. We all learnt about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Northern Australia was bombed much more than Pearl Harbor. There was a Japanese invasion fleet just around the corner; the Battle of the Coral Sea finally turned it back in the dark days of 1942.
That generation was shaped by this, and therefore by the need to understand our region.
My mother instilled two things in me. One: trust America, because when your back was against the wall, that’s who was there. Two: understand Asia.
These are the maternal imprints on these things. Have I always trusted America? Most of the time. Sometimes the Americans walk off the reservation and do strange things, for example in Iraq, and most recently in Iran.
Have I sought to understand Asia? Yes. I’ve spent my life trying to understand one part of it.
Audience questions
Climate policy and carbon pricing
Audience member: I have a question about carbon taxes. Correct me if I’m wrong, but during your first premiership you tried to introduce one, making mining companies pay, which upset a lot of people.
In Canada, there was also an attempt to introduce a carbon tax, which the Trudeau government proposed. It was in place for a bit, but then it was scrapped because it became particularly unpopular. People who owned a lot of big businesses were very angry.
What do you think about it? Do you think it’s still feasible and works? Can we convince regular people that it actually gets things done?
KR: I’m a practical sort of guy. I believe in science, and therefore I believe in climate science.
Climate science is pretty clear. The world is becoming warmer, becoming hotter: climate change, extreme weather events. That’s because we have a concentration of carbon in the atmosphere which is producing a greenhouse effect, producing the environmental consequences which flow from that.
That’s the science. I’m always puzzled when people dispute the science, because science is science.
The policy question is what you do about it. There are multiple things you can do.
You can put a price on carbon, either through a carbon tax or a floating price, which is an emissions trading scheme. You can mandate a level of contribution by renewable energy to your total electricity supply. You can do other things in terms of energy conservation on the demand side, and you can collaborate globally.
Australia represents 1.5 per cent of global emissions. What we do, at one level, doesn’t matter. But if everybody takes the same view, then the planet simply burns.
I put forward legislation for a floating carbon price. Ultimately, it was voted down in the Australian Senate by the conservatives.
The second thing I did was introduce a mandatory renewable energy target to boost what was then a very small renewable energy sector to what is now 40 per cent of electricity supply in Australia.
We are one of the largest suppliers of coal anywhere in the world, so it’s been counterintuitive for Australia to turn to renewables when coal is also freely available. But we’ve done so in a responsible way.
The third thing we’ve done is subsidise the provision of rooftop solar right across the country. We now have about a third of Australian households with rooftop solar. It’s the largest domestic solar penetration of any country in the world.
Fourthly, because we are active in the UNFCCC—the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—and we are co-chairing this Conference of the Parties with Türkiye in the meeting about to happen, we will seek to take each of these agendas further forward.
But there is one ultimate discipline: if we fail collectively as a planet to ensure that carbon increases are kept within defined limits, to produce a temperature increase not exceeding 1.5 degrees centigrade by the end of the century, then we will have failed.
At present, we’re on track for a three-degree increase this century, which means we are failing.
The responsibility of national governments acting collaboratively internationally is critical. The two largest emitters in the world today are China and, about to be, India. The carbon price debates within those two countries are therefore critical.
American politics and the global balance of power
Audience member: My question is about the future of US foreign policy if the democratic socialists get to power in 2028 or 2032.
I would also like to ask about the future of the global order. I’m thinking about Immanuel Wallerstein’s work on the world economic system.
Wallerstein presupposes that there is always one hegemon, and when the hegemon is declining, two major powers compete for hegemony. If we accept that the USA is now a declining hegemon, will there be major competition in the near future, for example between China and India, for hegemony?
KR: Thank you. There are two questions: will the Democratic Socialists of America prevail in 2028, and who will dominate the global system?
RL: All in two minutes, sir.
KR: China and the United States, or China and India. Let me try to give haiku responses, because Richard is monitoring the length of my answers.
The first is as follows. If you look carefully at the midterms and what’s unfolded—the extent of the Democratic Party’s wins, both in the House and Senate, and across the political geography of the United States—it has returned a whole bunch of candidates from what I would describe as the mainstream Democratic Party.
Those who attracted more attention, like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and prior to that Mamdani, the Mayor of New York, are phenomenally strong individuals and candidates. But if you look at the political spread of who’s just been elected to Congress, it’s much more centrist than that.
That includes, on the Democratic side, a record number of former servicemen and women from across the armed forces doing, in their judgement, their own patriotic duty. I see a more complex set of outcomes for 2028 than a DSA landslide win.
Mind you, a footnote: why is the DSA doing so well in America? Both in America and the other democracies of the world, we see a cracking of the political centre. Why? Because the social contract with people is cracking.
Why? The cost of living and, frankly, the cost of housing.
Unless our democracies, from the political centre, fix both those problems—but particularly the housing problem, whether rent or purchase through a mortgage—to make it accessible for working families across the democratic world, the political centre collapses, and people retreat to either the far left or the far right.
That’s the challenge for all our democracies at the moment.
On the question of China and India in the future, the first thing I’d say is: anyone who writes America off doesn’t understand American history.
America constantly reinvents itself. Look at what everyone said about America three months ago. Look at what everyone says about America today after the midterms, with the political automatic stabilisers of the American system kicking in and producing a different result, not just on either coast, but in the Midwest and the South.
It’s a strange thing about America: you push it too far one way, and the United States has a habit of restoring itself to equilibrium.
After the global financial crisis, everyone thought the American economy was dead and buried, that the American financial model, in its extreme form of capitalism, had ultimately consumed itself.
Well, they managed to reinvent themselves again. This time they’ve reinvented themselves through Silicon Valley. Quite remarkable.
On the future of the global system and India’s role, what is critically relevant is which way India itself chooses to go, given the emerging binaries of the global system: China and the United States.
India under Modi made a series of choices over the last decade to lean increasingly towards America.
India under Modi is now dealing with the domestic political consequences of the United States, notwithstanding that, adopting a tariff posture towards India which has been hostile and difficult to explain in Indian domestic politics—just as it has been for a number of other allies and partners of the United States around the world.
But if I’m making a bet about where India will land, given its long-term geopolitics with China, the unresolved Sino-Indian border dispute, and the long tail of the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, India will still be leaning in the direction of America.
It will take comfort from what’s happened in the midterms. Of course, it’s contingent on what happens in 2028.
What China and Europe misunderstand about each other
Audience member: What do you think China still doesn’t understand about Europe? On the flip side, what does Europe still not understand about China?
You described a new, assertive China under Xi Jinping. How should Europe respond? How do we accept the ambitions of a rising power on one side, and at the same time set some limits to the danger and threat? How should Europe develop an independent strategy?
KR: I thought I was going to get through this entire conversation without opining on Europe, but now I have to opine on Europe. So I’ll choose my words carefully, which is unusual for Australians.
First point: what does China not understand about Europe?
When I look at China’s techno-industrial strategy being applied towards Europe at present, and the impact on German manufacturing, with the shedding of 12,000 German manufacturing jobs every month—you saw the recent list of layoffs at Volkswagen, for example, 160,000—the Chinese thesis is: this is simply because China is more innovative and has better and more competitive costs of production.
The external analyses of the level of effective Chinese subsidy of its domestic motor vehicle and manufacturing industries are very clear. There are high levels of effective subsidy.
This is usually delivered through soft credit from the local banking system in China to firms which otherwise, in a normally functioning market economy, would simply fold up.
There are something like 125 EV companies in China. The most recent analysis I’ve seen suggests 45 of those are actually competitive: that is, they would survive in a normal market without local financial subsidy.
What does China not get about Europe? I think it is that this is a sophisticated part of the world which analyses the data carefully, looks at the numbers, and is reaching a decision across the European consensus that there is a different pathway forward for Europe.
It must begin to hold up the stop sign and say: we are not prepared to allow all our manufacturing simply to be ceded to China as China becomes the global factory for the planet.
China, at 20 per cent of global GDP, today represents 35 per cent of global manufacturing output, rising on current trends to 45 per cent by 2030.
Europe and the rest of the world are saying: this has gone too far. The employment consequences are too acute. Furthermore, the resilience questions—the ultimate ability to survive as economies in times of duress—come into question as well.
What does Europe not get about China? In dealing with the Chinese system, it’s important to be united. It’s important to be strong. It’s important to be clear.
Remember, China is led by a Marxist-Leninist leadership. Marxist-Leninist leaderships are known for their robustness.
China respects strength and is contemptuous of weakness. That’s my experience, having been a head of government.
Finally, on the question of what Europe should now do, I think I’ve referred to that in the earlier part of my answer.
Thank you, Richard.