China's recent history details a success story. In 1978, the size of China's economy was just one-40th of that of the US, but during the past 40 years, China's GDP has grown by an average of about 9.5 percent a year. By 2017, the size of China's economy had grown to more than three-fifths that of the US, according to International Monetary Fund estimates.

During the past four decades, China has also succeeded in lifting more than 740 million people out of poverty.

Jacques said he feels confident that China will continue to develop. He said its GDP growth rate may drop to a more sustainable level over the long term, but its development will increasingly focus on innovation and quality growth.

He recalled that when he first published When China Rules the World, one question he was often asked at author talks was how China could break free from the need to imitate advanced economies' technology, and what would happen if the country reached the point where it was inventing its own technology.

"I never hear that question anymore, because the answer is clear with the transformation of the technology companies in China," Jacques said.

For instance, in the second quarter of this year, China's Huawei overtook Apple to become the world's second-largest smartphone seller.

In the pioneering sector of mobile payments, China has emerged as the biggest market, worth 40.36 trillion yuan ($5.90 trillion) in the first quarter of this year. Its two biggest payment companies, WeChat Pay and Alipay, now have 900 million and 500 million active users respectively. These numbers eclipse Apple Pay's 127 million active users.

Accompanying these technology innovations is China's rapidly strengthening intellectual property system and its soaring number of patent registrations. Chinese companies' filings with the European Patent Office in 2017 were up 16.6 percent year-on-year, compared with the global average of 3.9 percent. This year, for the first time, Huawei topped the EPO's league table by number of patents filed by a single company, ahead of Siemens and LG.

While China's development path shows a rosy picture full of excitement, Jacques also warns that one challenge China will encounter in the future is the antagonism it will attract from Western countries fearful of being challenged.

Equally, the novelty of China-proposed initiatives such as the BRI could lead to questions and doubts. US President Donald Trump's moves to instigate a large-scale trade confrontation with China this year is evidence of the sort of external pressure China must learn to face, he said.

The trade dispute, which started this year, has seen the US slap tariffs on billions of dollars of Chinese imports, and China doing the same in retaliation. Many companies have already been negatively impacted, including US companies that rely on the supply chain in China.

Jacques said he feels that the attitude in the US under Trump is based on a recognition that China has been successful, and that the antagonism US administration has expressed toward China has, in a sense, spoken of the success of China.

"As China has risen, its relationship with the US has become more difficult," Jacques said. "For the US, it's one thing to look relatively benignly on China when it's well behind, but when China is not well behind, but is a competitor who has an alternative view of the world, then that's a different game."

He said that as China experiences rapid transformation and gains global influence, it must find its own new position in the world and ensure that other countries are comfortable with it.

"China has got to find a way of dealing with it," he said. "By and large, I think it's succeeding in doing it, but it's not a simple matter."