As organisers put it, the dialogues and field visits of the GDI International Summer School are meant to “translate the GDI from vision to action.” Five years after President Xi Jinping proposed the Global Development Initiative, that translation is becoming urgent. The world faces unbalanced development, the digital divide, climate change, housing shortages, and water insecurity. The old model, where a few developed countries set the agenda and developing countries listened no longer fits the reality of modern world.
The numbers tell part of the story. Over the past five years, China has mobilised more than $23 billion USD to support over 1,800 projects in eight GDI priority areas: poverty reduction, food security, green development, and the digital economy among them. Cooperation has extended to more than 90 countries and international organisations.
But as speakers at CAU stressed, GDI was never intended to be only about projects and funding. Its deeper purpose is to change how we think about development itself.
Prof. Yang Yadong of CAU captured this shift. The summer school, he said, goes “far beyond wonderful lectures.” Its value lies in seeing development “with our own eyes,” in moving from classrooms in Beijing to villages and enterprises inland. The theme this year: “understanding transformation and the meaning of our mutual development experiences”, points to a central truth: there is no single template for progress. Housing, water, and climate challenges look different in Nairobi than in Banjul. Solutions must be rooted in local conditions.
That is why the awakening of the Global South matters. As Global Times President Guan Kejiang noted, “modernisation does not equal Westernisation.” For too long, the global conversation about development was shaped by a small group of countries. The voices, questions, and experiments of the Global South were often overlooked. Today that is changing. Countries of the South are exploring “their own modernization path based on their own national conditions.” This is not rejection of cooperation. It is an assertion of agency.
CAU itself illustrates what that agency can look like. With partnerships in more than 260 institutions across 50 countries, its students and scholars have worked on farms and in rural communities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They are not exporting a finished model. They are exchanging technology, sharing experience in smart agriculture and rural revitalization, and learning together. That is South-South cooperation in practice, practical, peer-to-peer, and problem-driven.
The young people have today been described as the “beneficiaries, contributors, and vital driving force of global development.” Platforms like the Youth Leaders Community for Global Development are designed to give them space for equal dialogue, not to speak for them.
The path ahead is not easy. Self-reliance does not mean isolation. It means moving “beyond aid” toward mutual learning, technology sharing, and collective problem-solving. It means recognising that development is not a gift to be given, but a capacity to be built.
The dialogues at CAU will not solve climate change or close the digital divide this year. But they do something essential: they put the people who will live with those challenges in the room together, as equals.