BEIJING, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) — Overseas experts have expressed optimism about global influence of the Chinese economy, saying that China’s economic restructuring and reforms and maintenance of stable growth will create opportunities for common development of the world.
Commenting on a somewhat slowdown in China’s economic growth and a downward pressure faced by the Chinese economy, the experts generally believed that for the Chinese economy which has already profoundly integrated itself into the global system, such fluctuations and setbacks are actually related to the process of global economic revival.
Jonathan Freedland’s new thriller The Third Woman is set in a future in which the United States is in thrall to China. Freedland told the Guardian newspaper that his new book was inspired by Martin Jacques’s bestselling When China Rules the World which, according to the review in the Guardian, argues that ‘China has no interest in moving towards western-style democracy. Rather, its economic power will grow as it learns to operate “both within and outside the existing international system… sponsoring a new China-centric international system which will exist alongside the present system and probably slowly begin to usurp it”’.
Business China, in conjunction with Singapore Press Holdings, organised a wonderful event on 27th November in Singapore in their Eminent Speakers Series. Over a thousand people packed into the Grand Ballroom of Singapore’s Furama RiverFront Hotel to hear Martin Jacques talk on Why China Will Be a Very Different Kind of Great Power — and now for the first time, a complete video of the event is available to view.
The talk was followed by a question and answer session during which the moderator, Professor Tan Khee Giap, asked the audience whether or not they broadly agreed with Jacques’s argument. Did they vote for or against? See the short video below.
Click here for the extensive media coverage of the event (in Chinese)
Protesters cry democracy but most are driven by dislocation and resentment at mainlanders’ success.
Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong on Tuesday. ‘Hong Kong has lost its role as the gateway to China.’ Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
The upheaval sweeping Hong Kong is more complicated than on the surface it might appear. Protests have erupted over direct elections to be held in three years’ time; democracy activists claim that China’s plans will allow it to screen out the candidates it doesn’t want.
It should be remembered, however, that for 155 years until its handover to China in 1997, Hong Kong was a British colony, forcibly taken from China at the end of the first opium war. All its 28 subsequent governors were appointed by the British government. Although Hong Kong came, over time, to enjoy the rule of law and the right to protest, under the British it never enjoyed even a semblance of democracy. It was ruled from 6,000 miles away in London. The idea of any kind of democracy was first introduced by the Chinese government. In 1990 the latter adopted the Basic Law, which included the commitment that in 2017 the territory’s chief executive would be elected by universal suffrage; it also spelt out that the nomination of candidates would be a matter for a nominating committee.
