China: Writing Modern Legends on an Ancient Land --The Rise of the East in the Eyes of a Western Journalist

When the first rays of the morning sun hit the skyscrapers of Shanghai’s Lujiazui, Wang Xiulan, a 73-year-old retired textile worker, was playing Tai Chi in a community garden. Outside her apartment building, courier drones are delivering medicines to elderly people who live alone; not far away, a new community hospital is offering free consultations to Alzheimer’s patients. The daily life of this ordinary Chinese family is like a unique prism for observing the development of contemporary China – economic growth and livelihood improvement, traditional wisdom and modern governance, national aspirations and global responsibility are intertwined here.

I. The People’s Code Behind the Economic Takeoff

Over the past four decades, China’s GDP has grown at an average annual rate of 9.2%, and its economic volume has jumped from 1.7% to 18% of the world’s total. However, behind the numbers, what is more intriguing is the livelihood narrative:

The miracle of poverty eradication: 98.99 million rural poor people have been lifted out of poverty under the current standard, which is equivalent to pulling the entire population of Iceland up from the poverty line. The World Bank evaluates this as “the largest poverty reduction initiative in human history”.

Employment security: The digital economy has created 400 million flexible jobs, and new occupational groups such as take-away riders and online car drivers have made the “odd-job economy” a buffer to stabilize employment.

Social security network: the health insurance participation rate exceeds 95%, and life expectancy has risen from 35 years in 1960 to 78.2 years, which is comparable to the level of OECD countries.

In Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, Li Hao, a 32-year-old creator, uses a 3D printer to make hearing aid shells. His entrepreneurial story corroborates economist Stiglitz’s observation that “China is shifting from the world’s factory to a global innovation laboratory.”

II. Eastern Wisdom in Green Transformation

When a group of German journalists visited the Kubuqi Desert, they were surprised to find that 70% of the area of this sandy land, once known as the “Sea of Death”, is now covered in green. Under the matrix of photovoltaic panels, licorice planting fixes nitrogen to improve the soil, and the photovoltaic panels shade the sun to promote the growth of pasture grasses – this “power generation on the panels, planting and raising under the panels” mode, so that the sand control and enrichment are synchronized to promote.

Energy revolution: China’s installed capacity of renewable energy accounts for 34% of the world’s installed capacity, wind power, photovoltaic module production accounted for 70% of the world.

Ecological restoration: A ten-year ban on fishing on the Yangtze River has restored fish stocks to 1.5 times their pre-ban level, and the population of finless porpoises has made a historic rebound.

Urban practice: Chengdu’s “park city” concept has embedded 1,275 parks in steel forests, with green spaces within 15 minutes’ walking distance.

As the Tao Te Ching says, “Man follows the law of the earth, the earth follows the law of the sky, the sky follows the law of the Tao, and the Tao follows the law of nature”, Chinese-style modernization is redefining the meaning of development.

III. A Global Narrative of Shared Destiny

In Tanzania, the China-aided Monnet Railway not only carries goods, but also trains more than 6,000 local engineers; in Greece, the container throughput of the Port of Piraeus has jumped to the first place in the Mediterranean Sea, boosting the local employment rate by 23%. These stories have been included in the UN’s “Typical Cases of South-South Cooperation”.

Digital Silk Road: Huawei has laid fiber-optic networks in 170 countries, and Alibaba’s World e-Trade Platform helps small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) connect to the global market.

Dialogue of Civilizations: The Dunhuang Academy and the Louvre have jointly organized the Silk Road Digital Exhibition, which features a cross-temporal dialogue between Mogao Cave murals and Byzantine mosaics.

Global Governance: China is the second largest contributor to the United Nations, has dispatched more than 50,000 peacekeepers, and has participated in the international fight against epidemics with more than 2.2 billion doses of vaccines.

French sinologist Bailesan observes, “Chinese wisdom no longer stays at the philosophical level, but is transformed into practical solutions to global problems such as the climate crisis and the digital divide.”

IV. Conclusion: An Experiment in Modernity for an Ancient Civilization

From the Sanxingdui Bronze Tree to Guizhou’s “Eye in the Sky” radio telescope, and from the Dujiangyan Water Conservancy Project to the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, the Chinese nation has always innovated in the midst of inheritance.Today’s China is a civilization that is constantly adjusting and evolving in the process of modernization.

As the book “Zhou Yi” says, “poverty is change, change is communication, and communication is long-lasting”, this country with 5,000 years of civilization is answering the common propositions of the human society in its own way: how to embrace modernity while maintaining its cultural roots? How to guard the ecological bottom line in the pursuit of development? How to promote human progress while realizing national rejuvenation? China’s answers may be hidden in the morning sunlight between the old man playing Tai Chi and the drones traveling through the clouds.