GDI high

The holding of the first high-level Forum on Global Action for Shared Development on July 10 in Beijing has once again confirmed China’s increasing indispensability in overall global development.

The conference was organised by the China International Development Cooperation Agency with the theme "Global Development Initiative: Echoing the Development Agenda and Calling for Global Action".

More than 800 participants focused on eight key areas of cooperation under China's proposed Global Development Initiative (GDI), discussing and exchanging views on how to accelerate the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and promote community building can become a common future for mankind.

China will take action in six areas to promote global development: supporting the development priority agenda, optimizing the cultivation of development projects, breaking the bottleneck of development financing, expanding development cooperation methods, strengthening tripartite development cooperation, and supporting youth to lead development.

After incubating the idea after it was first mooted by President Xi Jinping on September 21, 2021 in his address to the General Debate of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly in his speech titled “Bolstering Confidence and Jointly Overcoming Difficulties to Build a Better World”, China will now officially release the GDI to the world. As of September 2022, more than 100 countries and international organizations had expressed support for the initiative and more than 60 countries had joined the Friends of GDI at the UN.

The conference comes at a time when the world is undergoing challenges unseen in a century, with some powerful countries seemingly out to return the world to a cold war in order to maintain their hegemony. The West, led by the Northern Alliance Treaty Organization, is leading an onslaught on Russia using Ukraine as a front. The one and a half year Russia-Ukraine conflict has exacerbated the global economic crisis just when countries were on the path to recovery after the devastating COVID-19 pandemic.

Moreover, the Russia-Ukraine crisis has also led to the worsening of food insecurity in many developing countries, most of them in Africa, who had been afflicted by a prolonged drought in the last couple of years. Therefore, peace should be among the top agenda items for discussion at the GDI high-level conference. Without peace, there is no meaningful and sustainable development that can take place regardless of the effort and good intentions.

But as President Xi Jinping noted in his speech at the High-level Dialogue on Global Development held virtually on June 24, 2022 “this is an age rife with challenges, but it is also an age full of hope”. The emerging development paradigm promotes win-win outcomes and common prosperity, and not the current winner-take-all scenario that creates cut throat competition for both resources and markets.