China's concept of a shared future

BEIJING, March 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- An opinion piece by Josef Gregory Mahoney, a professor of politics and international relations at East China Normal University, for Beijing Review:

A community with a shared future for humanity, a term cited frequently by President Xi Jinping, poetically describes the Chinese vision of a future, global community, shared by the peoples of the world.

Xi first proposed the concept in 2013, and five years later it was written into the preamble of the Chinese Constitution. In Xi's view, this community is characterized by lasting peace, universal security, common prosperity, openness and inclusiveness, and a clean and beautiful environment.

Scholars have cited the term as an indication of China's shift from a more nation-centered to a more global-oriented foreign policy.

This interpretation coincides with the increasing globalism of major-country diplomacy in the Xi era and is consistent with the emergence of the Belt and Road, Global Development, Global Security and Global Civilizations initiatives. It likewise accommodates China's call for a genuine or "true" multilateralism, one that promotes the reinforcement, and if necessary the reform, of international organizations to ensure better global governance to support sovereignty, win-win development and peace in the international system.

More simply, however, the term can be understood as depicting a basic fact: We already experience and will continue to live in a highly globalized society, one in which different civilizations and a multitude of nations are interconnected through shared security, economic, environmental and health concerns. In this sense, the expression is consistent with reality—the reality of the present and the inescapable reality of the future. This reality is demonstrated presently by the shared fate associated with climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and global susceptibility to economic downturns and conflicts, like the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. In the future, our fate will be even more shared—whether we like it or not. No amount of isolationism, decoupling, hegemony or zero-sum foreign policy will change this. In fact, the opposite is true—such thinking and behavior would only make us more vulnerable to a darker fate.

Consequently, the term can be understood as a non-normative acknowledgement of a reality that already exists and will continue to exist. On the one hand, this indicates the term is merely factual and non-ideological. On the other hand, there are some nations in the world that resist this reality, sometimes in their official ideologies but above all in their actual policymaking. They pursue zero-sum and even Cold War strategies like trade wars, decoupling, containment, small bloc building, the proliferation of arms and weapons of mass destruction, proxy wars and direct confrontation. They exploit and suppress developing countries and actively deprive them of vital public goods, like vaccines, whether serving narrow national interests at others' expense or through punitive policies like unilateral sanctions.

As a result, such actors tend to characterize the Chinese expression as an ideology. They do this by either denying reality as it exists presently or by trying to induce fear of this reality. They project their own worst images and practices, asserting China wants to displace the U.S. as a global hegemon. This is quite laughable.

The new era, a post-hegemony era, of a global future will advance or humanity risks ceasing to exist. This is reality. There is no other way forward, and thankfully so.

SOURCE Beijing Review