Keith Bennett, vice chairman of Britain's 48 Group Club, has hailed the outstanding achievements China and its people have made in the past 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China.

The 48 Group Club is an independent business network committed to promoting ties with China. The origins of the club stem from the early 1950s, when some British business groups, known as the "Icebreakers," began to establish mutually beneficial trade relations with China.

Expressing his congratulations on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Bennett said in a recent interview with Xinhua that the history of China over the past 60 years is one of the most epic stories in human history.

Pre-liberation China was one of the most wretched, poverty-stricken societies, and life for the broad masses of people was one of unrelieved misery and oppression, he said.

Nobody could have imagined that, in just six decades, this country could have been so much transformed, he said.

Now China has become the world's third largest economy and is now looked to for solutions to many global problems, he said.

The vice chairman said he believed that none of the achievements that China and the Chinese people have made over the past six decades would have been possible without the correct guiding ideology and strong, unified political leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

He said one of the CPC's great strengths is that it has proved to be good at grasping the reality of China and finding the correct way forward.

The Chinese leadership has made "an important contribution to perfecting the program, guiding ideology and practice of the party, by putting forward the scientific concept of development and the goal of creating a harmonious society, with a view to addressing crucial issues such as those concerning wealth disparities, regional disparity and environmental concerns," Bennett said.

In addition, it is wise for China to seek a stable international environment for its efforts to improve people's standards of living and boost its comprehensive national strength, he said.

He stressed that China's peaceful development poses no threat to any other country and brings only benefits to people in all parts of the world.

The international community is in urgent need of democratization and this tends inevitably toward the creation of amulti-polar world, therefore, China needs to continue pursuing its independent foreign policy of peace, while seeking to maintain friendly, positive and cooperative relations with all countries in the world, Bennett said.

(Xinhua News Agency September 29, 2009)