Nation shares its public goods with world

In Kasane, northern Botswana, construction workers are racing against time to build a primary school that could provide access to education for 560 children. It will be the fourth primary school built in the country with aid from the Chinese government. Meanwhile, in Fiji, Chinese experts have trained 1,704 locals, including female farmers, disabled people and even tour managers who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, to cultivate mushrooms.

In Ecuador, 58 farmers have just completed an online training session offered by Chinese experts on designing and making furniture and lamps from bamboo, one of the country’s most abundant resources. Over the past decade, China has emerged as one of the top providers of global public goods, sharing its expertise on development and offering solutions to challenges with much of the developing world. As the Communist Party of China held its 20th National Congress from October 16 to 22, analysts and observers highlighted the significance of the country’s international development collaboration in enabling a better response to various challenges worldwide, including underdeveloped infrastructure, food security and climate change. Wang Luo, director of the Institute of International Development Cooperation at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, hailed action the country has taken. “From the Belt and Road Initiative and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative, we can clearly see that China, led by the CPC, is responding to global development challenges in a more proactive manner.”

With the lingering pandemic posing challenges to global development and the crisis in Ukraine resulting in new risks and challenges, China has done its best to present its own solutions, especially the Global Development Initiative to bridge the worldwide development gap, Wang said. President Xi Jinping proposed the initiative during a session of the UN General Assembly in September last year. He named eight priority areas for the global community to step up cooperation: poverty alleviation, food security, COVID-19 response and vaccines, development financing, climate change and green development, industrialisation, the digital economy, and connectivity.

“That is why China’s global development cooperation has always sought to help other nations attain their sustainable development goals with the implementation of concrete projects and funding programmes."