China’s Implementation of Goal 9 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: International Capacity Cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

The experience in reform and opening up shows that China’s achievements in industrialization are largely attributed to its industrial openness towards the outside world and the international cooperation. As it enters the second decade of the 21st century, China’s industry has stepped into a new era of leading international development cooperation and promoting inclusive and sustainable growth in global industry, namely a period of developing international capacity cooperation supported by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As vigorously driven by the BRI, the international capacity cooperation has not only pushed forward the creation of new industrial cooperation models among developing countries, but also opened new paths and contributed Chinese approaches to regional and global industrial cooperations under the new situation, in particular for the implementation of the inclusive and sustainable industrial development goal set in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This mainly manifests as: dovetailing the top-level design with planning to build new mechanism-based capacity cooperation models, achieving cross-border infrastructure connectivity to promote trade, investment and industrial cooperation, constructing cooperation zones as an important platform for small and medium-sized enterprises to participate in capacity cooperation, breaking the financial bottleneck of regional development through diversified and open financial cooperation, and leading the leapfrog development of countries along the Belt and Road through technological cooperation and collaborative innovation.