Insight@ZJU: China, Africa advance modernization in new era (I)

【Editor’s Note: The joint pursuit of modernization by China and Africa will set off a wave of modernization in the Global South and open a new chapter for building a community with a shared future for humanity, as emphasized at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. GONG Sen, a professor at the School of Public Affairs, and director of the Centre for International Studies on Development and Governance, Zhejiang University, shares his views with China Daily on the significance of China-Africa cooperation in inclusive development.】

China's successful experiences offer two key factors for consideration:

Good governance: China's good governance comprises three elements. First, it involves having the political will and determination to sustain policy implementation. Second, it requires setting a priority sequence as it is challenging to advance comprehensively, necessitating prioritization of various development aspects. This process involves mobilizing all the resources from the broad society and ensuring government coordination across departments. Third, China adopts a pilot experiment approach.

Inclusive development: China has primarily achieved incremental approaches in urbanization, industrialization, agricultural modernization, informatization as well as and infrastructure development. Incremental development entails setting goals and standards based on specific capabilities during the initial stages of development and gradually raising these standards as capacity and development progress, ultimately reaching high levels.

A crucial aspect to consider is to strike a good balance over all the modernization processes betweenhuman capital and physical capital development. Western countries focus on aiding human capital, particularly in education, as education empowers development and is thus crucial. Prior to cooperating with Africa, China has predominantly emphasized physical capital through infrastructure development. Why is infrastructure considered inclusive? This is because many individuals engaged in infrastructure projects are from rural and low-income populations, directly benefiting from their involvement in the process. Therefore, infrastructure development in Africa can not only benefit the broad economy and thus uplifting low-income groups through the trickle-down effect, but also provide employment opportunities to the poor directly. Both growth and inclusiveness must be emphasized to ensure long-term sustainable development.

China's incremental development across various sectors enables low-income and vulnerable groups to gradually adapt to new lifestyles, changing social networks, new production tools, technological advancements, and information technology development over various structural transformations.

This article originally appeared on chinadaily.com.cn. 

This article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of Zhejiang University.