Vice Minister: China should endeavor to strengthen soft power
From: Xinhua
China has achieved significant growth in its hardware development and needs to do more in strengthening its soft power in the future, Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Fu Ziyi said here on Saturday.
Fu made the remarks on the 18th Annual Conference held Saturday by the Chicago-based Association of Chinese-American Scientists and Engineers (ACSE).
In the past 30 years, China has made great progress in developing such hardware facilities as expressway, high-speed railway and port, but the construction of soft environment was far lagged, said Fu.
I could hardly see any building in Harvard University that is more magnificent than those in China s Tsinghua University or Peking University, but Harvard has attracted the most talented people around the world, said Fu.
The financial crisis will produce significant effect on the world and also brings opportunity for China to improve its software in the future, said Fu, calling on Chinese overseas talents to make more contributions to their motherland.
Fu also cited that even the sales for a cargo of China s garment are less than the consulting fees charged by U.S. investment banks that serve 10 to 20 China s companies to go public listing, which, however, are not recorded as U.S. exports.
China s consul general in Chicago, Yang Guoqiang, also delivered a speech at the conference.
The ACSE is one of the largest Chinese-American professional associations in the U.S. and has more than 6,500 registered members, of which, 90 percent have Ph.D. or master degrees.