Cultivate the seeds for community of shared future

While addressing the 70th Session of the UN General Assembly on Sept 28, 2015, President Xi Jinping, in his statement titled "Working together to forge a new partnership of win-win cooperation and create a community of shared future for mankind", emphasized that, "In today's world, all countries are interdependent and share a common future."

Based on this judgment, he urged all countries to build a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation, and create a community with a shared future for mankind based on five principles: building partnerships in which countries treat each other as equals, engage in mutual consultation and show mutual understanding; creating a security architecture featuring fairness, justice, joint contribution and shared benefits; promoting open, innovative and inclusive development that benefits all; increasing inter-civilization exchanges to promote harmony, inclusiveness and respect for differences; and building an ecosystem that puts Mother Nature and green development first.

Given the nature of the current international community and the inertia of international politics, characterized by the law of the jungle and zero-sum games, there is reason enough to doubt the enforceability of Xi's beautiful ideas. It seems humankind is in a dilemma, the dilemma of choosing between a community with a shared future or a community with no future. But there is only one correct choice.

To transform the current international community into a community with a shared future for mankind, countries across the world have to take a variety of measures, including political, economic, security and environmental measures. For instance, Xi proposed the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 with the aim of improving infrastructure connectivity between Asia and Europe and Africa, and thus help build a community with a shared future for mankind.

Equally important, intercultural communication can play an irreplaceable role in this historical undertaking. On the one hand, it can foster awareness of shared economic, security and environmental interests among citizens of different countries and, as a result, the growing awareness among people of shared interests will constantly expand the foundation of a community with a shared future for mankind. On the other hand, intercultural communication can accumulatively foster common core values such as peace, development, harmony in diversity, equity, justice, democracy and freedom, all of which are fundamental to the survival of a community of shared future.

Yet intercultural communication is impossible without intercultural education. As John Dewey put it," … education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction."

Therefore, to prepare the young generation to act as competent global citizens of a community with a shared future for mankind, we have to sow in their hearts and minds the seeds of empathy, mutual respect and win-win cooperation, which will enable the community to constantly grow and flourish.

As I understand it, intercultural education is not one course, nor a-once-and-for-all effort. It should be integrated into day-by-day classroom teaching and extracurricular activities from the kindergarten through elementary and high school to the institutions of higher education, so it becomes a life-long pursuit of every global citizen.

So, as Mother Teresa put it, "Yesterday is gone, tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today, let us begin."

The author is vice-president of Beijing Foreign Studies University. The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.