The chairman of BRIX Sweden, Stephen Brawer, says BRI should be a phenomenon much bigger than politics, trade, and business. It’s about human values and friendship between nations. The speech was held at the Sichuan-Sweden Economic and Trade Cooperation Exchange Session on November 4, 2024, at the Sheraton Stockholm Hotel in Stockholm.
Extract from his speech:
”The history of Chinese culture is far too deep and profound a subject matter to go into here, but the two great Chinese philosophical thinkers, Confucius and Mencius, operated on the idea that the basic nature of human beings, of men and women, is basically good.
When I was in Chengdu [China], I said in light of this that geopolitics is a dead end. It doesn’t lead anywhere. For those who don’t know, geopolitics originated in a so-called theoretical thinker from England, Halford McKinder, in 1904. It’s famous for the idea that, at that time, he said he who controls the heartland, the Asian heartland, controls the world.
Now, that is the idea of control, not friendship or, as the initiative of the Belt and Road is built on, a community for a shared future for mankind. It operates on a different principle. It operates on the idea that people are good when not distorted or led in directions where they behave otherwise.
And I think that’s the importance of what it means to have a win-win relationship. It’s not only business; it’s friendship, which must be built on a deeper understanding. This should lead Swedish government authorities to recognize the benefits of not continuing geopolitical competition and conflict but seeing the economic and cultural benefits of building cooperation.
My colleague mentioned that the sky is the limit. We don’t have to go into the details of what he articulated, which I thought were quite important and illuminating, but one of the famous ideas in Chinese history, Confucius, is the Mandate of Heaven. I think it is a mandate of heaven for all humanity that we work together to develop not only business between Sweden and China.
Sweden has a long, actually very important history, which goes back to a well-known inventor, Christopher Polhem, who I spoke about at a previous conference here in Stockholm. Polhem was a collaborator of a philosophical thinker, who I know has great importance.
I can’t go into that right now. God’s revealed homologous. That history of Sweden’s involvement in thinking about the general benefits of humanity as a whole, I think, is a direction we need to go in addition to embracing good bilateral economic cooperation and development.”
Photo and sound recording: T. Sassersson, NewsVoice