Foreign Policy magazine has compiled a list of ‘top 100 global thinkers‘. They got 63 of them to participate in a survey, blurbed thusly:
Want to know what former President Bill Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, three Nobel Prize-winners, best-selling authors such as Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria, and thought leaders from China and Canada to India and Indonesia think about the world’s most pressing problems?
Chinese citizens who took part, include erstwhile editor of Caijing magazine Hu Shuli, governor of the People’s Bank of China Zhou Xiaochuan and legal scholar and activist Xu Zhiyong
China related findings from the survey:
A majority … (79 percent) [think] that China China is the inevitable next global power…
… The most influential world leaders outside the United States are Chinese President Hu Jintao (by a large margin), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva…
…Asked what one person we should listen to in order to make the world a better place, our thinkers produced no fewer than 34 nominees, including everyone from the Dalai Lama to James Hansen, Samuel Huntington, Angela Merkel, and Franklin D. Roosevelt…
…Predictions for 2010 include: a possible collapse of the Pakistani state, a dollar crisis or Asian asset bubble-burst, civil unrest in China, biological terrorism, and a global pandemic.
The whole report is titled titled The wisdom of the smart crowd, which is even more cringe-inducing than the tired “Hu’ pun in my photo caption above.
Despite the title, it’s well worth a read, and it comes with charts and illustrations. In the age of Twitter, even sober-minded publications like Foreign Policy need eye candy.