Full text of President Xi's address to BRICS Business Forum

We should not ignore problems arising from economic globalization or just complain about them. Rather, we should make joint efforts to find solutions. We should work together with other members of the international community to step up dialogue, coordination and cooperation and contribute to upholding and securing global economic stability and growth. To this end, we should promote the building of an open global economy, advance trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, jointly build new global value chains, and rebalance economic globalization. Doing so will bring benefits to people across the world. We five countries should open more to each other, expand converging interests in this process, take an inclusive approach and share opportunities, so as to create even brighter prospects for growing the economies of the five countries.

The development of emerging market and developing countries is not intended to move the cheese of anyone but to make the pie of the global economy bigger. We should join hands to steer the course of economic globalization, offer more vision and public goods, make the governance model and rules more balanced and inclusive, and improve and reshape international division of labor and global value chains. We should work to reform the global economic governance system to make it commensurate with the reality of the global economic architecture. We should also improve governance rules for the new domains of deep sea, polar regions, outer space and cyberspace, so as to ensure that all countries share both rights and responsibilities.     

Fourthly, we should increase the influence of BRICS and build extensive partnerships. As a cooperation platform with global influence, BRICS cooperation is more than about our five countries. Rather, it carries the expectations of emerging market and developing countries and indeed the international community. Guided by the principle of open and inclusive cooperation, we BRICS countries place high premium on cooperation with other emerging market and developing countries and have established effective dialogue mechanisms with them. 

As a Chinese saying goes, “It is easy to break one arrow but hard to break ten arrows bundled together.” We should leverage our respective strengths and influence, promote South-South cooperation and North-South dialogue, pool the collective strengths of all countries and jointly defuse risks and meet challenges. We should expand the coverage of BRICS cooperation and deliver its benefits to more people. We should promote the “BRICS Plus” cooperation approach and build an open and diversified network of development partnerships to get more emerging market and developing countries involved in our concerted endeavors for cooperation and mutual benefits. 

During the Xiamen Summit, China will hold the Dialogue of Emerging Market and Developing Countries, where leaders of five countries from different regions will be invited to join the BRICS leaders in discussing global development cooperation and South-South cooperation as well as the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Mutual understanding and friendship among peoples is crucial to enhancing BRICS cooperation and building extensive partnerships. We should fully leverage the role of people-to-people and cultural exchanges and encourage extensive public participation in BRICS cooperation. We should hold more events like cultural festivals, movie festivals and sports games that are popular among the people so that the BRICS story will be told everywhere and the exchanges and friendship of the peoples of our five countries will become an inexhaustible source of strength driving BRICS cooperation.