Yang Xuedong, director of the Department of Political Sciences at Tsinghua University, attends the Global Times Annual Conference 2026, themed "Trust in China: New Journey, New Opportunities," on December 20, 2025, in Beijing. Photo: Global Times

The Global Times Annual Conference 2026, themed "Trust in China: New Journey, New Opportunities," was held in Beijing on Saturday. In a discussion on the topic "Civilizational States: Why China's Solutions Are Most Implementable," Yang Xuedong, director of the Department of Political Sciences at Tsinghua University, said China is able to carry out its governance solutions because it employs a practice-based way of thinking, and the Global Governance Initiative also reflects this mindset. 

Yang said that discussing "why China's solutions are most implementable" is essentially discussing implementation capacity, and it can be analyzed in two aspects. 

First, China has a practice-based way of thinking - when discussing a plan, the first question is how it will be implemented. Many countries have their own views on global governance, and these views reflect their underlying ways of thinking. China's national mindset is summed up by the phrase "Only when the granary is full will people learn etiquette," which corresponds to the Marxist idea that the material base determines the superstructure. To make a plan work, you first need a certain material foundation; once that foundation exists, common actions follow, and then shared ideas develop. China's Belt and Road Initiative exemplifies this thinking: we start with infrastructure, linking people through connections, communication, and interaction, Yang said. 

Second, when China's national governance thinking is translated into a global governance approach, three dimensions are particularly important: first, emotionally China shares many similarities with developing countries and can empathize with them; second, in terms of development stage, China's experience can offer other Global South countries very direct points of reference; third, when China considers governance mechanisms it thinks in terms of unity rather than division - how to construct implementation mechanisms from an integrative perspective. From the three dimensions of sentiment, development stage, and collective effort, one can see the key reasons why China's approach can be effectively executed, Yang said.  

Global Times