On Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy. Hugh Goodacre. Speech to the Symposium on China’s Diplomacy and Building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind at the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, London. 21 February 2024.

Your Excellency Ambassador Zheng Zeguang,

Comrades and Friends,

It is a great privilege for me, as well as a pleasure, to join with you today, and to make some comments on behalf of the Xi Jinping Thought Study Group hosted by the Institute for Independence Studies.

Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy has creatively developed the guiding principles for socialist international policy to the conditions of the new era, thus powerfully impelling forward the cause of international socialism and peace.

For us in this country, the subject of today’s symposium, and in particular socialist China’s major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics, is quite simply a matter of life and death, standing as we do on the western front line of global imperialism’s dangerously aggressive stance towards the socialist countries of Asia and the countries friendly to them.

Moreover, in building understanding and support for this crucial element of socialist China’s external work, we are upholding principles enunciated by Karl Marx 160 years ago in his inaugural address to the First International, in which he pointed out that the terrible effects of the wars of his time

have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power.

Socialist China is immeasurably increasing our capacity to perform this duty today. It has stepped up its constructive interaction with progressive forces and forces for peace internationally, strengthening party-to-party relations with communist and socialist parties, building links with workers’ and progressive organisations of all kinds, from trade unions, to peace movements and other progressive organisations, with the progressive parliamentary groups that exist in many countries, and all other forces whose activities contribute in one way or another to the development of a global network of partnerships favourable to international friendship and peace, and mutual learning between civilisations.

To this end, socialist China has engaged in dynamic activity in recent years in the exchange of delegations, the organisation of international scientific, technological, academic, social, cultural and business activities, the further development of progressive media and information resources, and all other such means of strengthening the capacity of all people of good will to make a contribution to relationships based on mutual respect and understanding, and thereby strengthening the basis for the kind of constructive intervention in the field of international relations and diplomacy that Marx called for.

In furthering these activities, China inherits the leading role played by socialist countries in such ways ever since their first establishment, and it has developed that role to new heights in the conditions of the new era in such a way as to strengthen the unity of all such forces to an extent not seen for decades. Indeed, by integrating into this world of socialist internationalism so powerfully developed by China, communists in this country are now in a position realistically to set themselves a new ambitious goal. This is to recreate the situation in the past in which this country’s Communist Party, despite its relatively small size, successfully shouldered its heavy responsibility of representing a united communist movement in this, the oldest country of modern imperialism.

Looking around this room today, I feel this world of international communist and socialist unity come alive again. I feel the call of Marx being taken up, that the working class must assume its duty to engage in international diplomacy and intervene actively to influence the government of its country in the direction of peace.

It is with the aim of encouraging and participating in this current of unity for peace and socialism that our Institute established its Xi Jinping Thought Study Group, with its Patron, Keith Bennett, being the Comrade who for half a century has stood in the forefront of efforts to study the struggle for the application of Marxism in China and to apply the lessons learnt in that struggle to the conditions in this country.

The aim of this Study Group is that even here, in this oldest colonialist and imperialist country, weighed down as it is by centuries of colonialist and chauvinist intellectual and cultural life, the message of the benefits of China’s socialist advance in both theory and practice can be shared by all people of good will, and Xi Jinping Thought be studied and its lessons applied to the conditions in this country, whether in relation to Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy, as on this particular occasion, or indeed in all other spheres of political, social, intellectual and cultural life, in the interests of the great goal of Building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind.