China and Governance: A Model for the Rising Multi-Polar World

IF memory serves me right, my first visit to China, in Guangdong Province, Southern China, was around 2013, during my first term as Director of the National Press Club of the Philippines (NPC), on the invitation of the Modern Cancer Hospital in Guangzhou, to help promote its modern cancer treatment in the Philippines.

Back then, the physical improvements in China, especially in infrastructure and its skyline dominated by competing high-rise towers and buildings, are already very much visible. This leads to envious remarks from our group of visiting journalists from the Philippines that the same can also be replicated, nay, even surpassed, by our own government and private sector back home.

Fast forward to the present day and after at least five more visits to China in the years following, I arrived at the conclusion that each time I landed in China, there is always something “new” to see and appreciate, along with the “old” that Chinese modernization has never taken away— the honest warmth of its people.

I have never been much of a traveler—the farthest I reached was Chile in 2024 through Australia and countries in the ASEAN (except for Brunei and Timor Leste) but friends and acquaintances who have been to a lot of places admitted that they, too, feel much at home in China.

Why?  Because the Chinese people do not discriminate against anyone, something that cannot be said about those in the West or the so-called ‘WASP’ (White-Anglo Saxon Protestants) whose ‘world view’ remains wrapped in their sense of ‘racial superiority’ because of their former position as colonial and imperialist “masters” of much of the rest of the world, including China.

This commitment to humility and basic human decency despite its many great achievements speaks volume about the modern governance of China.  Unlike Western-style governance and its copycats in other parts of the world imbued with the spirit of material success as the “measure” of social standing, the “zero-sum game” and “might is right” mindset, China made it clear that there are alternative paths towards success thru its “win-win solution” approach in any problem and in pointing out, repeatedly, of its “vision” of a “shared future for humanity.”

For journalists and other self-styled “experts” indoctrinated with the West’s natural bigotry and sense of “superiority” against the “colored races” including the Chinese, what they are hearing from China is either “confusing” or another “state-sponsored propaganda.”

But one only needs to look to the fact that unlike Western-style governance where both policy and governance philosophy can change overnight, depending on the result of an election, China’s style of governance has turned out to be the most stable, predictable and reliable.

Indeed, how can any official statement be confusing or be dismissed as propaganda when it is in pursuit of a policy decision made at the highest level of government?

Again, in Western-style governance, leaders and policies can change but in China, only the leadership changes but the policy, once everyone agrees is beneficial to everyone, remains.

It is this stubborn refusal to understand this basic principle in Chinese governance aggravated by their intellectual laziness that has muddled the thinking of the Western press ever since about China. Being wrong from the start, their “conclusions,” expectedly, are also wrong.

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping formally announced the launching of the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) that seeks to encompass countries and territories under the famous ‘Silk Road’ of olden times anchored on his call for a “humanity of shared future.”

In the last 4 years since 2021, China has taken the lead in launching 4 more global initiatives—the Global Development Initiative (GDI, 2021), the Global Security Initiative (GSI, 2022), the Global Civilization Initiative (GSI, 2023) and last year, the Global Governance Initiative (GGI).

For observers looking at these initiatives as separate and unconnected, the canvass can indeed be “confusing” – all they can see are “blurred” lines and images.

But if one patiently “connects the (historical) dots,” so to speak, one would end up marveling at the exciting, colorful tapestry of potential human achievements that connects each one of them.

We are all now part of a changing global order where hegemony would soon be swept away by the coming multi-polar world.

And China’s style of governance and development model can become an inspiration to the rest of the world.