Being Remarks by Charles Onunaiju at A Ministerial Meeting of Global Civilizations Dialogue Holding in Beijing, P.R China On The 10th And 11th Of July, 2025.
Esteemed participants,
It is great pleasure for me to return to Beijing again. Trips, I have always characterized as my intellectual pilgrimage providing clarities and insights to the great questions of our time extending from its panoramas, paradoxes and promises. The Beijing dialogues have both the effects of spiritual serenity and intellectual ponderings.
The subject of our current interrogation “civilizational dialogues and progress is thoughtfully provocative because it relates to the existential question of how humanity can progress and prosper through the dialogue of civilizations or perish through the clash of it.
Civilization progress is not a simplistic linear progression rather its dynamism is defined and engaged through understanding its contents and context, which fit into the historical process. Knowledge is both pivotal to the progress of civilization and understanding of its trajectories.
Every human community creates, nurtures and develop its civilization according to its internal dynamics and refines it through knowledge innovation. Because knowledge is profound and universal, its cross fertilization enriches civilization. Every civilization represents and exemplifies the aggregate achievements of its community and with development as a key feature of society, civilization and knowledge is built and enabled to progress through development.
While every civilization as a cultural category in the broadest sense, exhibits its own characteristics. It is by its own nature, not inwarding – looking or cosigned to atrophy. Its material and spiritual contents reflecting its productive capacities and relations along with the values that consist of its norms and ethics which constitute both its community in the institutional sense of processes, rules and laws.
Civilizations develop and modernize with fresh vistas of knowledge. Knowledge infrastructure is the foundation and driver of civilizational progress. The creative application of knowledge and innovation arising from it provide the guarantee for civilizational progress. Because civilization is progressive, its particular context within time, place and circumstances, should be understood.
A critical context of civilizational progress is its diffusion and cross fertilization among human community to the point that in the contemporary times according General Secretary Xi Jinping: “We as humans all live in the same global village, in the same time and space at the confluence of history and reality. More and more, we are becoming a community with shared future in which we all have a little of others within us”. The imperative of the historical and existential reality of the fact that “we all have a little of others within us” is the power of knowledge innovations accentuating the commonality of our humanity through scientific breakthrough and disruptive technologies that push the boundaries to humankind’s shared future.
When President Xi Jinping, who is also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) spoke at the Moscow State
Institute of International Relation in the Russian Federation on the
23rd of March 2013, in his first ever foreign visit as President of the People’s Republic of China and hinted that “we are becoming a community with a shared future”, the epoch-making afflictions of the COVID-19 pandemic was nearly a decade away. But, when it hit in 2020, it did not take any much proddings to recognize that the fate of our common future can only be secured under the banner of international cooperation transcending political and ideological difference, race, creed or status. The encroaching and approaching upheavals of climate change recommends us to the same banner of international solidarity, requiring the contributions of wisdom by all civilizations in the struggle against common afflictions.
The imperative of the dialogue among civilizations is the objective trend of the time and progress in finding a common ground of the crucible of civilizational progress can be mostly advanced through knowledge innovations.
In his important speech at an international symposium to mark the 2,565th Anniversary of the birth of Confucius in 2014, President Xi Jinping remarked that “the world has become what it is today through exchanges between and the fusion of humanity’s different civilizations”, and “promoting such exchanges, fusion and learning is the natural path to a better world and to better lives for the people of all countries”.
And further, he added “how to deal correctly with the civilizations of different countries and nations and with traditional and contemporary culture is a major subject that we must grasp well”. The context for civilization dialogues and intercourse as points of departure to “grasp well”, the broad range of civilizations through rigorous knowledge exchanges cannot be over emphasized.
In the Book of Rites (Li Ji) record on the subject of Education, it urged on the imperative of mutual learning and exchanges, warning “study alone in the absence of others and become isolated, uncultivated and be poorly informed” and in a brilliant answer to this, President Xi Jinping exhorted that “all of us should approach every civilization that human societies have created with a willingness to learn from them, be it the ancient Chinese, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or Indian civilization, or the Asian, African, European, American, or Oceanian civilizations of today”.
The challenges of the contemporary world as dauntly realistic as they are, also sit in the lower rung of human prospects as the evolving trends of common human concerns translate to solidarity to secure and foster humankind’s common destiny of a shared future. But as in all things, this will not happen without a struggle; that existential contestations in which the strength of the general will must triumph over the narrow and vested interests.
In an era of inverse and inwarding – looking nationalism fostered by power and bloc politics, the struggle for a fair, equitable and inclusive global orders is now politically located in the global South where the echoes for rejuvenations, renaissance and cultural diffusions seamlessly integrating the achievements of the civilization of all human societies is compellingly loud and articulate.
The scholarly community of all societies who in the immortal characterization of Kwame Nkrumah, a visionary Pan-Africanist and founding President of the Republic of Ghana in West Africa, “the powerless conscience” must engage through the power of knowledge to bring to mainstream, the discourse on the strength of intercivilizational dialogue to foster its progress and build the community of shared future for all humankind.
Thank you all.
Charles Onunaiju,
Centre for China Studies, (CCS) Abuja, Nigeria.
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