President Xi's speech at this year's Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), where he proposed the shared modernization vision for the 2.8 billion people of China and Africa, is unprecedented in human history. This initiative marks the first time such a clear proposal has been put forward, closely linking the development visions of the Chinese and African peoples.
For Africans, who have endured centuries of enslavement, humiliation, exploitation, colonization, and neocolonization by others, there is no sensible alternative to President Xi's initiative for China and Africa to join hands in promoting modernization. This initiative offers a more just, fair, humane, and reasonable opportunity to end centuries of humiliation, marginalization, subjugation, exploitation, and resource plunder.
I say this with utmost confidence because President Xi's initiative is open and win-win. It is people-oriented, diverse, inclusive, eco-friendly, peaceful, and secure. Crucially, it does not undermine our independence and sovereignty; rather, it strengthens them. Without our sovereignty, we are nothing; and if we are nothing, we cannot modernize and develop, as nothing good comes out of nothing.
President Xi's initiative represents a brand new path of modernization that belongs to all the people of the world, to all humanity. It is, indeed, a vision for modernization from the Global South.
President Xi also proposed ten major partnership activities for China and Africa to work together to promote modernization. These activities specifically aim to foster a common path of modernization for China and Africa through mutual learning between civilizations, trade prosperity, industrial chain cooperation, interconnection development cooperation, health initiatives, promoting agriculture for the benefit of the people, cultural exchanges, green development, and building security together.
While this sounds exciting, and indeed it is, we should not fool ourselves or allow ourselves to be fooled into believing that it will come easily or on a silver platter. There are inherent problems and challenges. Those who have dominated, exploited, and humiliated us for centuries do not wish for us to escape their influence; they desire to continue their exploitation and humiliation.
The United States military maintains a large presence in Africa, continually seeking to expand it through AFRICOM (U.S. Africa Command), establishing bases and offices across the continent. The U.S. employs various methods to instigate color revolutions in Africa and support pro-U.S. puppet regimes. Furthermore, the U.S. competes with China in the economic and trade spheres and leverages its media hegemony to distort and smear China's image in Africa.
The second challenge lies within African countries themselves: their administrative capacity and sense of struggle are not yet fully developed. Africa's Western-style electoral politics has often led to wavering stances and a lack of policy continuity among ruling parties. Moreover, the long-term intellectual extraction by Western countries has resulted in a general weakness in the administrative capacity of African nations, compounded by insufficient investment in capacity building. These factors frequently prevent African countries from properly receiving support from China, thereby undermining the efficiency, effectiveness, and orderliness of cooperation.
The third challenge is that cooperation projects presented by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have indeed encountered a number of implementation problems. For example, some Chinese companies lack communication with local African trade unions and even refuse to cooperate with them, believing that only relations with the government are necessary. Without the mediation of trade unions, minor frictions in daily work cannot be communicated and resolved in a timely manner. These issues sometimes escalate into major conflicts and are even exploited by ill-intentioned media, damaging the image of China-Africa cooperation in the hearts and minds of the African people.
China's friends need to understand that most African countries do not have a strong ruling party that represents the fundamental interests of the broad masses of the people, as China does. Many political elites in Africa seek only votes and personal interests, rather than serving the people. China's friends should recognize that the people of Africa, along with the left-wing political parties, trade unions, and people's movements that represent them, are China's staunchest friends and comrades.
As the Belt and Road Initiative enters its second decade and China and Africa begin a new chapter of working together to promote modernization, we hope to build on the foundation of China-Africa relations to further enhance friendship, exchanges, and cooperation between the Chinese and African peoples. This will enable us to jointly address objective challenges and advance our efforts towards the modernization of the 2.8 billion people of China and Africa.
(Transcribed from recording and edited.)