Hello! My name is Ragnar Baldursson. I'm from Iceland, a very different cultural background from China.

I come from a family of teachers. In our home, we got a Chinese monthly. It was published in Esperanto and I read about China. It was obviously very different from Iceland. So when there was an announced a scholarship to China in 1975 in summer, I went to learn about the real China.

I thought that eventually the alphabet, the pingyin would be used to write all the Chinese words. But my teachers they told me is not that simple. I would have to learn the characters.

One of the first words I learned to write was the name for my country - Iceland. In Chinese it is called ice island, bing dao. Actually when we were learning the Chinese characters, we were actually learning the concept to the last thought to think about abstract things. I realized also the Chinese worldview or the Chinese idea about the world is linked to these characters and to the old civilization.

One of the fundamental basic characters of the Chinese civilization is He, which means with or to cooperate, me and you, link this with “he”. It's a corn or a rice together with a mouth. Mouth stands for the people. And you need to work together on the watering, on the irrigation, the flooding, and the roads to bring the crops between different regions. So that is the origin of the Chinese concept of cooperation that the whole society is based on cooperation on he. China is a rice culture. Now, those characters like he, like collaboration and trust is even older than Confucianism. So I may say that Confucianism grew up from the agricultural way of doing things, of the working together.

And another thing very important, I found, which is a fundamental, a principle of Confucianism, and Chinese governance even today, is trust.

Now, trust is a character with a person, and another character, which means to speak, yan. Confucius says about this character, about this concept, trust, that how can you be a person if your words are not to be trusted. So for the Confucianists, it meant a basic quality of a person and governance is that you have to be trusted. And if you are not trusted, you are no better than the beasts, than the animals. And this principle is a basic principle of the Confucianism together with the collaboration, working together with he, these two. And the aim of those action points basically is to work together and is to be trusted. And the aim of this is to provide for the people. So the people, the livelihood of everyone in the society become the most important concept in Confucianism and in Chinese political thought.

When I was studying at the Peking University philosophy, we were focused on Western philosophy originally. They would discuss Western philosophy, they would always tend to talk about ancient China. I started studying the Chinese classics, The Analects of Confucius. And as I went on, and I found that in Confucianism, for instance, the basic principle is the people. The goal of unifying the State was to make the lives of the people better. So it was the central idea of the Chinese philosophy of Confucius.

Then I came to realize that in modern times, this is still the central theme, the confucianists, all of them, not only Confucius, also the Laos and all of them, they are always talking about the people, about the common people. And this is also done by the present political leadership of China.

The modern world is characterized by increasing trend towards globalization. When I started my work as a diplomat in the late 90s, there was no understanding of the importance of sustainable development in general. And it was not only China, in the western world, people had not realized that sustainable development was important. But then around 2000 and thereafter, it become more and more important. When I thought about it as a diplomat in China, I realized that the concept of sustainable development was basically it was extension of the concept of collaboration and trust, he and xin. Because if you're not working together, you cannot achieve sustainable development. And without peace between people, you cannot have sustainable development. And without trust between people, you cannot have sustainable development. The only way to maintain it is to do it in a sustainable way based on the principles of a peaceful collaboration He and trust, mutual trust. And the purpose of the development is not to create more and more machineries and more and more technology. The purpose is to improve the lives of the people.

This became in my mind central in the contemporary and future development of international relations. What China has done. The Chinese agricultural civilization has meta morphed into a modern, highly developed and highly specialized civilization that is still based on the basic principles of ancient Confucianism, of collaboration and trust for the people, for providing for the people.