It was my wife Lakshmi who first awakened me to the beauty of China.
She had been invited to attend the 50th Anniversary Celebrations of the founding of the People's Republic in 1999, held in the Great Hall of the People at Beijing. The festivities were grand, and as usual, Chinese hospitality was superb.
However, more than the architecture and the visible progress that China had made, what stood in her mind was the warmth of the Chinese people. She came back enchanted by a friendly people who remained peaceful neighbors of India for five thousand years, and made me decide to visit China as well.
A gracious Chinese diplomat in Delhi, Madame Liu Jinfeng, had many times told me that the people of China had only friendly feelings for the people of India, a statement repeated by another friend, Madame Li Wenming of the People's Daily.
A day after I landed in Beijing for the first time in 1999, it was clear that they were right. From that time onwards, my respect for the Chinese people has grown with each visit to China, the latest being on May 12-21, when I visited Beijing and Shanghai together with my wife.
It was on May 20, at the Shanghai Expo 2010, that I saw the inner calm and strength of the Chinese people. All of them - young and old - were fully aware of the history of their great country. They knew how China was made to suffer by foreign powers during the 1920s and later, till the end of the 1940s, and the suffering the people had had to undergo as a result.
Yet, in just two decades, the people of China had gone from poverty to becoming the second-biggest economy of the world.
Each of the Chinese visitors to the Expo showed in their faces and hearts the soft, silent pride of a people who knew that at last, their time had come. The magnificence of the Expo, with its many pavilions and the modern arrangements for transport and viewing, made it clear to even the skeptics that the Chinese people could do anything, once they decided to.
Yes, China is still a developing country, and close to two hundred million people are still poor. But more than four hundred million have been lifted out of poverty just during the last 20 years, and change is accelerating at a faster rate than in any other country in a similar time period
Any visitor to the Shanghai Expo, whether Chinese or foreign, would see that the people of China are capable of the highest standards of human effort. I thought to myself what the thousands of people that I saw on the Expo grounds must have been thinking. In just a generation, their country had become the emerging superpower. The Expo is good medicine for the Chinese people, for it will make them confident that they can achieve anything that others can. That someday soon, China too will build the best aircraft, the best space probes and the finest automobiles. The Shanghai Expo has a simple message "We Chinese can do it!"
And this message has been conveyed in a true Chinese style, without boasting or threatening. The development of China into the world's biggest economy (a situation that continued for more than two thousand years) did not result in the impoverishment of neighboring states.
Indeed, it was win-win, unlike the rise of the European powers who became rich, but in the process made the rest of the world poor. The visitors to the Expo went to each pavilion with friendly curiosity, believing that the whole world was one, that all of humanity was one. There was no arrogance in the faces of the Chinese visitors or Expo staff, only a warm welcome to those from outside.
Visiting the Expo, it was clear that the Chinese people have stood up!
During my first visit to China eleven years ago, it was difficult to find a person who spoke English. Even those at hotel reception desks spoke only Chinese. But on this trip, I found many people speaking English.
More than that, they were clearly determined to reach the best international standards in all that they did. Both Beijing and Shanghai are among the top cities in the world. Indeed, in Shanghai, it is difficult to realize that one is not in Paris or Boston, so international is the spirit of the city.
The people of China have adjusted rapidly to the outside world, and have learnt the skills needed to compete in a globalized world. They speak with a confidence and knowledge that was not there in 1999, and are comfortable with other cultures while holding firmly on to their own
Apart from the confidence that I saw at the Expo, what impressed me the most during this visit was the increasing spirituality of the Chinese people. An ancient civilization, this is the land that protected the teachings of the Buddha when they were under threat in India.
Today, China can be said to be the heart of the Buddhist world, a truth that is demonstrated in the many temples and pagodas that are coming up all across the country. It is this mixture of spiritualism with the practicality of the Expo that has made the Chinese people heroes!
The author is professor of geopolitics at Manipal University, India.
(China Daily 06/28/2010 page9)