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The Rise of East Asia: Threat or Opportunity
Nevertheless, you'll be hard pressed to argue that China's stability rest on the soundest of foundations. All of us in a democracy like this should want to see changes in China, but we should want to see it managed efficiently and without turmoil. A China torn apart by political fighting would be bad for all of us and not just that for China.

What will trigger change? One strong possibility, another issue, which I think, threatens China's future and the conceivable future of all of us ¡V environmental threats which crowd in on China. A few years ago, I was to see the Yellow River, which has played such an important part in Chinese history and played such an important part in Chinese culture. I was surprised as I got to the bridge and tried to see the Yellow River that it was identified as a rather dirty smear on the landscape. In most years since 1985, the Yellow River has failed regularly to reach the sea.

China uses between 7 and 20 times as much water for every unit of GDP as any other middle ranking developing country that I can think of. That is one of the sorts of environmental issue which is starting to cause the creation of a civil society in China and starting to bring protest, the sort of protest that we also see in relations to land and contractual issues.

Let me finish with a few words about security. And it is in this area perhaps that China most frequently finds itself dealing with the proposition advance particularly in the United States. That China represents the threat to the security of Asia and the security of the rest of us. Sometimes that argument is couched in terms of China's military spending. But China only spends about a quarter of what America spends on arms and about half of what Europe spends. I don't myself find it surprising that as China has grown economically it has increased its defense budget.

Sometimes the argument is put in relations to Japan and to the age old hostility between Japan and China. It's interesting that the sort of reconciliation which in Europe has taken place between France and Germany has never taken place between China and Japan, which is one reason why the Americans had had to hold the "ring" in security terms, in Asia for the last 50 years. A main reason for the reconciliation between France and Germany has been the generosity of Germany in owning up to its own responsibility to some of the horrors of the first half in the last century in Europe. I can't help myself wondering whether we're seen anything like that gesture or generosity from Japan.

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