The Importance of Global Cooperation in the 21st Century

Over the past month, I’ve been visiting various parts of China including Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Wuhan.

While working on various partnerships for OneIsland throughout China, I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the Forum on Global Production Capacity and Business Cooperation in Wuhan from the 19th — 20th of October 2018.

Over 3,000 delegates and representatives from over 100 countries attended the forum which included sessions and discussions on various projects and partnerships between Chinese and foreign governments, corporations and organisations.

The emphasis of the event was to create strong cooperative partnerships, relationships, and ventures between Chinese and foreign enterprises on a global scale.

I was privileged to meet and learn from many leaders and experts developing partnerships between China and Africa, and many other developing parts of the world.

I have a firm belief that to understand problems which affect the world we must first begin to understand the world. In order to understand the world, we must understand the global systems, which require an understanding of a variety of foreign systems.

Foreign systems are comprised of foreign ideas, and foreign ideas are created by foreign people. At its fundamental source, “foreign people” are created by people. People who, in particular, see others as different from themselves.

Boiling it right down — when we see people as “foreign” we see them as separate or different from ourselves, and when we see them as separate and different from ourselves we often fall into the fear-based ideology of “competition”.

We are more inclined to focus on our differences than our similarities; we are more likely to feel scared and isolated from our world when we see ourselves as separate from others and put them in groups such as “countries” and “companies”.

The world that we live in is a beautifully complex place — yet we often miss the fact that we are living beings, and that we are all citizens of “Planet Earth”.

We often look at the world through the polarising lenses of “us and them”.

We see fear and scarcity — yet we forget that fear and scarcity are love and abundance through a different lens.

We see competition — yet we forget that competition is cooperation through a different lens.

We live in a global world, a world which is made up of people who share the same DNA.

We share the same dreams and same fears — we wish to live in a more peaceful and prosperous world!

No matter where we are from we want to see the world become a more prosperous place full of opportunity.

We often feel trapped where we are in the world and don’t know how to make a start — we only know what we’d like to see.

I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’ve woken up and seriously questioned where to start when it comes to making the world a better place.

I was lucky enough to discover the power of meditation a few years back which helped me learn to see the world through the lens of cooperation.

Cooperation comes from love, and love is everything!

I founded OneIsland aiming to solve a problem that I consider to be one of the most significant issues of my generation — affecting over a billion people from all over the globe.

The global housing crisis is an epidemic, and we cannot fix it without global cooperation.

We must take the time to understand each other, to understand ourselves collectively as people so that we can together meet our needs.

Global cooperation is crucial to ensuring that we thrive together as a planet, rather than knocking others down to bring ourselves up.

We live in the 21st century where the world is no longer a zero-sum game; global business and politics should not be one either.

The 21st century brings many technological advances, but they come accompanied by many social, economic and political challenges.

I believe that to solve these challenges we need to take a fresh approach to global politics.

It is time for us all to realise the definitive importance of extensive global cooperation within business and politics.

We all need each other’s support to build a prosperous future for our world.

China sees this clearer than most — it realises the importance of supporting and leading projects around the globe as part of its “Belt and Road Initiative” which should significantly improve the lives of many people globally.

Planet Earth is home to all of us, and we must remind ourselves of this and act accordingly.

We are all building “Spaceship Planet Earth” — our vehicle to a more abundant and prosperous future yet to be discovered.