A Paradigm in Crisis
The global development model is broken. While humanity commands unprecedented wealth and technology, the international development agenda has stalled. The evidence is stark: unilateralist tariff wars have fractured supply chains and shifted economic pain onto the world’s most vulnerable. In South Asia, a generation of anxious Gen Z youth protests a future of inequality and stagnation, challenging the very legitimacy of the status quo. In Southeast Asia, great-power competition siphons resources away from public welfare and into the machinery of geopolitical rivalry. These are not isolated dysfunctions but symptoms of a profound structural failure. The old paradigm—rooted in zero-sum logic and a winner-takes-all mentality—is no longer viable. It has failed to answer who development is for and has proven incapable of insulating progress from politics. Against this backdrop, China’s Global Development Initiative (GDI), proposed in 2021, is more than a policy;........

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