Chongqing - Global Vision sat down with Martin Jacques, a British academic, journalist and political commentator, visiting professor at Tsinghua University and former senior fellow at Cambridge. During his September visit to Chongqing, Jacques said China and the Global South will jointly shape the future world order, calling it “the first majoritarian global order in modern history.”

The diversity of the developing world will surely pose challenges. Still, Jacques praises initiatives where China showed leadership, the signature of which is the Belt and Road Initiative, when more than 150 countries signed on.

At the same time, Jacques does not consider China a model-setting hegemon. He stresses that China does not hold itself up as a model: "we're not interested in you being like us," he says, but "in development and having a good relationship."

On green technology, he cites Chinese solar panels across Africa as "an absolute classic example of showing leadership." On AI, the worry is the more recent and perhaps more urgent. Two serious players, the U.S. and China, "only represent a minority of humanity," and the open question is "whether humanity's got enough sense and enough shared values to stop and control it."