Nowadays Beijing is home to more than 150,000 foreigners, or one in every 100 Beijingers, according to Wo Ai Wo Jia, a house-letting agent company that conducted a survey on demands of house renting among foreign residents in Beijing.

Fu Tian, 65, now lives in an apartment high-rise in downtown Beijing, only 300 hundred meters away from France-invested Carrefour mall and the U.S. fastfood store KFC, while the street is crowded with cars of Japanese and German brands.

"Many big events with global profiles now take place just on our doorstep - the Olympics, the Asia-Europe meeting," he says. "We come to each other as one world. We shall never go back to the old days."

Come together

Fu's feeling is echoed by Prof. Huang Ping, director of the Institute of American Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country's top think-tank.

"China is increasingly incorporated into the world after 30 years of economic reform and opening up, because no one would want to ignore the significance of China, and it will be harder to do so in future.

"Also for the Chinese, we can no longer just close our eyes and shut the door, because we've been so much connected with the rest of the world," he says.

Numerous Chinese now suddenly feel the pinch of the global economic downturn late this year after the United States, China's second largest trade partner, was hit by the worst financial crisis since the 1920s.

Liang Fengyi's factory of auto parts in Foshan, south China's Guangdong Province, received a notice from General Motors to cut orders by 20 percent just one day after the U.S. government rejected the auto giant's plea for up to 10 billion U.S. dollars to help finance its possible merger with Chrysler in early November.

A similar thing happened to Zhou Xiaoguang, who runs a shop selling home decoration accessories in east China's Yiwu City, a famous wholesaling market.

"Some of my regular clients abroad came eight times a year. But this year they came just four times," Zhou says. "I'm afraid I will lose 20 percent of profits this year."

Their experiences provide unhappy evidence as to how close the ties and interactions between China and the rest of the world have become.

"Over the last 30 years China has changed from pursuing economic autarky to adopting a policy of integration and comparative advantage, from lack of participation in the global economy to interdependence with that economy," says David M. Lampton, director of China Studies at the U.S.'s Johns Hopkins University.

"This is the most fundamental and far-reaching change in the relationship between China and the West," he says in an interview with Xinhua via email.

Such a change means that "international actors are increasingly looking to China to play an active role in addressing the problems and fallout of the global economic crisis," says Chris Alden, head of the China in Africa Programme of the South African Institute of International Affairs.

Martyn Davies, executive director of the Center for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University of South Africa, says China's development also is evidence that countries are able to reverse their situations and determine their own development trajectories, particularly for many African countries.

"China's increased engagement in Africa offers a new model for foreign power engagement with that continent - one that is not purely donor or only commodity driven, but rather, multifaceted, combining investment, trade and donor models," he says.

This has resulted in a reorientation in Africa's relations - away from traditional Western power in favor of renewed relations with the East, which centers on China, he suggests.

All the changes are deeply rooted in the meeting held exactly 30 years ago in Beijing.

"If there had not been a Deng Xiaoping, China would not have developed as rapidly as it has and in the manner that it has, and more generally the world would be a more dangerous place," Alden says.

But despite what China has achieved, Prof. Huang suggests that a lot of challenges need to be addressed in China's interaction with the outside world.

"Economically we are well interconnected with the world, but lack of mutual understanding on cultural levels is a concern for future relations," he says.

"China must continue to learn how to maintain a dialogue and correctly express itself in order to win the understanding and respect it deserves," he says.

(Xinhua News Agency December 19, 2008)