China on a fresh start of reform(2)

THE BEIJING SOLUTION

On Sept. 3, 2013, some 20 African civil servants from Ethiopia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Nigeria, began their first lesson under a tailored training program on public administration at China's National School of Administration in Beijing.

The project is just one of many. China's success has become a paragon that scholars and officials from across the world are eager to study and learn from. The reform policies due to be hammered out at this year's "two sessions" will add to the valuable trove of Chinese experience.

Without any doubt, some of the new measures will be about urbanization, a buzzword of the year and one of the hottest subjects during the "two sessions" at lower levels.

Analysts have predicted that the central points of a "human-centered" urbanization process will include lowering the barriers for China's 230 million migrant workers and 70 million non-local urbanites to settle in the cities where they work and live, and removing restrictions on hukou, or household registration, in towns and small cities.

Given that China spent 30 years to reach the level of urbanization that took Britain some 200 years and the United States 100 years, the future chapters of China' s urbanization story are also worth expecting.

Beneath the surface of China's successful story is a vein of pragmatic and strategic thinking. It is thanks to such thinking that China has decided to focus more on the quality rather than the speed of its economic development.

In essence, what China has been doing is thoroughly studying its own actualities and external environment, actively drawing lessons from the successes and failures of other countries, and eventually coming up with its own solutions based on the former and supplemented by the latter.

As China' s trajectory has eloquently proved, different conditions need different approaches, and every country can find its own way forward based on its national realities. History will not end in the way Francis Fukuyama has predicted.