In mid-March, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) at the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-level Meeting. This initiative is another significant international public good that China has provided to the world, following the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative. In a recent interview with CSST, Dennis Munene, executive director of the China-Africa Center at the Africa Policy Institute in Kenya, discussed the distinctiveness of this new Chinese initiative and its potential global implications.

Redressing cataclysmic narratives

Munene pointed out that as China rises peacefully, some Western scholars have put forth opposing views, such as Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and Graham T. Allison’s “Thucydides’ trap.” These scholars envision that the emergence of a new power like China could pose a threat to or displace existing powers as a regional or global hegemon.

Munene disagrees. According to him, China’s peaceful rise does not imply a desire for any form of hegemony. Its efforts to modernize and become the world’s second-largest economy were driven by the commitment to promoting shared prosperity and eradicating absolute poverty within its own population and other civilizations.

As opined by Samuel Huntington, civilizations are bound to clash due to the basic differences in how they view the citizen and the state, the importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, and equality and hierarchy. Further, according to Huntington, civilizations tend to clash due to increased interaction between people of different cultures.

The GCI represents an antidote to these cataclysmic Western narratives that perpetuate politics of confrontation and a Cold War mentality, Munene said. It advocates for the common values of humanity, including peace, development, equity, justice, democracy, and freedom, which act as irreducible minimums to humanity’s modernization path.

For human good

In terms of the GCI’s global implications, Munene told CSST that the initiative is first of all an antidote to retrogressive philosophies such as the abovementioned clash of civilizations and Thucydides trap. It establishes that peaceful development must not be monopolized by a few countries or specific classes or segments of society. Prosperity must be shared.

Second, the GCI underscores the idea of humanism rather than imperialism. Africa’s underdevelopment can be traced back to policies that were implemented during the colonial period, and these same policies continue to hinder Africa’s governance systems, economic growth, and development in the post-colonial era. The GCI is simply emphasizing that every civilization must be treated with respect and dignity. If all people act with respect for each other’s path to modernization, the global community will live in peace and harmony, Munene said.

He further explained that the GCI urges all civilizations to embrace the notion of smart and soft power and reject hard power as the only solution to challenges affecting the various democracies in the world. Smart and soft power are more appealing because they rely on persuasion, reason, and dialogue rather than threats, coercion, or the use of military power. “Today, China is using the approach of soft power to persuade the world to respect other civilizations’ forms of democracy and their path to modernization and to uphold the principles of equality, mutual learning, dialogue, and inclusiveness,” he said.

Moreover, the GCI demonstrates that no civilization is greater than any other, said Munene. As noted by President Xi, there are many ways to achieve democracy. The true barrier to democracy lies not in different models of democracy, but in arrogance, prejudice, and hostility toward other countries’ attempts to explore their own paths to democracy, and in assumed superiority and the determination to impose one’s own model of democracy on others. Thus, the GCI urges both developed and developing countries to recognize and respect the diversity of world civilizations. This simply means that no single model of democracy is superior to another.

Munene also noted that the GCI truly advocates for the principles of multilateralism, which takes a more global perspective and aims to bring together the Northern and Southern hemispheres to build a community with a shared future characterized by the right to develop equally.

In addition, the GCI advocates for international people-to-people exchanges and cooperation. Munene held that with the easing of COVID-19 prevention restrictions, civilizations need to rebuild the existing global network for inter-civilization dialogue and cooperation. “The GCI is promoting mutual understanding and friendship among people of all countries and jointly advancing the progress of human civilizations as we open up the borders in the post-COVID-19 era,” he said.