China's success comes from 'its own way of governing': US scholar

China's remarkable success in the past seven decades since the founding of the People's Republic of China has come from its own way of governing — socialism with Chinese characteristics, a US scholar has said.

"In my own tiny, small way, I applaud and celebrate with you and your people as an American for what has taken place in your country," Sarwar Kashmeri, adjunct professor of Political Science, Norwich University, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Kashmeri, also a Foreign Policy Association fellow, attributed China's unprecedented rapid development to its "own way of governing-- socialism with Chinese characteristics."

"So I believe a lot of the theories that have been used to analyze China have been very self-serving, not by the government, but by the experts who were trying to predict what China would be like," Kashmeri said.

It should be understandable that China has its own way of governing, he said. "As far as I know, it is not interested in taking its way and changing every country in the world. So I think it's a very different proposition."

"And we have to understand that other countries in Asia will have a very different form of government ... And we need to live with that, because that's how the world is going to be," he said, adding that Western countries have to understand that China is going to "run its own course."

Credit should also be given to the Chinese people, he said, "because without that, nothing is really possible."

Lauding the "flexibility amongst China's leaders," the scholar said: "I cannot even imagine how difficult it must have been for a leader of China to (reform and open up) a completely inward looking economy."

"That must have taken so much courage and so much flexibility... And to put all of that together into a strategy which perhaps didn't all come together at one time, but block by block it came together," he explained.