BEIJING: From the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 to the 2008 global financial meltdown, humanity has been no stranger to daunting challenges so far this century.
Coincidentally, those challenges often pop up around the turn of a decade.
This time around, a previously unknown coronavirus has caught the world off guard. As the infectious disease it causes, COVID-19 has spread to over 180 countries and regions, posing an unprecedented risk to global health security.
While nations around the world are racing against time to contain the virus and uncover a remedy, the pandemic has also prompted a time for reflection.
“What has happened to the world and how should we respond?” That was the question posed to the world by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the UN Office at Geneva in 2017.
In fact, Xi tried to answer that penetrating question as early as seven years ago, when he first put forward on an international occasion the idea of building a community with a shared future for mankind, the theme of his Geneva speech.
“It is a world where countries are linked with and dependent on one another at a level never seen before. Mankind, by living in the same global village within the same time and space where history and reality meet, have increasingly emerged as a community of common destiny in which every one has in himself a little bit of others,” Xi said in his speech at Moscow State Institute of International Relations on March 23, 2013.
When addressing the general debate of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2015, Xi set forth a five-point proposal on how to build a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation and create a community with a shared future for mankind, with partnership, security, development, culture and ecology being the key aspects.
Those remarks ring even truer today as the strike of the coronavirus pandemic has tied together the fates of all people inhabiting this global village once again.
Viruses know neither borders nor ethnicities, attacking anyone anytime and anywhere. And once they strike, no country can stand alone in this age of super-connectivity.
Since the outbreak was first reported in China, Beijing has all along held fast to Xi’s idea that mankind is a community with a shared future.
To protect the health of its own people and everyone on this blue planet, China rolled out a chain of unprecedented measures to contain the fast spread of the virus. Such efforts and sacrifice bought valuable time for the world to better prepare.
Bearing in mind its responsibility as a member of the global village, China has been sharing information and cooperating with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other countries in a timely, open and transparent manner. –Agencies
