Former foreign minister George Yeo was invited to deliver a keynote address as part of the Centennial Celebration of Hwa Chong College on July 24.

Here, we reproduce an uncorrected transcript of his speech made about the wisdom and the differences between the East and the West, his appreciation of China and its history, and his understanding of the United States.

***

By George Yeo

Teachers, students, alumni of Hwa Chong; distinguished guests; ladies and gentlemen - it is a great honor for me to be here as part of the Centennial Celebration of Hwa Chong College.

This is also the hundredth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. When I walked in this morning I asked the principal whether the school had commemorated this. He said no, you did not. I was a little disappointed but not entirely surprised. And we can talk about this later because in that question, is a question about Singapore's future.

The establishment of Hwa Chong by Tan Kah Kee a hundred years ago was part of a great movement called the New Culture movement. When the Chinese people were deeply frustrated by the inability of China despite the 1911 Revolution to transform itself and stand up, it led to the myth of explosion. This resulted from a grave injustice done to China after the first world war. She contributed over a hundred thousand workers – many of whom died in Europe – and in return for which she expected the return of German concessions in China in Shan Dong but instead, those concessions were given to Japan. This outrage quickly spread throughout China and throughout overseas communities. Without the anger and that sense of will, Hwa Chong could not have had its beginning.

It is important to remember this even though how this story is intertwined with Singapore's own history is itself complicated and not fully resolved. And it will never be resolved because this yin and yang and East and West is within the heart of Singapore – it is what defines us as Singaporean.

Rudyard Kipling said in his famous ballad, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Whether we like it or not, the twain is meeting again; and creating and opening a new chapter in history. When we read about the trade war and Huawei, we read about the anti-China and increasingly anti-Chinese sentiments in the US, one recalls Kipling's famous one line. But for him the East was not China. For him East was South Asia where he spent many years of his life.

The East as the realm of "Chopsticks people"

For my address this morning, I would like to confine East to the realm of the Chopsticks people. There is a reason for this. There is a coherence to the culture to the Chopsticks people. It is not possible to understand history of Vietnam, Korea or Japan without reference to the great drama on the Chinese mainland.

Japan was the first to peel off from the Asian mainland to address the challenge of Western imperialism. By the time of the second Opium War, any Japanese ship landing on the Asian mainland would be inspected by the Europeans probably a Britisher and Japan knew that it was only a matter of time before she would suffer the same humiliation. This led to the Meiji Restoration and a top-to-bottom overhaul Japanese society to the point where she became an imperial power ravaging the Chinese mainland. When we read about the quarrels between Japan and Korea, the roots are in the encounters of East and West.

When the new emperor ascended the throne, the Japanese had to find the reign title. This is an old Chinese tradition of giving a reign title to an emperor. And historically the reign titles compose of two characters drawn from the Chinese classics. For the first time they decided not to draw from the Chinese Classics, but from an ancient Japanese poem. They chose the characters ‘Ling He’ (令和). ‘Ling’ has a double meaning. The ordinary meaning is of course ‘to order’ but he said, no, that's not the meaning. The meaning is beautiful. It is an obscure meaning and it is how they interpret it. This is Japanese culture - which as Chopsticks people – instinctively could understand this double meaning - which they like.

At about the same time, an instruction that henceforward instead of calling Shinzo Abe, he would be called Abe Shinzo - the Japanese prime minister. As a result of Meiji, the Japanese decided to go Western and inverted when they deal with the world outside, henceforth, he will be Abe Shinzo.

Japan is re-Asianizing; but very conscious that in this process, it should not become a satellite of China. This is a long process. You find equivalent processes happening in Korea - North and South - and in Vietnam. But to understand all these things, we have to understand China.

China experiencing the greatest revolution in human history

The reason why May 4th happened was because there is such a deep inertia in Chinese society. That period from the opium wars to 'Tai Ping Tian Guo' (太平天国) to Xin Hai Ge Ming' (辛亥革命) or Yi He Quan (义和拳) - all the way to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Evolution, and finally, Deng Deng Xiaoping and now Xi Jinping – it is the greatest revolution in human history. It is a greatest revolution in human history because the Chinese people are the most homogeneous among human beings on earth. And this is the result of centuries of social evolution.

If you are small, the change can come quickly. If you are big it takes a long time to change the internal systems. Each of us has a brain and the brain is probably the most complex assembly of molecules, of atoms in the known universe.

And our ability to create civilization is because we have a collective brain which means that we are networked together to one another and to our history to all ancestors. And these operating systems linking us all together is culture.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be able to replicate what goes on in an individual brain. But I don't see AI ever replicating what is in the collective brain because the collective brain is much more complicated.

'Li' (礼) and 'fa' (法) in China vs rule of law in the U.S.

What is it about Chinese civilization that gives it its homogeneity? China today is over 90% Han - over a continent and been so for a long time. Is it because Chinese empires were not able to colonize neighbouring countries, incorporate them and therefore reduce the Han proportion? That’s not the reason.

The reason is something which happened 2,000 years ago when Qin Shi Wang (秦始皇) by force united the Warring States. It was tough employing in the loose translation the rule of law.

It was so tough that the Qin Dynasty did not survive his son. People were happy to get rid of him and for a long time after that until the modern era, he was cursed - for burying scholars, for destroying ancient books, for his crudeness and vulgarity.

Han, when he took over decided on the different organizing principle of Chinese society based on 'Li' (礼) (which means decorum or courtesy)

Joseph Needham once wrote, it is not that China had no law, no legislation but in fact, if you look at history, China had a greater corpus of legislation than the Western world.

But in China when it comes to the emperor, does the emperor decide on the basis of ‘fa’ or ‘li’? It has to be on the basis of ‘li’.

So ‘fa’ can be an instrument, a way of regulating large numbers; but ultimate decisions, especially ultimate moral decisions, are based on ‘li’. This is very different from the Western world. Many of us would have watched the hearing confirming Brett Cavanaugh as the Supreme Court Justice. It was almost a struggle to the death.

Today Trump has appointed 2 conservative Supreme Court judges. If he appoints one or two more if he gets a second term, the final interpretation of law in the US will be fixed for the next few decades. In a sense this would be much more important than any congressional or presidential election to shape the direction and evolution of US society in this century.

But these are the rules and the Americans fight according to the rules. Like hell. So Mueller, the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse, impeachment exercises – in the end everything goes back to the law.

The Chopsticks people view all this with a combination of disdain, astonishment and awe. How could a system operate like this? How could the leader of a country be subject to all these pressures and still be in a position to govern?

But if you read Roman history, Cicero or the debate between Cicero and Catiline, even Jesus Christ, Christians, non-Christians, we know what happened when the Pharisees wanted Jesus dead. They couldn't do it because under Roman law they had no powers to put a person to death so they had to go to Pontius Pilate. Pilate who passed the buck to Herod and Herod passed it back. In the end, he was crucified.

Among the apostles, Paul was a Roman citizen. “I am a Roman citizen” - famous words of Cicero. So he could not be crucified. He was beheaded.

This almost punctilious adherence to legal principles is quite alien to the Chopsticks people. For them, for the Chinese, you got to look at the overall picture. Should you or should you not? If you should, then you find a way to do it.

The enduring differences between the East and the West

So East is East and West is West. And why this is been so enduring?

I've been mulling over this for a long time and one reason is paper technology. The Chinese had paper for over 2000 years. And the according to the books, it is ‘cai lun’, but they probably had histories before the invention of paper. Paper required ink. Ink was based on carbon black. Carbon black is made from soot. The particles are nano-sized and the ability to spread the soot on the paper using water was a complex process. But it enabled the Chinese to store data and to manipulate data on the scale and volume unmatched by anybody else. The Chinese had this advantage for centuries. It was only after the 8th century, after a big war in Central Asia when the Tang army was defeated by the Abbasid army. The prisoners were captured and paper technology went to the Islamic world. Within a short time, paper mills were established in Bukhara, Damascus, Baghdad. It transformed Islamic civilization and eventually it was the Muslim scholars who brought the classics from Greece through Muslim Spain into Europe and that began the process of European revival.

You know today when we read about Huawei, they wanted to deny Huawei the use of Android. Android is not just the operating systems but also all the apps which are latched onto Android.

They say the CPU architecture is proprietary and we can deny it to China. It may take China a few years to overcome these setbacks. But you imagine China had an advantage in paper for centuries and the programmers were the scholars because they were able to master the brush, which requires years of education. The brightest people chosen by examination to be the software experts for centuries and they kept detailed records.

I've been stealing time the last two weeks to watch a video on my iPad. It is called The Longest Day in Chang'an and is right now the rage in China. It will be China’s number one drama this year.

It is about one day in Chang'an during the Tang Dynasty. You combine drama with intrigue. But the care with which they were accurate to the history, the architecture, the dress, the food, the behavior of the people, the makeup – fascinating. But one aspect which fascinated me the most was record-keeping in Chang-an and who had access to those records and the database? All control in the end came to this - who had control over the database.

China, because she had this advantage, and whether by design or by accident, a writing system which was not phonetic. If it is phonetic, then the words change all the time. It is very difficult to read Chaucer because the English of the time was different because the pronunciations have [since] changed.

But Chinese characters are digitalized. The icon has a fixed value. The context might have changed, the meaning in context might have changed, but you can read a character and you know its meaning. For whatever reason, it has created a very cohesive civilization, very conscious of itself, very conscious of what is within and without; and wanting to keep the outside so they can nurture what is within.

Many Americans today worry that as China become stronger, they exploit the system and also become imperialistic. I don't think so because that is not in the nature of the history of the civilization.

All of us know that if you go to China if you don't have WeChat payment, it is very inconvenient.

I mean you take out cash and they look at you, “why you giving me cash?’ But how do you get a We-Chat payment in China? You can’t get it. You can only get it if you open a bank account and you have a telephone number associated with the bank account. That telephone number and bank account cannot be acquired online. You must go to a specific location, register there and fill it in in paper. And once you are fixed at that point, then you can swim the ocean freely. But you cannot access the ocean unless they fix you at a particular spot.

So I open an account in Shantou where my mother came from. I had to show some residential status and so on – very difficult, all in Chinese, and my Chinese is not good.

Then they are boxes. You can’t tick the boxes. You got write ‘zhi dao’. If you can’t well, too bad. That’s your problem. They won't help you.

Then they give you a space big enough for three characters. In my passport, I only have my English name. How do I write that in if I don’t have the space.

The system is to keep out the foreigner. In other words, we are quite happy within ourselves. If you are not one of us, it is fine. We can deal with you as a foreigner. Don't pretend that you are one of us.

This is very deep. I don't believe that the capital markets in China will ever be opened up fully because they want to control their own internal system.

They are afraid of the world outside because the world outside can cause them to lose control.

The financial wizards of New York and London can manipulate the system before they even realize the financial system was open.

So when they deal with the world outside, always very carefully through portals and that is why for a long time when the westerners came, they confined them to the Pearl River Estuary and Macau was given to the Portuguese not because they were afraid of Portuguese, but because it was a way of containing the foreigner.

And which is why - I spend half my time Hong Kong now – I believe the Hong Kong has a great future because in the end Hong Kong is useful to China but provided neither Hong Kong or Macau tries to change what goes on the mainland for as long as you are separate, that's fine. But if you become a point of infection then that's a different matter, then they will have to extinguish you. This is the reality.

The Chinese and the Americans

And when the Chinese and Americans are now engaged in this fight, it will go on for a long time. There could be a trade agreement but the technological war will go on. The people involved in defence and intelligence, it is their job to worry and they worry all the time about the possibility of war.

The Chinese are feeling their own strength. They do not want to escalate. They have a love-hate relationship with America. Many of the leaders send their children to America. They like America. Why do they like America? Why do we like America? Because of freedom, or it could be rights of a citizen or a permanent resident or a foreigner. Once you clear immigration, you have rights. Before immigration, you have no rights. And that is one reason why illegal immigration has now become such a big problem in America because once you enter, you have rights. You can employ lawyers. There are things you can do to you. There are many things they can’t do to you.

My youngest son had leukemia and went through two rounds of chemotherapy. He was very sick. In the end, he had a bone marrow transplant in the US at the St Jude Children's Research Hospital, which is one of the biggest charities in the US.

Because we did not have insurance and they did not want costs to affect their research into new treatment modalities, they said no you don't pay. And not only did we not pay, the entire family because apart from me, my wife, the siblings, the grandmother, all went to Memphis and they put them in an apartment provided by corporate philanthropy.

Before Christmas a note went around to my kids. “What are your Christmas gift wishes? So they wrote, ‘snooker sticks’, this and the other, not expecting that any of these wishes would be fulfilled. All of them were fulfilled by charity.

While I was there – I visited them seven times in nine months – I was told this story that there was a child of an illegal immigrant who was in the hospital. You can’t treat leukemia without the mother next door because the chemotherapy is very tough and throughout the night the mother has got to nurse the kid. But the child is illegal. So they appealed to Senator Ted Kennedy who then got the mother in so that the child could be treated. Whether they eventually remained in the US or not, I do not know. But this is the generosity of the American people.

I have an MBA from Harvard and being a member of Harvard, I get to vote. I get to vote as any American alumni gets to vote. Equal. I could stand for elections.

So when I started receiving the ballot paper I thought, what do we do in the National University of Singapore (NUS)? Would Peking University give American alumni the right to vote for who will be the principal of Peking University? I don't think so. Only the US would do this. So even though in recent years with the Trump Administration the moral standing of America has come down, deep down there is a feeling that they are good people.

The Chinese are trying not to escalate and are trying to tell the Americans you can be the policemen of the world. We don't think it's wise of you to be but anyway, if you want to be, very good, carry on. If you want to have aircraft carriers going to the Baltics, to the Black Sea to maintain freedom, carry on.

You know how expensive aircraft carriers are? How expensive it is to maintain these battle groups, the weaponry?

Trump called up Jimmy Carter – I think many of you who have seen the video - and asked about China. Jimmy Carter said since 1979 when they established relations with China, China has fought no war. How many wars have we fought? How many trillions have we spent? No wonder China is making such good progress and such fantastic infrastructure and we're in such a parlour state.

Does China want to be like the US? I don't believe it.

Does China want to increase her populations such that you will have hundreds of millions of non-Chinese? I don't think so. I think they are quite happy where they are and they are quite happy just dealing with Han people because with Han people there is a predictability.

You know the Chinese way is whom you know. I would never have been invited to Hwa Chong by a simple email or letter saying can you come to Hwa Chong to give a lecture. A lot of time is spent by the school committee - who knows whom and how do you get to that person and preferably through a person to whom the speaker can’t say no to – then you have achieved your objective.

A large part of our brain in daily life is spent thinking how to manage relationships. This is ‘li’. And the way we treat people is all part of it.

On the last day of class in my final year in Cambridge engineering school, the students were throwing paper darts at the professor. I looked in bewilderment - what's wrong with them - but they engaged freely.

As Chinese students, you know you don't make the professor lose face. You got to express yourself with nuances and indirection. I remember we had a very old very distinguished Mathematics teacher in SJI. I see many of my co-SJI students there. He made a fundamental error in Math. In solving problems in XY vectors, he was doing solving for ‘x’ and solving for ‘y’ separately and not simultaneously so it was a fundamental error. So a group of us were very worried that he was teaching the wrong stuff to the class. So they said, ‘Hey George, better speak to him.’

This is a very delicate matter as this is an old professor. So I found a quiet moment when we were talking about something else to raise this gently to him. He listened to me. He was not quite happy. But because I was one of his better students, he listened. He kept quiet. The following day in class, he made the correction without saying who told him or why he suddenly made the correction.

Face. Is it good or is it bad? It is part of the reality.

Singapore is in between two worlds

Here in Singapore we are in between two worlds. We got to deal with the West and we got to deal with the East; and we ourselves are a bit mixed up. But I always remember something which Lee Kuan Yew said in private but never in public – that we must accept that every Singaporean has two identities. You could be Chinese. You could be Muslim. You could be Eurasian. But you could also be Singaporean.

I will take it a step further - that a mono-identity person cannot be a Singaporean. A Singaporean is someone who accepts multiple identities and because I have a multiple identity, I respect your multiple identity. If I do not accept multiple identities in myself, it is harder for me to accept it in you and I will try to assimilate so as to standardize.

So this is an ideal of Singapore, which is very precious and which can be a light unto others because the world is mixed up now. Movement of people, globalization, the internet and if we cannot accept each other for what he is, not only to tolerate but sometimes to celebrate his other identities, then how can we live in harmony?

Is the solution to fight until one is finally removed or fully absorbed? He can never be fully absorbed because the cultural DNA in each and every one of us goes back a very long time and operates at a subconscious level.

The Vatican's relationship with China

I spend time in the Vatican on financial matters. From time to time I hear stories about the Vatican’s relationship with China. It is impossible to understand the Western world without an understanding of Christianity – Judeo-Christian, Greece and Rome. These are the deep underpinnings of Western society.

One day the Pope was going to Korea and in the papal tradition when the Pope flies to a place, he sends off a telex message to bless the people whom he flew over. Telex. There are no Telex machines in Chinese. So when China heard that a Telex message had been sent, they kind of said we don’t have Telex machines. So the Italian Embassy quickly downloaded it and sent it over. The Chinese thanked them. And I heard there was a request by the Vatican for the Pope to stop over in Beijing either on the way to Seoul or on the way back.

There was no reply from the Chinese and this senior Vatican official - a priest, a bishop whom I met – he thought the Chinese were very rude. I sent them a message and they did not reply.

I said no, they couldn't reply. You can't have a Papal visit without careful preparation.

Because if the pope visits and there's no careful preparation, it is bad manners. Not only will the Pope be insulted, the Chinese people will be demeaned. And because the request came so suddenly, if China were to say no, it is a slap on the face of the Vatican. So the best thing is to pretend I never received it.

So in Asian cultures, we spend a lot of time thinking how to say no except to say no in order to save face.

But little by little they are re-understanding China. Now there are exhibitions on both sides. A few years ago China and Xi Jinping sent a gift to Pope Francis. The gift was the reproduction of an ancient Nestorian stelae in Tang Dynasty China, probably 8th century. In that stelae, they had the history and situation of the Nestorian church in China. Nestoria is an earlier form of Christianity which was heretical but it was all over Tang China. You see aspects of it in The Longest Day in Chang’an serial, which I talked about earlier.

They sent a reproduction to the Holy Father really as a hint to the Holy Father that Xi Jinping envisages a day again when Christianity would be all over China. A few weeks ago, I saw a special programme in CGTN where they did scholarship on the stelae where it says that the emperor sent Christmas gifts to Christian communities in Tang China, which to me was astonishing and unimaginable if it did happen. But he wouldn't have said it if they did not or if they were not convinced that it was the correct interpretation of what was on the stelae.

It was the church – the Jesuits, when they went to China and wanted to convert China – who began to interpret China to the West and they were astonished by the fact that China had a moral system without religion. And in the West they were looking for moral systems without religion because the incrustation of the church on all aspects of society was too tight.

So this led to the Protestant Reformation, it led to the Thirty Years War and finally when intellectuals like Voltaire who found in China a system that could operate morally without religion, it inspired a new generation of idealists – away with the church, away with clericalism - a new western Society. But this removal of religion from European society is creating new issues.

In America – which was founded a few years before the French Revolution – religion is still a very important part and the big struggle in America today is between secularists and those who are believers in one religion or another. It is complex; I'm just simplifying. In Europe today, if you go to the churches, they are mostly empty and the secularization is creating a new age of confusion in Europe, but it's a different story.

What I want to conclude is to say that as the I-Ching teaches us, there are cycles within cycles. China may be on the way up today. One day it will peak; one day it will decline. Europe may be struggling now, but one day it will recover and come up again. The US is also going through a cyclical change. There must be a humility in whatever stage of the cycle that we are in – particularly if we are up that will one day we will be down. When we have that humility and see in the other person an identity with an old history as my own which has his good points and his own wisdom and from whom I can learn and benefit then we will have a better world. Thank you.

Top photo from George Yeo's Facebook.