IN March last year, China’s President Xi Jinping put forward the Global Civilization Initiative after presenting the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative. Through these initiatives, China has made its own devotion to the international community to cope with the common challenges and helped build strong support for the promotion of the community with a shared future for mankind. Justifiably, not by dint of force, but by sheer value of peace and participation. China, under President XI‘s Global Civilization Initiative is deepening its global soft power clout as it counters West’s narrative of civilizational clash.
On March 15, 2023, General Secretary Xi Jinping, in his keynote address at the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting, first proposed the Global Civilization Initiative, calling for respecting the diversity of civilizations, advocating the shared values of humanity, valuing the inheritance and innovation of civilizations and strengthening international people-to-people exchanges and cooperation via notion of cultural unity in diversity.
‘’China points with pride to the large number of countries that praise its three global initiatives — development, security, civilization. As another critical public product offering by contemporary China, following the Global Development Initiative (GDI) proposed in 2021 and the Global Security Initiative (GSI) in 2022, the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) is the third global initiative put forward in the context of building a “community with a shared future for humanity.” It serves as China’s most recent response to the pressing question of the century – “what is wrong with this world and what should we do about it.”Thus, the GCI is a modern expression of traditional Chinese culture and showcases the “continuity” in traditional Chinese culture as well as in China’s governance.
The Global Civilization Initiative calls for countries to fully harness the relevance of their histories and cultures to the present times, and push for creative transformation and innovative development of their fine traditional cultures. This shows China’s attitude to take the responsibilities as a major country to promote the progress of human civilization. From the Chinese point of view, civilization is colorful because of communication, and civilization is diversified because of mutual learning. China is willing to work with other states in order to take the opportunity of promoting the Global Civilization Initiative and take it as a driving force of carrying forward the spirit of the Silk Road to jointly create a bright future for the modernizationof the developing states.
Aims & objectives of the GCI: ’The Global Civilization Initiative is aimed to explore the building of a global network for inter-civilization dialogue and cooperation, enrich the contents of exchanges and expand avenues of cooperation to promote mutual understanding and friendship among people of all countries and jointly advance the progress of human civilizations. This reflects China’s pragmatic action and open mind to share its development fruits with all people in the world. Friendship, which derives from close contacts between the people, holds the key to sound state-to-state relations. People-to-people and cultural exchanges have always been an important bridge for mutual understanding and communication between countries and peoples. Greater exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations can further enrich the colors of various civilizations and the cultural life of people, and open up even greater alternatives in the future.’’
GCI is an antithesis to West’s narrative of civilizational clash: At the end of his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” The American political scientist Professor Samuel Huntington while arguing his thesis, predicted that in the post-Cold War period, people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict and that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. He further asserted that in the past, world history was mainly about the struggles between monarchs, nations and ideologies, such as seen within Western civilization. But after the end of the Cold War, world politics moved into a new phase, in which non-Western civilizations are no longer a paragon model and hence they need to learn from the western values in terms of democracy, human rights. But ironically, the western narrative of clash of civilization negatively affected the course of events in the post-Cold War period and to some extent it became the hallmark of globalgeopolitics—characterizing new trends and propensities—fostering western foreign policy narratives towards the Muslim world, further galvanizing the intensity of conflicts in Palestine and Kashmir endorsed by Israel-India sponsored apartheid policies. West’s clash of civilization narrative has given rise to Islamophobia in the Christian, Zionist and Hindu communities.
Nevertheless, the challenge is how to take the set of principles outlined in the Global Civilization Initiative and turn them into reality, including in dialogue promoting and cooperation with countries from the “West” that has long assumed its norms and values are universal, albeit such norms and values depict double standard, demonstrated by the ongoing war in Gaza. The time is ripe to nurture new forms of dialogue and cooperation between civilizations, across all sectors.
BRI and the Magna opera of three initiatives: Over the past decade, from high-quality development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to proposing and implementing the Global Development Initiative (GDI), Global Security Initiative (GSI), and Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), China, with firm beliefs and solid actions, has worked with all relevant parties to consolidate greater efforts for lasting peace, create a favorable environment for common security, inject stronger confidence into common development, provide important impetus for cultural exchanges, and take more actions for ecological protection.
Needless to say, if the BRI was initially about economics first and geopolitics second, these three initiatives seem to share China’s development, security and cultural prowess with the world, and, perhaps more importantly, build consensus on China’s preferred norms in the process. From the Chinese perspective, civilizations have not to clash. If we put President Xi’s Global Civilizational Initiative into China’s foreign policy model, it will be fit to say that it is a pragmatic resurrection of Chinese Premier Zanu Elahi’s famous five principles of peaceful coexistence.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-international law analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law. He deals with the strategic and nuclear issues.
Email: rizvipeaceresearcher@gmail.com
