The founder and president of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, recently sat down for an interview with a Chinese state media and proclaimed that China is a “model” for other nations.
Schwab, 84, made the comments during an interview with CGTN’s Tian Wei on the sidelines of last week’s APEC CEO summit in Bangkok, Thailand.
Schwab said he respected China’s “extraordinary” achievements in modernizing its economy over the past 40 years.
FILE: World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab sits as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (not pictured) addresses delegates during the final day of the WEF in Davos, Switzerland May 26, 2022.
(REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann)
“I think it’s a model for a lot of countries,” Schwab said, before qualifying that he thinks each country should make its own decisions about which system it wants to adapt.
“I think we should be very careful about imposing systems. But the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for a good number of countries,” Schwab said.
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Schwab did not elaborate on which aspects of the Chinese model appealed to him, nor which aspects would be beneficial to other countries.
China is ruled by the absolute rule of the Communist Party of China (CPC) which does not allow people to practice the religion or belief of their choice and does not tolerate dissent or criticism.
FILE: German Klaus Schwab, founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum, WEF, gestures during a news conference, in Cologny near Geneva, Switzerland, Tuesday Jan. 10, 2017.
(The Associated Press)
In 2014, the CCP announced a moral ranking system whereby individuals, government organizations, and businesses are ranked by social credit. Comparisons were made to environmental, social and governance, or ESG, scores used by leading financial institutions and global organizations to create a type of social credit system designed to influence behavior and transform society.
Schwab wrote in 2019 that ESG scores are necessary for stakeholder capitalism.
“‘Stakeholder capitalism,’ a model I first proposed half a century ago, positions private companies as trustees of society and is clearly the best answer to today’s social and environmental challenges,” he wrote. “We should seize this moment to ensure stakeholder capitalism remains the new dominant model.”
In 2020, with no accountability or transparency, the Chinese government forced a “national security” law for Hong Kong, which critics say gave authorities a pretext to brutally crack down on pro-democracy activists.
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More recently, Western countries accused China of dragging at least one million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities into detention camps, where many said they were tortured, sexually assaulted and forced to abandon their language and religion.
Beijing has denied these allegations as an invention concocted by Western nations.
Teny Sahakian of FOX Business contributed to this report.
