Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche used her weekly webcast today to report on the Global Governance Forum she had just attended in Xiong’an, the new city some 100 km from Beijing that China began building nine years ago. It was “a conference which one can only describe as truly historic,” she said. More than 400 participants took part, roughly half of them high-ranking international guests, in plenaries and 22 seminars on five major topics, all devoted to the Global Governance Initiative, the fourth of the global initiatives President Xi Jinping has put forward in recent years. The initiative, she said, is “an effort to put on the international agenda a framework for new relations among nations based on sovereignty, equality, harmonious cooperation and leaving no one behind,” which is why “the countries of the Global South are extremely attracted to this new proposal.”
Foreign Minister Wang Yi opened the forum, she reported, stressing the need to base the new system on a strengthened and reformed United Nations, and appealing to the major countries to set an example of how nations can live together, each working for the benefit of the other. Wang contrasted two paths before the world: one of “unilateralism, bullying, double standards,” and one “characterized by multilateralism, cooperation, and working together in harmonious development.” He also said that China, with one-fifth of the world’s population and 19% of global GDP, is going to play a much larger role on the world stage.
Zepp-LaRouche said the spirit of the conference was “unbelievably optimistic, rich in terms of creativity.” Having lifted 850 million of its own people out of poverty and, for twelve years, offered its development experience and capabilities through the Belt and Road Initiative, China is regarded by many representatives of Africa, Latin America and Asia “not only as a partner but as a friend.”
“The West should not complain about that,” she said, “because we could have developed in the last decades highways and railways, ports and industries in the Global South, but we did not. The Western model emphasized ‘security,’ building many military bases around the world, but not providing development.” China, which made development rather than security its priority, “is definitely the more attractive model.”
She attributed China’s success to a governing philosophy that draws on 5,000 years of tradition, in which the individual’s role is to contribute to the common good and the government is obliged to care for the well-being of the people—and to a Party that practices self-governance, including a fight against corruption that punishes the bribe-giver as well as the bribe-taker, which, she said, the West would do well to apply. Nearly 90% of Chinese agree with what their government is doing, she said. “Rather than trying to fight China,” the West should act “positively as partners. And then all problems can be solved.”
