'Shared future' can change world

It may help rally mankind, says a US senior China watcher

The community of a shared future for mankind is an important concept in a world still largely characterized by wars, ethnic conflicts and economic rivalries, a senior China watcher said.

"What we have known for the last two centuries as 'geopolitics' has not benefited the world greatly. The 'community of a shared future' is an attempt to change that model," said William Jones, the Washington bureau chief for Executive Intelligence Review, a US newsmagazine founded more than 40 years ago.

In his address to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in October, President Xi Jinping said China champions the development of a community of a shared future for mankind, and has encouraged the evolution of the global governance system.

Jones spent the last 20 years as EIR's bureau chief and followed Chinese politics and wrote extensively on China. He said the concept of "community of a shared future" aims to create conditions of real equality between nations and to ensure that in the decisions countries make, they also take into consideration the common good of mankind.

"It's only in this way that mankind will have the potential to develop as a species," he told China Daily.

"Only when we rally forces against a common danger, like in World War II, can we pursue a different model of relationships," he said. "But after World War II, despite the creation of the United Nations, the world during the Cold War returned to 'geopolitics' and lived under the threat of nuclear extinction."

Jones wrote in an EIR report on Oct 21 that China "will continue to work to establish that community of shared interest that President Xi has made a hallmark of China's major-country diplomacy".

He said that some in the West have responded well to Xi's concept of "community of a shared future" as seen in the enthusiasm for the Belt and Road Initiative, an example of "common destiny".

However, for others in the West, the judgment is unclear. Some feel that the Chinese proposal threatens Western "hegemony" or the "right" of the West to write the rules, according to Jones.

"But the Western nations are no longer united around this notion, and some have realized that the world has changed and therefore the relations between nations must change as well," he said.

Given that the economic "hegemony" of the London-New York financial system is on the brink of another crisis, what China is doing with building physical infrastructure for economic growth can also be a lifeline for Western economies, he added.

The initiative, proposed by Xi in 2013, is aimed at building trade and infrastructure in countries along and beyond areas of ancient Silk Road trading. Jones said there are many potential areas of cooperation between China and the US in the framework of the initiative.

"It is devoutly to be wished that President Xi's message of cooperation and inclusiveness also reverberates with President Donald Trump," Jones wrote in the EIR report.