Standing for sustainable development

China seeks to make the right to development real through ventures such as the BRI, Global Development Initiative, the Silk Road Fund and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

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In 2015, the world, with cautious optimism, adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals, with national governments agreeing to work together to end poverty by 2030, to combat inequalities and to create conditions for inclusive and sustainable economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all.

Today, there is only one goal where across-the-board progress has been made: SDG 1, ending extreme poverty. China succeeded in eliminating rural extreme poverty in 2020, accounting for 20 percent of the global reduction in poverty achieved between 2015 and 2022.

However, because China has already eradicated poverty, it can no longer exert a downward influence on the global number. Hence, the latest predictions indicate that extreme poverty will still afflict 590 million people in 2030 rather than being eliminated as intended.

Taking the SDGs as a whole and the 135 targets that can be quantitively assessed, just 17 percent look likely to be attained by 2030. Only marginal progress has been made with respect to 30 percent of the targets, and for 18 percent no improvement at all has been registered. The world is even going backwards in relation to 23 of the targets.

What explains the lack of progress? Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, has pointed to the scarring effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, escalating conflicts, geopolitical tensions and growing climate chaos.

However, Guterres also identifies the core problem — necessarily using diplomatic language — "systemic deficiencies and inequities in the global economic and financial system[that] leave developing countries to tackle enormous and growing challenges with only a fraction of the international support they need and deserve".

Repeated in less diplomatic language, the already rich world is determined to remain rich and to use the global institutions which it has created to ensure that others get rich less quickly, if at all.

If this formulation sounds extreme, evidence is on hand to support it. In the 40 years to 2023, real daily per capita GDP — a measure of average incomes — increased by $54.91 in high-income countries, while in countries that were in 1984 defined as low-income by the World Bank, incomes rose only $12.91 — or by just $4.89 if China is excluded.

The global financial institutions and organizations controlled by rich countries all extol the virtues of world trade and the rule-based world order. In 2023, for example, the World Bank claimed that "trade has generated unprecedented prosperity, helping to lift some 1 billion people out of poverty in recent decades".

In fact, almost 75 percent of the reduction of global poverty was solely due to China, the growth of its economy and its policies to eradicate rural poverty.

While China has benefited from its trade expansion since joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, most other developing countries have not. As already observed, their incomes increased at only a tenth of the rate of those in the already developed world.

Negotiations that ran from 2001 to 2015, which were called the Doha Round, were intended to overcome the discriminatory nature of WTO trade rules. There was a recognized need to reduce tariffs on agricultural imports from developing countries, to provide equal access to global markets and to enhance technical and financial assistance. The Doha Round ended in failure because the United States and Europe refused to make the necessary concessions.

The WTO embodies a set of principles derived from US-style liberal economics that encapsulate the Anglo-Saxon and continental European varieties of capitalism. These principles have been externalized as rules — the right way of doing trade — to be imposed on others. WTO negotiators were so convinced of the universality of these Western values that they predicted that China would become a liberal market economy by 2015.

China, of course, remains a socialist market economy. When it joined the WTO in 2001, its GDP was only 13 percent that of the US. Now, with an economy challenging that of the US in size, China is being accused of seeking to disrupt the WTO. Joint statements from the US, the European Union and Japan are demanding that China effectively abandons its socialist market economy to "address nonmarket orientated policies" that allegedly create "unfair competitive conditions".

The US has stated blatantly that it cannot "accept China's State-led, nonmarket approach to the economy and trade" and has sought "solutions independent of the WTO". The heavy import tariffs imposed on China under US domestic law are likely incompatible with WTO rules. However, the WTO Appellate Body is now defunct because the US is refusing to approve new members. The US, it seems, is the one country not deemed to be bound by the rule-based world order.

Further evidence of the unwillingness of governments in the developed world to work with others to achieve sustained development is provided by SDG 17. This goal was intended to revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development and to strengthen implementation. Yet, alone among the SDGs, it includes just one measurable target. The target, for rich OECD countries to devote 0.7 percent of their gross national income to development assistance, was first agreed in 1970. It has never been achieved.

Without measurable targets, rich governments avoid being held accountable for their abject failure to engage in meaningful partnership to create inclusive and sustainable economic development.

Indeed, rich countries refuse to facilitate, or even to accept, the right to development. Responding to calls by the G77 of developing countries, the UN General Assembly approved a Declaration on the Right to Development in 1986. Although only the US voted against, eight developed countries, including Germany, Japan, Sweden and the United Kingdom, abstained.

Subsequent attempts to give the declaration legal force have been rejected. In 2023, all high-income countries other than Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates voted against drafting a development covenant equal in status to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

How strikingly different, then, is China. Now as the second-largest economy, it still negotiates alongside the G77 developing countries. Moreover, it seeks to make real the right to development through ventures such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Silk Road Fund and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank creating shared prosperity for all.

The author is a professor at the Jingshi Academy at Beijing Normal University, a professor emeritus and emeritus fellow of Green Templeton College at University of Oxford, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.