Leading strategic analyst Hu Angang is optimistic about China's future after studying international statistics and domestic economic stimulus and potential.

"China is still in a period when its economy will keep growing and become prosperous by the year 2020," Hu said.

The country's reform and opening-up especially in the past 13 years have ensured its sustained development in the future, said Hu, director of the Center for Chinese Studies of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Qinghua University.

Statistics show that in 2001, China's gross domestic production topped 9.59 trillion yuan (1.15 trillion US dollars), tripling that of 1990. The country was listed last year as the sixth biggest economy in the world in terms of the total economic scale, compared with the tenth in 1990.

Jim Walker, chief economist of the Credit Lyonais Securities Asia, changed his view on China's prospects for the first time following a week-long visit to the country in January this year.

Walker has spent most of the last decade detailing China's shortcomings. However, he admitted this time that China had changed, sparking confidence in its future for the first time in seven years.

China has stood the tests of the Asian financial crisis and the recessive world economy and acquired rich experience at the same time, winning confidence from around the world.

The World Bank's report on China's economy in 2001 affirmed the country?s economic potential, pointing out that the strategy to expand domestic demand had taken effect, procuring speedy economic growth in a global background of economic recession.

Growing capital influx was the best indicator of the world's confidence.

Motorola has expressed willingness to increase capital, with plans to invest about ten billion US dollars in China by 2006.

More than 400 multinationals from the world's top 500 have branched into China, and 200 of them have established research centers in the country.

China progressed remarkably in the January-July period this year, ratifying 18,526 companies involving overseas capital and using a total of 29.54 billion US dollars of foreign investment, up 31.8 percent and 22 percent, respectively, on a yearly basis.

By the end of July, China had ratified more than 400,000 companies involving overseas capital and actually used 424.77 billion US dollars of overseas capital.

According to a report released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, China has led developing countries in attracting overseas capital for nine years running.

However, the country still has much to overcome in the 21st century, said prominent Chinese economist Wu Jinglian. The problems include rural poverty, increasing laid off workers, and economic imbalances between east and west regions.

More efforts must be made to promote economic restructuring and the reform of state-owned enterprises, Wu added.

The Chinese government is quite clear of the situation and has been working to overcome the shortcomings. A national working conference on re-employment last week mapped out concrete measures to gradually resolve some of the problems.

Hu Angang said that in the coming decades, China's economy would keep growing based on expanding domestic demand, increasing human resources and input in research, and industrial restructuring.

( September 18, 2002)