International ties

Is world's center of gravity "moving eastward"?

By Wang Tian (People's Daily Online)
Updated: 2010-08-05 09:38

With a drastic rise in their economic strength, developing countries worldwide are calling for greater democracy in international relations and an increased right for global discourse, and even Americans themselves have come to recognize that the post-War II international mechanism they had initiated and led is not duly adapted to the present global reality. It is precisely attributed to this factor that the United States has contributed to the institution of the Group of Twenty (G20) as a leading international economic platform nowadays.

An adjustment based on the reality, however, is not meant to readily abandon the right to control, and the adjustment may only annotate a policy adjustment rather than a strategic adjustment. Perhaps developed countries regard the admission of great emerging countries into the "power center" as the "true democratization of international relations" but for all developing countries, including China, however, the true democratization of international relations is meant that all developing countries have the equal rights to speak out and to formulate the relevant rules or regulations.

Economic globalization and the information revolution have spurred the human communication to enter a new epoch, but the complexity, nevertheless, poses greatest challenges facing this contemporary new era.

As the economic, political and security interests of the nations are closely interwoven, no nation can be left alone and stays self-centered; varied ideologies have not ended with the elapse of the Cold war, but their competitions in the "soft power" has come up on the agenda. The status approval and global status of many countries are yet to be defined.

Therefore, "the new reality is a kind of scattered turbulence" in this extremely complex world and, if people still pander the so-called world center of gravity from a traditional perspective of "the East and West", they are bound to make mistakes.