On China’s international policy  in relation to Xi Jinping’s concept of a Global Community of Shared Future for Humanity

Speech to the Symposium on the occasion of China’s “Two Assemblies”. Embassy of the PEople’s Republic of China. London, 20 March 2025

 Hugh Goodacre

Secretary, Xi Jinping Thought Study Group,

Institute for Independence Studies.

Your Excellency Ambassador Zheng Zeguang,

Comrades and Friends,

It is an honour for me to join with you today and to make some comments on behalf of the Xi Jinping Thought Study Group of the Institute for Independence Studies on the occasion of the ‘two assemblies’, an event which, year by year, becomes more significant internationally as China’s pivotal role at the heart of world affairs becomes more evident to the people of all countries.

Comrade Zheng Zeguang has given an inspiring account of the proceedings of this annual double event. I should like to comment in particular on Comrade Wang Yi’s press conference at the time of the event, a comprehensive application of Xi Jinping Thought to issues of modernisation, development, security and international relations generally that are faced by the world’s people today.

The power of Wang Yi’s survey of global issues clearly derives from its basis in the framework of Xi Jinping’s concept of a global community of shared future for humanity.

A close reading of Xi Jinping’s writings show this concept of a shared future to be firmly based in the Marxist method of dialectical and historical materialism, ranging as they do over the entire sweep of humanity’s history, with particular emphasis on how capitalism emerged in inextricable connection with the bloody history of colonialism and semi-colonialism, which inflicted such unimaginable suffering upon China and the global majority as a whole.

A legacy of that history has been the relative under-representation of the countries of the South in the decision-making processes of the United Nations, the first organisation with an institutional structure explicitly declaring commitment to universal representation of humanity in a just and equitable system of global governance. This shortcoming in their representation has prompted the countries of the South to take initiatives outside the institutional framework of the UN, ever since the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, to whose Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence China’s Premier Zhou Enlai’s made such a seminal contribution.

A further development of incalculable significance was China’s Reform and Opening Up under the guidance of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, whose outcome far exceeded in scale any previous chapter of development in humanity’s history. Moreover, it provided an example to other countries of the global South of how any country could chart its own development to development and modernisation independently and in accordance with its own conditions and aspirations.

These two mighty forces for transformation of the global landscape converged into an unstoppable historical trend that even the setbacks to socialism in the late 1980s and the resulting “unipolar moment” could not hold back, and by our time this has brought about changes unseen in a century, bringing ever closer the goal of establishing a just and equitable world order.

In the early 2020s, on the basis of his historical-materialist analysis of these transformations, Xi Jinping took a step forward in application of the Marxist principle of the unity of theory and practice, issuing the three mighty building blocks of the global community of shared future – the Global Development, Security and Civilisation Initiatives. Benefiting as these did from the accumulated experience of the Belt and Road Initiative, each of these programmatic initiatives moved promptly and directly into implementation in practice, exploring a veritable encyclopaedia of avenues of advance and platforms for furthering their respective goals, as illustrated and discussed in Wang Yi’s wide-ranging press conference.

Meanwhile, the need for reform of the United Nations has been becoming ever more urgent, as seen most painfully and shamefully today in a shocking misuse of the veto in the case of the genocide in Palestine. By contrast, China’s Global Initiatives are immune to such abuse, being precisely a product of the global transformations taken into account in Xi Jinping Thought; they thus have a built-in commitment and motivation for building precisely the true multipolarity needed to realise not just in words but in deeds the principles and purposes of the United Nations Charter.

Our Xi Jinping Thought Study Group, which is fortunate to have as its Patron Keith Bennett,  aims to show that we are not only affected by China’s initiatives materially, but also in the realm of scientific socialist theory, which, as Engels commented “demands the same treatment as every other science — it must be studied”. We need to study the concepts and terminology used in the writings of Xi Jinping rigorously and systematically apply them creatively in practice if we are to participate in developing Marxism for the 21st century.

Our Study Group consequently looks forward to further work in the coming period to propagate works of Xi Jinping, along with documents such as Wang Yi’s press conference, with the aim of generating a vibrant culture of studying and propagating Xi Jinping Thought and integrating its lessons into the practice of building socialist internationalism in this country, with the aim of bringing to the labour movement and peace-loving masses and all decent people in this country the message of Xi Jinping’s great call for the building of a global community of shared future for humanity.