A decade on, President Xi's proposal proves to be significant contribution

The vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind, proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013, has proved to be a significant global contribution, and the past 10 years have shown how important it is, according to observers in the United States.

"Xi Jinping's idea of interconnectedness and building a shared future was at the time, and is now, a revolutionary idea about world affairs," said Jack Midgley, principal of the global consultancy Midgley &Co and an adjunct associate professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

Midgley said there is a "very fundamental difference" between Xi's vision of a shared future, which emphasizes understanding and shared institution-building, and the prevailing US idea of building a future through competition, which is based on "success in competition".

"The shared future idea appeals to people at the top of the economic and cultural spectrum, and at the bottom, people can aspire. The idea of building a future through competition leaves much of the world behind," Midgley told China Daily.

Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for China-America Studies, told China Daily that the idea of a shared future was an important contribution made by President Xi, and it held great expectations for the potential of US-China cooperation.

Gupta said, "If one of the parties is unwilling to clap, one cannot clap. This is the sad reality of how geopolitics is at this point in time and where US-China relations stand."

"But it is an important idea to ...keep in mind the interconnectedness of countries and the shared future that each of these countries exists and operates in," he added. "Because at the heart of this shared future is also the sense of United Nations-centeredness."

"Even if it cannot be realized in the immediate future, going forward, the idea of a shared future needs to be protected, preserved and cherished, and as far as it can be, enlarged and broadened out among like-minded nations. I think that could be a great thing," Gupta said.

Midgley said that the past 10 years highlight the idea's importance, although "there's a difference between the value of an idea and our success in implementing it".

He added that the COVID-19 pandemic presented "a perfect opportunity to cooperate, to share, and to build a post-COVID future together" for the US, China and other countries. "But this opportunity was missed in 2020, and now we live with the results."

Midgley said COVID has made it clear that Xi's vision of building a shared future for mankind isn't just a wish or happy talk. "That idea is necessary for survival, and I think COVID has pointed exactly in this direction. The same is true for security."

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J.Austin III has described China as a "pacing challenge" to the US.

Midgley said: "That is a deliberate choice. What if we had made a different choice and said China is the most important security partnership in the world?"

He added that it is fine for the US to form security relationships with many different countries, "but the real opportunity is to work with our most important global partner, which is China".

Midgley said that there are many areas in which the US and China could cooperate, and it is important for the two nations to share responsibilities in areas such as arms reduction, the environment, technological advances, education and space.

"These are the real opportunities to change the way the world approaches its future," he said.

However, Midgley expressed concern that those opportunities have been missed, and he said that both sides instead will move away from each other.

"And the best evidence I can put forward about that is this ridiculous balloon matter," said Midgley, referring to an incident earlier this month in which the US military shot down a Chinese civilian unmanned airship that had inadvertently entered US airspace.

The incident prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a planned diplomatic visit to Beijing. The delay was not a good move, according to Midgley.

"We had an opportunity there. We had an opportunity to talk with our Chinese counterparts," he said.

"The secretary of state, instead of going immediately to China and having a conversation as between colleagues, canceled his trip. He stopped the conversation. The reason was he did not want to appear to be weak, as if a conversation is the same as weakness.… I think canceling the trip made him look weak. It didn't even get the result, and the Republicans were critical anyway," he added.

On bilateral relations as a whole, Gupta said China's approach is much "smarter" than that of the US.

"What China is essentially trying to do is trying to build it, create it and look at the US-China relations from the lens of being a confidence-building mechanism," he said. "When the US says that we do extreme competition and we cooperate in areas, it sounds very transactional, first of all. And secondly, what happens is the areas of cooperation also become those which just the US wants to cooperate on.

"And if there is extreme competition, it's hard to create those guardrails which the US itself is talking about, because extreme competition breeds more extreme competition, and that shatters the trust or the confidence-building capacity to engage each other on things, on any facet of cooperation," Gupta said.

Midgley said that while competition between US companies and their Chinese counterparts is OK, it is not wise to define the relationship by competition.

"At the level of national strategy, the approach needs to be one of collaboration and practical work together," he said.

"When Xi says shared future, that's a future that includes everybody and where everyone's interests have to be taken into account. We have to find a way to build a shared future together, or there won't be a future at all," Midgley said.

"We need to build quietly and systematically the structures of cooperation that will let America and China build a shared future," he added.

yifanxu@chinadailyusa.com