BEIJING: Chinese President Xi Jinping’s New Year speech on demonstrates that China is committed to safeguarding world peace and promoting global development, foreign scholars and officials have said. Domestically, China has scored remarkable development achievements, a prominent example being its anti-poverty battle, which offers inspirations to many other countries, experts said according to China Economic Net. In his speech, Xi pledged to achieve the first centenary goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects in the “milestone” year. He also pledged to lift all rural residents living below the current poverty line out of poverty and eliminate poverty in all poor counties. Tom Watkins, an advisor to the Michigan-China Innovation Center, said Xi in the speech “grasps the notion that we all need to take a broad view of the world,” adding that China “can take a bow for its effort to end poverty within its borders and around the globe.” Milenko Djuric, director of Public Relations and International Cooperation Center at the College of Tourism in Belgrade, said China’s poverty reduction campaign “is a very good example of what we can strive to do here in Europe and in the rest of the world to help people … overcome poverty.” In Xi’s speech, the president also said that China will unswervingly follow the path of peaceful development, safeguard world peace and promote common development. Senior Bangladeshi parliament member Rashed Khan Menon highlighted this part of Xi’s speech, saying that China can play an important role in safeguarding world peace. The view was shared by many analysts around the world. McDonald Chipenzi, executive director of the Governance, Elections, Advocacy Research Services Initiative, an advocacy body in Zambia, said China has a lot to offer in terms of ensuring world peace. Chipenzi said Xi’s pledge to follow peaceful development and maintain world peace is a notion that all major countries in the world should embrace. William Jones, Washington bureau chief of the U.S. publication Executive Intelligence Review, said Xi “expressed a clear determination to move forward on its (China’s) road of peaceful development with the Belt and Road Initiative, and a determination to move from a world based on geopolitical rivalries to one where we approach a community of common interests.”
