Zhang Weiwei (1982-), PRC badminton player, women's doubles specialist /Kangxi radical 118

If criticism is not free, praise is meaningless.

At the end of my visit in Germany, I was quite saddened by the backward high-speed rail network, outdated infrastructure, and low-slung buildings, Germany seems to be less than most Chinese people think it is."Developed." "What does it mean to be developed? Heinen Ellmann, an expert from the German Federal Agency for Foreign Trade and Investment, asks this rhetorical question. Developed buildings, developed railroads, developed technology ...... "These are only tools for achieving a goal, not a goal worth pursuing per se."

Prof. Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University has shared his personal feelings in a famous speech titled "China's Confidence": when you fly from Shanghai Pudong International Airport to New York Newark Airport, you will feel what it means to go from a first world airport to a third world airport.

6At the beginning of the month I finished a study tour of Germany, and as I returned from the outdated and cramped Berlin airport to the huge, brand-new Terminal 3 of the Capital Airport, my fellow journalist friend laughed and said, "Facilities in developing countries are just as developed as they come!"

Over the past few years, I have traveled back and forth to the United States, Japan, and Europe many times, and there are many other similar feelings that I have experienced in my cross-cultural exchanges and observations:

The view of Manhattan Island from Brooklyn's dirty Riverside Park seems no more breathtaking to me than the view of Lujiazui from the Bund. From Hangzhou to Shanghai, the Harmony had traveled with350kilometers; but the Tohoku Shinkansen from Tokyo to Sendai rarely exceeds the speed of250Kilometers. In Hamburg, Germany, where smart city construction is in full swing, the Internet technology used is no more advanced than in Beijing ......

Thirty years ago, when a Chinese person came to the United States, he or she would be shocked by the airports, highways, supermarkets, and skyscrapers; for today's Chinese, that sense of visual impact is gone. So the question arises, why is China still a developing country? What constitutes a developed country?

Of course, whether one is a developed country or not can be measured by many indicators, such as gross domestic product, national income per capita, life expectancy, literacy rate, level of industrialization...... But in recent years I have gradually developed some subjective methods of judgment in my cross-country travels and interviews. To summarize, there are three kinds of giving that developed countries will do at no cost.

First, pay for the weak

Just as it is not the long board but the short board that determines the capacity of a bucket, the criterion for evaluating the degree of development of a country is not the height of the strong but the position of the weak.

The status of the underprivileged is reflected in every aspect of social life: in Hamburg, buses are hydraulically tilted sideways to make it easier for elderly or disabled people to get on and off the buses when they arrive at their stops; in Tokyo, all the subway doors have Braille engraved on them to inform the blind of the location of their compartments; and in New Haven in the United States, government subsidies have enabled the poor to live in the same apartments as doctoral students at Yale School of Medicine.

Paying for the weak, which means first and foremost paying money at a totally disproportionate cost-benefit ratio (e.g., public facilities serving the blind and the elderly do not generate economic benefits), is a sign of a society where the strong pay for the weak. On the other hand, excessive pursuit of monetary benefits, with the weak paying for the strong, is a symptom of an underdeveloped society (just imagine how many blind alleys in Beijing are not occupied by parking spaces or stores).

Giving to the weak also means the spiritual upliftment of society as a whole. In Hamburg, a Cisco manager showed me a container for refugee medical services that he had developed with donations to provide medical help to refugees flooding into Germany.

In the opinion of many people, refugees who bring social problems and do not generate economic benefits are not welcome, while this manager at Cisco is adamant:"They need help." When the spirit of humanitarianism transcends the spirit of pragmatism, and when society as a whole is characterized by the emergence of a large number of social groups that are willing to serve the weak and vulnerable regardless of the cost, that country will certainly be a developed country.

Second, pay for the details

Focusing on the quality of details rather than grandiose appearance is perhaps a commonality among the developed countries I have traveled through. Tokyo Narita Airport may not be as modern as Beijing Capital Airport, but the public toilet facilities on the streets of Shinjuku are definitely comparable to five-star hotels in Beijing. Although a third-tier city in China's skyscrapers are not inferior to Osaka, but in Japan, I went to even the most remote small towns, can be assured that drinking water directly from the tap.

Paying for the details also means there's no rush. In Brooklyn, New York, a local friend introduced me to local community development. In front of a piece of barren land, my friend said that because the land had been used as a chemical plant building, the local government had spent40The cleanup of soil and water contamination has not been completed in years, so even though the land is expensive, it has to be left unused and abandoned.

Face is easy to learn, but inside is hard to mend; economic development can be fast, but a developed society needs patience. It is not the mentality of developed countries to boast about the hard power of skyscrapers and ignore the soft power of quality of life.

Again, paying for the future

With a population of only12In the small German city of Bottrop, which has a population of 10,000 people, I visited the recently founded University ofHRW, which is the city's second university, has a total of70Multiple professors. Mayor Tischler said, "We need to invest in the future of our city." This reminds me of my hometown, Jiangyin, ranked No. 1 among the top 100 counties in the country, with36Listed Companies,160million people without a real university.

In Bottrop, I also visited a school namedThe "House of the Future" condominium renovation project was designed to make the building more environmentally friendly and energy efficient, but the cost of the renovation was to be recovered through rentals at a minimum.15Year. Faced with such an uneconomical program, investors have a simple reason: it's the future.

In the U.S., where gas is cheap, the American people, simply for the sake of an environmental idea, have since2000Purchased since year160million Toyota hybrid Priuses that are twice as expensive as equivalent gasoline cars. In Germany, the German people have endured a doubling of electricity prices over the past decade in support of green power development.

All these seemingly economically irrational behaviors are in fact paying for the future. If the inhabitants of a country are only concerned about immediate economic benefits and are only willing to pay for cheap services and commodities, and do not intend to make long-term plans and investments for the future, it will be difficult for the country to move from theUpgrading of "development-following" developing countries to "development-leading" developed countries.

At the end of my visit in Germany, I was quite saddened by the backward high-speed rail network, outdated infrastructure, and low-slung buildings, Germany seems to be less than most Chinese people think it is."Developed." "What does it mean to be developed? Heinen Ellmann, an expert from the German Federal Agency for Foreign Trade and Investment, asks this rhetorical question. Developed buildings, developed railroads, developed technology ...... "These are only tools for achieving a goal, not a goal worth pursuing per se."

(This article is an excerpt from a speech entitled "China's Confidence" by Prof. Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University.)