Martin Jacques: GDI, GSI, and GCI show China coming forward with ways to solve the most difficult problems facing humanity

BOAO, Hainan, April 4 (Guangming Online) – A session themed “The Chinese Path to Modernization” was convened during the BFA Annual Conference 2023 on the morning of Mar. 29, 2023. Martin Jacques, Senior Fellow at Cambridge University, joined the other experts in the discussion of the features and significance of the Chinese path to modernization.

Mr. Jacques talked with Guangming Online in an exclusive interview after the forum, where he hailed China’s action to carry out the vision of a community with a shared future for mankind.

Q: What do you think of China’s vision of a community with shared future for mankind? How is China carrying out this concept?

Martin Jacques: One of the very interesting features of the last decade or so in China have been a series of really interesting ideas about what the world needs, or what China needs. And one of these is the idea of a shared future for mankind. The importance of this idea is that the resolution of some of the most important problems of the world requires the corporation not just of one or two countries, but a range of countries. And it offers a way of looking at international relations in a more dynamic and useful fashion.

The best example of shared future for mankind can be found in the Belt and Road Initiative, the idea of which is to transform the economic condition of Eurasia by means of investment in infrastructure. And this brings together whole range of countries, which geographically part of that landmass and beyond that landmass, and bring them together with China to find ways of developing their infrastructure through investment.

China regards its relationship with the developing countries to be the most important set of relationships that it has. And you can tell from the response of Belt and Road. Something like 140 countries have signed agreements under Belt and Road. There's only about less than 200 countries in the world. So the appeal of it is enormous.

There are many other examples. In the long run, a classic example is going to be fight against climate change. Because this can only be resolved by the cooperation of the whole of humanity, not just governments, but at all levels of society. People collaborating in different priorities, new lifestyles, new kinds of investment, new kinds of work. In the words, a carbon-free green future. The idea of a shared future from mankind is expressed very obviously in the demands of fighting global warming.

Q: China put forward Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative and Global Civilization Initiative. How will these initiatives affect the world?

Martin Jacques: What we’ve seen is China coming forward with ways in which some of the most difficult problems in the world could be resolved, the way to think about it, the lines of action that might be followed. And these three issues are absolutely essential.

Development is the problem of the great majority in the world who live in the developing countries. So a commitment to development and how to achieve it is fundamental. The West would never do something like this. Never would never offer something like this. Doesn't think like that. Doesn't have that relationship.

Security become more of a much bigger problem. We've moved into an area with the deterioration and relations between the United States and China for example, where peace can no longer be taken for granted.

And the Civilizational Initiative is not new in the sense that China’s for long put forward the proposition of inclusive civilizations. This is very Chinese, and extremely alien to the West, because the West does not think in terms of civilazation at all in any meaningful way. China does. And China is right, because China is indeed a civilization. The influence of civilization in the Chinese context is still very heavy. The problem is that under the Western age that we've lived through hitherto, the West does not recognize difference, does not represent the historical duration of difference, the ancestry of difference, which is a civilization ancestry often lost partially by country, like what happened to all the traditions of African countries for example. And for developing countries, it's become more and more important to them to seek to find the historical connections with their parts. So this is a very important issue.