China has moved away from being a communist society and is on its way to becoming an integral part of the international community, a Cornell University professor said last night in Baker University Center.
China is anything but a communist country
said Chen Jian, professor of history and China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Cornell, during his lecture, entitled The 'China Challenge' in the 21st Century: A Historian's Perspective.
China is only a communist country in name he said.
Jian said American perceptions of China are shaped around the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, where the country was viewed as a nation under a bloody communist regime.
In the past 27 years, China's economy has registered national growth at a rate of 9.4 percent and is still increasing, he said, adding that its economic rise has been one of the most important phenomena in international affairs going into the 21st century.
There is no doubt that this rapid growth will cause tremendous challenges to every aspect of global life, he said, including China's own need to redefine the distribution of economic resources.
In the last century, Jian said there has been a shift in political ideology in the country. Under Mao Tse-Tsung, the communist leader of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1976, people internally accepted the communist state and the political, social and cultural programs associated with the regime. That led to a pursuit of centrality instead of domination, between which Jian said there is a significant difference.
There is a fundamental need to make a distinction between the pursuit of domination and the pursuit of centrality Jian said.
China's 20th century history was dominated by revolutions, and that indicated a desire on the part of the Chinese to change their nation, Jian said.
Mao's China was a revolutionary country
Jian said. It was also an outsider of the existing international system. That was a danger.
In the years following Tse-Tsung, Jian said one of the most important historical transformations in the 20th century was China's reform in opening to the outside world, which has stirred tensions in recent years. Why should China's progress and development necessarily cause military confrontation in the future? Jian asked, adding that is not in China's or the United States' interest to allow a war to break out between them because the two countries are too interrelated.
China is in the greatest process of historical transformation today
Jian said.
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Anna Maria Georgalis
