On their recent overseas visits, Chinese leaders have been explaining the nation's foreign policy from the perspective of civilization.

This new approach has been taken because the Chinese people have become increasingly aware of the importance of the interaction between Chinese civilization and the world civilizations.

During his US visit last month, for instance, President Hu Jintao picked Yale University as the venue to deliver a major speech, showing the high regard he has for this prestigious seat of learning.

Regardless of their majors, it is compulsory for first-year students at the university to study the history of world civilization and Western political theories.

Yale President Levin Bowl says that the university does not prepare the future for the young people, but prepares young people for the future.

Yale has spawned dozens of Nobel laureates and a number of US presidents and vice-presidents. A strong atmosphere of culture and humanity permeates this esteemed university. All this must have made a deep impression on the Chinese visitors.

As is well known, each form of civilization contains such elements as "hardware," "institutions" and "ideas." Basically, these are the material aspect of life, political institutions, and ideology and culture.

Bearing this in mind, fostering a greater public awareness of civilization is vital not only from an intellectual perspective. It should be understood as a compulsory course in enhancing political governance, economic management power and communicative capability in international affairs.

To be more specific, such education will be beneficial in the following ways.

First, it helps the public deal with difficulties posed by society's transformation from one type to another. The history of civilization tells us that, apart from sowing havoc, harsh social situations and natural disasters were sometimes engines that powered human progress. The Black Death claimed millions of lives in the Medieval Europe but it dealt a telling blow to feudalism and helped prepare the conditions for an awakening of the human spirit and the coming of the Renaissance.

Second, it enables us to calmly cope with social ills and contradictions brought by the transformation of society, for example, from an agrarian to an industrialized one.

Clashes between different social strata and pent-up social pressure would be minimized. Industrialization, for example, initially brought about unemployment, slums, social disorder and polarization as seen in the works of Charles Dickens. But these pressures forced the earliest industrialized countries to strengthen management and improve governance, with the situation taking a turn for the better until social stability was eventually achieved.

Third, education on civilization can make Chinese people more aware of the difference between Chinese and Western civilizations, overcoming the mentality that "everything Western is good," as well as tackling blind complacency.

Many are bewildered by the differences between civilizations. As a matter of fact, it is the different natural environs in which different peoples lived and the varying production modes, multiplied by extremely low rate of communication with each other, that brought about the differences between various civilizations. Superiority and inferiority is not an issue here. So nobody should be cocky or feel inferior just because of his or her cultural background.

Fourth, this kind of education helps promote our understanding of and respect for the developing world.

Despising the poor only reflects one's unsound personality and racial prejudice is an expression of shallowness. Knowledge of human civilization tells us that primitive African music largely helped develop modern jazz and rock-n-roll. And everyone uses Arabian figures and the decimal system invented by ancient Indians. Moreover, Buddhism, which originated in India, has had a great influence across the world, including China. The Dunhuang and Yungang Buddhist grottoes are a testament to this. A knowledge of world civilization helps instil a sense of respect.

Education on civilization also helps the Chinese people calmly deal with attacks on the country's current social system from some people who use the Western values and political model to gauge everything.

History shows that pluralism has been the hallmark of human progress. Even Europe's industrialization took on different forms, with France, Britain and Russia offering different models. So, why is there all of this fuss today about exclusive Western values and political models?

In addition, a greater awareness of civilization will make us more sensitive to newly emerging phenomena. This facilitates the renewal of our ideas about social development and upgrading concepts of governance.

For example, people often discuss the definition of the "middle class" but cannot agree with each other because they fail to get the criteria that frame this group of people's professions, income, values and influences on society. But the history of world civilization has long offered answers about the development and roles of this group of people.

Finally, this education will help redress some erroneous notions about the transition from a planned to a market economy.

The progress of human civilization shows that literary works lashing out at negative sides of industrialization and the ideas of equality championed by utopian socialists both exercised moral restraints on the society.

Looking back, we see that the end of slavery in Europe, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the emergence of environmentalism and the concept of sustainable development were all the outcomes of the interaction between powerful public opinion on the one hand and the strong impulse for profits on the other.

Applying healthy forces of public opinion to fight against the negative aspects of the market economy is pivotal to raising the level of governance and maintaining the momentum of civilization's progress.

In conclusion, civilization is the only true gauge of social progress. The Chinese nation needs to accurately map out its route on the chart of human progress in the context of the major progress the Chinese economy is making in the process of economic globalization.

The author is a researcher from the China Foundation for International & Strategic Studies.

(China Daily 05/26/2006 page4)