Afterword

Abstract

Sixteen years ago, in November 1997, I left China and went to the UK. Between 1997 and 2010, I moved around within the UK. I worked successively in Northumbria, Salford, Cambridge, Plymouth and Sunderland. Since 2010, my UK Prime Minister Initiative 2 has allowed me to build research partners in North America. I moved to North America for a while and spent some time working at Penn State University in the USA and Windsor University in Canada. I feel very privileged to have lived and worked, taught and researched, discussed and debated, and travelled between West and East. This has made me think deeply. Echoing the starting point of this book, the twenty-first century is an era of contending, and an era that calls for great wisdom and great strategy. In the last 35 years, the world has changed dramatically, especially between West and East. As established previously, the start of China’s economic reform and its opening to the outside world, the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, and the burst of financial bubble in Wall Street in 2008 have been combined with 35 years of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. In particular, East and West are facing different challenges. This requires great wisdom and great strategy to deal with. This is an era of large reflection, rethinking, reconsideration.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Steve Jobs