And equipment is going through and we know this stuff. We have the proof and i know that some people dont want to do that. And i think that we have to be part of this and i would talk about the misfortune to read this blog and feel the stuff that they have put out about that, including very recently, we understand what has happened and i think that that has to be with no ifs, ands or buts. And i think that thats where you start. And my second point goes to the longerterm question of some of my colleagues have said what we see as part of his reactions what is happening its not only that they are putting themselves forward in a new conservative international appealing to traditional stakes were we have traditional family values, but its almost a revolt against this and obviously we all understand the what they need to do is talk about this. A lot of this is what is appealing and they sort of dont want to be in the 21st century. So if he is in power for another 10 years as it likely. We have to think about where the next generations of people who are going to be coming in to power at some point when hes no longer in the kremlin. And we have to do everything that we can while we are still dealing with this crisis to build up longerterm and continual contacts with those who do not fear modernity. Thank you and you get the last word. I think ambassador is the ambassador is going to get the last word because his Climate Change wisecrack was terrific and is going to be out there trending. And i bet it is already trending. So i just want to pick up on something that angela just said which i think goes to the meta point here which is we are together almost every day, it seems, on this subject. She made a very good point that the russian word for security means absence of danger. So if we want to emphasize and be under standards of vladimir putin, we need to understand where he sees the danger coming from. He sees it coming from the west and that is the only point of the compass from which the danger is not coming to russia. So what they want to see is basically the following. A modern economy and globalized economy. Not being the poster child for this resource but a healthy population, which it doesnt have. And an open society, which it doesnt have. And since it has 14 continuous neighbors, it should have 14 friendly neighbors. And in fact what it is doing is inspiring or engendering fear and loathing in 13 of the 14 and we know what the 14 says, loathing but aspirations for russian territory and we have to hope that these future leaders will recognize. Thank you very much. I want to thank everyone who is here and i hope that for all of you in the room and certainly those watching on cspan, people believe an objective and serious nonpartisan discussion of issues and that is what the Strategy Group is about. Nonpartisan discussion. If youd like to know more, i would say that the book is available on amazon. Com. Thank you very much to all of the panelists and the ambassador of denmark and estonia and lafayette. Thank you all for being here. [applause] on this weekends newsmakers, we have a congressman is our guest. He was elected in the next session of congress and he talks about the committees priorities when republicans are in full control of congress in january. Watched the interview on sunday at 10 00 a. M. And 6 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Cspan2 provides live coverage of the u. S. Senate floor proceedings and key Public Policy events. Booktv, the only Television Network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2 created by the cable tv industry and brought to you as a Public Service by her local cable satellite provider. Watch us and like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. Coming up tonight on cspan2, an encore presentation of q a with evan osnos, who was recently named the winner of this Years National book award for nonfiction. Then a look at Irans Nuclear program as talks here monday deadline for reaching an agreement. Author evan osnos is among the recipients of this Years National book awards. He was recognized for his nonfiction work age of ambition, which looks at rising conflicts between the individual and Chinese Government. Earlier this year, he discussed the book on q a. This weekend, our guest is evan osnos. He discusses his new book, age of ambition chasing fortune, truth, and faith in the new china. In your new book, under the ottomans come you start out by saying that none of my grand parents to see this book, but they are responsible for its conception. Can you tell us more . Guest my grandparents on my fathers side came from pole poland great they were polish jews who left at the beginning of world war ii. On my mothers side, my mothers father was an american that matt sent to hungary and was in fact keep down and accused of being a spy, which he wasnt. And in some ways, these stories, the experiences being ejected from poland or hungary, formed a kind of backdrop in our family story about life under authoritarianism and it was not an explicit part of our conversation. But i think that it always i was always interested in what it felt like to live in a country in which there were fundamental constraints on what you could care about and what your values were. And so when there was a moment in my life when i could go to a place and try to dig into that, china was the place that fascinated me. So that story was part of my interpretation. Cspan when you enter in 1996, could you speak chinese . Guest i started the Previous Year and i was learning it. Oftentimes i think that if anyone told you how hard it would be coming you would never undertake the process. But that wasnt your and i ended up taking about four Years College chinese before i ended up moving to china. I was just starting in 1990s and went for the first time. Cspan i will ask the question a question in english and i want you to answer. What is this book about . Guest you would say in chinese. [speaking in native tongue] and what i mean by that is this book is about ambition, which is about the wild heart and that is the term that people use in chinese to describe ambition. For longtime in chinese it was an unimaginable idea. If you were accused of being ambitious and chinese, that was a death sentence and professionally it could damage your family. Immensely put this before anything else that you put yourself before the group. For chinese history, that was totally unimaginable either under the confucian period were the socialist period and when i got there, things were beginning to change in a deep way and when i began to hear more around me, i heard people talking about themselves, not in a self glamorizing way but a self protective way and in a way that they would say that it matters what i want and the world that i wanted to find for myself. So even this for myself was transforming and people were getting comparable using it. In the United States we talk about the me generation in which we started to focus on ourselves too much and in china it was a revolution in our conception of what it meant to be a person. In the past people would talk about this, which is us, a group, the factories and all of a sudden beginning after 1979 when the country embarks on this economic transformation, people had no choice but to think about themselves and that became the fundamental dynamic the began my eight year fascination in investigation. Cspan you married in this, how did you meet your wife . Guest i met why ought my wife in beijing. And she went over to china for a year and she met me. Cspan dishy speak chinese . Guest yes, she does, she learned it work in an alternative environment, the only foreigner working in a modern environment at at the time. An all day long she was surrounded by tiny speakers, she would take them on the road to go to places like italy and she was there link to the rest of the world and so she had a natural kind of understanding of how people talked daytoday rather than learning it in the classroom which is more formal. Cspan what difference does it make in trying to write this book working for the new yorker, writing about china, that you spoke the language . I couldve done the kind of work that we did at the new yorker if i didnt speak the language and in the simplest sense that so much of what makes a story ultimately makes this book is the kind of minor strokes of conversation and the little choices that people make when they use an expression when they choose an idiom and that sort of the wild heart. That would be inaccessible to me if i hadnt studied chinese. Thats one of these processes that on your whole life and there are still times when i go with a translator for an interview because i know that a person is going to be speaking about something technical or using a dialect. Or gives me a cushion and it means i can think about what is on the wall behind them or how they are holding themselves and with their emotional experiences like. It buys time and this is one of the great things. Working with a translator. So one of the experiences that was a big part of my life was going out in any tour of europe with these chinese tourists. And it was an idea that came where they said we didnt really know how to go out and i thought, maybe i would just die now do this and go with them and see it through their eyes. And there were two are denying tourists and me. And from the getgo they were incredibly welcome. I often felt that if the roles were reverse, how would we respond. I would like to imagine that we would be just as welcoming. I spent this, five countries, 10 days, we almost entirely chinese food in all these countries in europe, they were speaking to each other in chinese and mandarin and the ability to be able to purchase it in a conversation without it being put in some without them trying to get through it in english is the only way that a story like that becomes possible. Cspan would you learn about them being on that trip to and had you been to those places before . I was born in london and we lived there when i was a kid. But flying to germany with them, almost entirely leaving asia for the first time, there was one guy that had been out of asia and he was fond of all the information that they relied upon and then there was a guy who was much more than a guide. He was like a storyteller, an authority figure, the first thing he was to do when we got onto the buses to synchronize our watches because we were going to miss a single second of europe. So we went country to country and i think in some ways our imagination when we think about china at this point in history, we think about it as being this muscular figure starting to make its way in the world, and it feels brave and strong in ways that we dont in this moment. But the truth was that there was a great sense of selfconsciousness and vulnerability as they made their way out into these very unfamiliar places. Sometimes he would go to chinese restaurants. And i thought, why did we do this . Why would we go to wonderful places like france and italy and eat this type of chicken. But the truth was it was like americans going to paris and eating a hamburger. There is a deep insecurity venturing out into the world. That applies also politically and economically with the way that china conducts themselves, which as it has not acclimated to having the body of a superpower but yet it doesnt have all the experience that comes with them. So one of the things was quite striking about that experience is that they also looked at some of the things in europe and they were not impressed. They would look at this and say, why is there graffiti everywhere . Why is it that these people are on strike. They are on strike because they want to work less . And this is a radical notion for a chinese tour group. But really what they brought it home with them was the power of the western Education System. This includes the power of creative thinking and i think that more than anything else is the thing that appeals to Chinese People today about what we have in the west. Its not a physical infrastructure and not wealth because they see themselves on the path to that but that we have this culture in which people are able to pursue idiosyncratic intellectual ideas in a way that they havent yet figured out how to do stand your ground you wrote in your book about china stand out. What is the story behind this video . Guest it is the chinese equivalent of youtube which emerged in 2008 just before the olympics in beijing. The olympic torch was making its way around the world. As a winter became a symbol of china and people used it as an opportunity to talk about human rights abuses and things like that. Its stored in a normas nationalist response particularly among young people. This very proud and defensive response to world criticism of china. And its second only to a tv blooper in a newspaper doing something and some things are universal about the internet. And its clearly an attempt to express an idea that i didnt recognize. And this idea was becoming much more powerful and chinese vice and it was a response to criticism in the west and i said that i have to figure out who made this. Cspan who made it . Guest it turned out not to be a guy that i expected. I had an image of who would be, somebody that was angry, somebody that was isolated from the west. Some of it was probably living in the proverbial parents basement, unaware of what it means to be on the left. And a chinese friend helped me to trace this video back and there was no name attached to it. And before i left i actually said to friends and im going down to meet this guy, this almost militant video that he made and if you dont hear from you for a couple days, ring the bell. So i got there in the first thing he did when i arrived was try to pay for my taxi fare and his name is [inaudible] and he is a graduate student studying western philosophy. He was dressed the same as i was and wearing khakis and blue shirt and he was studying the work of edmund hershel, 80 phenomenal guy, very esoteric elements and he said youre familiar with this and i said of course. Naturally all americans are familiar. And i wasnt familiar at all, had to go back and i looked it up on wikipedia. [laughter] what was interesting is that he spoke german and english and he was studying ancient greek and latin and he was deeply literate. His room was this personal library that had everything from the crown to modern western economic theories treated and yet it had not made him distinctively affectionate towards the west but heightened his sense of and that includes a whole generation of talented successful young Chinese People. A dominant factor of their interpretation of the world which was that china could only go so far. Cspan the two names. Lets show some of it. And how many people have seen this . Guest i was just couple weeks after happen there were up to a million. He remains a kind of manifesto for this community that calls itself the angry youth. And its sort of a stripe of Chinese Society that is angry for all kinds of reasons and the thing that draws them together is that they are proud of what china is then on the other hand frustrated by their own sense of their own lives being limited. Cspan they have to read quickly, it sounds like, and theres a script right below and you will see. And by the way, the music. Guest it is this great orchestral thing and he said this is something that i tied it into the emotionally resonant music and it pointed them to an artist artemis. It was called 1492 and he writes that this was about globalization in another sense. Cspan didnt he also deuterium to fire . Guest yes. That is correct. Cspan when we go back to the beginning, we saw this chairman. But after that is that imperialism will never abandon it the intention to destroy us. Do they really think that he meant. Guest fundamentally i think that they do. The language has changed we no longer talk about imperialism unless it is in the context of this kind of thing where weve really tried to register the contempt for what the west was doing. But they do feel that the west well that they will never allow this without putting up a fight. And that has become a key element of the way that not just ordinary Chinese People but also chinese leaders see this moment with a very anxious moment. They see a certain inevitability as being one of the great civilizations and in the world. And at this point they now see that when you look back over the course of the last 2000 years that whenever a country has emerged to challenge an incumbent power and in this case the United States, most of the time it has led to conflict and both sides are aware of this. Both sides talk about it. They read about and write about those that identify this when athens and sparta were the two dominant civilizations of the time and they ended up in a conflict that lasted 30 years and really ruin both of them. So they recognized the threat of this moment. And this is an important point that this concept that they encounter from the rest of the world has become a very important part of the Education System over the last 25 years. And that was not an accident. And the creator of this video was in a time in which china was searching for the bang that would hold people together and you remember the socialism in the rearview manner and they realize that was not economic salvation. In 1989 there was a tenement square uprising which we are celebrating the 25th anniversary we are marking this spring. That is political idea and they need to pull people together in some way. And they said we will rely on two things. This includes the failure to inspire people and so this young man, many in his generation have grown up being told about the ways in which western countries have sought to keep china down and they are not wrong. They were, as they like to say, carved up like a melon and that is the term that they use to describe the way that foreign powers to control at various points and they talked about a century of humiliation. This is topics was early that china has weathered this the wind from the mid19th century to the mid20th century at the end of world war ii and eventually that was the dominant factor when you think about chinese history. And that includes preventing china from being humiliated again. Lets watch more from that video cspan lets start with the last part there. Then has to reform Million People at the most . Guest yes, that territory has a very sparse population. Cspan how many billion people today have in china . Guest 1. 4 billion people. Cspan why is there so much fuss over this . Guest in some ways they call it an administrative region, and uptown is independent administrat