China's recipe for bigger pie of global development in new blueprint

BEIJING, Oct. 28 (Xinhua) -- The world has been keeping tabs on one of China's most important meetings in its political calendar concluded last week to gauge the direction China will take in the next half-decade and beyond.

The Communist Party of China (CPC) on Sunday unveiled its new top leadership, which will take the world's most populous nation on a new journey of high-quality and inclusive development, with far-reaching significance to the region and the world.

Reviewing China's development success, Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, reaffirmed China's commitment to further opening-up and the common values of humanity.

Observers believe that as global recovery progresses in fits and starts, China, under the leadership of the CPC, will remain an indispensible stabilizing force and an inexhaustible source of development wisdom.

OASIS OF GROWTH

China's economic rise and modernization from a primarily agricultural country decades ago is an inspiring rags-to-riches story. From 2013 to 2021, China's GDP grew at an average annual rate of 6.6 percent, beating the global level of 2.6 percent.

The country now boasts the world's most extensive social welfare system, the largest high-speed railway network, as well as the largest and fastest growing middle-income group, which is sure to translate into massive opportunities for China and the wider world.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s human development index (HDI), from 1990 to 2019, China is the only country to have moved from low human development category to high human development category since UNDP first began analyzing global HDI trends in 1990.

Earlier in May, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the international community to rescue and prioritize the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

"The multiple crises facing the world raise the bar even higher ... The years ahead will demand much stronger leadership and ambition at all levels," said the secretary-general.

Against such a backdrop, the most populous nation's miraculous, people-centered development represents a motivation for an anxious world.

China's development is not only illustrated by economic figures, but also by the sense of happiness shared by its people, and the results of the CPC's people-centered endeavors in various fields have been tested by practice and recognized by the people, said Ang Teck Sin, a political commentator in Singapore.

Now that sense of fulfillment has been shared by a wider crowd across the world. China's contribution to global economic growth during the 2013-2021 period averaged 38.6 percent, outstripping that of the Group of Seven (G7) countries combined.

The world's second largest economy has become a major trading partner for over 140 countries and regions, leading the world in total volume of trade in goods, and emerging as a mainstay in building an open world economy.

Meanwhile, Chinese modernization is widely inspiring in the way that it does not comply with a fixed or a Westernized storyline, but rather adapts to its national conditions and evolving circumstances at home and abroad.

As British scholar Martin Jacques once put it, China proves that the Western belief that "as countries modernize, they also westernize" is simply an illusion.

China's modernization has provided an important reference for many countries that are facing economic and social development problems and are exploring development paths suited to their national conditions, said Luis Delgado, a researcher of Venezuela's Center for Advanced Studies in Development and Emerging Economies.

Senegalese sociologist Mamadou Diouf said, "Chinese modernization takes into account the living environment, ecosystem and natural environment, and puts people at the center, which is key to achieving sustainable modernization."

SEED OF HOPE

In the mostly arid, desert-capped Sub-Saharan Africa, locals have been planting a small grass from China for livestock feed, mushroom production, or even as a green barrier to fight climate change.

The "magic" plant called Juncao, which uses grass instead of wood to cultivate edible fungi, has worked wonder in 100-plus countries as a cash cow and the source of tens of thousands of jobs.

Debunking the myth that to produce edible mushrooms trees must be chopped down, the small grass has offered a green alternative and a boon for a shared future.

First cultivated in China, the plant has taken root in the far-flung, poverty-stricken fields in Papua New Guinea, Tanzania, Rwanda and Fiji, its mushrooms gracing the tables of an increasing number of households.

Petty in size, Juncao has become "grass of happiness" and "grass of prosperity" for people in developing countries and a signboard for China's foreign assistance and poverty-alleviation endeavors overseas.

In Iraq's Mesopotamia, desertification and soil salinization have long threatened to bury this cradle of one of humanity's earliest civilizations in dust.

"My dream is to transfer what I learned from China to Iraq and turn deserts into oases," said Sarmad Kamil Ali, deputy chief agricultural engineer of Iraq's State Board of Combating Desertification, who studied in China nearly 10 years ago to learn about sand control.

In tropical Ethiopia, China's climate remote sensing satellite, orbiting more than 600 km above the ground, is working like a guardian angel for this "hometown of coffee," to cushion the impact of climate change on coffee planting.

China's green energy projects and technical assistance overseas have not only worked as a magic wand turing barren, tropical areas into energy oases, but also helped fully harness the natural endowment of many countries.

China has been a true practitioner of its vision to build a human community with a shared future. Its invaluable experience in poverty alleviation has also taken root elsewhere as a seed of hope for locals.

The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) puts developing nations on the right track to achieving their long-term development goals, said Khairy Tourk, a professor of economics with the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

"The BRI has drawn world attention to the importance of infrastructure as an essential pillar of economic development," Tourk said.

"TEA AND BEER"

"The Chinese people are fond of tea and the Belgians love beer. To me, the moderate tea drinker and the passionate beer lover represent two ways of understanding life and knowing the world, and I find them equally rewarding," Xi said in a speech delivered at the College of Europe in Belgium in 2014.

Xi used this metaphor to elaborate on China's vision of civilization featuring diversity, equality and inclusiveness.

On multiple occasions, including the just-concluded CPC national congress, China has vowed to hold dear humanity's common values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom, doubling down on the joint building of an open, inclusive, clean, and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security, and common prosperity.

This is also the bedrock value of the country, which has long been committed to an independent foreign policy of peace, safeguarding a UN-centered international system and promoting a human community with a shared future.

China, in its earnest pursuit of national rejuvenation, knows all too well that peace is the prerequisite for development, and inclusive development requires an inclusive vision of security, in which humanity works as an indivisible whole.

To help fix global deficits in peace, development, trust, and governance, China has walked its talk to pool resources and consensus, crack security puzzles, and boost sustainable and inclusive development.

Since 1990, China has dispatched over 50,000 peacekeepers to nearly 30 UN peacekeeping missions. It is the second largest contributor to the UN regular budget and peacekeeping assessments. It has supported the United Nations' work in various fields through establishing the Peace and Development Trust fund with the UN.

The vision of a shared future largely reflects the core values of China's traditional culture such as harmony and equality, said B. R. Deepak, chairperson of the Center of Chinese and Southeast Asian Studies at the New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative, both proposed by China and based on mutual respect and win-win cooperation, are like an antidote to hegemony, unilateralism, exclusion and the Cold War mentality in today's world, he said.

Unlike some Western countries' unilateral pursuits of their safety, the Global Security Initiative seeks common security, which underlines peace and cooperation, said Bambang Suryono, chairman of the Indonesian think tank Asia Innovation Study Center.

The global future "is an issue which commands the attention of people everywhere in the world, not just people of this country or that country," said Martin Albrow, a fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences.

Tackling such big global issues as climate change, nuclear security and deforestation needs the focus on "collective activities, which go beyond national boundaries," he said, hoping that China can take the lead.