The holding of the first high-level Forum on Global Action for Shared Development on July 10 in Beijing has once again confirmed China’s increasing indispensability in overall global development.
The conference was organised by the China International Development Cooperation Agency with the theme "Global Development Initiative: Echoing the Development Agenda and Calling for Global Action".
More than 800 participants focused on eight key areas of cooperation under China's proposed Global Development Initiative (GDI), discussing and exchanging views on how to accelerate the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and promote community building can become a common future for mankind.
China will take action in six areas to promote global development: supporting the development priority agenda, optimizing the cultivation of development projects, breaking the bottleneck of development financing, expanding development cooperation methods, strengthening tripartite development cooperation, and supporting youth to lead development.
After incubating the idea after it was first mooted by President Xi Jinping on September 21, 2021 in his address to the General Debate of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly in his speech titled “Bolstering Confidence and Jointly Overcoming Difficulties to Build a Better World”, China will now officially release the GDI to the world. As of September 2022, more than 100 countries and international organizations had expressed support for the initiative and more than 60 countries had joined the Friends of GDI at the UN.
The conference comes at a time when the world is undergoing challenges unseen in a century, with some powerful countries seemingly out to return the world to a cold war in order to maintain their hegemony. The West, led by the Northern Alliance Treaty Organization, is leading an onslaught on Russia using Ukraine as a front. The one and a half year Russia-Ukraine conflict has exacerbated the global economic crisis just when countries were on the path to recovery after the devastating COVID-19 pandemic.
Moreover, the Russia-Ukraine crisis has also led to the worsening of food insecurity in many developing countries, most of them in Africa, who had been afflicted by a prolonged drought in the last couple of years. Therefore, peace should be among the top agenda items for discussion at the GDI high-level conference. Without peace, there is no meaningful and sustainable development that can take place regardless of the effort and good intentions.
But as President Xi Jinping noted in his speech at the High-level Dialogue on Global Development held virtually on June 24, 2022 “this is an age rife with challenges, but it is also an age full of hope”. The emerging development paradigm promotes win-win outcomes and common prosperity, and not the current winner-take-all scenario that creates cut throat competition for both resources and markets.
The meeting comes as an ideal curtain raiser for the upcoming BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa in August. This potentially expanding group of the strongest developing economies currently comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa has emerged as alternative centers of power in their own right. Their unified voice has become has now become part of the global socioeconomic agenda. They are also the strongest bulwark against unilateralism, and biggest advocates of a multipolar world.
The GDI has also inspired similar thinking in the so called first world, most recently “The Paris Agenda for People and the Planet”. This was the mantra spawned by global leaders who had gathered in Paris in June to explore financial solutions to tackling poverty, curbing pollution and environmental protection during the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact.
Similar to the GDI, the Paris summit came up with four guiding principles for a new world order. This include ensuring zero opportunity cost to eradicating poverty, respecting every country’s right to self-determination, and creating a global financial system that is receptive to the needs of vulnerable, emerging and developing economies.
Undoubtedly, China has become a pioneer in the emerging global trends related to creating a just and equitable world where everyone counts. The vision is a brave multipolar world with power shared not by a few through brawn as is the status quo, but by the amount of talents a country possesses. The GDI seeks a world of shared synergies and mutuality, aspects which the Monday meeting will definitely reiterate.
The world is no longer what it used to be. The global social and economic landscape has changed dramatically and continues to change inexorably. Unlike a few decades ago, no country can claim to save the world because of its unilateral power.
In the words of former United States President Benjamin Franklin during the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a time has come when "we must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
Stephen Ndegwa is the executive director of South-South Dialogues, a Nairobi-based communications development think tank.
