China's role in "the new building of the world"

By Daniel Chinoy (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-08-24 12:58

As the world recovers from the financial crisis, developing countries like China and Argentina will have a major role to play in building new global financial and political institutions, the Argentine Ambassador to China, Cesar Mayoral, said in an exclusive interview with the China Daily’s website recently.

“Both countries have a lot possibility to help the new construction, the new building of the world,” he said.

In part, this is because the financial crisis has weakened the ability of developed countries like the United States to offer financial leadership, Mayoral argued. “Before it was the developing countries who make problems for the developed countries. Now the crisis was born in the US,” he said. “It is important to have some regulation.”

It is also a reflection China’s growing global influence – something Mayoral said he was able to see when he served as Argentina’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations before coming to Beijing.

“I could realize the new accountability and responsibility of China in the international scene,” at the UN, he remembered. “And I think in the future it will be and more integrated to make solutions,” to international problems.

As the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China approaches, Mayoral credits China’s new international position both to Mao Zedong, for unifying the country in the wake of World War II, and to Deng Xiaoping, for subsequently modernizing it after 1978.

“When Deng Xiaoping arrived to power in 1978, the task was to make China in the head of the international scene, and to do that, they made a lot of effort to support the reforms…to modernize China and the economy,” Mayoral said.

Still, that task that remains unfinished, as Beijing looks to extend China’s dramatic economic growth outside the country’s major cities.

“The challenge is to give work and to give the most important things to the ordinary people,” Mayoral said. “I think now is the moment to support the big development of the Chinese people who need to be the same level as people living in the developed world.