Two inside views on these questions were offered by Chinese diplomat Wu Jianmin who began his career as a translator for Mao Zedong and recently retired as president of the China Foreign Affairs University, and the prolific author and commentator on Chinese political affairs Cheng Li, Research Director and Senior Fellow, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution.
China has not quite made the transition to a superpower. At the recent G20 Summit, Chinese officials shied away from asserting leadership even when it was handed to them, said Moderator Charles W. Freeman, III, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ambassador Wu admitted that China “was not quite ready to move to center stage,” but at the same time declared that as the world also needed to accept China’s need to expand its political power to match its economic contributions. For example, as China increases its financial commitment to the International Monetary Fund, it needed more voting shares, creating a direct challenge to the West, which holds most of the power. A major challenge to U.S.-China relations, said Wu, is whether Americans can accept China’s success.
“Why does China have a more optimistic view of the economic crisis than the rest of the world?” asked Li. Chinese see an opportunity in this crisis, a major power shift from West to East. For example, said Li, the World Trade Organization in 1998 predicted that there was great danger that China’s large banks would fail, with their heavy burden of bad loans. Today, on the contrary, bad loans have fallen to a few percent, and the world’s top three commercial banks by capitalization are Chinese banks. The irony of the richest country in the world borrowing from one of the poorest is not lost on the Chinese.
Chinese nationalism was another area of discussion. China has experienced periodic outbursts of anti-foreign nationalism, most recently inflamed by what were perceived as anti-China, pro-Tibet demonstrations that marred the running of the Olympic torch around the world last year. Much has also been written about the nationalistic websites of the fenqing, or angry youth. Wu contended that “patriotism has to be based on China’s core interests—prosperity and reunification,” and he said that the “angry youth” kind of patriotism was not shared by the overwhelming majority of young people. The Beijing Olympics slogan, “One Dream, One World,” could not have been possible in the Cultural Revolution, said Wu. Now, China is looking for common interests with other countries. Li said that “the real challenge for China is to change that slogan to real value,” with China embracing a common future and a shared dream rather than seeing the progress of others achieved at China’s expense. “I’m afraid that probably Chinese leaders and some public intellectuals are only thinking there are some technical things [wrong] rather than really making solid progress.”
Editor：Jane Leung Larson
News source:Committee of 100
Web resource: http://committee100.typepad.com/committee_of_100_newslett/2009/06/a-changing-china-new-challenges-and-new-aspirations-featuring-wu-jianmin-and-cheng-li.html
