Speakers include
- Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President of the International Schiller Institute, Germany
- Zhang Jun, Dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University in Shanghai, China
- Charles Liu, Senior Fellow of the Taihe Institute, China
- Ole Döring, Professor at Foreign Language Studies College of Hunan Normal University
In the current geopolitical environment, Western leaders are moving away from referring to
China as a “partner” and emphasizing China more as a “rival”.
For example, the EU Commission recently promoted “de-risking” to reduce Europe’s alleged
dependence on China in certain economic sectors. The United States “decoupling” strategy
seeks to cut China off from technology supply chains. And the German government has declared
China a security risk and is working on a plan to impose import and export controls, investment
barriers and other sanctions on China.
China, on the other hand, emphasizes that if countries want to reduce risk, they should trade
more with China. What are the options and potentials of both views?
Western sanctions against Russian energy commodities and goods have already shown the
opposite effect and have largely backfired on Europe. Will Western leaders learn from this failure
and prevent another serious miscalculation?
In reality, China is the world’s most important market and production center, and its Belt and Road
Initiative is bringing infrastructure development to the majority of countries in need. Will the West
reflect on this fact and create a new paradigm of peaceful win-win cooperation?
Since the mainstream Western “narrative” leaves no space for such a debate, we want to provide
a platform for a broad alliance of international thinkers, entrepreneurs, and policy strategists to
have a public conversation.
