You know one of the things I frequently get asked in the west is: China is good at copying, but can it innovate? I wasn’t confident before, but I’m more confident now than I was several years ago about China’s successful ability to do that. 

There’s been a debate for some time in China about how to shift the nature of the economy. And at one point the Chinese government had to really make this a priority. And, of course, this predates Xi Jinping, but it also coincides with Xi Jinping. 

And everyone recognizes that this is going to be difficult because the previous period had been very successful. And making the shift to a very different paradigm which emphasizes the domestic market, emphasizes different industries, emphasizes the importance of new technologies and so on. 

That is a difficult transition to make. But if China doesn’t make that transition, then it’s going to get stuck. It will be stuck as, as they say, a middle-income country. 

What do I think about that? You know I’m more confident now. 

And the reason is because within an extraordinary short space of time, the Chinese economy has become a very innovative economy. I mean the classic example of this is, of course, is the high-tech industries, the Baidu, the Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent and so on. They are the only serious act in town in the world aside from what’s happening in the Silicon Valley. And it’s all been achieved in a very short space of time.

(British journalist and academic Martin Jacques, the author of global bestseller When China Rules The World, is one of the leading Western commentators on Chinese affairs. He is a senior fellow at Cambridge University and an invited senior fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University. Martin Jacques on China is an eight-part video series discussing issues affecting China’s future.)