Hans Hendrischke (Photo/Keli Hong)

“China has now become a global economic power. What China does now is important for the rest of the world. It's not that China just has to look after itself, but China has also to look after its international partners,” said Hans Hendrischke, a professor of Chinese business and management at the University of Sydney Business School in Australia.

Professor Hendrischke has a strong connection with China. During his academic career, he was the director of the Centre for Chinese Political Economy at Macquarie University, co-director of the UNSW-UTS Centre for Research on Provincial China, school head at UNSW, and director of the University of Sydney Confucius Institute. In the past few decades, he has conducted hundreds of interviews with Chinese private entrepreneurs and local officials and has published several articles on various aspects of China's economic development. Now he leads the Business School’s China Research Network and chairs the Business and Economics Cluster of the University’s China Studies Centre.

Professor Hendrischke’s relationship with China began when he studied economics in Germany. He became interested in China's economy. “At that time, people knew nothing about China and China looks like an unknown continent. That's impossible, you can't have a country as big as China and nobody knows much about it. I decided I wanted to learn some Chinese and study in China,” he said. After several years studying Chinese in Taiwan, he did his postgraduate research at the Contemporary China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

These studies experiences solidified the foundation for Professor Hendrischke’s work and research in China. While he worked as a translator in the German Embassy in China in the early years, he had many opportunities to exchange and discuss with people from all walks of life. “What I learned is how important it is that foreign partners can trust Chinese leaders, and that made a big difference when Deng Xiaoping came, people started to have trust. When Zhu Rongji was there, people had trusted China as a member of World Trade Organization. This is one of the lessons I have seen, how much importance people attach to knowing who is on the other side.”

Professor Hendrischke said that since the reform and opening-up policy, the living conditions have greatly improved in many poor areas in China. It helped China to build a more standardized and orderly economic system and made China's economy more prosperous. “I think it has made a big difference to China. It has enabled China to become what it is now, becoming a global power, by opening up China first for foreign investment, and by allowing Chinese companies to go overseas.”

Professor Hendrischke pointed out that China has made a very large contribution to the economic growth of the world over the last year and China is the most important trading partner for a large number of countries. “China has helped Australia to have economic growth for the last twenty-eight years, which is remarkable. I think China’s economy will continue to grow and furthermore Australia and China economic relations will evolve into new areas. They will grow into those new industries where the two can cooperate and where Australia can really make a contribution to the Chinese domestic market.”

“China may be suffering from the trade war. We don't know where this will end, but I think it's not going to bring the Chinese economy to a stop.”

Talking about the 70th Anniversary of the founding of the People Republic of China, Hans Hendrischke said: “I think the 70th anniversary is a great thing. China has really done well. It has used its link to the world to create wealth, both for China and outside.” (People’s Daily Online / Ruishan Li)