Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Foreign Policy magazine published on Wednesday an article by David Schlesinger, former editor-in-chief of Reuters, in which he declared "we're just coming off a period when it was, by near unanimous acclimation, China's century." When China hosted the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, some Western media outlets claimed 2008 was the start of a Chinese century. According to this, the Chinese Century includes the short period of seven years when China went from being the world's third biggest economy to the second biggest.

In recent days, rabble-rousers have been hyping the grim prospects of the Chinese economy in the Western media. Chinese American scholar Minxin Pei even said the collapse of the Chinese economy will help alleviate the South China Sea disputes, for a China facing economic downward pressure won't continue acting aggressively.   

Chinese century is a term created by Western scholars. Few Chinese take it seriously. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist, has forecast that a Chinese century would start in 2015.

Chinese society is generally down to earth, and doesn't like making such grand conclusions. But when others make high appraisals of us, we feel more or less happy. When others look down on us, we fell more or less uncomfortable. Chinese people do care about how the outside world judges us.

However, such cares are far from the core of Chinese self-awareness. Whether the 21st century belongs to China is not at all a serious consideration when China makes its economic or political predictions.

China knows its own problems and difficulties best, and we are well aware that there will be a variety of twists and turns during the country's development. The comparisons between China and the West are mostly superficial. Defining the 21st century by the balance of power is more like writing a poem, not reflecting reality.

China's economy will gradually become the No.1 in the world. As long as China is not divided, such simple economic prediction will turn out to be the only answer. But the quality of China's economy and its social governance are far from first class. And the 21st century will only become a period for the nation to learn and strive. How can we possibly name it after ourselves?

What Chinese are focusing on the most is how to solve our problems and how to overcome our imminent difficulties.

Meanwhile, many Westerners seem to care more about their advantages and sense of superiority when compared with China. They are not only excited, but also sensitive in such comparison. 

Badmouthing China is not only an issue of foreign public opinion, but also appears on Chinese domestic websites. Some public intellectuals are even harsher than Westerners. Since the social networking sites burst out, it is hard to say whether Western public opinion is guiding certain Chinese public intellectuals on the Internet, or the other way around. Perhaps the two sides are reinforcing one another. Among them, comments of some Chinese intellectuals have made the outside world convinced that the China collapse theory is plausible, while believing those radical comments represent the value of majority of Chinese.

Be it the China threat theory or the China collapse theory, which are both popular in the West, they are testing China's resilience and tolerance. We should keep strengthening ourselves, until we can laugh off whatever "theory" in the future.

The article is an editorial published in the Chinese edition of the Global Times on Saturday. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn