One diplomat said at a grand seminar on translation, opening on Friday, that it is hard to change the Western bias and doubts against China; but China should be still trying.

"A lot of Western countries would like to see the only one model, which is western, be popularized and globalized, " Shao Zheng, who is a news and information official for China's Foreign Ministry, said. "Rather than accepting the concept of co-existence with differences while seeking for common ground, which is raised by China."

To change the stubborn bias toward China, erase the worries and doubts from those countries and win over the people out there to understand China's rapid growth, are arduous tasks that take much time. But Rome wasn't built in one day, he pointed out.

Shao said there are challenges in sight. "The Western voices are stronger than us, which will remain a status quo for a long time, " he said, "According to an incomplete survey, the news reports on China which appeared in media outlets and websites every day, more than 90 percent are still from the four major news agencies in the world. The ideological differences still exist, while the worries and misunderstanding are not fading away, but rising even more in many aspects of culture, religion and history."

China is still a developing country; you have to realize that, Shao said. Dai Bingguo, one of the former State Councilors, visited the United States in 2008 while Shao was there as a diplomat in Chinese embassy. He remembered how Dai had held a speech at the Brookings Institution that China didn't go to the aerosphere for just hosting the Beijing Olympics; instead China is a real developing country. "A few days ago, I received a photo of my junior high school classmates and half of my 52 classmates have already passed away. Why so? Because China is still a developing country. Of my five brothers and sisters, the three in the countryside have all passed away. Why? Because China is still a developing country, " Dai once said.

So Shao still remembered the words and added, "When some western countries portray China to be the number one economy power in the world soon, we must see clearly from our hearts our real power," he said. To let China's voice be heard more often, he said, China should allow more intimate contacts between peoples and help charities in poor countries.

China also can pay more attention to cultural exchanges, he suggested, like sports, films, art festivals and even more sensitive areas like religion, he mentioned when he worked in the United States, he told American religious people the fact that every year China would print huge amount of copies of Holy Bibles, more than many countries combined. Thus far, China has printed more than 50 million copies of the Bibles, a piece of nice trivia for Western priests.

"To raise our voice in the international community, we have to handle tough problems with all our might. For example, China and the United States have the “three Ts” to deal with: Taiwan, Tibet, and Trade," he said, "Now we have another T -- Trust. Mutual trust," he said. "How to improve our strategic mutual trust, would be a very important task to undertake, rather seeing it as a difficult question."

The Advanced Seminar on Building China's Language and Translation Abilities, which also bears the theme “Translation and Communication of Chinese Culture," was held over the weekend at Beijing Language and Culture University. The event is sponsored and organized by China's Ministry of Culture, the Translators Association of China (TAC) and the university.

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