Introduction

Andrew Staples:

Well, good afternoon, everybody. It's a great pleasure to be with you. My name is Andy Staples. I'm the founder and principal of GeoPol Asia, a geopolitical advisory firm and also delighted to be part of the advisory board here at the Hinrich Foundation. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to welcome Michael to this session today.

And I'm just going to read through his bio before we get into the book itself, the themes of the work by Michael and Michael, we're talking for about 25-30 minutes or so, and then we'll get into a discussion with all of you. We have people online as well. And I would urge people online to send through any questions that you might have. I'll get them here on my phone and we'll bring them into the conversation.

Michael Pembroke is a writer, historian and avid naturalist whose work spans law, global affairs and environmental history. Born in Sydney in 1955 he's educated at the University of Sydney and the University of Cambridge and later served as a director's visitor at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University

Michael has contributed to Time magazine, Al-Jazeera, South China Morning Post and major Australian news publications, bringing historical depth and narrative clarity to contemporary geopolitical and cultural issues.

He's also the author of five books, and I won't go through them now, because we're going to be going through the latest book in quite some detail in a moment. And we are also drawing your attention to another of Michael's publications shortly. With that, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.

I had the pleasure of reading your text over the Christmas holidays. And you see, it's quite well annotated here. I'm well prepared to grill you on all the themes and issues that you've raised. But before I do all that, over to you, and please take us through your book, the key themes that you've identified, and then we'll get into a bit of a discussion.

Big Idea & Origin Story

Michael Pembroke:

Well, thank you, Andy, and welcome to the students. And it's a great honor to have Mr. Hinrich here too. I'm very pleased to see him and to meet him this afternoon. I must say, before I go on, the photograph that you see on the screen is about 17 years old, and I'm now, I think, the second oldest person in the room after Moule.

And I've reached the grand age of 70, so I'm a little embarrassed by that photograph. It was taken before my very first book, five books ago. Now, what I thought I'd do in my allotted time is give you a little potted summary of the major themes and parallels in the book.

I thought I'd deal with some introductory remarks first, then tell you about the commodities - the silk, the porcelain, the tea and the silver and the opium and then I'd deal with the invasions which the trade eventually led to, which started with the First Opium War in 1839.

Firstly, for most of the last 2000 years, China and to some extent India have been the dominant economic force in the world. My book covers only the imperial period, from the first emperor, the Qin in 221 BCE, to the last emperor, the boy Puyi, in 1912.

In that period, not only was China probably the major dominant economic force in the world, but by 1820 it had the largest GDP in the world. And for the 300 years from the early 1500s, when Europeans led by the Portuguese first started to come to China to Canton, China was effectively the sole global manufacturing superpower.

One historian described it as the cog running the wheel of global commerce. It was also the universal destination for most of the world's silver. China wanted silver in exchange for its export products and everyone brought their silver to China, where its value was worth more because the demand was so great.

Compare that to the current day, where China is again the global manufacturing superpower and has a trade surplus every year of about 1 trillion dollars, or about 100 billion every month. At the end of World War II, the United States was the global manufacturing superpower and the largest creditor nation in the world; China is now the largest creditor nation and the United States the largest debtor nation.

Dominance of China in export trade in years past led to friction and it's leading to friction now - not military friction, I hope. One byproduct of China's dominance was the balance-of-trade problem, the outflow of silver from European countries to pay for Chinese exports.

This worried people as early as the Romans. In the first century AD, elder statesmen in Rome complained about the affluent ladies of Rome spending so much money on exotic products from the East, particularly silk, just so they could shimmer in public.

Over time, Rome's gold and silver resources became depleted, and by about the third century, debasement of currency and military costs contributed to Rome's collapse. In the 18th century the problem became acute for European nations too. The Scottish philosopher David Hume said that if China were as close to us as France or Spain, everything we use would come from China.

Sir Isaac Newton, as master of the Royal Mint, said the China trade is so huge it takes away all the silver of Europe. Carl Linnaeus said there is nothing more important than to shut that gate to China through which all the world's silver goes.

The Five Essential Commodities

Michael Pembroke:

So that's the introduction. Let me tell you about the commodities. There are five in the book. Silk came first; it went to Rome at the time of the first Roman emperor. Porcelain came next with the Portuguese arrival in China, and tea shortly after. Silk, porcelain and tea were the three primary products and in Europe there was not just a fad for them; they became must-have products.

Silver was used to pay and then opium was used in the 19th century from about the 1820s onwards in a rather cynical move by the British. These products became sensations because they were totally unknown to Europeans. When silk first made its way from the periphery of the Roman Empire around the Euphrates, the Roman legionnaires had never seen anything like it.

In Rome, extremely affluent citizens went head over heels for silk because they were used only to wool and linen. When Julius Caesar first became aware of silk about 46 BCE, he replaced the large linen awnings in the Roman Forum with colored silk and the citizens could not believe their eyes; it was more fabulous to them than the gladiator show that followed.

Cleopatra appreciated silk and led the fashion; one emperor wore nothing but silk. The secrets of making silk, porcelain and tea were totally unknown to Europeans. They scratched their heads for centuries before, according to legend, Nestorian monks smuggled out silkworm eggs in the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Once the secret was out, sericulture became established in northern Italy and Spain.

Porcelain was first noted by Marco Polo in the late 13th century during the Yuan dynasty. He wrote that nothing lovelier could be imagined, because Europeans were used to earthenware and pewter and perhaps silver or gold if you were royalty. Porcelain was finer, harder, sometimes translucent, beautifully produced and painted.

For four or five hundred years Europeans tried to replicate porcelain. Kings and princes employed alchemists. It took until 1708, when a young German, Johann Böttger, effectively imprisoned near Dresden at Meissen, cracked the code through trial and error. Porcelain became so popular that the Dutch Republic was bringing in tens of millions of pieces every year.

Dutch ships left Canton loaded with porcelain, silk and other precious goods and were often raided by pirates, including English pirates. The French did not get going until 1768, establishing a porcelain factory at Sèvres. The English also started porcelain manufacturing in 1768; the first piece of English porcelain was a fairly drab beer tankard, but that was the beginning and Wedgwood took over from there.

Tea was incredible. In Shakespeare's time, around 1600, no one in England knew what tea was. Shakespeare never mentioned tea; he mentioned mead, claret, beer and ale. English people did not drink a hot decoction just for pleasure. Tea started to filter through via the Portuguese and the Dutch, but it really took off in England when the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza came to marry Charles II in 1662.

She brought a dowry of chests of tea and porcelain and established in the royal court the habit of ladies sitting with her and drinking tea from fine porcelain. What happened in the royal court was emulated further down society and tea quickly became England's national drink. At first it was too expensive but then it was democratized. After a while there was tea in every English household.

More importantly, taxes and duties on tea imports became critical for the British Treasury; 10 percent of all revenue came from tea in the early 1800s, and the tea trade became more important than trade in any other product. Silver first came on British ships from England to China in chests, returning with silk and porcelain. Later, the Spanish discovered silver in mines in Peru and Bolivia, notably the Potosí mine.

Initially the silver was carried overland across the Isthmus of Panama and then shipped to Cadiz and on to Seville, Amsterdam and London. In the 1570s the Spanish discovered the trans-Pacific route and the Manila galleon trade began. Ships built in Manila carried goods from China to Acapulco, where the world's biggest trade fair was held annually.

The galleons loaded silver at Acapulco and sailed back to Manila. Those ships were like floating bank vaults, often overloaded with silver. Chinese and Eastern goods were taken from Acapulco up to Mexico City, which became the effective center of the world between West and East. Mexico City in the 1600s was wealthy beyond imagination.

I've mentioned how the drain on silver became a huge problem. In the late 18th century, the East India Company and Warren Hastings devised a scheme. They created the largest opium-producing territory in the world along an 800-kilometer stretch of the lower Ganges, with huge factories at Patna and Benares.

Opium was sold at auction in Calcutta to independent traders, who then smuggled it to China. They used opium to obtain silver and to buy tea. This reversed the flow of silver - from flowing out of Europe to flowing out of China - and the system was sustained by financial networks in London through bills of exchange. These bills were drawn on London banks, discounted through brokers and traded around the world.

The system also helped finance purchases such as cotton from the United States. London's financial institutions became dependent on the opium trade, which is one reason it took so long to stop. It was not until at least 1905 that the British Parliament resolved to stop the trade, and then only by reducing it 10 percent a year over ten years.

The Era of Invasions and the Century of Humiliation

Michael Pembroke:

The last section, possibly the most horrific, is the period of the invasions. China sought to stop the opium trade. Commissioner Lin Zexu, whose statues stand in New York and Taiwan, was appointed to stop the trade in Canton. He confiscated the opium belonging to all European traders after giving them a deadline they did not believe.

The British government was up in arms and sent an invasion force at the end of 1839. The purpose of that invasion force was to protect the opium trade. The war that followed was one-sided; China did not have an adequate force to defend against British warships and troops. It lasted until 1842 and ended with the Treaty of Nanjing, the first of the unequal treaties, which opened five treaty ports to European trade.

That war was followed by the Second Opium War, starting in 1857 and culminating in 1860 with the sacking and burning of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. British and French forces looted the palace, but only the British decided to burn it so it was gone forever. The French refused, calling the British plan a Gothic act of barbarism.

The next series of invasions were in the 1870s and 1880s: Russia took part of Xinjiang, France invaded around Fujian, and Japan toyed with Taiwan and then took Okinawa. The very serious invasion was in 1895, the first war Japan launched against China, and the culmination was the Boxer Uprising of 1900.

The Boxers were mostly poor young men from Shandong who protested against missionaries and Europeans and carried out brutal killings. A coalition of the willing essentially today's G7 plus Imperial Russia - intervened to put down the uprising. They then engaged in reprisals at least as brutal as the Boxers' own killings.

At the end of the First Opium War, the Second Opium War, the Japanese war and the Boxer Uprising, ever larger indemnities were extracted from China. The Boxer indemnity was so huge it bankrupted and crippled China and guaranteed a breakdown in society and another war, much like the indemnity imposed on Germany at Versailles in 1919.

So that's a bit of a survey of what the book covers. I've been addressing the students and looking to my left deliberately; I hope you don't feel left out on the right-hand side.

Early Globalization and Chinese Industrialization

Andrew Staples:	Thank you so much for taking us through that arc of the book. It's an absolutely fascinating read. Many of the stories I've read from different perspectives over the years the Opium Wars, the trade in silver, silk, porcelain, more contemporary history and so on - but this is the first time to have it all weaved together in such a compelling narrative. I'm going to take the advantage of being moderator and pose a few questions to you, to dig into some of the themes. I'll be coming to the audience, so please do, if you have questions or comments that you'd like to pose to Author (Michael Pembroke), don't mask your thoughts. That goes to people online as well; I can see a couple of questions already coming through. important for me. First of all, the book is fantastically written, but there's a sense of tragedy that runs through it, particularly the last section the collapse of China, the imperialism - and I'm sitting here as a tea-drinking Brit, with the shameful imperialism that we saw in those years and how that set up this century China refers to as the century of humiliation, the unequal treaties and so on. I'm very interested in history, particularly the history you've described and its relevance today - how it underpins international relations now, not least between China and the United States. But I'll leave that there as a thought that particularly interested me. One thing, going back to globalization: we hear a lot that globalization has peaked, that we're in a state of de-globalization, whatever it might be. Most people think of globalization in very recent terms, of container ships and economic growth, but you go back to the 1600s and you've described an emerging global economy based on trade with China and silk. I wonder if I could ask you to dig into that a bit more today.
Michael Pembroke:	Yeah, sure. Once the Spanish discovered the trans-Pacific route, shipping was able to go around the world, and apart from navy ships the purpose of ships was to trade. So from the late 1500s through the 1600s we had the first wave of global trade. It was the Spanish going across to Manila and trading with the Chinese coming across from the east coast. And we had trade coming from northern Europe around the South Atlantic below the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, usually through the Malacca Straits; they would often go to India and Sri Lanka, Penang, down the Malacca Straits and then up through the South China Sea to Canton. So there was a well-established trading route which circumnavigated the world. Along that route went silver in one direction to China and the export products that Europe demanded in the other direction - or both directions actually, because some products went west via the Cape and Atlantic route and some went across the Pacific to Cadiz and Seville and through to Europe.
Andrew Staples:	I just wanted to pick up on a couple of other things before I come to the audience. Reading the sections on porcelain was fascinating - a very evocative description of mass manufacture hundreds of years ago. It brings to mind for the UK the industrial revolution, the dark satanic mills in northern Europe, the steel and pottery, Wedgwood you mentioned and so on, but this was taking place hundreds of years before in China. That to me was fascinating - that you had this very sophisticated economy in China producing things nobody else knew how to manufacture.
Michael Pembroke:	Yeah. There's a city in China called Jingdezhen and it was the world center of porcelain manufacturing going back for centuries. There were so many smokestacks in Jingdezhen that it was like the Stoke-on-Trent mills in England in the 19th century. It was so busy that many places carried out different aspects of porcelain manufacturing, and the Chinese had worked out over many centuries that the best way was for many hands to do small tasks to make up the overall whole. There were people who tended the furnaces, people who watched the objects, people who moderated the heat, people who dealt with the product when it came out, some who painted one tree or part of a tree, others who painted another part or a bridge or the patterns on Chinese porcelain. Hundreds of people were involved in making one teacup. That was a form of industrialization before we had steam engines, and it pre-empts Adam Smith's classic examples of specialization by many years.
Andrew Staples:	One final question for me, maybe a bigger one. The subtitle of the book is "The Trade with China That Changed History." It seems to me there was an inflection point somewhere. You mentioned that China's economy was the world's biggest right up until the early 1800s, when the opium trade was really kicking into gear. At some point power flipped from China - the world's biggest, most sophisticated economy and bled out elsewhere to Britain in particular and Western powers more broadly. Is that fair, that you would point to the early 1800s as that fundamental shift in the global political economy?
Michael Pembroke:	Yes. I thought I'd made that clear. I think by the 1820s, when China had the world's largest GDP, the introduction of opium on a huge scale completely changed the trade. It resulted in the emperor's efforts to shut down the opium trade and consequently led to attempts by the British, French and Western powers to expand the trade, open more treaty ports and reduce China to a state of neocolonialism. The effect on the present is this: after the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1912, the father of the Republic, Sun Yat-sen, sought to restore China's sovereignty, establish its independence and unify it after nearly a century of neocolonialism. Those were the same principles that Mao sought to introduce when he came to power in 1949, and they are very much the same principles that Xi Jinping has tried to build on. Both Mao and Xi Jinping praise Sun Yat-sen as a great hero for the Chinese nation. The result for modern observers is that China is absolutely determined to ensure its sovereignty is not intruded upon, that it is allowed to pursue its people's prosperity without interference, and that it retains a strong central government and will never again allow itself to be broken up the way it was after the century of humiliation.
Andrew Staples:	Yeah, and I think this is why the book is so valuable, particularly to students of business today and of globalization, to understand the dynamics that shape contemporary China and the global economy.

Geopolitical Lessons for the Modern Era

Andrew Staples:	Okay, I'm going to stop asking questions or I could be here all night and that's unfair of me. So let me come to the audience and see if we have some questions. We have some hands coming up over here. Let me start here and just let us know who you are and try to keep the questions short and sweet so we can get through as many as we can.
Audience:	Hello, my name is Mark Wales. I'm an author whose second book is actually this woman's part of the story. I'm interested in your views of the economic impact on India, of the opium trade.
Michael Pembroke:	Well, the answer is and I'm not an Indian historian, by the way. But the opium production areas and the factories that pattern binaries were, like slave labor. They were really dreadful places. The growers of opium were paid a pittance. And much of their product was often rejected, and they had to, they're effectively bound to the East India Company. And many of them died in the process of making opium. You know, they were exposed to the fumes of liquid opium as they stirred it and the like, which I've all described. But I don't know if India got anything out of it because all of them profit from the opium trade, went to the East India Company and indirectly to the British government. And all the opium trade did to the Indians was to impoverish them. And India, of course, was effectively under the control of the East India Company, until well into the 19th century. So, the economic effect on India, the nation, was not great. There was also the fact that there was on the western side. Yes. Yeah. India. We didn't get rise of the rise of the party since the Sassoon family. Well, I'm not sure how much the Jardines traded on that side. They tried and traded out of Calcutta, but yeah. Jardine doesn't come out very well from history. No. Jardine and Matheson became, well, Matheson in particular became the second wealthiest landowner in England as a result of his profiteering from the opium trade. And Jardine became a member of the House of Commons. And Gladstone made very clear his dislike of Jardine. In a novel he wrote in which he described Jardine as a dreadful Mr. Druggie or something like that, you know.
Audience:	Hello. My name is Prachi Sharma, and I am from the National University of Singapore. So, my question, actually, my reflection is this book is so, coincidentally, at a very opportune time when China has just, came out with the rule on first Jan 2026 declaring silver as a strategic material, which means it controls 60 to 70% of trade, which it was already doing. And I cannot help but reflect that. It's like China is making silver like the porcelain of the history that it has. The control over silver.
Michael Pembroke:	I meant to mention that it's gone round into circles so that there was a huge silver demand, during the 300 year period from early 1500s to the early 1800s. Huge silver demand in China and China now leads the world in the silver demand. Now, the two, three reasons, I think electrification of almost everything, industrialization and Al and yes, they're locking up the silver market.
Audience:	How do you think it will define the trade with China that will define our future and the geopolitical scenario?
Michael Pembroke:	Well, that is hard. I was speaking to Mr. Hinrich about this earlier. It looks very much as if the era of a rules-based world trade is well and truly behind us. The WTO has not been effective for a long time, partly because the Americans didn't like its results and sabotaged it so it couldn't work. They sabotaged it by refusing to appoint members to the appeal process so that no one could appeal from a decision. So we are going to have an era. It looks, of protectionism, self-interest and weaponization of trade. And in that sort of world, the strong dominates.
Audience:	Hi, this is Baird Bingley from the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. We're based here in Singapore, our headquarters in Vancouver. Thank you for drawing the linkages to the modern day. I've got a couple of questions for you. But they're quite different. I think. First, I think we might have some budding authors in the room. And I wonder if you could talk about your research process, some of the primary sources that you went to, you found interesting. How do you choose secondary sources, that sort of thing? Would be great to hear. And second, I wanted to look at, when you reviewed all the kind of conflicts in the 1800s. Well, you didn't mention at all and I was a bit surprised was the Taiping Rebellion. Because the Taiping rebels banned opium, gambling, alcohol, basically being fun.
Michael Pembroke:	Because they banned six.
Audience:	I mean, I guess if you're the Chinese brother of Jesus, you might have some funny ideas, right? 30 million people died in that conflict. And the Western powers got involved in support the Qing dynasty to protect their treaty ports on that. Or do you see that is kind of peripheral to the narrative that you're talking?
Michael Pembroke:	Well, the narrative I was trying to explain was the Western invasions. Yes. The Taiping Rebellion added to the instability. But, it wasn't the reason for the First Opium War, didn't it hadn't happened by then. And it wasn't the reason for the Second Opium War. It just added to the complication, and missed that China was in and the instability, and yes, Europeans, engaged on both sides in the Taiping Rebellion. There were lots of mercenaries, lots of American and European mercenaries. And, they were engaged in the arms trade, some to help the Taiping and some to help the then government. So it's a factor in the overall history of China. But I was focusing on the connection with the West.
Andrew Staples:	The writing process, because we talked a little bit about this yesterday. My question to you is when you started out with a sort of idea in mind about what the book would be and how is that different to the final product. But going back to Barrett's point there around the sources and the sort of operationalization of writing a book.
Michael Pembroke:	Well, I've had the same process for the last four books. The last three. One was on Korea, one was on the United States leadership since World War II, which I got the idea from at Princeton in the first year of the first Trump presidency. And this was the third. What I tend to do is spend with a big book, and this is the big one, spend a couple of years reading and thinking. And the more you read, the more you uncover and you drill down into the notes all the time and then you get hold of the notes or the sources referred to in the notes. And so your knowledge spreads, wider and wider. And you keep picking up new ideas, but new sources. Now, I'm very lucky to have a wonderful research assistant to actually, but primarily one who has access to all of the libraries in the world through her credentials. And everything's digitized these days. I needed books, from and sources for my book on Korea, which came from the Library of Congress in digital form. So, you know, I start to find things and she'll, I tell her what I need and what I want, and she'll get them for me. It could come from anywhere in the world. And then they often lead to more questions and more requests and more sources. So it develops. It's a huge organic process. And all the time during that reading process, your mind is thinking about a structure and what more work and what won't and what points matter most. And it's a, it's an ongoing fluid process. And then then you start to write after a few years of research, and when you start to write, you find that the process of research continues because you write something and then you, you drill down a bit and then you realize, well, I need to go a bit further on that. And you haven't been there before. So you're writing and reading and researching all at the same time. But the first couple of years, which is where I met with the next project is, is sort of more relaxed because there's no pressure to write anything. You're just learning and researching. Thank you.
Audience:	My name is, Hiro Ichisaka and I cover business development and economics for with the Pacific Corporation here in Singapore. I think, you know, with the recent developments in geopolitics, history is becoming much more important, especially the pre-20th century. And, my question is that, from a Chinese leadership point of view, what are the lessons you've already touched on all of the specific lessons that they took from the history, you know, that you mentioned between China and the West in terms of trade and how has it translated or affected, let's say, current strategies or policies, for example, the nine dash map in the South China Sea or maybe future policies moving forward. Thank you.
Michael Pembroke:	The lessons, I think, are these: China, because of its huge population, must have strong central government. That was the principle established by the first Qin Emperor. He was the first one to create a unified China. And cardinal to that process was having strong central government and, by the way, a meritocratic bureaucracy, very, very clever minds. And that's what China has now strong central government, brilliant minds advising the government. Now, the other thing, the other principle is this, China wants self-reliance. It's learned that it can't depend on the West, I think, to some extent it's given up. It's given up on the UK. It's I don't think it trust the United States. So it above all else, it wants to be able to rely on itself. And that's the way it seems to be going. But I must finish on the nine-dash line. Sorry to Andy. That's a military idea. I mean, China is surrounded on the East Coast by hundreds, I think, US bases from Okinawa to Guam to Singapore to Australia, many of them, many more than I've mentioned. And that's not comfortable. So minds will differ on this. But what the Chinese military is, has been built up in order to ensure its self-defence. Imagine if the United States had Chinese bases all around the Florida coast and up to North Carolina and so on. So, that's what I think about the nine-dash line.
Andrew Staples:	Just to pick up on the comment there about, self-reliance. And that's very much underpins a lot of, national strategy. And we see this in the, you know, 2025 policy and all the rest of it. Yeah. However, they also want access to overseas markets. Isn't that mercantilism?
Michael Pembroke:	Yes. And I don't think mercantilism is necessarily, has it necessarily had a negative connotation. And I see, I see more of China's trade happening with Asia and Africa and the many countries of South America than it will happen in the future with the United States. I almost said North America, but Canada was decided to be friendly again with China. And, and Europe. I don't know what will happen with the European trade. I did notice the other day in the context of recent events, a journalist, European journalist talk about the trade between the European Union countries and the United States being the biggest in the world. It's not. The biggest trade in the world is between China and the Asean nations. And so I do think that we, some of us tend to look at the China position with a certain Western centric bias still. And I think that, is quite apparent at the moment.
Andrew Staples:	One final one for me. This really struck me when I read this again. We mentioned this yesterday. This is a quote from John Wolseley, who was a young officer in the British Army, and he was at the sack of the Summer Palace in Beijing. And don't just think of a palace as a building is a massive site, huge grounds containing cultural treasures from centuries before and so on. It was comprehensively razed to the ground. He was looking at this and then writing, as you have here in the book, his memoirs, 43 years later, he became the commander in chief of the British Army. There is no nation numerically as great as China. To me, they are the most remarkable race on earth, and I've always thought that and still believe them to be the great coming rulers of the world. They only want the Chinese, Peter the Great or Napoleon to make them so. And in my idle speculation upon the world's future, I have long selected them as some combatants on one side of a great battle of Armageddon, the people of the United States of America being their opponents. In 1903 or 4 or so, when he was writing this. Is that inevitable?
Michael Pembroke:	First of all, the old Summer Palace was 860 acres. It was gigantic, and nothing was left. And the Chinese have left it in ruins. As a testament to history. That's a very attractive passage. Just the reason I put it in, but I don't agree with General Wolseley. I think he became a field marshal. Yes, I can accept that. And I don't believe in the CDC's trap argument either. I think China is too clever to intelligent, too thoughtful to allow itself to be drawn into that sort of thing. I think there'll be a lot of provocation. And there's certain forces are doing their utmost in Taiwan to persuade the government to declare independence. Japan is going to be troublesome. But I think the last thing that China wants or aims for is military conflict on a large scale. There hasn't been a war involving China since effectively a border skirmish in February 1979 with North Vietnam. And that was instigated in part because United States had in January of that year, established relations with China for the first time. And China supported Cambodia. I think Russia supported North Vietnam. And it is believed that China engaged in that two and a half weeklong war in order to establish its credentials with Washington. But that's all it did. So there was no war before that? No war except the Korean War. So we go from 1950 to the present without China engaging in a serious war with any country. So I don't see that pattern changing. They will make noises. Like, you have to make noises to make it clear that you know, you're not a pushover. And no doubt, the generals you know, want to go to war. Some do, but China's not inclined to do that, I think, and I don't believe that there will be some sort of Armageddon.
Andrew Staples:	Nice positive note on which to end, the session. So many more questions and areas that I'd love to to explore, but we are at time unfortunately. It just remains for me to say this is the first time I've been in front of a judge, just for the record, and I'm pleased and delighted at how well it's gone. Author (Michael Pembroke), thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a great pleasure, and I would urge everybody - students, people writing books, whoever you might be to read this book, think about the history and link that into today and tomorrow. So please join me in thanking Author (Michael Pembroke) for his time today.
Michael Pembroke:	Thank you.