China is not only transforming itself but also the world in the process of modernization, which requires the Chinese to have cosmopolitan outlook to embrace global impacts, Martin Jacques said on Sunday.
Martin Jacques, the author of When China Rules the World, and visiting senior fellow at IDEAS of London School of Economics and Political Science, made the remarks during a joint media interview at the 5th World Forum on Chinese Studies.
Martin is confident that China will become the most influential and powerful country in the world, not just economically but politically and culturally, despite it will take a long way to go.
In Martin’s opinion, China’s modernization will go through two phases and will see a profound transformation and completion of the modernization process in the next twenty years.
“The next period of China’s modernization is going to be more complicated in some aspects than the first half,” he said, adding that from now until 2030, China will get huge modernization as more people will move from countryside to the cities, develop more sophisticated, value-added economy.
And at the same time, China will have enormous impact on the rest of the world, he added.
He mentioned that the most fundamental difference between the first phase of modernization and the coming second phase concerns its impact on the rest of the world.
The impact of China’s modernization on the rest of the world will be enormous since its population is big and growth rate is high, he explained.
China’s global impact demands that it has a cosmopolitan outlook to understand its interaction with the rest of the world.
Talking about the identity of Chinese during the moderation process, Martin said the notion to be a Chinese will be reworked by this very profound process.
“The process of modernization has thrown the traditional culture into crisis,” said Martin, “you will see the emergence of Chinese with global mentality and they will increasingly have global consciousness and be much more aware of, affected and influenced by sensitive ideas from outside China.”
When sharing his view about global implication of Chinese dream, Martin said it is not only about improving living standards but also suggests that China begin thinking of itself in the global context in a different way and dream about its possibilities of exercising much more influence on the world.
Themed on “China’s Modernization: Road and Prospect,” the two-day forum began Saturday.
Co-sponsored by the China’s State Council Information Office and Shanghai Municipal Government, it attracts about 240 scholars and opinion-leaders from various fields to study the development of China in the context of modernization.