White paper highlights nation's key contributions to world progress

A major white paper reaffirming China's development and its role in building an international community toward a shared future for mankind helps the world better understand the country and its significant contributions to world progress, according to experts and observers.

The document, "China and the World in the New Era", was issued by the State Council Information Office in the run-up to celebrations on Tuesday marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The white paper highlights the country's wide-ranging achievements in the past seven decades, which have contributed to global peace and stability as the country has worked toward its own development.

"Comprehensive opening-up will create more opportunities for all countries to share the benefits of China's development," according to the paper.

The document, which points to how the world has faced profound changes, also calls for building a new type of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation while advancing economic globalization, safeguarding the international system with the United Nations at its core and promoting exchanges and mutual learning of different cultures to build a better world.

China will embrace the world in a more open and inclusive manner and have more positive interactions with the rest of the world, it says.

Moustapha Ould Elbou, a journalist from Mauritania, said he has been impressed by China's achievements in economic development and in overcoming poverty, and by measures to improve the environment and enhance the role of innovation.

"Africa is benefiting from China's development," he said on Sunday in Beijing in a speech at the Media Forum for Developing Countries. "The cooperation between Africa and China not only enhances the living quality of Africans, but also is helping Africa to better integrate into the international economic system."

Elbou, who visited many provinces or provincial-level regions, from the Ningxia Hui autonomous region to Guangdong province, during a one-year program in China, said he needs to write books to feel satisfied, since "every place has its own story of achievement and commitment".

Mahendra Subedi, associate editor of the National News Agency in Nepal, told China Daily at the forum that China's development experience and its model of governance have contributed to the progress of the world.

The document presents firm evidence and multiple perspectives to help the international community better understand the country, said Ruan Zongze, executive vice-president of the China Institute of International Studies.

"While some Western countries claim that China's development has posed challenges to existing interests and order (in the global landscape), facts show that China is a main stabilizer and powerhouse of global economic growth," Ruan said.

China contributes more public goods than ever to the world, and its development offers experience and reference for other developing countries to learn from, he said.

"The more peace China enjoys, the safer the world will be; the greater China develops, the more prosperous the world will be," Ruan said.

Zhong Feiteng, senior researcher of Asia-Pacific studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said China's opening-up to the outside world in the past decades has tackled the financial and technological problems it once faced as a developing country, promoting economic development, catalyzing its road to modernization and boosting innovation.

As China firmly fulfills its commitment to opening-up, it has also provided new opportunities to the rest of the world, contributing further to rules-setting in global economic and trade affairs, according to Chen Fengying, senior researcher of the world economy at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

"In the past, our country focused more on introducing capital and services. Starting from the 21st century, a large number of Chinese enterprises began to 'go global', becoming more involved in cooperation through investment, mergers and acquisitions. Chinese enterprises are increasingly boosting their global profile," Chen said.

Wang Yiwei, a professor of international relations at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative has become one of the largest platforms for global cooperation, with more than 130 countries and 30 international organizations participating.

The nation is forging ahead toward the largest scale of industrialization in history, Wang said. For example, it is creating a digital economy that includes 856 million netizens and 1 billion users of the WeChat social networking platform, "which helps lay the foundation for China to share more with the world", said Wang.

"What has been sought by Western developed countries in hundreds of years has been completed by China in the past seven decades — those years for China is a fast-track version of globalization," Wang added.

Nicholas R. Lardy, senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, said China should be proud of such things as high growth, poverty alleviation, integration into the global economy and moving up the technology ladder in many areas.

"So I think there's a great deal to celebrate, especially for the last 40 years. But I think that there could be more to come," Lardy told China Daily.

Leo Chan, executive director of the Midwest USA Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Cincinnati, Ohio, said China has contributed much to the world even as it has focused on tackling its internal problems in the past 70 years.

Seventy years ago, China had an 8 percent illiteracy rate, which is now down to 4 percent, Chan said, and 40 years ago China had an 85 percent poverty rate, which is now down to less than 10 percent. It also has lifted more than 700 million people from poverty. "That is quite an amazing accomplishment," he added.

"None of those could become reality without a relatively peaceful global environment and economic integration with the rest of the world," Chan said. "I think China sees that and will continue to play an important role to keep the world in peace and out of trouble for many years to come."

Alexis Hooi and Zhao Huanxin contributed to this story.