In his book Civilization: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson interviewed a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, an arm of the Communist Party in China. This unnamed Chinese official praised the role of Christianity in the Western world. He said:
One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success … of the West all over the world.
We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had.
Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system.
But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity …. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.
