“Abject Poverty Is Absolutely Conquerable”

In a few short decades, China has accomplished economic feats that have left the world stunned in happy amazement: bringing 700 million Chinese out of poverty; increasing average life expectancy from 35 years in 1949 to 76 years today; launching world-class scientific work in the fields of space exploration and fusion energy development.

But China is not resting on its laurels. President Xi Jinping’s government intends to totally eliminate poverty in China—there are still 40 million in that category—by the year 2020. Xi recently met with Party leaders in China’s northern Shanxi province, and told them: “As long as we pay great attention, think correctly, take effective measures, and work in a down-to-earth way, abject poverty is absolutely conquerable.”

Nor is China limiting its ambitious intention to China alone. Foreign Minister Wang Yi was at a two-day conference June 21-22 with the African Union in Addis Adaba, where he stated that “Close to 400 million people in Africa live under the poverty line, and more than 40 million Chinese need to be lifted out of poverty. China and Africa need to join hands in fighting poverty and achieving common development. This is our responsibility to the future generations, the shared objective of Chinese and African people and the inherent part of human progress.”

Wang Yi went from Ethiopia to Lebanon, where he stressed that “China advocates more actions to curb the deterioration of a refugee crisis in the Middle East and find a solution as soon as possible,” adding that China is willing to enhance cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative.

As Helga Zepp-LaRouche has repeatedly emphasized in recent weeks, last month’s May 14-15 Belt and Road Forum in Beijing—in which she was a prominent participant—was a turning point in modern history, to make this intention a global reality. With the important indications earlier this week of growing U.S. involvement in the Belt and Road project, we stand at the threshold of that planetary change.

Lyndon and Helga LaRouche have been at the forefront of many of these developments, way before they ever happened. It was Lyndon LaRouche who first stated that the U.S. joining the Belt and Road Initiative was the key to the strategic crisis, and he provided the programmatic basis for doing that with his Four Laws. It was Helga Zepp-LaRouche who, in a 2015 speech in Chongqing, first urged China to help resolve the crisis of wars and emigration in the Middle East and Northern Africa, by bringing the Belt and Road into that region. It has been the Schiller Institute, which has pioneered the spread of Classical music and culture as the basis for a dialogue of civilizations to bury British geopolitics once and for all.

Now we stand less than two weeks from the start of the July 7-8 G20 meeting in Germany, which will see historic summits between and among Trump, Xi, Putin, Abe and others. But regardless of the outcome of those meetings, Helga Zepp-LaRouche stressed today, the planet is now moving under the overwhelming dynamic of the Belt and Road Initiative. Its successful outcome depends, as it has from its inception, on the singular strategic and policymaking conceptual input provided by the LaRouche movement. And it is our special responsibility, Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated, to use our organizing effort to introduce beauty into the political debate.

Now is the time, as Lyndon LaRouche has been fond of saying for decades, to have fun.