China adjusting: Cleaning our mirror

Jin Xide, Institute of Japanese Studies Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China Daily, Asia News Network, Beijing

Facing rare opportunities and tough challenges ahead, China should adjust its opinions about itself and international society. The beginning of the 21st century provides a unique opportunity. However, its rapid development has caused misgivings and even obstruction in some quarters of the United States, the European Union and Japan.

This will not only increase the cost of China's resurrection, but could also rouse painful memories of its 150-year history marked by oppression, exploitation and humiliation.

For China, today's development heralds the re-emergence of past glories; while for the world, it signals the rise of a new power. This determines the peculiarity and complexity of China's self-orientation and international image.

Since the late 20th century, China's national psyche has undergone profound changes as its power potential has become increasingly evident. The people suffered from centuries of backwardness followed in the 19th and first half of 20th centuries by invariably abusive foreign intrusions.

Over the past century-and-a-half the attitude of the Chinese to the rest of the world has vacillated between one of isolationist self-sufficiency and crushing self-deprecation.

It has been our long dream to develop a powerful nation. The establishment of the New China enabled all Chinese to stand up for the first time in a Western-dominated world. By the 1970s, China had taken its place as among the five leading players.

However, it was still an impoverished political power. With the reform and opening-up, many no longer feel the dream of a strong motherland is out of reach. Yet few have been well- prepared. We need the moderate psychology of a major power which allows it to calmly take its rightful place in the world.

With a combination of national cohesion with an opening-up attitude and crisis awareness, China's ability to mould the international environment will be improved. A positive, civilized, and open mainstream consciousness will have an increasing significance upon China's advancement towards being a prosperous and stable nation.

Exaggeration of outside challenges may cause domestic hostility towards the world. Preventing a generation of over- pessimistic opinions and a blind xenophobic tendency is a must.

China will become ever deeply entwined in more multi-lateral episodes, in both the political and security arenas.

Despite fallacies concocted by overseas anti-China forces, from the "China threat" theory to "China's collapse," China has nothing to fear if it maintains a strong national cohesion coupled with a self-confident and open-minded mentality.

The Chinese should analyze not only the negative, but also the positive elements which exist internationally. Modernization of the national consciousness may be more fundamental than economic modernization. A gracious attitude, one which is neither haughty nor humble when analyzing international issues, will be crucial to China's renaissance.