(LinkAsia: November 16, 2012)
Yul Kwon:
So who is Xi Jinping? Neighboring Japan is keenly interested to know what the leadership change means for the future of its strained relations with China. Here's Japan's public broadcaster NHK with its take on the new Chinese leader.

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NHK World NEWSLINE
Airdate: November 9, 2012

Reporter:
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping is 59 years old. He comes from Shanxi Province. Communist Party leaders named Xi Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission in 2010. He's taken an active role in diplomacy as well as domestic affairs.

Xi Jinping:
China is committed to defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity. We will try to settle disputes with our neighbors over land and sea rights through friendly negotiations.

Reporter:
Xi Jinping's father was a Vice Premier. So Xi became part of China's informal princeling network. Princelings gain power by taking advantage of their parent's status and ties to influential figures. But Xi didn't have it easy. Authorities ousted his father and jailed him during the cultural revolution. Xi was forced to work in the countryside as a teenager. He went to a prestigious university in Beijing from 1975 to 1979. And then he spent the next quarter century holding down key positions in the Communist Party and the government in Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanghai.

Reporter:
Xi gained domestic and international prominence in 2007. He skipped the stage of Politburo member and went straight into the Politburo's standing committee. Xi's wife is a well known figure in her own right. Peng Liyuan is popular singer in the troupe belonging to the People's Liberation Army. Analysts say her star status and support from the military has helped Xi's career. Xi has spent the past couple of years cementing his position as successor to President Hu Jintao. He visited the U.S. in early 2012 to promote relations. His counterpart, Vice President  Joe Biden was with him for much of the visit.

Xi Jinping:
We will, in light of China's national conditions, continue to take concrete measures and craft effective policies…to promote social fairness, justice and harmony, and push forward China's cause of human rights.

Reporter:
Xi said that on some issues, the two governments will not necessarily see eye to eye.

In the latest episode of Global Pulse, host Erin Coker asks whether China's 60th anniversary festivities were a display of power for the world or just for Chinese citizens. Watch the episode and leave your comments below!

Media worldwide covered China's celebration of 60 years of communist rule, acknowledging China's rise over the past six decades, while also pointing out its spotty human rights record and the barring of its own citizens from attending the festivities.

Such general wariness of the Communist Party of China's (CPC) celebration may be indicative of a greater global anxiety concerning China's new place on the world stage. In marrying the tenets of communism with explosive economic growth, the country has, perhaps, come to embody the worst of communism and capitalism -- reckless urbanization within the rigid framework of a repressive authoritarian system. The result? A growing power whose rapid industrial expansion and repression of personal freedoms is both a detriment to its people and a possible threat to western interests.

Some experts question the durability of the so-called "authoritarian capitalism" model. "The more open and competitive an economy becomes, the greater the pressure to liberalize political institutions and democratize civil society," notes Tim Dunne in a Guardian editorial. "China wants the former while resisting the latter."

For state-run Chinese media however, capitalism remains an opposing ideology that is distinct from both the country's government and its burgeoning economy. A recent opinion piece in the state-run People's Daily extols socialism as the country’s historical choice, while an article on the CCTV website attributes China's private sector expansion to the country's larger socialist market economy.

In Yasheng Huang's 2008 book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, the MIT professor points to reforms of governance, not market reforms, as crucial for China’s brand of capitalism to thrive. "Many of the endemic problems in the Chinese economy today—massive pollution, corruption, inefficient capital deployment, land grabs, and so forth—cannot be tackled without…reforms of Chinese political governance," a Reuters article notes in an analysis of Huang's book.
 
In the end, whether seen as a pure success story, a threat to the west, or the worst of two economic systems, China's continuing rise assures that it will not be ignored.