GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
In recent days Beijing has hosted the World Peace Forum organised by Tsinghua University and China’s Institute of Foreign Affairs attended by approximately 500 diplomats, academics and students.
Xi Jinping, as General Secretary of the CPC, called for greater cooperation to tackle global challenges including COVID-19, inequality, terrorism, climate change and he urged an end to technology blockade, de-coupling, and pandemic politicisation. He said, “the judgment on whether a country is democratic or not, should be made by their own people, not by a handful of others”.
China + Russia, on the one hand, traded words with the Ambassadors of France and the UK. Andrey Denisov, Russian Ambassador to China said he would be grateful if somebody could give him even one example of the CPC imposing its ideology on anybody outside China. The French Ambassador referred to “freedom, liberty and democracy leading Ambassador Denisov to say, mockingly “Fine, fine freedom, we know how it works in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The intense debate highlighted broader geopolitical tensions as the US strives to restrict China’s growing role in global governance. Denisov supported Yu Hongjun, former vice minister of the international department of the Party’s central committee who told the audience that China did not, unlike others, try to export its own governing model. Mr Yu said “Afghanistan is a typical example where democratic reform had failed and now someone [the US] wants to just leave. A bigger disaster is waiting” – he warned.
Tension in Afghanistan, in the S China Sea and Taiwan. The world is becoming unstable. Things will change
