Global Civilizations Initiative Promotes Higher Level International Cooperation

Nowadays, countries around the world face common challenges in pursuing peace and development and exploring a path to modernization. Despite louder calls than ever for unity, cooperation, and dialogue, mistrust, division, and rivalry still hinder international cooperation. Thus, it is crucial to boost exchanges among civilizations and people-to-people connectivity.

The GCI is a timely response to the urgent call of people around the world for greater solidarity and cooperation as well as concerted efforts to cope with global challenges.

Today's world is full of overlapping and intertwined challenges and crises. The global economy is struggling to recover, the development gap is widening, and the ecological environment is deteriorating. The Cold War mentality persists, and deficits in peace, development, trust, and governance are growing. Thus, humanity once again stands at a historical crossroads. To tackle these common challenges, it requires both the material means and cultural and ethical resources together.

As the future of all countries is closely connected, inclusiveness, coexistence, exchanges, and mutual learning among different civilizations play an irreplaceable role, in the process of advancing humanity's modernization and the development of different civilizations in the world.  The GCI unveiled at the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-level Meeting conveyed China's sincere desire to work with other countries to pursue modernization with their own distinctive features, promote exchanges and mutual learning from different civilization and advance human civilizations. 

The GCI is an active response to the common wishes of countries around the world to uphold equality and inclusiveness and safeguard cultural diversity.

No country or civilization is superior to another. Since ancient times, people in various regions of the world have created a myriad of brilliant civilizations based on their production activities, utilization and improvement of nature, and continuous pursuit of the human values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom, which have promoted the progress of humanity. No set of values surpasses the rest, and more than one model of national governance can lead to modernization and cultural advancement. The illusion of “universal civilization” is easily shattered, and drawing lines based on ideology and values or creating artificial divisions and conflicts will bring catastrophic consequences to the world and plunge human civilization into darkness. For this reason, President Xi has repeatedly stressed the importance of diversity of human civilizations. The GCI advocates respecting for the diversity of civilizations and the need for countries to be open-minded to the different understanding of value connotation from different civilizations, not imposing one's own values and patterns on others, not engaging in ideological confrontation. The GCI reflects China's willingness to work together with countries around the world to boost cooperation and mutual appreciation from various civilizations.

The GCI is a consciously response to common calls from the international community to enhance inter-civilization dialogue and exchanges and promote cultural prosperity and development.

To promote the development of humanity and jointly build a global community of shared future, China should gain a deep understanding of the origins and contents of various civilizations, so that humanity can benefit from their accomplishments. The Global Development Initiative (GDI) and the Global Security Initiative (GSI) proposed by China in recent years have opened up new prospects for international development and security cooperation. The GCI injects new impetus and provides guarantees in terms of inter-civilization cooperation. The GCI, along with the GDI and the GSI, constitute a strong support for building a community with a shared future for mankind, reflecting China's overall thinking on building a sustainable, peaceful and prosperous world.