The globe is a home village where people from different races and with different beliefs and ideologies coexist. As time goes by, and as exchanges intensify and technology develops, the world population is getting closer, sharing similar views and perspectives.

Recently, intensive media reviews have focused on Time Asia magazine's list of its top Asian heroes, including 56 people who have helped Asia rise "from poverty to powerhouse, from imitator to being imitated" in the past six decades. The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, Victor and William Fung from Hong Kong's Li & Fung Group, Taiwan Acer Group's founder Stan Shih and Yahoo's co-creator Jerry Yang are on the list. Also named are the mainland's Olympic gold medallist-turned-businessman Li Ning, legendary action star Bruce Lee and popular actress Gong Li. They are separately listed in the categories of nation builders, artists and thinkers, business leaders, athletes and explorers.

Being the only honored nation builder from China, Deng is hailed for his contributions to setting off China's economic reform, which has been widely accepted and has made great achievements.

Time Asia explained that it chose Deng instead of Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic of China, because "although the name of Mao is known throughout the world, it is Deng who inherited the mantle of a Chinese hero."

"While Mao is now mainly associated with the idea of revolutionary excess and periods of colossal suffering, Deng has come to be linked to China's astonishing economic development, and to the steering of China away from its organizational straitjacket into a wider world of technological growth and international trade," the magazine said.

One of the most influential weekly publications in the world, Time was first launched in 1923. In 1927, it started celebrity lists, which gained the magazine even more fame. In the past years, nearly a dozen Chinese people have been selected by the magazine as cover faces. Among them are Communist leaders Mao, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi and Deng, Kuomintang chief Chiang Kai-shek and Puyi, the last emperor of China. In recent years, the ranking of Chinese President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao, Vice Premier Wu Yi, basketball star Yao Ming and actress Zhang Ziyi have demonstrated the converging taste of the Chinese and the Americans, assured by growing exchanges and mutual understanding resulting from a closer economic and diplomatic relationship. Last year, Li Yuchun, top winner of China's most popular talent show, the Super Girl singing contest, also made the cover of the magazine.

Prior to the 1980s, Chinese Communists were usually demonized and bluntly attacked in Time's reports. But now, Deng wins much more applause than criticism.

Soon after China's reform and opening up to the outside world in the late 1970s and, in particular, after its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, its growing participation in world affairs and the responsible image it has built up have dramatically reduced the ideological segregation set up by Western powers. We are getting closer and closer by sharing ideas through dialogue.

Through Time's coverage of China, we are inspired by the changing way that the American people look at the Chinese people, and we are even more encouraged to quicken our steps in the process of emerging into the world family.