A failure to communicate

By Einar Tangen

China's Global Development Initiative (GDI) aims to create a global consensus based on human concerns rather than economic metrics.

The initiative was born as a result of the failure of the Doha Round, and the inherent deficiencies of the Paris Agreement and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To understand China's GDI, you have to understand the Doha Round and the UN's SDGs.

The path from Doha, to Paris, to the UN, to Beijing

As a response to the dangers posed by failed states, the Doha Round was launched in 2001. The idea was to use economic prosperity as a means of stabilizing nations. The official task was to make trade fairer and more inclusive by 2005. However, by 2008, it was being panned as a giveaway to corporate interests in the developed world.  

The assumption was that the magic of "free markets" would stabilize countries economically and, therefore, politically and socially.

By 2015, the U.S. called for the Doha Round to end. The same year, governments from around the world reached an agreement to combat climate change — the Paris Agreement — and the UN General Assembly adopted 17 SDGs, with clear outcomes targeted for 2030.

It was not a coincidence that the efforts to deal with a raft of issues affecting developing countries, including trade facilitation, the service economy, rules of origin, dispute settlement, and the need for special and differential treatment based on the differentiated needs of the countries involved, had proved to be politically and economically impossible. To address the vacuum, the U.S. and UN had decided to move on.

The failure of the Doha Round has been attributed to differences between the developed nations, led by the European Union (EU), the U.S., Canada, and Japan, and the major developing countries, led by India, Brazil, China, and South Africa.

Far from presenting united fronts, there were significant differences within these North/South blocks, in particular over agriculture subsidies between the EU and the U.S. and India and Southeast Asian nations.

While China played its part in all of the negotiations, by 2013, China's new president, Xi Jinping, started talking about "a community with a shared future."

It was first mentioned in his 2013 speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He stated, "Mankind, by living in the same global village within the same time and space where history and reality meet, have increasingly emerged as a community with a shared future in which every one has in himself a little bit of others."

"A community with a shared future" has since become a guiding principle of domestic and global action. As it is centered on people rather than economics, it represents a 180-degree change from the economic-centric assumptions of the developed Global North.

At home, the extreme poverty eradication program, and abroad the GDI manifested in infrastructure and trade programs, like the Belt and Road Initiative, RCEP, BRICS, and SCO, among others, are presented in terms of "a community with a shared future" as a manifestation of China's foreign policy goal of peace, equality, development, and win-win cooperation.

In October 2017, "a community with a shared future for mankind" was written into the CPC's constitution and included in the preamble of China's constitution the following year.

The concept was endorsed by the UN and written into several UN resolutions, including resolution 2344 related to promoting peace and stability in Afghanistan and the surrounding region, and two resolutions by the UN Human Rights Council on the "Question of the realization in all countries of economic, social and cultural rights," and the "Right to food."

The GDI is a logical extension of China's "shared future" outlook, which was explained by State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the opening ceremony of the Sustainable Development Forum 2021.

Wang Yi said that the GDI embraces a people-centered core concept. It takes the betterment of people's well-being and realization of their well-rounded development as the starting point and ultimate goal, and endeavors to meet the aspirations of all nations for a better life. It focuses on development as the master key to addressing all problems, and strives to solve difficult issues of development and create more opportunities for development, leaving no countries and no individuals behind.

Due to the failure of the Doha Round, its inability to get past political and economic concerns, and the deficiencies of the Paris Agreement and the UN's SDGs,  which have provided goals without means, China has been quietly promoting an alternative idea with its actions.

Today, as was said in the 1967 Paul Newman movie "Cool Hand Luke," "What we've got here is failure to communicate."

It was a line uttered by a corrupt, arrogant prison warden intent on using those under his control to enrich himself. It laid bare the greed and inhumanity of a feudal overlord, which is how many feel about the divide between developed and developing nations.

Unfortunately, China's "putting people first" approach continues to be viewed with paranoid suspicion by those outside the Global South. As a result, there is a false dichotomy in which one is either a proponent of free market economics in developed economies or wrong.

Now facing COVID-19, climate change, political fracturing, an end to the Post World War II order, and the economic reality of slow-growing developed nations rubbing up against faster-growing developing and emerging countries, it may be time to put aside the ideological hysteria and realize that economics is what supports humanity, not what defines it.

Think about the GDI as something that returns some of humanity to a world that needs more cooperation, not conflict.

Einar Tangen is a senior fellow at Taihe Institute and the chairman of the Asia Narratives Channel.