Ambassador Xie Feng: In a turbulent world, China’s choice is to pursue Chinese modernization at home, and forge a community with a shared future for mankind internationally

A China where everyone benefits from development will keep creating opportunities for building a world of common prosperity.

Chinese modernization is about common prosperity for all. We will both make the pie bigger and share it more fairly, so as to offer new solutions to the universal challenge of polarization, and ensure the gains of modernization will benefit all people in a more equitable way.

Confucius once said, "Worry not about scarcity, but about inequality". For thousands of years, common prosperity has been a shared aspiration of the Chinese people. A lot has been done. We have achieved moderate prosperity, and lifted over 800 million people out of poverty.

While China has a 400-million-strong middle-income group, its per capita GDP has only recently exceeded $12,000. Even so, China contributed one-third of global growth last year with a 5.2% growth rate. Just imagine how much more potential will be unlocked as China's population in the middle-income bracket reaches 800 million, and as higher-end, diverse consumption further surges!

The world will be better only when all get better. Modernization should not make the rich richer and the poor poorer, in China and globally alike. No country should be left behind in the process of global modernization. This is why President Xi Jinping put forward the Global Development Initiative (GDI). To date, over 70 countries have joined the Group of Friends of the GDI, and more than 200 cooperation projects are up and running, providing a strong impetus for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a vivid example of seeking common prosperity for the world. Over 3,000 cooperation projects have been launched, and 420,000 jobs created. For participating countries, the BRI is a road to cooperation, opportunity and prosperity.

A China making constant progress will keep serving as a bridge for building an open and inclusive world.

Chinese modernization is about both material abundance and cultural-ethical enrichment, with the aim of promoting all-round social progress and well-rounded human development.

From day one of its founding, the Communist Party of China has been a champion of democracy. We have written "upholding and protecting human rights" into our Constitution, and incorporated "democracy" and "freedom" into both core socialist values and the common values of humanity.

China's democracy is whole-process people's democracy. It is a democracy in both process and outcome; a combination of both procedural and substantive, and direct and indirect democracy. It is people's democracy in nature, and at the same time represents the will of the state. The Kennedy School's decade-long surveys in China showed that over 90% of the Chinese people are satisfied with the central government. All roads lead to Rome, and a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Democracy is not an ornament or a show. It should be about solving real problems for the people.

Likewise, each civilization is unique in its own way, and none is superior to others. This is why President Xi put forward the Global Civilization Initiative. It advocates respect for the diversity of civilizations, and calls for overcoming estrangement between civilizations with exchanges, preventing their clash with mutual learning, and rejecting a false sense of superiority with coexistence, so that all civilizations will flourish together.