Speech by Zhang Weiwei at the Multipolarity Forum in Moscow, 26 February 2024

It’s a great pleasure to speak at the Multipolarity Forum. Why “multipolarity” is so important? Because its opposite “unipolarity” is immoral, unjust and outdated. Under the unipolarity, virtually everything, from dollars to trade to technologies to climate change, can be weaponized, and sanctions, missiles and color revolutions are the norms and used routinely at will, causing wars, havocs and untold human sufferings for millions upon millions of people, and this order has to be changed and will be changed.

With the rise of China, Russia, the expanding BRICS and other members of the Global South, a multipolar world order is emerging fast. In the case of China, with 7 decades of socialist construction, China has become for the first time in human history the world’s largest economy (by purchasing power parity since 2014), the largest industrial, manufacturing and trading nation, with the world’s largest consumer market. At a speed of accomplishing almost one industrial revolution every decade since the early 1980s, China is now at the fore-frontier of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (with big data, AI and quantum technologies, etc) and now the only country capable of providing goods, services and experience from all the four Industrial Revolutions to the whole world. All this has changed China and the global landscape forever.

It’s in this context, China launched the Belt and Road initiative 11 years ago, with over 150 countries participating in thousands of projects based on the Chinese idea of “discussing together, building together, benefiting together”, and the BRI has now become the largest common good and platform for international cooperation in human history. This is laying a good foundation for the emerging multipolar world order.

As a full-fleged independent pole, China is also a civilizational state, with full sovereignty, powerful defense capability, immense economic, technological, and cultural and intellectual power. We believe in the motto of “unite and prosper” rather than the Western belief in “divide and rule”. We embrace “a shared future for mankind” as contrast to America’s "if you're not at the table, you're going to be on the menu".

Likewise, despite controversies over the Ukraine conflict, Russia’s determined objective and resolve to change the unipolar world order is widely appreciated and supported by the world majority. Hence it’s true that Russia is isolated by the West, but it’s also true that the West is isolated by the Rest. This fact alone shows Russia is also a full-fledged independent pole, with full sovereignty, powerful military might, economic weight, cultural and intellectual strength of a civilizational state.

Many new poles have emerged, not only China and Russia, but also India, Brazil, Iran, Turkey, plus the expanding members of the BRICS and the Global South, and they may have internal differences, yet they all share one common objective for establishing a multiple world order based on peace, development, justice, mutual respect and common prosperity. Many of them also consider themselves as civilizational states or civilizational communities. If the US unipolarity is underpinned by its “deep state”, which does so much harm to the world at large, civilizational states are known for their “deep” cultures and “deep” peoples, and they all cherish their moral standards and civilizational roots and reject categorically the Western moral lecturing or imposition of its will on them.

EU’s foreign policy chief Mr Josep Borrel admitted not long ago that “almost everyone (in the non-Western world) thinks now that there are credible alternatives to the West, not only economically, but also technologically, militarily and ideologically”. This is true, and with immense material weight or “hard power” and enormous intellectual power or “soft power” on the part of the world majority, this shift towards a multipolar world order has become an irresistible trend of history. Let’s celebrate and promote it further for a better and more humane world to come.

Finally let me again express our sincere thanks on behalf of all the Chinese participants to our Russia host for holding this grand forum and for your gracious hospitality. We wish the forum a great success.