Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi addresses the opening ceremony of the South-South Human Rights Forum in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 7, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)

 

Officials and scholars from more than 70 Asian, African and Latin American developing countries, as well as the United Nations, visited Shanghai on Saturday before attending the upcoming 2019 South-South Human Rights Forum.

The forum, hosted by the State Council Information Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will be held in Beijing from Dec. 10 to 11.

According to the Beijing Declaration issued at the first South-South Human Rights Forum held in Beijing in 2017, participants agreed that the right to subsistence and the right to development were the primary basic human rights.

During the one-day trip in Shanghai, the officials and scholars, from countries including Laos, Brunei, South Africa, Mexico and Mauritius, visited the city's financial district and the World Expo Museum, snapped pictures of local residents' life scenes on the bank of the Huangpu River, and investigated the progress of waste sorting in ordinary residential streets. They were impressed by the prosperous and orderly development of the mega city.

"I think China is becoming more open and confident about human rights. The changes I saw here are examples of the great improvements in the Chinese people's rights to subsistence and development," said Davina Sigauta Rasch, director of Corporate Service of the Ombudsman Office in Samoa, who studied international economics and trade from 2009 to 2013 at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

She said that compared with 10 years ago, China has made significant progress in the emerging fields such as high-speed railways and mobile payments, which directly improved people's lives. China is not only developing itself, but also helping other developing countries, she said.

Her idea was echoed by Lionel Vairon, CEO of CEC Consulting in Luxembourg and also a senior research member of the Charhar Institute, a private think tank in China.

Over the past 70 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, great achievements which have attracted worldwide attention have been made, he said, adding that the international community should not ignore China's progress in human rights out of ideological misunderstanding and prejudice.

"In the future, global governance must make a choice between the policy of strong-power hegemony and the path of a community with a shared future for humanity. And the latter is the wisdom China has contributed to the world," he said.