By John Ross
[The speech below was delivered on 12 September 2025 at a conference in Beijing on the subject of “See China and listen to the world,” co-hosted by the International Department of the Communist Party of China and Renmin University].
Two of today’s key themes are economic cooperation for an open world economy and strengthening exchanges among civilizations for open and inclusive development. I would like to look at them not separately but in terms of the relation between the two.
In his speech to the recent virtual BRICS summit Xi Jinping pointed to the present “critical juncture” in the world situation and the considerable dangers which exist. “As we speak, transformation unseen in a century is accelerating across the world. Hegemonism, unilateralism, and protectionism are getting more and more rampant. Trade wars and tariff wars waged by some country severely disrupt the world economy.”
Because of the context Xi Jinping specifically underlined the need for BRICS to adopt policies capable of dealing with this: “As a Chinese saying goes, ‘It takes a good blacksmith to forge good steel.’ We [BRICS] can only cope with external challenges more effectively when we manage our own affairs well.” This applies to all countries.
These changes have an economic dimension. One, which has been discussed for many years, is U.S. decline from the position of complete international economic dominance which it possessed in the intermediate aftermath of that last comparable global transformation a century ago – that is, after the great world crisis of 1929 to 1945. The recent factor is China achieving what no developing country has ever achieved before on anything like China’s scale: that is, while it remains a developing country, China has achieved technological leadership in a series of major industries.
It is important not to exaggerate this. It is not, yet, an overall technological leadership, but those industries in which it China has achieved technological leadership—renewable energy, EVs, large parts of telecommunications, drones, sectors of AI and others—are major ones and their range is expanding.
But the consequences of this spread far outside the economy. This is why cooperation for high quality development, while certainly having a strong economic dimension, must also be seen in a political, social, cultural and “civilizational” sense.
This can be most clearly understood via the concept, put forward by Xi Jinping, of the “common destiny of humanity”— which is, of course, the foundation of China’s foreign policy.
There are numerous aspects of this “common destiny”—security, climate change, politics, culture and others. But I will focus on the economic one and its consequences.
What is the economic foundation of the “common destiny of humanity.”? It flows directly from the opening sentence, and fundamental idea, of the founding work of modern economics, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations: “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour… seem to have been the effect of the division of labour.”
Marx used the terminology of “socialisation of labour”, but there is no difference in the fundamental concept.
Smith, and Marx, drew the necessary conclusion from this of supporting internationalisation of the economy – because the world economy is the largest possible division of labour. That is, they supported, to use China’s terminology, “opening up”. Attempting to develop a nationally self-contained economy, because it does not use the largest division/socialisation of labour, is inevitably less productive/efficient than an economy attempting to make use of the largest possible use of this—the global economy.
This has necessary consequences. If economies are not self-contained, they necessarily depend for their maximum possible prosperity on each other – they advance together. This creates a common interest and destiny of humanity.
But an additional advantage of internationalisation is the differences and specific features between different economies – their different relative advantages. If every economy was the same the advantages, while they would still exist because of the greater scale of division of labour in a global economy, would be less than if the different relative advantages of different economies were made use of. Therefore, diversity and difference is not something to be attempted to be overcome, in an erroneous, and in reality impossible, attempt to impose a single pattern on each economy, but is something which is an advantage.
But such specific and diverse features in the economy are also necessarily associated with specific and diverse features in society, politics, culture— numerous other aspects of “civilisation”.
In short, what is required to understand, develop and institutionalise this is “harmony without uniformity”— the ancient concept of Confucius which Xi Jinping has analysed.
This is directly opposed to the concept of attempting to impose a single model, a uniformity, on every country. To quote Confucius again, he put this as that the superior person: “aims at harmony, and not at uniformity; the petty… aims at uniformity, and not at harmony”.
In short, economics originating with Smith, and European philosophical thought, formulated by Hegel and Marx, arrives at the same conclusion as ancient Chinese thought.
These processes create the three interrelated historical dimensions of crisis and transformation which the world is passing through at present and which explain its enormous dimensions.
The first, which Xi Jinping has extensively analysed, is the greatest geopolitical changes for a century.
As an economist, I can’t help but being aware of another dimension of 150-years. This is that in the decade 1870 to 1880 the U.S. overtook Britain to become, first, the world’s largest and greatest economic power and then to become an overwhelmingly dominant economy¬ for the world—the position which is now ending. Therefore, no living human being has existed in a world in which the U.S. did not dominate the world economy. And to imagine, to envisage, a new reality which no living human being has ever experienced requires a tremendous effort of analysis and thought.
Finally, there is an even longer time scale—of 533 years. This is the time since 1492, and Columbus establishing permanent contact between Europe and the Americas. This symbolised, and modern economic studies shows to a major extent underpinned, 500 years of global dominance of Europe and its offshoots. This gave rise, as is well known, to imperialism, hegemonism and racism.
China’s peaceful rise is, in its domestic terms, national rejuvenation. But in global terms it overturns all three of these frameworks which began over 500 years ago.
To read about China’s unprecedented economic growth is something abstract, but to see the superiority of China’s EVs in your own country is something that can be felt by everyone! To handle these three simultaneous changes¬—geopolitical, economic and cultural—requires the highest quality cooperation and transformation in institutions and thought.
Therefore, not out of politeness because I am in China, but for the fundamental reasons I have tried to outline, I believe the framework for understanding these transformations is Xi Jinping’s “common destiny of humanity.”
These ideas can be understood in terms of classical Chinese thought, of classical European thought, and of Marxism. But that is the character of truth. Because it exists objectively it can be found from different starting points, and it can be expressed differently. Different national cultures have different starting points, and different ways of arriving at it, but the truth is objective. It may flow from the economics of Smith, or Marxism, or classical Chinese thought but it expresses objective reality.
The above article was originally published here on John Ross’s Substack