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I have had the opportunity to chat with quite a few Americans over the past two months here in Beijing. As journalists, researchers or economists, they all tell me that they are here to try to understand more about China.

I believe it may be helpful that the members of the high-profile official US delegation headed by Henry Paulson, who begin the Sino-US strategic economic dialogue with their Chinese counterparts today, have also come to learn a little bit more about China.

Even though they have brought to Beijing their own agenda and objectives, it goes without saying that people have to be inside China to be able to feel its pulse and enable them to engage in meaningful dialogue.

But learning is essential, especially when American knowledge of China remains pitiful.

Richard Sousa, senior associate director and research fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, said that his institution has yet to achieve depth in its research on China, despite the fact that its scholars have carried out fruitful studies over the years and developed a solid archive on China, especially the pre-1949 era.

Nowadays, the institution has two or three economists visiting and working in China regularly. As Sousa put it, they "need boots on the ground (in China) to understand what is going on."

But it still takes time to become really familiar with the goings-on in China.

David Brady, deputy director of the Hoover Institution, told me that initial meetings with his Chinese colleagues were often filled with presentations of official plans, facts or figures Chinese politeness rather than American straightforwardness.

His tone suggested that the meetings merely scratched the surface of what is happening in China.

But how do you get over the initial phase of introductions? Brady believes that people have to be in the country long enough. "It takes a damn long time to get down to working on specific issues, to build relations and get people to pay attention to each other," he said.

One Hoover researcher comes to China "all the time," and so "he knows things most economists don't know."

Paulson may know China better than most Americans as it is reported that he has visited this country more than 70 times. But even with this knowledge, Americans still have to overcome their tendency to hold onto their own perceptions as if only the Americans know better with their successful stories.

I believe Sousa is right in saying that Americans "need to understand the culture a little more and the workings of a country before making pronouncements."

Sousa recounted the failure of the US economists in addressing economic problems in Russia in the 1990s. "The big problem with why the Russian experience was so bad in terms of Americans going in and looking at what was going on there was that they were not there," Sousa said.

The Americans did not understand Russia's infrastructure and they did not make efforts to do so. They just dropped in and flew out, after applying the American model in Russia. "The (US) economists assumed too much," Sousa said.

What the Americans can do is share with their Chinese counterparts their experiences and ways of handling problems.

And the Chinese, on the other hand, also need to open their minds wider and learn to look at many development issues not only from the Chinese perspective, but also from an international viewpoint. It is imperative that we Chinese do so as China's development is now closely intertwined with, and has a significant impact on, world growth.

It's a two-way process to smooth things out.

Despite that, Brady still advises that "the Chinese are going to work out things on their own," to go through its transformation into a market economy and urbanization and deal with its own problems. No one can dictate what China should and should not do.

(China Daily 12/14/2006 page4)