China Voice: Proactive China to help rather than hinder global governance

This week one of the initiatives instituted by China made solid progress -- 57 prospective founders signed the charter of Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) on Monday.

In the past two years, the country has surprised the world by proposing regional cooperation plans and taking an active part in international affairs, a notable change from its previous reserved strategy.

For many outsiders, China conjures up an image of a giant, distant nation hidden behind the Great Wall. For the more attentive observer, that image could not be further from the truth.

Promoting the Belt and Road Initiative, founding the Silk Road Fund, hosting the APEC summit and pushing forward the AIIB, the country is not only pulling down "the Great Wall" but also building a wide bridge to the world.

There are many ways to interpret the change. The West, especially the United States, prefers a negative perspective, worrying that China will be the rebel of the existing international order.

Some Western politicians attacked China's initiatives as being imitations of the Monroe Doctrine or the Marshall Plan.

Last August, U.S. President Barack Obama commented that China had been a "free rider" in international security affairs for 30 years. At the same time, the U.S. has been standing in the way, if not undermining, the establishment of AIIB.

This is clearly Cold War mentality, and a judgement made based on an outdated school of geopolitics.

A more reasonable perspective is that the world's second largest economy is trying to play its part. It has not only taken on the responsibility in economic issues such as international trade and investment but also contributed new ideas and strategies to global governance.

At the Fifth BRICS Leaders Meeting held in Durban, South Africa, in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised his counterparts that China will always actively take part in, and work constructively toward global governance reform: China wants to make due contributions to the establishment of a more fair and equitable international order.

China is trying to be a constructive player. It was a victim of Cold War mindset in the 1960s and 1970s, when Chinese leaders believed that another world war was inevitable. However, it changed its point of view to a positive stance and now champions peace and development as mainstream and universal.

Its actions reflect this ideology. The country promotes the concept of "community of common destiny" and accommodates the interest of other countries while protecting its own.

It exercises a foreign policy of peaceful coexistence, supports a free, open and equal global trade system, opposes hegemony in security affairs and respects cultural diversity.

It also attempts to address the weakness of current mechanisms and offers supplementary solutions. China's regional cooperation initiatives cater to the interests of developing countries, which are often downplayed by the international institutions and multilateral mechanisms that are dominated by developed nations.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, in the Guardian commented that the AIIB was "big news in global economic governance".

Helen Clark, the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, spoke highly of China's role as a committed partner in improving global governance at the second forum on global governance held in October in Beijing.

Even the U.S. administration expects China to contribute.

"The future contributions of a successful, open, and collaborative China that embraces the responsibility of a stakeholder and a responsible competitor have tremendous potential for all of us; the whole world," said U.S. Vice President Joe Biden at the opening session of the Seventh Round of China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue last month.

The 2008 financial crisis, which began with subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S. and spread to economies across the world, showed how interconnected the world has become, thus, the current global governance mechanism has to adjust.

"Global problems need global solutions", former British prime minister Gordon Brown observed in his 2012 New York Times article.

Brown said that global cooperation depended on how China, the biggest developing country, evaluated its influence and position, while the U.S. and European countries must also adapt to that fact.

Let's hope that there will be open and inclusive partners on the other end of the bridge China is building. The whole world will benefit from this scenario. Endi