INSIDE OBSERVERS: John Naisbitt and his wife Doris visit Beijing to promote their new book, China's Megatrends: The Eight Pillars of A New Society. The book helps Western readers understand China through its history and development (JIANG XIAOYING)

Best-selling author John Naisbitt and his wife Doris have co-written the upcoming book China's Megatrends: The Eight Pillars of A New Society. The two recently visited China to promote the new book.

A U.S. citizen, John Naisbitt has proven himself a guru at predicting social trends in various countries. His series of books, which started with his first Megatrends in 1982, has sold more than 14 million copies around the world. The new book is based on the research of the Naisbitt China Institute in Tianjin Municipality, which he founded in 2007. He is also a guest professor at the Tianjin University of Finance and Economics and at Nankai University.

On August 30, Beijing Review staff reporter Li Li interviewed the couple on their new book and their conversation with former Minister of the Information Office of the State Council Zhao Qizheng, based on which a Chinese press will publish another book.

Beijing Review: We know that you have conducted intensive studies on Asia in the last few years. How long did you conduct research for your upcoming China's Megatrends?

John: My travels in Asia and particularly travels in China over the last 40 years are certainly instructive as to what is going on. When I was here in the 1960s, it was so primitive and backward that it wasn't yet modern China.

You have to say, "How did they do it?" No one has ever done that before. That's the question.

The very important thing we try to convey to the West is that this is not a shift or adaptation, but the creation of a totally new social and economic system. How did this system get built? What were the underpinnings? That's how we moved to the "pillar" principles. That's when we really started to get involved in the last couple of years.

Doris and I have been traveling together over the last 10 years around China. Our institute got underway in 2007, which monitors what is going on locally all over the country. It is clear to me that, throughout the world, what is going on locally in any country taken together is what is going on. So you have to monitor locally from the bottom up. We did research for the book for about two years.

You said an essential idea at the core of your new book is that China is creating an entirely new social and economic system, which challenges Western democracy as the only model of government that can provide social and economic rights. So why is it important for Westerners to learn and believe in your findings?

Doris: When the West looks at China, it always has a view from our values, from Western history and the Western political system. We judge China with those values in our heads, always measuring it against the West. But that does not give a picture of the real China. The only way we think to understand China is to look from inside out, not from the outside into China. China needs to be judged by its own values and its own history, because its values are based on its own history. To give the West information necessary to understand China on its own terms is one of the purposes of this book.

Why did you choose China?

John: Because it is the story of our time. It is the greatest story of our time. If you think about it, what is the story of our time? This little financial crash that is going to come and go? All these stupid wars? Compared to the rise of China, nothing comes close. This is a great story and the story of our time.

Doris: Fourteen years ago, when John wrote Megatrends Asia, I was the German language publisher. I remember the media was attacking him because he said Asia and China were on the rise. He already said at that time that there was a shift from the West to the East.

We know that you have been a successful futurist ever since your first groundbreaking Megatrends book in 1982. Are there universal tools you use to study and analyze domestic and international trends?

We try to sort things out, figure them out, use our heads and try not to be prejudicial about anything. One of the guidelines for me is how powerful it is not to have to be right. We write things and people say maybe it is not right. We also said maybe it is not right but that is how it looks to us.

If you have to be right, like academics, they don't tiptoe past their data, because they don't want to be caught wrong. But that is really terribly inhibiting. It is liberating not to have to be right. You just have to see the world, look at it and talk about it. This is so interesting.

In your highly popular book, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives, which has many fans in China, you listed 10 new directions transforming people's lives. In retrospect, have the 10 directions accurately depicted the future?

John: The book is about the United States. I can only tell you that the Financial Timessaid not a single one was wrong.

Of course, the 10 megatrends played out because they were based on what was going on in the country. It was already happening and people hadn't noticed that it was happening. When I say it is happening, it sounds like I was predicting things and they all came true. Well, they had already begun.

That is what we are talking about in China. China has not yet reached the promise of the direction in which it is heading. It is not on the other side of the river. It is only about a third of the way there. It is only a guess, but it's an instructive estimate. This suggests it's just getting underway and it's going to be extraordinary.

You have been writing books on global trends for nearly three decades. Do you find it more difficult to predict because we are in a more complicated world?

John: Not really. The thing that is different today is that the media, especially television, is the great magnifier. No matter what happens, it is magnified all out of proportion, even including the fiscal crisis that is going on now or Michael Jackson's funeral. Anything that happens. It sounds like there is all this noise and it's a crazy world. It's partly the function of artificial magnification and also the function of bad news.

When I get up and look at CNN, I know exactly what I am going to see. An inventory from the most remote parts of the world, anywhere they can find the little bad news. If you let that run you, then it gets even more complicated than it used to be. I don't think it's more complicated than it used to be, except that there are more players because of globalization.

Do you have a favorite of the personal stories from Chinese people in the book?

Doris: One is of our friend Wang Yukun, the dean of a business school in Tsinghua University, who has an illiterate mother on a farm. She was so forward-looking that she told her son, "Only when you step out of the field can you see the dirt on your feet." We love that because that is teaching your children to look at facts and to look at what is really there, then they can move on. That's a symbol of what China did. China 30 years ago looked at itself and did not glorify the bad circumstances under some ideology, but said, "Our feet are stuck in the mud, so we have got to get out of this."

The mother sacrificed her own desires to enable her children to get a good education. The Chinese system has one very strong advantage—that if you are good at school, it supports you to move on. It is too exam-driven, but that's another thing.

We have another friend Wang Wei, who early on went to the United States and worked there. He came back because what China offers is more than what the West offers.

John: The recent invasion of "sea turtles" (Chinese returnees from foreign countries) is because the opportunities clearly are perceived to be greater in China than they are in the West these days; all over Asia, too, but especially in China.

Doris: The United States used to be the strongest magnet for intelligent people. Now that is more and more shifting to China.

In your short stay in Beijing this time, you are going to have a dialogue with former Minister of the State Council Information Office Zhao Qizheng. What are the main topics of the dialogue?

Doris: The topics are what is going on in China, how the West sees China and why the West's picture of China is different from the Chinese picture of China. There are two pictures of China. The question is what is the real picture of China.

John: I think neither is the real picture. One is too inside and one is too outside. That's what we are trying to do. We're trying to really see by doing it inside out but also trying to be as objective as we can about it. We think it doesn't serve anyone for the West not to really know what is happening in China.

Doris: The West has formed a picture about China and doesn't want to change it. The West always feeds the picture with what fits into the picture. We don't like that. Not everything is good about China, but very many things are very good.

John: The China bashing is fed by what I call the "fur factor"—fear, uncertainty and resentment about China.