陆克文演讲：中美两国是否注定冲突英文演讲稿

Good day, my name is Kevin. I am from Australia. I’m here to help.

Tonight, I want to talk about a tale of two cities. One of those cities is called Washington, and the other is called Beijing.Because how these two capitals shape their future ,and the future of the United States and the future of China doesn’t just affect those two countries, it affects all of us. In ways , perhaps, we’ve never thought of .The air we breathe, the water we drink, the fish we eat, the quality of our oceans, the languages we speak in the future, the jobs we have, the political systems we choose, and , of course, the great questions of war and peace.

You see that bloke? He’s French. His name is Napoleon. A couple of hundred years ago, he made his extraordinary projection: “ China is a sleeping lion, and when she wakes, the world will shake.” Napoleon got a few things wrong, he got this one absolutely right. Because China is today not just woken up, China has stoop up and China is on the march, and the question for us all is where will China go, and how do we engage this giant of the 21st century ?

You start looking at the numbers, they start to confront you in big way. It is projected that China will become by whichever measure , PPP, market exchange rates, the largest economy in the world over the course of the decade ahead.

They’re already the largest trading nation, already the largest exporting nation, already the largest manufacturing nation, and they’re also the biggest emitters of carbon in the world.America comes second.

So if China does become the world’s largest economy, think about this: it’ll be the first time , since this guy was on the throne of England, George III, not a good friend of Napoleon’s ,that in the world we will have as the largest economy , a non-English speaking country, a non-western country, a non-liberal democratic country. And if you don’t think that’s going to affect the way in which the world happens in the future, then personally, I think you’ve been smoking something, and it doesn’t mean you’re from Colorado.

So in short , the question we have tonight is , how do we understand this mega change, which I believe to be the biggest change for the first half of the 21st century? It’ll affect so many things. It will go to the absolute core. It’s happening quietly. It’s happening persistently. It’s happening in some senses under the radar, as we are all preoccupied with what’s going in Ukraine, what’s going on in the Middle East, what’s going on with ISIS, what’s going on with ISIL, what’s happening with the future of our economies. This is a slow and quiet revolution. And with a mega change comes also a mega challenge,and the mega challenge is this: Can these two great countries, China and the United States. China, the middle kingdom. And the United States, 美国. Which in Chinese, by the way, means “the beautiful country”. Think about that----- that’s the name that China has given this country for more than a hundred years. Whether these two great civilizations, these two great countries, can in fact carve out a common future for themselves and for the world? In short, can we carve out a future which is peaceful and mutually prosperous, or are we looking at a great challenge of war or peace? And I have 15 minutes to work through war or peace, which is a little less time than they gave this guy to write a book called “ War And Peace”. People ask me, why is it that a kid growing up in rural Australia got interesting in learning

Chinese? Well, there are two reasons for that. Here is the first of them.That is Betsy, the cow. Now, Betsy the cow was one of a herd of dairy cattle that I grew up with on a farm in rural Australia. See those hands there? There are not built for farming. So very early on, I discovered that in fact, working in a farm was not designed for me, and China was a very safe remove from any career in Australian farm life. Here’s the second reason.That’s my mom.Anyone here ever listen to what their mom told them to do? Everyone ever do what their mom told them to do ? I rarely did, but what my mom said to me was, one day, she handed me a newspaper, a headline which said, here we have a huge change.And that change is China entering the United Nations. 1971, I had just turned 14 years of age, and she handed me this headline. And she said, “ Understand this, learn this, because it is going to affect your future”.So being a very good student of history, I decided that the best thing for me to do was , in fact, to go off and learn Chinese. The great thing about learning Chinese is that your Chinese teacher gives you a new name. And so they gave me this name: 克，which means to overcome or to conquer, and 文，ant that’s the character for literature or the arts. 克文，conqueror of the classics.Any of you guys called Kevin? It’s a major lift from being called Kevin to be called Conqueror of the Classics. I’ve been called Kevin all my life. Would you prefer to be called Conqueror of the Classics ? And so I went for after that and joined the Australian Foreign Service, but here is where pride before pride, there always comes a fall. So there I am in the embassy in Beijing ,off to the Great Hall of the People with our ambassador, who had asked me to interpret for his first meeting in the Great Hall of the People. And so there was I, if you’ve been to a Chinese meeting, it’s a giant horseshoe.At the head of the horseshoe are the really serious pooh-bahs, and down the end of the horseshoe are the not so serious pooh-bahs, the junior woodchucks like me. And so the ambassador began with this inelegant phrase. He said, “China and Australia are currently enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness.” And I thought to myself, unilaterally see to change the rules of the global order. So apart from all of that, it’s just fine and dandy, the U.S., China relationship. No real problems there.The challenge, though, is given those deep-rooted feelings, those deep-rooted emotions and thought patterns, what the Chinese call 思维，ways of thinking, how can we craft a basis for a common future between these two? I argue simply this : We can do it on the basis on a framework of constructive realism for a common purpose.What do I mean by that? Be realistic about the things that we disagree on, and a management approach that doesn’t enable any one of those differences to break into war or conflict until we’ve acquired the diplomatic skills to solve them. Be constructive in areas of the bilateral, regional and global engagement between the two, which will make a difference for all of humankind. Build a regional institution capable of cooperation in Asia, an Asia-Pacific community. And worldwide, act further, like you’ve begun to do at the end of last year, by striking out against climate change, with hands joined together rather than fists apart. Of course, all that happens if you’ve got a common mechanism and political will to achieve the above. These things are deliverable. But the question is, are they deliverable alone? This is what our head tells us we need to do, but what about our heart? I have a little experience in the question back home of how you try to

bring together two peoples who frankly, haven’t had a whole lot in common in the past. And that’s when I apologized to Australia’s indigenous peoples.This was a day of reckoning in the Australian government, after 200 years of unbridled towards the first Australians, it was high time that we white folks said we were sorry. The important thing that I remember is starting in the faces of all those from Aboriginal Australia as they came to listen to this apology. It was extraordinary to see, for example, old women telling me the stories of when they were five years old and literally ripped away from their parents, like this lady here. It was extraordinary for me to then be able to embrace and to kiss aboriginal elders as they came into the parliament building, and one woman said to me, it’s the first time a white fella had ever kissed her in her life and she was over 70.That is a terrible story.

And then I remember this family saying to me, “ You know , we drove all the way from the far North down to Canberra to come to this thing, drove our way through redneck country. On the way back , stopped at a cafe after the apology for a milkshake. And they walked into this cafe quietly, tentatively, gingerly, a little anxious.I think you know what I am talking about. But the day after the apology, what happened? Everyone in that cafe, every one of the white folks, stoop up and applauded. Something had happened in the hearts of these people in Australia. The white folks, our aboriginal brothers and sisters, and we haven’t solved all these problems together, but let me tell you ,there was a new beginning, because we had gone not just to the head, we’d gone also to the heart.

So where does that conclude in terms of the great question that we’ve been asked to address this evening, which is the future of U.S. , China relations? The head says there’s a way forward. The head says there is a policy framework, there’s a common narrative, there is a mechanism through regular summitry to do these things and to make them better. But the heart must also find a way to re-imagine the possibilities of the America , China relationship, and the possibilities of China’s future engagement in the world. Sometimes, folks, we just need to take a leap of faith, not quite knowing where we might land.

In China, they now talk about the Chinese Dream. In America, we’re all familiar with the term “The American Dream”.I think , it is time, across the world, that we’re able to think also of something we might also all a dream for all humankind. Because if we do that, we might just change the way that we think about each other. 人类梦。That’s my challenge to America. That’s my challenge to China.That’s my challenge to all of us, but I think where there’s a will and where there is imagination. We can turn this into a future driven by peace and prosperity. And not once again repeat, the tragedies of war.

I thank you .