In the 49-page White Paper “China’s International Development Cooperation in the New Era,” issued Jan. 10, China lays out its principles for cooperative economic development with the developing world, pointing clearly to the Confucian basis on which they have built those principles. The paper gives a very detailed rundown of China’s involvement in assisting other countries’ development, particularly since President Xi Jinping’s announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative on Sept. 7, 2013. This marked a new qualitative stage in China’s own political development. While China has been involved in Global South development since the foundation of the People’s Republic, the BRI was China’s stepping onto the world stage as a major power and major funder and supporter of global development.
The paper gives one a real sense of the breathtaking array of projects and developments initiated and completed over the last seven years, with perhaps a greater concentration of successful development projects than were accomplished in the previous 30 years or more. It also outlines the work China is doing in establishing a new model of development which can be used by the developing countries to emerge from the vicious cycle of crises which have characterized development policies since the 1970s, with countries going from prosperity to poverty rather than the reverse. And China is doing this in cooperation with international organizations and countries and most often under the umbrella of the United Nations, which has come to support China’s efforts. While the anti-China hawks will portray this as China’s “influence-peddling,” the reality is that its method of promoting development works, while the traditional move from macro- to micro-financing, which has characterized Western policy since the end of Bretton Woods in 1971, has failed miserably.
