Confidence in Theories: Ideas Rooted in the Land Of China

Interview John Ross Well-known columnist in UK, Former Deputy Mayor of London It just raised a whole industry in the west predicting that China is going to collapse. What is ridiculous is that these people continue credibility. I mean the most farcical is Gorden Chang who wrote a book in 2002 called The Coming Collapse of China. China hasn’t collapsed. The problem in the west is that they had a wrong theory of China. They thought that Chinese economy should not succeed. When the facts went against that, instead of examining the facts， （for） example, why their theory is wrong, we predicted that Chinese economy will not grow, there will be a big disaster in China. Our theory was wrong. Therefore，what’s wrong with that theory. They attempt to defy the facts. They say our theory is right, China hasn’t really grown or China hasn’t really improved the social conditions or if they can’t get away with that, because, you know, China has the world’s most rapid growing economy for the last thirty-eight years, they say, well it’s about to collapse. It will collapse next year. And then when it doesn’t collapse next year, those say that it will collapse the year later, right? That is not doing science and that’s what I called fantasy literature. Interview Bob Carr Former Foreign Minister of Australia I think the modernization of the Chinese economy driven by Chinese leadership since Deng Xiaoping, the great Deng Xiaoping has been the most successful revolution in world history. Yes, the biggest change is that China has had the year after year of high economic growth. Back when I was watching the emergence of Deng Xiaoping and his reforms, nobody expected that right through the 90s and into this century, China would have such a run of success. No one expected that. No hard landing. No economic collapse. Public support for hard measures like the reforms of the state sector in the 1990s, I mean nobody could have expected such success. And when I hear people, especially Americans say it’s all going to come to an end, China would fall into a stagnation, I say you’ve been saying that for twenty years and it hasn’t happened. Interview NGEOW Chow Bing Deputy Director, Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya, Malaysia Well, China basically defies many of these predictions that if you don’t reform your political system, then you will collapse and if you don’t reform your economic system in the way they want, you know, further marketization, then you will encounter a lot of problems. On the other hand, this kind of predictions of doom may underestimate the resilience of the present system in responding to these crisis or these issues that accumulate from the lack of reform. Eventually, generally, they are able to do with some part of these issues, some of them completely gone. And then they does of course other new issues come out there, they are also able to respond. Having say that China’s model is unique in the sense that it is able to basically today propel China to the state it is today. And we cannot say that it is a failure. In a way, China is really successful in combining what it learns from the world and its own considerations of national conditions and other things. The communist rule so far in the way that it rebuild a state, regenerate the economy and then basically giving the Chinese people certain sense of confidence in their own country. So in this sense, he’s doing great. Interview Zheng Yongnian Director, East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore Actually the party has become so strong. So that’s why I tell scholars that if you want to understand China, you need to look at those facts first. Don’t, you know, you should not have the ideology bias perspective towards China. What Deng Xiaoping mentioned as “Shi Shi Qiu Shi”. You should, you have to stick truth for facts. So you have to look into facts first, then you have a judgment.