Originally published with transcript at https://www.nickfabbri.com/bloom/paulmonkonchina

In this episode, Nick and Paul discuss:

• Paul’s book Thunder From the Silent Zone, and four possible futures for China

• The history and legacy of Hu Yaobang, the "conscience" of the Chinese Communist Party

• The history of democracy in China, and the possibility of political reform or democratisation

• Xi Jinping and his designs on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan

• China’s rapid militarisation under Xi, and implications for Australia and the regional order

• Exercises in thinking: adopting the world view and perspectives of Chinese communist nationalists in regard to the current geopolitical order

• The Thucydides Trap, and the prospect of conflict between China and the United States

• The COVID-19 pandemic and China

• The diplomatic and trade war between China and Australia

• Literature on the implications of China’s rise

Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China. 

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