The China-proposed Global Governance Initiative (GGI), launched one year ago at a time of "great chaos" in the world, reinforces China's resolve to act as a force of peace and invites all countries to build a multipolar world order that puts people at its heart, a Canadian scholar said.

"The Global Governance Initiative has further underlined China's intention of continuing to serve as an oasis of peace, of expanding that zone of peace beyond China's borders to include more and more countries," Radhika Desai, director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba in Canada, told CGTN in an interview on Sunday.

Desai described the GGI as an open invitation for the international community to jointly build a "cooperative, multilateral, rules-based, and multipolar" world order that is "aimed at producing people-centered development."

Central to the Chinese initiative is respect for every country's economic sovereignty, granting nations the right to shape their own economic arrangements to fit their development needs and the interests of their people, she added.

The Canadian professor of political studies was among nearly 400 representatives from strategic, political, academic, business, media, and youth sectors from more than 90 countries and international and regional organizations, including the United Nations, who attended the three-day 2026 Global Governance Forum (Xiongan) that concluded on Sunday.

Hosted by the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs, it is themed "Rebuilding Confidence and Cooperation: Reforming and Improving Global Governance in a Transforming World."

(Cover: Radhika Desai, director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba in Canada, during the interview with CGTN at Forum in Xiongan New Area, north China's Hebei Province, October 25, 2026. /CGTN)