Hello, welcome to visit Shanghai Forum
Zhang Yunling
Member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Director of Institute of International Studies, Shandong University
Professor Chey, thank for inviting me to attend the Shanghai Forum on site. The theme of this Forum is Asia’s New Journey. What is New Journey? I will give two definitions: new development and new civilization. Here is my point of view.
Today I will focus on East Asia. Why East Asia? Because in the new development and new civilization, East Asia will play an important role in innovation and diffusion, leading and guiding. If we want to understand such a role, we should review what has happened in East Asia.
After the Second World War, East Asia has been integrated and achieved the miracle of economic development. Since the 1980s, the participation of the governments has promoted the opening of the markets, formed a new economic development strategy under the opening-up policies, which triggered participation in the international economy and the division of labor, and made use of comparative advantages to develop themselves rapidly. Therefore, Japan took the lead in economic recovery after the War, which set an example for other economies and formed the Flying Geese Paradigm in East Asia. In the early 1990s, the World Bank issued a report proposing the Asian economic miracle. Since the 1990s, East Asian countries have continued to develop the economy, among which, China has accelerated its economic development by intensifying Reform and Opening-up, and become the chain center of East Asia's economy. In spite of the Southeast Asian financial crisis in 1997, through strengthening regional cooperation, namely 10+3 cooperation, East Asia has further opened up, formed a regional production network, and become the most dynamic new economic growth center in the world.
However, there are many problems in the rapid development of East Asia, prominently the dependence on dangerous balance. What is a dangerous balance? First, production in East Asia is heavily dependent on the support from external markets, that is, production in East Asia and consumption in North America. Second, although China's economy is crowned as chain center and world factory, its weak internal consumption and innovation has stopped it from being a sustainable center to support regional economic development. Third, the rapid economic growth follows the production paradigm of traditional industrialization and takes the industrial transfer from developed countries, which stands for the expansion of traditional backward production capacity. In this way, its growth comes with huge prices, such as air pollution, water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and so on.
The economic crisis in 2008, President Trump's preferential unilateralism of “America First” and the problems accumulated in East Asia have broken the dangerous balance and forced East Asia to change.
The new development of East Asia is to head towards a new development paradigm. The new core is balance, inclusiveness and sustainability. From the regional perspective, it is to reconstruct the regional economic chain structure and innovate the new mechanism of opening + cooperation. The 15 countries in East Asia have just signed RCEP, which is conducive to building a new framework of open cooperation and promoting the construction of endogenous mechanism in East Asia.
As the largest economy in the region, China will play an important new role. China has also gradually adjusted itself and begun to put forward high-quality development, then sustainable development, scientific outlook on development and new development philosophy. The 14th Five-year Plan has just put forward the dual circulation, which is committed to building a dual circulated economic operation system based on domestic and foreign chains. There are two key points in the dual circulation: one is to stimulate and mobilize domestic demand, while the other is to strengthen China's independent innovation capacity. In this way, China will become a new center of consumer demand and R&D innovation, and gradually drive the big economy in East Asia.
An important power force for new development comes from the new scientific and technological revolution, which, led by intelligent technology, is conducive to solving many problems accumulated in the traditional development mode, and promoting the new development paradigm. East Asia has caught up with this new scientific and technological revolution, and in many ways, it is not catching up, but leading, which gives new hope to this revolution.
Over the past decades, we have enjoyed the benefits of open development, but we have also suffered from huge pressure and losses. The imbalance of development, regional development, income, social and economic aspects have cost us so much. We put forward the people-oriented development philosophy, which is in line with the cultural values of East Asia. It is feasible to speed up the construction of the new development paradigm with the help of the new scientific and technological revolution, and create a better future.
East Asia is marching towards a new civilization. First of all, what happened in East Asia? In modern times, East Asia was dragged into the imperial colonial competition with many colonized countries and truceless wars. World War II was followed by some drastic changes: first, East Asian countries have stepped out of colonization and realized independence; second, the relations among the countries have gradually normalized. Although the Cold War divided East Asia, it also brought new developments. The biggest change was ASEAN, which was initiated by few Southeast Asian countries from the confrontation of the Cold War. ASEAN's self-adjustment lies in, on one hand, shifting the focus of cooperation from politics to economy, and building an open development regional cooperation framework of ASEAN, and on the other hand, gradually taking countries with different systems, backgrounds and relations into the regional cooperation organization. ASEAN’s development is based on a new way, that is, the ASEAN Way of cooperation and symbiosis oriented by cooperation, which can also be called Asian paradigm. What's important is that apart from ASEAN itself, it has built a number of 10 + 1 around itself. The ASEAN Regional Forum has formulated the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), inviting other countries to sign TAC and jointly abide by the new rules based on peaceful cooperation and development. This reflects the new Asian civilization oriented by cooperation.
Looking back on the history of mankind, Europe claims to have built a modern civilization, which, however, has a fatal problem in its competing nature, namely, competing civilization, in order to compete for dominance, form a hegemonic dominant structure, and the winner takes all. We can see that in modern times, with fierce competition, the world fell into war. The European Union is built on the lessons learnt from the two world wars, but so far Europe has not completely given up some of their original values and orientations. ASEAN Way is different in its philosophy of cooperation. Through an inclusive framework, different countries are integrated into a cooperative framework to build a shared economic, social and safety community for cooperation. Therefore, it is fundamentally a cooperative civilization. The basic values of cooperative civilization are cooperation and symbiosis, cooperation and common interests, and cooperation and development, which are in line with the basic spirit of the community of shared future of mankind advocated by China.
The cooperative civilization embodied in ASEAN has such prominent characteristics that ASEAN does not identify any country as an enemy, while the mechanisms created by Europe and the United States all identify the enemy. ASEAN is to expand the circle, follow TAC, turn them into common rules, and realize cooperation and coexistence. The ASEAN Way has expanded through 10+, promoted East Asian cooperation, and constructed the Asia Europe cooperation mechanism, which is of great significance for solving the problems of Northeast Asia, East Asia, Asia, and even the whole world.
The cooperative civilization may embody the beginning of a new civilization based on cooperation and symbiosis. After more than 40 years, ASEAN has gradually realized cooperative coexistence, cooperative development, and cooperative safety. East Asia is also developing towards that way. With the construction of multilateral cooperation mechanism, the whole Asia is also moving towards the same destination.
Chinese traditional values contain the civilization spirit of harmony and coexistence. China has taken the initiative to announce that it will unswervingly follow the path of peaceful development, will not seek hegemony, and will not follow the competing path of traditional big powers. In the past, no big power has taken the initiative to announce such high standards. China and its peaceful development will certainly help promote the development of Asia’s cooperative civilization.
Thank you!
