来自“悉尼先驱晨报(Sydney Morning Herald)”的一篇社评

Happy birthday, Red China
October 1, 2009

ON OCTOBER 1, 1949, the Communist leader Mao Zedong stood at Beijing's Gate of Heavenly Peace to declare the birth of the People's Republic of China. For Mao and his war-scarred followers, that moment marked a triumphant end to a very long, hard march. The Chinese people have been on another journey ever since, and they are still striding along on a bumpy road. But today, exactly 60 years after Mao's climactic declaration, they already have immense achievements to celebrate - which is precisely what they are doing, with a huge, carefully orchestrated parade featuring massed schoolchildren and soldiers, patriotic floats, fireworks and lots of very serious military hardware.

They have earned their birthday party. During the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, China was bullied, invaded and exploited by rapacious foreign powers, ravaged by home-grown warlords and then by a terrible civil war, followed by famine, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the brutal tragedy of Tiananmen Square. Until relatively recently, it was a huge, seemingly hopeless economic backwater, as much the victim of rigid ideology as of foreign devils; now, measured by purchasing power parity, it is the world's second-biggest economy, a formidable strategic power and, yes, America's creditor and Australia's most important export market. Yet many of its rural people remain desperately poor.

None of this makes it less difficult for Australia to live comfortably with this rapidly emerging, hyper-sensitive, increasingly assertive major player in the global game. But it does make it more urgent that we learn how to do so. Obviously, this must be on the basis of mutual interest and mutual respect, which is easier said than done. Recent squabbles - over iron ore prices, the imprisonment of the Australian Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu, bids by Chinese state-owned entities to buy into Australian resources companies, the visit here by a Uighur leader whom the Chinese consider a terrorist, the screening of a film about her at the Melbourne film festival and other human rights issues - have shown that an Australian prime minister speaking Mandarin is not enough to guarantee harmony. But this is a day to celebrate modern China's achievements - and the contributions generations of Chinese have made to our development since the 19th century gold rushes - not to dwell on passing differences. If New York's Empire State Building can light itself in red and yellow in honour of Communist China's 60th birthday, Australians should be ready to raise a glass to them. After all, their prosperity underwrites ours.