As US President Donald Trump harangued world leaders about anti-globalisation at the 74th UN General Assembly, China was publishing a white paper,  “China and the World in the New Era”. In it, Beijing expresses its intention to fully engage in globalisation and contribute to peace and development.It is important to note that China’s views of and relationship with the rest of the world have deep roots in its own history and experience. It was in the mid-19th century that Chinese people started to realise the tremendous gap between the West and themselves in economic development and industrial technology. 

Since then, the pursuit of socioeconomic development and modernisation has been Chinese people’s main, if not only, concern. 

In Fudan University professor Tang Shiping’s “new development triangle” framework, long and sustained economic development must be supported by a powerful and critical state, sound institutional systems and good economic policies. China’s experience clearly reflects such a dynamic, with its party-state highly instrumental in its developmental process.
Indeed, economists and political scientists studying China often refer to the state’s action in coordinating economic policies, mobilising and allocating economic resources, and creating and building institutions, such as through market integration and enhanced regulation. 

The late leader Deng Xiaoping would describe this as reflecting “the strength of socialism”, meaning that the party-state can rationally plan and manage development to “serve the people in a better way”. 

China’s white paper sheds some light on this dynamic, showing how the state enabled economic growth while enhancing its capacity to manage and steer development. Between 1950 and 2018, China’s gross domestic product expanded massively while the state’s fiscal capacity increased at an annual rate of around 12.5 per cent. 

This allowed the state to perform many important actions required by economic development and upgrading, such as funding roads and ports, power grids, schools, health care and university research. 

China has also been able to focus attention on underdeveloped areas when necessary, introducing for example its “western development strategy” in the late 1990s to address the wealth gap between China’s east and west, and the “socialist new countryside” policy in the early 2000s to modernise the countryside. Beijing’s “targeted poverty alleviation” programme rolled out in recent years, to lift the poor above the poverty line, is an extension of the same logic.Given all its experiences, China has found a developmental path that works for it,  according to the white paper. Furthermore, its domestic experience in large part defines how Beijing approaches global affairs and international relations. 

As China sees it, the main challenges and goals for the global community are to ensure peace and development, and the two are mutually dependent. Peace is an important and necessary goal, but it is also the precondition for development. And for peace to endure, countries must strive for development: when people enjoy a decent life, many of the causes of wars and conflicts are removed. 

It is also within this context that China will contribute to the world: “China, which has a more stable economy, higher quality of growth, and promising growth prospects, contributes to the development of the world economy in the long run,” the white paper states. 

China believes that internal diversity in things such as culture, religion, political systems and so on should be respected, but countries can still work together in pursuing peace and development. Once these two objectives are in place, other good things will follow, such as state capacity and quality institutions. 

China’s gradual and incremental transition away from a Soviet-style command economy to a more market-based economy shows that while any nation may not start out with a complete set of the right institutions, they will appear once the developmental process begins to pick up speed. 

Many of the initiatives in foreign affairs and international collaboration that China has rolled out in recent years reflect such a perspective. 

While contributing to the making and building of peace in various parts of the world, the central leadership is clearly hoping to promote bilateral, regional and global collaboration in trade, infrastructure, industrialisation, finance and investment, as well as developmental know-how and policymaking. The Belt and Road Initiative is a prime example. 

Clearly, these are interesting times and two paths now lie before us. One will take the world back to the 1930s, to an era when protectionism prevailed and wars followed. The other path will usher us into a globalised and interdependent world.Compared with the Thucydides era, we now have the possibility and intelligence to act responsibly. Let us hope that China’s new white paper will generate a new round of discussion that can help us to make better choices.