China, from good student to wise teacher

Editor's note: As China aims to eliminate extreme poverty and be a "moderately prosperous society" (xiaokang shehui) in time for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China next year, we talk to leading experts for their take on the country's commitment.

As the country has sped along the path of rapid growth and better living standards, it has learned much from others, and now many can learn from it

Impoverished rural areas of China made a distinct impression on the British Sinologist Kerry Brown when he lived in Inner Mongolia between 1994 and 1996. He recalls vividly traveling to stay on a simple farm on a number of occasions and sleeping on a brick kang (bed stove) and being awoken by pigs grunting or cockerels calling out.

"You could see that people's living conditions were tough－limited sanitation, often unpredictable electricity supply and pretty backbreaking lives. And there was a desire to move forward in the 1990s, but the levels of development were very uneven and patchy."

In stark contrast to what he had witnessed in the 1990s, on a research trip to the villages of Hebei province about 10 years earlier, there were already signs of wealth and development that one usually observes in rural areas of more wealthy provinces such as Fujian or Zhejiang, he said.

"In the 1990s, one would imagine that maybe one day the Chinese countryside would be developed, but perhaps not as quickly as happened."

From 1998 to 2005 Brown served with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office as first secretary at the British embassy in Beijing. While China's rapid economic growth over the past 40 years has been integral to how the world has developed, it is not widely recognized, he said.

The country has managed to lift more than 850 million people out of poverty since reform and opening up began in the late 1970s, with GDP growth averaging almost 10 percent a year, according to the World Bank.

"The vast majority of humanity is better off than it was 50 years ago, and a large part of that is because of the achievement from reforms in China which have made such a fundamental impact on Chinese people's lives and on the wider world," Brown said.

These days Brown is a professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London and is now working on a study of the Communist Party of China as a cultural movement.

While his main role is to try to communicate to Britain and greater Europe something about the history of China's development over the past 70 years, and in particular what has resulted from this, this has not been easy, he said.

"Knowledge levels of China are uneven, for instance, in the UK. Talking about poverty alleviation and China's achievements here is important－and from my point of view I am sincerely admiring of what China has achieved.

"For all the challenges facing the world today, people live longer, and have better standards of life than they did even a quarter of a century ago. A big part of that has been because of what has happened in China. That is something that should be understood and recognized no matter what other issues there might be."