China's approach an instructive one

There is something powerful about a country which can shape the way one faces challenges or believes. This is the case with me and China. The country where I lived from 2007 to 2013 — and visit regularly after moving back to Brazil — makes me see life from a more pragmatic and objective angle.

Those new lenses I wear were polished by the continuous process of reform and opening-up that China started in 1978. Dec 22, the exact day this process began, was my first birthday. So maybe that is why changes through those 40 years are so familiar to me. Since 2007, when I moved to Beijing, I could experience some of the transformations Chinese society was going through. That was a time when the capital had four subway lines and the ticket was a thin white piece of paper with blue writing. The now-ubiquitous QR codes were pure sci-fi. Now the subway system has 22 lines and more than 600 kilometers of track.

China has built its path through a strategic approach to its social and economy policies relying on the creativity and innovation of its institutions, its people and its industries. By experimenting locally, China has time to adjust its regulations before implementing a new rule throughout the country. As examples we can mention the Township and Village Enterprises that flourished in the 1980s or the Special Economic Zones implemented in the same decade by the central government. The fintech ecosystem of the contemporary digital economy offers another example of innovation and creativity that can be disruptive, no matter whether they are ignited by the private or public sectors.

I arrived in Beijing on a hot summer morning in 2007, on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 30–year anniversary of implementation of the reform and opening-up policy. It was an era with a spirit of novelty, warmth and transformation. A time when the China in the world was changing. A little more than 10 years after that first contact with the Chinese universe, the pace of change has not cooled down. It was the decade of cranes everywhere that heralded the building of a new China. Today, the smartphone is China’s contemporary image, an indicator of the changes in the structure of the Chinese economy. China is shaping its own future step by step.

Once, in a Mandarin class, I asked the teacher if she had positioned some characters wrongly by showing: "qiantian (前天)" for "the day before" since the character 前, or "qian," means “front”, while she wrote "houtian (后天)" and the character 后 or, “hou”, which means "behind", to refers to "the day after tomorrow". She was not wrong.

For the Chinese, there is no doubt about how correct such concepts are, and why it is as simple as it is philosophical: the past is ahead of us - and hence "After Tomorrow" is the "Day Behind", in a metaphor that the past is the result of our actions and reactions. The future is behind us because we do not see it, we do not know it.

The powerful learning was more profound to me than just a timeline for the days. There were also a message behind those concepts that made me believe that China shapes its future mixing it to the roots with its past, but never forgetting to be able - and ready - for changing.

Janaína Camara da Silveira is director of Radar China and a Sino-Brazilian relations researcher.