China's Harmonious World Concept And Its Implementation Mechanism

While the world is considering "the China Issue", China, as a nation boasting a history of civilization of several thousand years and as a big flourishing country fully integrated into the international community, must also take into consideration "the World Issue". At the beginning of the new century, China is summarizing and subletting the essence of its traditional culture—harmony, its historical experience and the new diplomatic claims advanced since the founding of New China; China is learning from the essence of all human civilizations, including the concept of freedom and democracy; the concept of harmonious world, based on the careful thinking over the issues of China and the world and the future development of China and the international community, shows China, a country with a long history and fast economic development and magnificent aspirations and ideals, consciously begins to establish and show its image as a peace-loving, developing, progressive and responsible big country. This shows China's pursuit of the international political and economic order on the basis of the values of peace and security, development and progress, fairness and justice, and the harmony between nature and human beings. In short, it reflects China's good wishes to realize lasting peace and mutual-prosperity of human beings and China's consciousness of its duty to carry out such missions.In the process of promoting and practicing the concept of harmonious world, China must face two problems.The first one is how to build up the reasonable connection between the concept of harmonious world and that of freedom and democracy in a convincing manner that the western world may come to understand and accept such a concept. After a careful investigation into the origins of both essential concepts belonging respectively to Chinese and western civilizations, this dissertation holds that both the concept of harmonious world and that of freedom and democracy are reflections of the understanding of peaceful coexistence and the persistent pursuit of it by human beings, "the natural political animals". The concept of harmonious world provides excellent world view and methodology for human beings to realize ultimately the magnificent ideal of everlasting peace and mutual prosperity, and the concept of freedom and democracy is proved by history to be the most successful value of domestic management up to now. The only difference lies in the different understanding of the way to design a system that helps to make into reality the concept of freedom and democracy in different cultural backgrounds. In fact, it is impossible that an identical design system may exist in this world. The advantages and disadvantages of and similarities between the two concepts make it necessary and possible to communicate between and learn from each other.The second problem is the establishment of reliable organization platform. The establishment and development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization clearly shows that its establishment and development originates from geopolitics but there is something far more than that. It is the natural result of rational consideration of "mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality and cooperation", which developed into the guiding principles for state-to-state relationships and cooperation in various fields, and which finally came out as the "Shanghai Spirit" embedding the essence of the concept of harmonious world. The establishment and development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization shows that in a diversified region and even the whole world, no matter it is the development of normal state-to-state relationships, or the strengthening of the win-win cooperation among countries in various fields, or even the establishment of regional cooperation organization, only by carrying out the concept of harmony can we meet the dual requirements, namely, the diversified reality and the impetus for the development of human beings. This provides many valuable thoughts for China to develop friendly cooperation relationships with other countries, especially in terms of building up a new neighborhood relationship schema with a multitude of neighboring countries and promoting and practicing the concept of harmonious world on a wider scope in the new century.