Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today is that relatively rare creature, a member of the Chinese political elite,

both familiar with and comfortable in the world of Western think tanks, media debate,

and policy discussion. The freedom, accorded to Henry Wang, inside China, is an

indication of the trust the Communist Party leadership has in him. He is the founder and

president of the Center for China and Globalization in Beijing. Previously, he studied and

lectured in Canada and the United States and served as a

counsellor on China's prestigious government advisory body, the China State Council. He's seen as an

advocate of an open, outward facing China, embracing multilateral and global cooperation. But that hasn't been the direction of travel

of President Xi and his government. Hostility with the US has been on the rise. China's refusal to

condemn Russia's war in Ukraine has exacerbated those tensions. In economic terms, China's rise to global preeminence doesn't look quite as inevitable as it once did.

Growth is stalling. The response to COVID has done real damage. And some of China's overseas ambitions embodied in the Belt and Road Initiative now look a bit overblown. Is China more vulnerable

than her leaders would have us believe? Well, Henry Wang joins me on the line now. Welcome to

Hard Talk. Thank you, Steve. It's a pleasure to have you on our show. I'm mindful that you

were the founder, the creator of a think tank, the

centre for China and globalisation. You said you wanted it to be a bridge between East and West.

Right now, it seems many of those bridges are being burned. Would you agree?

Absolutely. We see the things have changed a lot in the last five to

six years, basically. And there's a lot of dialogue has been cut off. There's a lot of communications

cut off. And also, of course, on top of that, COVID-19 pandemic has also isolated, you know isolated many countries and also given the, you know, the trade

war, the sanctions, the, you know, ideological and, you know, tackle, decoupling and all those

is add up. I think that we really need to strengthen the dialogue,

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