NEW YORK, Dec. 16 (Xinhua) -- Understanding China is vital especially at a time when globalization is under great pressure from mounting protectionist forces, a U.S. expert said in a recent interview with Xinhua.
"The imperatives of global cooperation have never been greater," Stephen Roach, senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and also former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, said via email.
The senior economist who is invited by the third Understanding China conference scheduled for Dec. 16-18 in Beijing said the meeting is "at a point in time" since it would help accomplish an important thing.
"It would be to establish a new understanding of how an increasingly integrated world benefits from the cross-border liberalization of trade flows, capital flows, information flows, labor flows, and technology flows," said Roach.
Hailing the progress of China's reform and opening-up during the past decades, the former Morgan Stanley senior executive said he is always optimistic about the outlook of the world's second largest economy, which "has also been the most dynamic economy in the past 40 years."
"I am convinced that China is making great progress on the road to rebalancing -- from manufacturing to services, from export-led growth to consumer-led growth, from surplus saving to saving absorption, and from an importer of innovation to a nation that is now starting to thrive on indigenous (home-grown) innovation," said Roach.
In early days of the reform and opening-up, China was viewed solely as an export-led economy that depended heavily on the rest of the world to sustain its economic growth and development, but "that is no longer the case," he said.
Given China's economic scale and dynamism, "the global linkages have been turned inside out -- the world economy has become heavily dependent on China," he said.
"By my calculations, China accounted for one-third of all global growth over the post-crisis 2008-17 period; putting it another way, the world would have lapsed back into global recession over the 2012-16 period were it not for the strength of the Chinese economy," said Roach, adding that those facts are not always well understood by others, and there is certain misunderstanding about China on the economic front.
"The misunderstanding comes from a world that has long been unwilling to accept responsibilities for its own problems, and has chosen, instead, to blame others," he said.
Roach said that China also faces its share of challenges, including property bubbles, aging and environmental issues, which the country has been making efforts to tackle with.
Noting that China has transparent and well-designed strategies to deal with most of these problems, he said "the key will come in the political will for implementation -- pressing ahead with further reforms and opening."
With the theme of China's new growth drivers and new opportunities for global cooperation, the third Understanding China conference attracts participants from China and around the world to engage in in-depth discussions and exchange of ideas on various topics.
The first and second Understanding China conferences were held in Beijing in 2013 and 2015, respectively.
