China's rise justifiable and conducive to world order

Beijing's increasing engagement with the international community is not aimed at replacing existing institutions, but reinforcing and optimizing them, experts said at a seminar on Friday.

China is not the only rising power in history, countries including the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan and the United States had all played the same role at their apexes, said Huang Jing, a researcher at the National University of Singapore during a panel discussion at the 2016 Beijing Forum.

The 13th annual forum was hosted by Peking University, Beijing Municipal Commission of Education and Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies.

"The difference is that the former rising powers' trajectory often involved increasing military power and direct challenges to the international order", said Huang. “But China managed to become a major power by integrating into the US-led institutions in the past decades, thanks to its reform and opening policy."

China made more changes to get involved in the game than some expected, he said. It took the country 15 years to be included in the WTO, the epitome of its longtime struggle to adapt to the global economic governance.

As a newcomer in the modern international society, China has always found its own rules incompatible with the ever-changing international norms led by the West, said Zhang Xiaoming, a professor at Peking University. “But there is no instant cure. It has to join the game first before seeking changes in its favor."

Despite their differences in the way the US and China govern themselves, the world's largest and second largest economies, they are unlikely to fight against each other, Huang said. Given ongoing global economic integration and the increasingly multi-polar geopolitical order, the interdependence shared by the two nations should be able to keep any attempt to divide the world at bay, according to Huang.

China's peaceful rise, on the other hand, can effectively counter the touting of the “China threat", said Xu Xin, a scholar from Cornell University. "In fact, Beijing needs to do more to increase its international credibility."