China's changes continue to dazzle Western world
By Cecily Liu (China Daily) Updated: 2014-05-19 07:33
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Humphrey Hawksley says over the years China has achieved tremendous economic growth. Monica Wyithe / For China Daily |
Country is achieving growth in its own way, says BBC correspondent
People in the West still have not "got their heads around" the astonishing changes in China over the past 20 years, a leading BBC foreign correspondent says.
"The difference between China (then and now), in my view, is quite confusing to the West," says Humphrey Hawksley, who set up the BBC's bureau in Beijing in 1994.
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But over the years China has achieved tremendous economic growth, brought a large proportion of its population out of poverty and shown the world that those things can be achieved without Western-style democracy. China is "winning the game", he says.
By that he means that for other emerging economies China has presented an alternative model of achieving economic growth, which is often the thing they are looking for.
"In my travels around the world, in the poorest parts of Africa or Latin America, people want their children to be safe, they want a clinic to be nearby, they want a road. They don't want 'isms', which are all mechanisms to deliver those things."
Though China's economic success is amazing, he says, he is not entirely surprised, having got to know some of the country's political leaders in the 1990s.
One memorable figure for him is Zhu Rongji, who served as mayor of Shanghai between 1987 and 1991, during which time Hawksley interviewed him.
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