The world is shocked by China's ascent, and this is not only true for ordinary countries, but even statements from the U.S. government and military— the world's most powerful forces— reflect a shift in sentiments about China. China is constantly invoked, almost always as a dreadful foe. Such a viewpoint is now widely held. China appears out of nowhere on the eastern horizon as a terrifying giant.
In the digital age, research reports on many countries are available. Yet, the charts and figures about some countries are often superficial. They are merely surface observations of some quantitative factors. There are of course, some superficial stories on China from the media. As for comparative researches, those are mainly derived from the businesses that attract investors in the securities industry, though suspicions are plenty about their credibility. The actual substantiality of many countries and all their dynamic factors, especially of a country like China, i.e., its history and reality, remain unfathomable for most scholars.
It is true that China has changed, but the world need not panic because of the change.
Common sense tells us that everything starts with exploration. China still has a serious lack of understanding of the world that it should explore. The country has a serious shortage of talents, especially well-trained talents. While the Chinese has traveled all over the world as tourists, those who dare to take risks are often young people who are eager to brag and show off their experiences on social media.
I have seen a young Chinese couple driving a Chinese-made car through the tortuous Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan. However, among the photos and videos they took along the way, apart from personal photos, only a few of them contain information worthy of attention, record and research. They hardly understood what they saw, and they lack the ability to observe details. Furthermore, they were unable to communicate with locals and make social comparisons. What they could do was just like what ordinary tourists do, that is leaving visual impressions. China's basic understanding of exploring the world is almost at the same level as the rest of the world.
Comparing with Western books on Central Asia, we can see that the knowledge gap between this kind of understanding and experience is all too great. Rory Stewart provides us with a list of books about Central Asia in his Places in Between, among which are Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana, Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, and Peter Levi's The Light Garden of the Angel King. This is just a list of books that a single person like Stewart has ever read. Compared with the books that China can get for Afghanistan, in addition to the fragmented information found online, there are only very limited writings in historical record and the encyclopedias.
Historically, the Chinese are not daring explorers. Save the late 2nd century BC diplomat Zhang Qian and the 7th century AD monk-pilgrim Xuanzang and a few others, China has had almost no knowledge and experience in global exploration. This makes it difficult for China to carry out effective and precise strategic construction of facts about the rest of the world. Take the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as an example. This initiative did not come from the institutional department within the Chinese government. While Chinese governmental documents and reports adopt a lot of buzzwords used in post-modern countries, in the actual policy implementation process, Chinese customs and traditions still prevail. This has caused the BRI to be no more than foreign investment projects that appear all over the world, with neither planning nor strategy as a whole. It may cause more problems for China in the future than it will benefit the country.
Even if China is displaying high morale with rising national sentiment, its presumption cannot fill its lack of knowledge and experience, and China itself will soon realize that it does lack the experience and ability to navigate the world even if it possesses such opportunities and resources. In the future, China, like the Western countries in history, may pay a higher price in acquiring more talents, to understand what it should master to get knowledge, experience, observation, and develop a strategy. Only with these can it understand the world, and make the world understand it. These have always been the basis for the construction of the new world order.
The world must comprehend that China will become a true world power only after it has acquired adequate knowledge and abilities to explore and understand the globe, but that is not the case at the moment.
