I think the values that China will represent
remain unclear at this point.
This emerging power is going to overtake the world,
with honesty, dedication, humanity, morality.
The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is known for its
winter meetings of the world's most powerful
business and government leaders.
It now holds an annual summer meeting in China.
The northeastern coastal city of Dalian offered the foreign visitors
industrial tours.
In the evening it dazzled them with performances
that gave a sneak preview of China's aspirations for the future.
... which goes back to Confucianism, and is the idea
that there should be a proper balance
between heaven and earth, between nature and society.
They're groping for that, but it's still at this stage fairly elusive.
China is known as the factory of the world.
It's poised to overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy
after the United States.
And it is enjoying increasing influence in global politics.
China is going to be defining in many respects what this 21st century
is going to be about. One of the key questions on what China's role will be,
will depend partly on what the internal dynamics are in China,
but also very much on how the rest of the world responds to China,
and the most important actor in this respect is of course the United States.
U.S. China historian, Orville Schell.
With the West and the United States in economic crisis, diminished power,
and China's economic power rising,
for the first time in a century-and-a-half
there is a prospect of a more equal, partnership-like relationship.
Can we do that? With such different political systems, histories, cultures?
I don't know.
Orville Schell is Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations
at the Asia Society in New York.
He says if the U.S. and China can treat each other as equal partners,
... then China does have a chance of continuing to evolve slowly,
and piecemeal, into something that will be more open and more constructive
in the world, rather than more pugnacious, still steeped
in victim culture, nursing its grievances and not
fully playing the role of a responsible world power.
Panelist Kenneth Lieberthal was Director for Asia
on the U.S. National Security Council under President Bill Clinton.
The Chinese are quite good in terms of economic and social rights,
and quite poor in terms of civil rights.
Of course part of the international community is more concerned
with the civil rights side.
So I think it will take some period of time before there is agreement
on basic norms in the human rights area.
China, seen from Southeast Asia, looks quite different.
Muhammad Lutfi heads Indonesia's investment promotion agency.
He spoke on a panel about how increasingly influential Asian powers
would like to change global financial institutions.
We've been ruled by 60 years of the Western domination.
How we trade, how we govern.
The norm right now is being changed.
With Chinese influence, with the Japanese yuan's influence
to the world community.
It will equal, it wil be more prosperous,
and we're going to get the prosperity much faster.
Our future lies in the hand of China.
And I'm so upbeat.
Pakistan and China both have fought wars with their mutual neighbor, India.
China is a key provider of military technology to Pakistan.
And, unike the United States, China does not link aid with democracy.
China does not have any covert political ambitions,
to go into any country and occupy its resources.
Their interaction is a business to business, human to human,
people to people relationship.
That is the difference between the European, American and Chinese.
China's economic and political systems are winning greater respect.
We used to think of China as in transition to what we would recognize in the West,
democratic, multiparty, pluralist democracy.
I'm not so sure now that China is in a transition to be more like us.
Or closer to being like us.
They may be in a transition to being something else, for which they
are going to set the model.
And it will be more congruent with Chinese tradition,
which has always been heirarchical, centered on uniformity
of idelogical view, and had a great deal of emphasis put on
obedience, on loyalty, on staying in line.
So that may be China's contribution for a certain kind of country.
A more efficient, effective, orderly system
that raises a lot of people out of poverty,
but for a certain bandwidth of society is not very free and open.
But it would be very foolish to deny what it can accomplish,
has accomplished.