In remarks delivered at the opening ceremony of the fifth annual meeting of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing on 28 July 2020, Xi Jinping said that ‘The global response to COVID-19 has made it clear that mankind rise and fall together in a community with a shared future’ (Xi, 2020). This was a reference to an important concept in China's official statements about global affairs, the idea of building a ‘community of shared future for humankind’ 人类命运共同体 renlei mingyun gongtongti (hereafter ‘community of shared future’ or CSF). This chapter focuses on the history and interpretations of this concept as a way of exploring China's global visions of collaborative governance, the third major narrative critiqued in this book. The aim is to present some of the ideas behind these and the ways that they have developed in contrast to – and sometimes in dialogue with – the perspectives discussed in earlier chapters.

Getting to grips with Chinese visions is no easy matter, and the purpose of this chapter is not to make a simple claim about ‘how China sees the world’.1 As noted in Chapter 1, ‘the Chinese self-image is increasingly a contingent, pluralized product of contentious negotiations between an overweening state and a restless population’ (Lee, 2017, p 260), and given the complexity and multi-dimensional nature of Chinese perspectives on global issues, simple answers are not possible. To help deal with this complexity, this chapter focuses on CSF to give some structure to the discussion of Chinese visions.