IPU General Secretary Martin Chungong highlights China's sustainable development triumphs contributing to community with shared future

Interview Series: Community with a Shared Future for Mankind

EP23:IPU General Secretary Martin Chungong highlights China's sustainable development triumphs contributing to community with shared future

In a distinguished interview with Guangming Online, Martin Chungong, General Secretary of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), hails China's remarkable progress in attaining sustainable development goals and emphasizes China’s commendable commitment to building a community with a shared future for mankind within the Belt and Road Framework, asserting its significant role in advancing sustainable development for developing nations.

Martin Chungong: When we are talking of sustainable development, we’re talking of climate change, these issues do not have any political connotations. Whatever we are saying about sustainable development goals, parliaments across the world, irrespective of their political system, have a role to play. They do legislate. They make the whole government accountable. They do provide resources. And that is why we think that they should come together and discuss. The reason why we would like to choose China as a partner is because China has a success story to tell in terms of sustainable development.

In the past several years, China has been able to lift 800 million Chinese out of poverty. They have eliminated abject poverty in China. We have seen areas where China is developing new cities, taking into account the sustainable development agenda in terms of water and other facilities amenities in those cities. We were told that a lot of the industrial development in this country was driven by coal and other fossil fuels. Today, the share of fossil fuels, like coal, in the energy sector has gone down considerably, and renewable energies are now becoming the norm in China. I think it's an appealing model, and it is also a model for cooperation with other peoples of the world so that what China is getting in terms of prosperity can be shared with other communities around the world.

President Xi's Belt and Road Initiative is a very good one. It is consistent with the spirit of solidarity that should prevail in multilateralism. I know in Africa, for example, Cameroon, Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso, the Chinese authorities have contributed to developing road and rail infrastructure. I once visited Balochistan, where I saw big industrial infrastructure being constructed, a free trade zone that was being built as part of the Belt and Role Initiative. So this idea is not just fiction. It’s real. You can see manifestations of this across the world, and I hope that many more countries will be willing to embark on this project that has the potential to promote well-being for citizens around the world.