That's a very complicated question. Well, the question is not complicated—the answer is complicated.
China is a vast place. If you think of it historically, it has been more or less unified for a very long time, unlike Europe, but it is bigger than Europe, and it is culturally more diverse than it appears ethnically, so to understand.... There are a lot of Canadians who understand the China that they see. The China of the south, the China of the northeast and the China of the far west are all very different cultures, in spite of the fact that the Han ethnicity dominates the place so we tend to think of it as unified. It's less unified than we think.
In fact, the history of China has been a history of unification, and then, gradually, dynasties fall apart as regional interests overwhelm the central pull. That's one of the things that Xi Jinping fears. It's that the centre won't hold. It's why he pushed back hard against 30 years of change, which was leading to a weakening of the party's influence around the country. He pushed back to try to reverse that.
What is interesting about China is that it is changing. One of the great things that Mao Zedong did—there were many more things he did that were bad—was that he turned a more or less completely illiterate society into a literate society. We see the benefits of that today, when we see Chinese students in all our universities and all over the world. We see the young China becoming more and more worldly.
There's one thing that I would say Canadians should recognize. It's that China is in the midst of a very big transition, and it hasn't reached the end. We don't know what the end is going to be in terms of what happens when a highly literate and increasingly educated society becomes comfortable in their life and looks to expect other things, such as greater respect for the rule of law and seeing that their interests are responded to in some kind of political process. It will take time, but it will keep changing.
We saw the beginnings of that huge change between 1978 and 2014. That was almost continuous—not always at the same pace but almost continuous—and it's only in the last five years that we've seen this kind of counter-reform.
In terms of the changes that we were helping to make in those early days when I was ambassador, which is a long time ago now, at the time of the turn of the century, we helped to establish their National Judges College, where we taught the international principles of the rule of law, the right of legal counsel and all those things. Our Supreme Court justices, members of the Quebec court, which is particularly applicable because of the civil code, and other members of our judicial hierarchy came over to teach the Chinese, who wanted to learn.
One thing I would say is, don't assume China has stopped changing.