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Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and Chinese president, proposed the Global Civilization Initiative when he delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting on Wednesday. This is the third major global initiative presented by China after the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative. It fundamentally answers a series of questions of the times, such as "What kind of modernization do we need?" and "How can we achieve modernization?" The initiative has become another important public good provided to the world.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202303/1287448.shtml

The Global Civilization Initiative doesn't seem to serve any purpose. What does China have to gain from creating this initiative when it already has the Belt and Road Initiative? It sounds like an useless initiative that was only spun up for the purpose of propaganda. Is there any merit in joining it?

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    Please be aware of the fact that Global Times is directly produced by the CCP.
    – Boba Fit
    Mar 17 at 0:12
  • Just from what I could read about it insofar, I'm not sure how one [country] could even "join" something like this, since it doesn't appear to be an organization. Time will tell, I guess. Maybe they plan regular meetings or something, but that's not clear from that piece. FWTW, at the end it also says "the Global Civilization Initiative, together with the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative" which are equally obscure to me.
    – Fizz
    Mar 17 at 10:23
  • OTOH the last one has a short wiki page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Security_Initiative
    – Fizz
    Mar 17 at 10:30
  • Do you think it is not true that the goal of anything China suggests is Chinese hegemony?
    – Robbie Goodwin
    Mar 24 at 21:00

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The goal of this initiative is to get some important political figures together to talk about future policy directions. As such it is more similar to for example the OECD which also has the main goal to bring together important political figures to talk to each other. The belt and road Initiative is more about infrastructure with the goal to actually build different infrastructure projects.

And of course it is a Chinese propaganda vehicle. It serves to promote the Chinese view of what future policy directions should be. It still might make sense for countries to join this initiative just to understand and learn about the Chinese view on these topics regardless of whether they agree with it or not.

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  • OECD has formal membership. It's unclear to me at this point if this or the other two similarly named "Global" initiatives (see comment under Q) have anything like that, i.e. how one can join them in a formal sense.
    – Fizz
    Mar 17 at 11:40

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