Two days after presiding over Tuesday’s UN Security Council debate on the UN Charter, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will participate in the May 28 meeting in New York of the Group of Friends of Global Governance, the 43-country coalition launched at the United Nations on December 9, 2025 to advance President Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative—proposed at the September 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin.
The Group’s founding membership includes Belarus, China, Cuba, the DPRK, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Malaysia, Niger, Pakistan, Palestine, Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and twenty-eight additional states, predominantly drawn from the Global South. Within five months of its founding the Group launched chapters in Geneva and Vienna. China reports that the Global Governance Initiative has now drawn some form of endorsement by nearly 160 countries and international organizations.
Taken together, Tuesday’s UNSC Charter debate and Thursday’s Group of Friends meeting constitute a paired diplomatic intervention in which the world’s changing strategic structure is being constructed in real time, inside the United Nations system, by the Chinese rotating presidency.