Global Civilization Initiative

All that is in there, right? Third is peace, and that's under the Global Security Initiative, and that is very much focused on increasing law enforcement engagement.

And the last two, civilization and people-to-people ties, I think that's under the Global Civilization Initiative.

It's much more public diplomacy, trying to increase Confucius Institutes and trying to get more young people to study Mandarin.

So you see that huge expansion of interest over time.

If you have ...

And remember, Xi has four global initiatives: the Global Security Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative, and the Global Governance Initiative.

Those are all been announced and as major programs, just like the Belt and Road Initiative.

These four global initiatives that Xi has unleashed are what they say: global.

No country has the right to interfere in the development of another country, e.g. decisions made in your capital should not be the economic decisions forced on other peoples in other countries.

The next one was the Global Civilization Initiative.

And these are all released two years apart.

So don't think that they were random.

This was very, very carefully planned and calibrated, giving people time to get used to it.

Global Civilization Initiative, and this is my interpretation, said, look, we have countries.

how they were drawn up, whether they were drawn up by colonials who thought that they were being clever and putting, you know, creating contentious issues that they could leverage in the future or by accidents of birth or conquest, e.g. kings and queens kind of traded different lots of lands along with their wives and things like that.

You can see that in Europe and many other places.

And here you have in that four global initiatives, the one which most Westerners pay the least attention to being the most important one, and it is the Global Civilizations Initiative.

'Cause what the Global Civilization Initiative fundamentally argue is that- There is not one single nation or grouping of nations which has a right to tell the others how to govern themselves or live their lives.

So if you, in the Global South, in a less than democratic political system or at least as the Westerners will call you, the problematic democracies or outright autocracies, China is reassuring you that under the new international order or to be transformed into international order, with China leading it on your behalf, that order will not impose any conditionalities on your governance in how they, that order engages with you.

So it is a charter for autocrats to feel completely comfortable at home to do whatever they want.