China at the center of a New Age of Enlightenment

He says there is a tendency in the West not to give full credit to the giant leap China has made since reform and opening up in the late-1970s.

"It has been hugely successful and it has been faster than anyone anticipated, much faster, in fact," he says.

He says, however, that the recent nervousness in the financial markets about China's slowing growth is indicative of the fact that people were ignorant of the government's long-term strategic approach to policy.

"The (concept of the) five-year plan is not very well understood in the West. People don't pay attention to it or read it properly," he says.

"A lot of the anxiety about the slowdown in growth was very easily answered by simply pointing to the plan and saying that is what Chinese leaders said was going to happen."

He says that it might take a historic event such as China becoming a bigger economy than the United States ending its more than 100 years in pole position to change perceptions.

"I think this will be a huge moment and I think it is important that US citizens and US politicians, in particular, react in a cool-headed way," he says.

Byrne, however, does feel that there will have to be reform of the post-World War II Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

"China is now doing something very clever in building new institutions to sit alongside the Bretton Woods settlement. The BRICS bank, for example, may be more powerful than the IMF or the World Bank over the next 10 years. China will be helping steer that in a big way," he says.

Byrne, who now teaches a class to students from leading Chinese banks at the Said Business School at Oxford University, believes there needs to be more focus on China in the UK education system. He is currently exploring private Chinese lessons for his 13-year-old son. "It is a big challenge for our education system. When a friend of mine asked the education secretary how many qualified Mandarin teachers we had in British schools he didn't know," he says.

Byrne says he has had recent discussions with educators trying to develop an A-level course in Chinese civilization but they are finding it "tough to get it off the ground".