Interview: 13th Five-Year Plan highlights China's foresight: Italy's former PM Mario Monti

The Western world should learn from China's forward-looking policies, Italian former prime minister and president of the Bocconi University in Milan, Mario Monti, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

He said the 13th Five-Year Plan approved at the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC) on March 16 highlighted the image of a country "deeply committed to transform, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, the course of its development."

The NPC and the annual session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) have further pushed a "significant structural transformation" of the Chinese economy oriented towards innovation, the development of service and infrastructure sectors, environment protection, employment and pro-capita income growth, Monti said.

The fight against corruption and the creation of a legal security system are also crucial aspects of China's future progress, he added.

"I am impressed by China's far-sighted view in the decision making process, which I see as increasingly lacking in the Western world. This time around both Europe and the United States have shown a tendency for short-term policies," Monti said.

He said the "One Belt, One Road" initiative launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 is "a great project of strategic geopolitics to include many regions, from Eurasia to the African continent and the United States, in the long-term development of China."

Today's globalized economy, Monti went on saying, is a central theme for China that in recent years has made important steps towards its increased responsibility on the global scene.

University and research exchanges are an important platform to further enhance China's role in the global governance, Monti added. He said he has found the Chinese young generations very curious and open to the world.

"According to the Organization for the Economic and Cooperation Development (OECD), in 2012 students from China accounted for 22 percent of all international students enrolled in tertiary education in the OECD area," Monti noted.

In recent years, there has been an enormous growth of interest towards China, and also an improved capacity for comprehension of certain delicate issues, which he said was positive as "it is important to understand things before judging them."

Italian goods, tourism and services are among the sectors that offer great potential of collaboration between China and Italy and between China and Europe, he said mentioning the importance of intellectual property rights protection on which he started a fruitful dialogue with China when he served as European Commissioner for Competition from 1999 to 2004.

During his mandate as Italian prime minister from 2011 to 2013, China was one of the countries that he first visited, "because of the central role of China on the world scene but also because the Italian government needed to explain to other countries and investors its strategy of budgetary rigor to ward off a further deepening of the country's economic crisis."

Monti, 73, said his interest for China dates back to when he was a young economist at Bocconi University after he had been a student there, and the then head of the economics department, Innocenzo Gasparini, founded the ISESAO, the Bocconi's Institute of East Asian Economic and Social Studies.

But it was when Monti began to study the relations between governance and globalization that China became central in his research as a "huge economy, a subject which is becoming a point of reference of the globalized world." Endit