Editor's Notes: As China prepares its 15th Five-Year Plan, Bridging News launches a Global Vision special series featuring overseas experts who unpack what the new blueprint means for the world, offering valuable international perspectives on cooperation, innovation, and green development.
Chongqing — After living in China for many years, Australian sinologist Roland Boer said he has seen firsthand the country’s rapid urban transformation, expanding infrastructure, and ongoing industrial upgrading—changes he described as a steady, everyday process rather than short-term or isolated developments.
Boer said he recalled a conversation with a friend from Lebanon who works in southern China. She told him that wherever she goes in China, she sees constant activity, “building things, making things, constructing things.” By contrast, when she travels to Western countries, she often encounters stagnation or, in her experience, the dismantling of what already exists. For Boer, this grounded comparison revealed a deeper divergence in how modernization is unfolding.
“I like to put it philosophically,” Boer said. He said what he observes in China can be described as a “dialectical leap,” a term that refers not only to material development but also to a fundamental shift in how modernization itself is understood.
Reflecting on his conversations with people of his own generation in China, those now in their 50s and 60s, Boer said there was once a strong belief that China needed to “work really hard to catch up with the West.” Modernization, in that framework, meant following a path already taken by Western countries.
Boer said the old framework no longer explains China’s path today. While modernization remains the goal, he said countries pursue it differently based on their own histories and systems, and in China’s case, a new framework has emerged that goes beyond following the West.
“It’s not following the same path as the West,” he said. “It’s actually leaping ahead.” He described this leap as operating on two levels. One is practical and highly visible: China’s sustained capacity to build, produce and develop at scale. The other is philosophical, reflecting a broader shift in thinking about development, governance and social progress.
These differences are especially evident in discussions of democracy, Boer said, noting that in many Western countries, democracy is often reduced to a single idea. “If you ask someone in a Western country, ‘Can you define democracy for me?’ they say, ‘Oh, it’s elections, and that’s about it,” he said, adding that this represents “a very thin definition of democracy.”
Drawing on his research into the history and theory of socialist governance, Boer said democracy should also be understood as an everyday practice. Consultation, discussion, debate and consensus-building, he said, are not peripheral but fundamental, forming “a crucial part of democratic practice” that takes place not only during elections but throughout daily social life. From this perspective, he said electoral democracy and consultative democracy are not mutually exclusive, with their relationship shaped by the system, history and culture in which democracy develops.
Placing Western modernization in a longer historical context, Boer said Australia’s colonial past offers a clear example. He said Western-style capitalist modernization was closely tied to colonial expansion, relying on resource extraction and exporting finished goods back to colonized societies, a process that fostered a zero-sum “I win, you lose” mindset that still shapes global politics today.
Against this backdrop, Boer said China’s modernization path offers an alternative perspective on development, one that moves beyond the historical limitations of Western modernization.