Xinhua reports on the China at the Crossroads conference
How will China's deepening policy reforms affect the Asia-Pacific region and the rest of the world?
(Xinhua, 26 June 2014)
Leading China experts from China, New Zealand, Australia, the United States and elsewhere will gather in Wellington next week to consider the impact of the third plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held in November last year.
The scholars would assess the Third Plenum and post-Third Plenum policies and how affective they were, not just for the Asia-Pacific region, but within China too, said Peter Harris, acting director of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre, which is hosting the conference.
"There is quite a lot of difference of opinion among different people outside of China as to where China is going," Harris told Xinhua in a phone interview.
"Some people think – like many commentators in China – that China will rapidly become a successfully developed and wealthy country, and others are more sceptical and think that the Third Plenum underlines the fact that this stage of China's reforms is going to be much harder than the previous stages and that there aren't yet policies in place that are going to address the many different issues that China inevitably faces at this stage."
While China-New Zealand relations were very good, people in New Zealand and elsewhere were carefully watching China's relationships with other important powers in the Asia-Pacific region.
Harris said relations with the United States and Japan were "uneven at best" with tensions over the East China Sea and Chinese concerns that the United States was not leaving China enough room to develop as a new great power.
"There are a lot of issues to resolve as one great power, the United States, which is over-weaningly important but arguably growing less globally influential, has to come to terms with another which is rapidly becoming more influential in the region," he said.
Throughout the world policymakers and decision-makers were running to catch up with events in China and the need for specialists who could understand the country would grow.
"I do think that China sometimes has difficulty in putting its changing policies and evolving status in the world clearly and effectively to the outside world. There are times when people are puzzled by what's going on in China and don't fully understand either policy or political leadership issues," said Harris.
For New Zealand, some of the issues involving China included its reliance on China for external trade and managing growing numbers of students and tourists, he said.
The one-day conference, "China at the Crossroads – What the Third Plenum means for China, New Zealand and the world," will be held at Victoria University on July 2.
Principal speakers include Professor David Shambaugh, of George Washington University, Washington DC, a leading author and commentator on contemporary China, and well-known Chinese economist Professor Cai Fang, director of the Institute of Demography and Labor Economics at the China Academy of Social Sciences.
New Zealand Trade Minister Tim Groser will also give a speech.