President
Xi Jinping’s call to “build a community with a shared future for mankind” will
have an even better chance of being realized, should the United States be ready
to move beyond challenges and to seize new opportunities.
With
US recent general election, the Capitol Hill riot on Jan 6 in Washington, DC,
and the impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump behind it, the US
must move from challenges, to opportunities and to seek new solutions.
The
American nation should recall the words of President Abraham Lincoln in his
annual message to Congress on Dec 1, 1862, during the Civil War: “It is not
‘can any of us imagine better?’ but, ‘can we all do better?’ We must
disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we
cannot escape history. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope
of earth.”
The
time has come for the US to disenthrall itself once again and to revisit the
first principles of its greatness; foremost of which is tolerance — now needed
not just urgently, but existentially, to launch a new discourse for global
resilience and collaboration. In that spirit, as a start, the US and China can strive
to promote international tolerance, sustainable development and cooperation at
multiple levels globally. We need a clear call to action.
First:
About two weeks after the US general election on Nov 3 last year, the
International Day for Tolerance was observed. I, along with my Global
Challenges Forum Foundation co-founder, Walter Christman, responded by issuing
a Global Partnership Declaration. Our aim is to connect the world through
relational trust and to confront the emerging challenges of the 21st century.
More
than ever, in a hyper-connected world, local is global, and global is local.
Remote challenges ripple globally. Any mass threat, no matter how distant, is
global.
Therefore,
we must address challenges and collaborate collectivity. What is needed is a
world campaign encouraging a new spirit of partnership for global resilience,
while respecting the needs of both China and the US to balance complementarity
and competition.
To
build a shareable discourse respectful of all mankind, and to avoid dividing
humanity into rival blocs, the two nations must jointly articulate shareable
interests with the rest of the world. The new “last best hope of earth” is for
the US and China to join with other nations to co-develop partnership
principles for global resilience in the 21st century, while reaffirming the United
Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
Second:
US President Joe Biden’s well-received inaugural speech on national healing
should soon be followed by a speech on global healing — with a call to build
global partnerships for a sustainable world. The COVID-19 pandemic has rattled
everybody, and the paramount question the US faces is not whether China is a
threat, but whether post-pandemic nations will become more resilient to manage
future global challenges.
US-China
relations, poised precariously, are paramount for world progress, and all
people await their positive development. Enabling partnerships for global
resilience is precisely why partnership is the final, crowning goal among the
17 Sustainable Development Goals. Promoting tolerance, global resilience and
youth empowerment for sustainable development are feasible partnership options.
Emerging
global challenges will be multiple, interconnected, unpredictable and
persistent. Global challenges need global solutions, in which we must all be
partners.
We
need a new global partnership that is more equitable and balanced, but also
yielding mutually shared benefits. Pursuing entails collective rethinking — on
how to be secure, for example. There is no zero-sum, absolute security. We are
interdependent. We also need new thinking: concepts, mechanisms and means to
achieve a secure world.
President
Biden should respond positively to President Xi’s call to “build a community
with a shared future for mankind”.
Finally:
I am issuing a call for all of humanity to support of UN Secretary-General
Antonio Guterres’ statement that if the US and China drift apart, the world
risks splitting into two rival blocs. All peoples everywhere should endorse his
appeal for the two nations to cooperate to overcome major challenges, including
the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate change threat.
The
issue before us is how best to move from challenges to opportunities to
solutions – by launching a new endeavor to promote global resilience through
partnerships for sustainable development.
I
began with a thought from the great US president Lincoln. I will end with
wisdom from China, from the Analects of Confucius: “Men of virtue can
cooperate, even when they don’t agree; men of meanness can’t cooperate, even
when they agree.”
Let
us all together face and overcome world divisions and crises by recalling our
virtue.
*
Published in China Daily Global, on 7/4/2021