China is building the machinery of a post-Western order

Beijing’s Global Governance Initiative is testing whether a more multipolar world can produce a more functional global order The latest SCO and BRICS summits offer a glimpse of a world no longer organized around a single center of gravity. As governments from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere seek greater room to maneuver, the old architecture of global governance is under pressure – not necessarily because it has become irrelevant, but because the distribution of power around it has changed.That is the backdrop against which China’s Global Governance Initiative, or GGI, enters its second year.When President Xi Jinping unveiled the initiative at the SCO Plus meeting in Tianjin on September 1, 2025, it could easily have been dismissed as another diplomatic cliché. A year on, and China has begun translating the GGI into institutions dealing with mediation, data, and artificial intelligence, while embedding its principles in its longer-term economic and diplomatic planning.A different map of globalizationThe GGI starts from a proposition that the institutions of global governance have not kept pace with the distribution of global power. China’s preferred answer is not to aban...