Beijing's surprising 'surplus of confidence' in the world

Until recently, the exhortation has been faithfully followed by his successors, Jiang Zemin in the 90s and Hu Jintao in the new millennium. Under Jiang, Deng's reform and opening up policies took root and the once moribund economy sprang back to life. Hu stepped into Jiang's shoes in 2002 and presided over China's “peaceful rise” to a big-power status.

The rise was so rapid that it has stunned the world and made China dizzy with success. It seemed hard for China's leaders to stick to Deng's teachings. And they have plenty of reasons to show assertiveness, confidence, and even hubris.

First, it was beyond the wildest dreams of Deng, the “chief architect” of China's reforms and opening, to expect that China could have ever become the world's second largest economy in 2010 in a short span of three decades. When Deng set the “hunker-down” foreign policy in the late 1970s, much of the country lived below poverty line. This year, according to IMF, China's GDP would amount to US$5.3 trillion, surpassing Japan's US$5.2 trillion. China's per capita GDP would exceed US$4,000, compared with US$1,000 in 2003. A quadruple jump in seven years! It would make anybody dizzy.

Second, an economic backwater 30 years ago is now the biggest creditor country of the United States-the world's wealthiest superpower. What does that mean? Lawrence Summers, chief economic adviser to U.S. President Barak Obama, once asked pointedly, “how long could the world's biggest borrower remain the world's biggest power?” The unasked question is, “how long could the world's biggest creditor country remain the world's non-power?”

Well, a lot of people don't believe in statistics, especially those released by China, which are often inaccurate or even cooked. For skeptics, Novel prize economist Paul Krugman has an advice: seeing is believing. “China's economic success should be obvious even without statistics. For those who have visited Shanghai, did it look poor or backward?”

Third, China seemed the only country in the world which has weathered the global financial crisis relatively unscathed. It's gross domestic product grow by 8.7 per cent in 2009, above the benchmark 8 percent set by government. Does that show the “superiority” of their system? Chinese leaders certainly think so.

All these, plus a plethora of others, have fed a sense of national pride that is hard to conceal and much harder for the country to hunker down. It now seemed that Deng's exhortation has to be pigeonholed. China must have its day in the sun. So, in Copenhagen and at Davos, China's voices are heard and reverberated around the world.

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