Good evening everybody. Good evening on this beautiful evening. Thank you all for joining us. We are very excited to host this launch in d. C. Of a monumental new book, train three. It is already getting excellent reviews in the New York Times. If you havent seen it, that should be the second thing you read after her book this brave new world. We are excited to have anja manuel joining us in conversation. I will give you just a brief sketch of both of their biographies because they are so well known to all of us in this room. Three is a lawyer anja manuel is a lawyer and handles the asia portfolio for the undersecretary of state who handles clinical affairs. They have served as the Deputy National security adviser among many positions as chairman of the u. S. Institute of peace. This book is really a wonderful work. Its important and comes at an important time when so many of our policymakers and Business People and are trying to determine precisely how to think about china and where these two very important countries fit into it. So, on the half of all of us, we are very honored to have the ability to host this conversation tonight. Without further ado, let me turn it over to anja manuel and steve. [applause] thank you, richard, very much. I need to begin by saying i am a big fan of anja manuel and her book which i think is extremely informative and readable. Its a terrific read. Congratulations. I want to start by asking you why you decided to write a book, why why did you decide to write this book and why india and china together . For most people either one of them wouldve been a daunting task and you decided to do both. Thank you and thank you for hosting this. Thank you for being willing to do this with me and thanks to all the friends and bureaus in the audience peered and very happy to be here and seeing all of you. Why this book . Asia is a little bit in my blood. I actually grew up partially in pakistan which wasnt famous then for bin laden but was at the base of the highway leading to the wild west of china leading to india. This was an area i have been interested in for a long time. I did a lot of work at the state department mostly on india and some on china. Increasingly, as i watch, nows course we do business in both of those places for our clients and as i see i see the Public Discourse in america about asia, it seems were so worried about china and theres so much about china. One day there 10 feet tall and theyre coming to get us in the next day there that the doom dragon and their economy is collapsing. Neither of which is quite right. Theres very little Public Discourse about india. I believe that even now, but especially a a decade or more from now, these are the two countries that are going to have a dramatic impact on how we all live as americans. By then they will have 3 billion people between them so our companies will be selling to them. They will have the Worlds Largest middle classes and we cant even begin to solve the worlds biggest problems without them. I live in california. A small cloud already travels from asia all the way to san francisco. In a decade or so india and china will be the first and Third Largest carbon emitters. We need to get our relations with them just right. So you already knew a lot about india and a lot about china before you worked the book. What is it that you learned in writing the book that most surprised you . A lot. The number one thing, i would say, we spend our time, all of us in washington talking to government officials, talking to officials, talking to business leaders, when i wrote the book i very much tried also to see the interlands of both of these countries. I spent some time in the slums of delhi where people live in corrugated iron huts with no plumbing or electricity. They make their money by recycling materials from a trash heap that is 3foot high. I spent some time interviewing the folks that assemble all of the worlds electronics. Your iphones and android phones. Thats not something i had been exposed to before. The most interesting thing i learned from that, we all know there was a lot of poverty in china and india, india is much worse. India has 300 Million People still under the world poverty line which is a dollar 25 a day. China has 84 million. Million. The scale of the problem is much bigger but its also, in china, most of the poor, especially the urban poor are working in factory jobs or jobs that are on the books. In a way they are easier to help because you can do it through the paycheck and you can give pension and health benefits. In india, all of these guys are working in the economy. What are you going to do. Until india just introduced a new biometric id system which actually puts some of the people on the books and gives them an existence and modi has opened almost 250 Million Bank Accounts which will then allow these people to actually be helped by the state in a way they were before. One of the things, these are countries that have very different approaches to development and seeking prosperity and in some sense seeking power. I know you avoid the horserace analogy, which is better and which is going to win, but do we have a stake in terms of how these countries succeed and whether they succeed . Whats the u. S. Stake in all of this mark. We do have a stake in this and i think we want them both to succeed. Its often much more comfortable to deal with india than with china. I described that in the opening of the book for the state visits. Im sure many of you were part of them but there were two, and one in seattle and one in palo alto. One was just comfortable and relaxed and we were already partners and it was easy and the other dinner was wonderful as well but it was very formal and we were working hard to get our Relations Just right. It wasnt quite as comfortable with india. I agree with you, i dont think this should be about the horse race. I think its very much in our interest for both of them because as i said you cant have Climate Change without them. You cant solve a lot of of the worlds other problems without them. Despite of what we heard on the campaign, our economies dont succeed unless these two growing economies continue to be the engine of world growth. Lets talk about environment issues. China is now the biggest emitter of co2, for example and india india is probably the Fastest Growing in midair. So obviously it affects what happens in those two countries and that affects the World Economy and the United States in terms of the environmental situation. Is there something that we can do with india and china together that all three countries can do that can make some progress on these Environmental Issues . This is a good question and this is one of the most fertile opportunities for working together. In the book i lay out a number of challenges that these countries face on their way to power status and how they are dealing with them. The environmental one is an enormous challenge. When youre looking around china, you see see this huge coal mine, 30 football fields in length and they make those mining trucks look teeny tiny and you see china still needs to do this stuff to grow. They cant help it. In india the pollution is actually even worse. Thirteen of the 20 most polluted cities are actually in india. When i was on the river, you see dead bodies floating on the river. The problems are dire. This is one of the areas where i think weve done a good job, our governments across Different Administration working with china and india to solve the problem. When i was in government, i had a small part and you have a large part in negotiating this civilian nuclear deal with india partly that was about our Strategic Partnership in india, but a lot of it was about getting clean, nonpolluting power as india scales up its electricity use. Its. Its a big win win for both country. India has these super optimistic projection about how many Nuclear Operators they were going to build. I would say, similarly, i really think what the Obama Administration is doing with china and on the Climate Change in 2014 that has helped spur the rest of the world to announce their own binding commitments on omissions was another helpful way that all three can work together. More to come on that. You wrote an oped on indias corruption. We dont hear a lot about indias corruption but if you talk to business communities, one of the problems they have is that india is so corrupted cant deal with it. They wonder how much is about corruption and how much is about political course of this. Can you talk a little bit about the different approaches in india and china and what they say about their two political systems . The way they are dealing with this is a perfect example of the two systems. The reason the New York Times wanted to write about the india story is because theres a personal story. When i was a young state department official, of midlevel official tried to involve me and a kickback scheme. I just sat there naively blinking and nodding and got out of his office as quickly as i could. Its ram. And its a difficult problem like it is in china. The chinese story is wellknown. The way china has dealt with it so far has been almost completely topdown, own almost 200,000 people were investigated and have gone to trial. Purely topdown. Indias solution is almost entirely bottomup. So about four or five years ago, a lot of citizens were finally fed up with this. A man who looks a little bit like gandhi but is older started a hunger strike. It caught on. Before you knew it there were tens of thousands of people across india who demonstrated and said enough is enough. Some new anticorruption laws have been passed and its been far from perfect, but this citizen activism is there and it continues. The problem is neither of these approaches alone are perfect. When you look at the countries that have really tackled corruption and done a good job with it, singapore, hong kong, south kong, south korea, what they have done is a little bit of what youre seeing in china and india, but more more. Hong kong for example established an independent which is nonpolitical and very quickly adjudicated many of the programs a wanted to teach young people that this is not how you should be doing business. In some cases there was a rise in Civil Servant salaries. Those are some additional steps that i think both india and china should take if theyre really going to solve this problem. Are you optimistic they can do it or is the corruption to ramp it . Is it almost too far gone to fix . I think with corruption when there is a will there is a way. I named three countries that really turned around their system. Its doable. But it requires a lot of sustained effort and a political effort. Lets talk a bit about china. There has been a remarkable crackdown in terms of china. I think that is what we would have to say in terms of human right workers and in terms of media and social media and i think there was an article in the review actually, the wall street journal, where there are about 180,000 incidents of civil disruption in china every year. Talk a little bit about the challenge and can they really keep the lid on that society. A society that now has many people on the internet and an engaged population. How are we to think about them long term and their stability in light of whats percolating their . Thank you. Im going to ask that second part of the question right back at you in just a minute. So in terms of the kind of dissent that you see in china, as i started digging into it in the book and i started interviewing a lot of people, i saw three different kinds of dissent. One is the 180,000 protest that you talk about. Mostly runofthemill people who dont want their property appropriated and are worried about Labor Conditions at their factory, who want a better environment, sort of daily issues, not political. This is not for freedom. This is is not for i want to get paid more or i want clean water. Two you have some people who are just going to be outsiders in the chinese system. Other communities that are on the outside and are in some instances protesting and a lot of other places are underground. Third, i think this is the most important force that is coming up, when i go to go to china now and i speak to students at stanford, where i teach they have a big center, when i speak to students there, these millennials have no memories of tenement square. They have no memory of crackdown. They are unbelievably active on social media, just as you said. Some some of the things they say really cross over, theres a guy at berkeley who studies whats trending on chinese social media and you would be surprised of some of the things that are out there. So when the peoples congresses meeting in beijing you have a whole uptick in who are these people, they dont represent me. When i have a young, when we were there a few years ago, we have a young government translator and we asked her about this and she said well, we all know that social media is monitored, but we keep switching to the new one until they catch onto that one. We thought that was a little surprising from a government translator. For your second question, is it going to implode, i think no one predicted the fall of the soviet union. There has been recently a lot of chatter about china and its hard to see how you interpret it, as im sure many of you know in march there was anonymous letter sent asking him to step down because hes developing a controlling personality, there are constant rumors, no one knows if theyre true or not of attempts on his life. Its anyones guess whether there is more brewing there or not. I do think if there is a change of government in china there would be more likely that it is an internal, within the communist party uprising than a tenement square type uprising. But i would love to have you answer that question as well. That wasnt in the script. I was at the u. S. China dialogue a week ago and one of the same things they talked about in regards to instability and security threats, he doesnt really believe it. He thinks he wouldnt have seen the leader travel internationally the way he does. His theory is theres a lot of rumors in the system. They were giving me a hard time about the american political system, sort of making the suggestion that is in the chinese better. I think the risk for the chinese and what i said to him was in the United States what you are seeing is a lot of discontent being played out within our political system, for better or worse because thats what our political system allows. Rather than than playing out on the streets in terms of violence or demonstration. We invite that much. Of course the question for china is, if you clampdown too much and there is discontent, what is the outcome. If you put the lid too tightly on a boiling pot, at some point theres a problem. Let me add one thought on this. I think we speculate about this stuff a lot in the media and in policy, i think its not in anyones interest for there to be a drastic change in government in china. Political turmoil in china, think about the Financial Markets so i dont think we should be hoping for any type of overthrow. Let me ask you something we havent talked about. How about political stability a in india, a very different system. Any worries or concerns about that . India is exactly iq say, its like the american system. It is resilient. Governments may not be perfect but a lot of my indian friends are frustrated but its a balance. The problem is, when when you have a democracy you have to deal with lots of other Interest Groups. In india, people were fed up. So now you have a government which has tried to do a lot on economic reform but isnt able to move as quickly because there are Interest Groups within both the central groups but most importantly the stakes in states in india have so much power that makes it harder to achieve things quickly but theyre much more resilient. I will put you down as india is stable instability and china is unstable stability. Hows that . That sounds okay. Let me. Let me ask one more question. They say they are one of the worst democracies to be a woman. Is that true and how do india and china compare . I think it is true. I learned much more about this in my research for the book. So in india, a lot of the laws are on the books. So pretty decent antiharassment laws and maternity leave, all of the things that you would expect, sometimes better than the u. S. However, especially for the poorer segments of society and the lower castes, they are not enforced, sometimes ever. They are not as well enforced as they should be. In typical indian style, people often take things into their own hands and their citizens who do something about it. One of the stories that i tell in the book is about a gang of women who wear hot pink scarves. They are lower caste women and they are females. There are tens of thousands people who have joined them across india. They are in the villages where if they know a woman is being beaten by their husband, for example in the police doesnt do anything about it, they will they will go with sticks and beat up on the husband. Its a very indian solution. But, when you compare india and china on these issues, there is just no comparison p at the communist communist party has actually been very good for women, especially if youre looking at women in the workforce, i think Something Like 70 of chinese of Chinese Women work compared to 58 here, 25 in india. Many, many Chinese Women are at the top, not so much the top of the political establishment but in business, more Chinese Women are selfmade billionaires than anywhere else on earth. 30 million Chinese Women run companies. They are female entrepreneurs. Those are really big numbers and that means something. Thank you. Questions from the audience . A boom microphone is on its way to you. I love the logo on the book, but of course to be more accurate, the gears from india and china would actually be messed