China praised for leading South-South cooperation

The idea of “building a community of shared future for mankind”, first floated by President Xi Jinping in 2013, is highly consistent with the UN Charter and will serve as a bedrock of global efforts to safeguard human rights, said human rights officials and scholars at a two-day conference in Beijing that concluded on Friday.

“A single thread cannot make a cord, and a single tree cannot make a forest,” said Bat-Erdene Ayush, director of the Development Rights Office under the United Nations Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights. “China’s vision for a shared future for all humanity points to a way forward to realizing the right to development.”

The 10-year, $1 billion China-UN Peace and Development Fund, proposed by Xi in 2015 and inaugurated a year later, is evidence that China is determined to take this vision forward, Ayush said at a panel discussion of the South-South Human Rights Forum on Thursday.

Citing China’s success in lifting more than 700 million people out of poverty, Ayush said the Belt and Road Initiative presents new possibilities to achieve win-win development for people across the world, through international cooperation, including South-South cooperation.

To a certain extent, building a community of shared future for mankind has initiated a new thinking on global human rights governance, said Zhang Xiaoling, director of the Human Rights Research Center of the Party School of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

Under the framework of SouthSouth cooperation, China has helped scores of developing countries, especially the least developed ones, to reduce poverty and improve people’s livelihoods, Zhang said. Since 1950, the Chinese government has provided assistance to more than 160 countries in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America through gratuitous loans, interestfree loans and concessional loans, and helped build nearly 2,000 projects that have improved local people’s livelihoods.

The concept of building a community of shared future for mankind has become the ideological basis for the construction of a new mode of global governance in the new era, said Fu Zitang, president of Southwest University of Political Science and Law, and vice-president of China Society for Human Rights Studies.

Mohammad Musa Mahmodi, executive director of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, urged countries in the South to pay more attention to and deepen cooperation on building a community of respect and dignity for human rights, as the mechanism for “restoring peace and stability and respect for human rights” is missing.

“There should be a focus on the establishment of an effective regional mechanism for human rights and building peace,” he said. China’s proposals such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative could benefit all countries of the South, he added.