During its rise, the West had much more severe problems than China has today. If the West's rise had been perfectly smooth, there would have been no Karl Marx, Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens. The existence of serious social problems prompted the emergence of many great Western thinkers and critics.

Compared to the process of Western development, the problems that China faces today are not unusual at all.

In current China, it is absolutely normal that social problems exist and sometimes erupt into confrontation. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. The crux is whether there's a proper way through which these problems can be managed and solved.

China has been talking about economic restructuring, which is crucial to a better social structure. In fact, many social problems in China today do stem from an unbalanced economic structure created over the process of economic reform.

Over the past three decades on the Chinese mainland, economic reform has been prioritized, whereas social reform has been relatively lacking.

This is understandable if we look at the past experiences of Japan and the "Four Little Asian Tigers," namely the economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, all of which prioritized economic reforms before social and political ones.

They first focused on economic growth, which was then followed by efforts to promote fairer wealth distribution and democratization.

China should follow suit and promote changes in a gradual way. Over the past few years, I have conducted investigative tours in many places in China. And I believe as the current momentum of development continues, a new social order will be built after five to 10 years.

Today China's social order is largely centered around the primacy of GDP and economic construction. But the new social order will focus on social construction.

In Japan and South Korea, the authorities were once very close to entrepreneurs and capital, which were indispensable for economic growth.

However, after their economies took off, their governments conducted thoroughgoing reform of their administrative systems, transferring a certain amount of their power to independent corporations and liberating themselves from the role of economic management.

China has already launched an institutional economic framework that is in accordance with a market economy. The country has also gradually started the process of social reform in recent years. Now it's time to lay equal stress on both economic and social reforms.

China, as a vast country, has all kinds of regional differences. It's not surprising that China has eight or even 10 kinds of development models in total. But all these models are ultimately aiming at the same goal.

In backwater regions, local authorities play a bigger role, whereas the government role is relatively smaller in more developed areas. It's meaningless to do a simple comparison between different models from different regions.

The biggest challenges that China faces comes from the domestic arena. External forces can exert pressure on China, but are unable to influence China's development in a direct way.

And to a certain degree, such pressure could be beneficial. At the moment, it's normal that China is coming to rely less on US and European markets, which actually propels the nation to stimulate domestic demand.

Social radicalism must be avoided, and changes should be brought via gradual reform. Some critics are used to blaming various problems on China's political system. Nevertheless, the political system itself is undergoing changes too.

Compared to a few decades ago, China's political pattern today is quite different. Now Chinese leaders have both term limits and age limits. The Party is open-minded, and constantly seeks innovative means to solve practical problems.

Each country has its own problems, and Western countries still have flaws in their systems even today. China does need political transformation, but this doesn't mean China should turn to the Western track.

The most urgent task for China is to find good opportunities to make further breakthrough in its reforms.

In the late 1980s, previous reform had slowed down, and some feared the possibility of stagnation. But then powerful opportunities were created by then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's southern tour in 1992, which empowered reformers and sent the signal that the government would not abandon change.

Before any reform can be successfully launched, there is always a period for trial and error. Now China is going this period, and it has to find good opportunities in the next five to 10 years to make breakthroughs that will kick-start the next stage of reform.

This is an critical race against time, since both China's domestic and external environment are seeing rapid shake-ups.



The author is professor and director of East Asian Institute at National University of Singapore. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn