The C20 Summit 2021 (C20) concluded successfully on September 8th. This three-day-long summit, from the 5th to 8th of October, was held in a hybrid online and in-person approach due to the COVID19 pandemic in Italy. Mrs. Zhang Yinjun, the President of Beijing Changier Education Foundation and China Youth AIDS Prevention and Education Project, was invited to participate in the online summit along with other representatives and experts. The summit focused on three main topics consisting of “People, Planet, and Prosperity,” promised to maintain its commitment to global civil societies and worked to facilitate the Summit of the G20 Heads of State and Government, which is to be held in Rome later this month.

Mrs. Zhang Yinjun participated in the official opening and closing of this summit, and have shared her opinions in panels “Global Citizenship and Sustainable Development”, “A Time of Crisis: Addressing Health Inequalities in the Era of Climate Change”, “Strengthening UHC Engagement: A New Health for All Advocacy Toolkit for Civil Society”, and “Amidst COVID19: Potting the Last Mile First.”

President Mrs. Zhang Yinjun expressed the importance of this C20 summit at a historical time when the COVID 19 pandemic has yet to be fully contained, wherein Beijing Changier Education Foundation attached great importance to this summit and had carefully appointed its representatives to participate in relevant discussions. Beijing Changier Education Foundation has been working to address the issue of AIDS in the past 16 years, wherein the foundation has promoted relevant sex education, especially to women and to children, in residential communities – both rural and urban – and in educational institutions at different levels that geographically spanned across 27 provinces in China for the purpose of AIDS prevention. This experimental “AIDS Social Vaccination Project” meet with success: it had been highly recognized and praised by UNAIDS Executive Director Mr. Michel Sidibé, and was welcomed by Chinese communities, especially in schools and individual households. Thus, the main goal of our foundation in the coming decade will be the promotion of our “AIDS Social Vaccination Project” in China and around the world, which will hence be a unique contribution to the global goal to eliminate AIDS in 2030. The summit, with its focuses on “People, Planet, and Prosperity,” placed its emphasis on urgent issues apposite to the current need of our world, such as “Health and Inequality” and “Sustainable development.”  Specifically, health is the premise of prosperity, and the prosperity of the human population cannot be achieved without a high level of universal health attainment. In this way, the C20 summit this year will be conducive to many positive influences in our society.”

Zhiping Ding, a volunteer of Beijing Changier Education Foundation, addressed the issue by sharing: “We believed that viruses are integral parts of an environment characterized by biodiversity, while the unchecked human activities that altered the environment triggered their contraction with viruses, resulting in outbreaks within human society. And hence, we consider human interference with the ecosystem and the failure to reconcile with climate change and human development to be the root causes of infectious diseases, be it the bubonic plague in the past or AIDS and Ebola we are currently working on to eliminate.  Thus, we would advocate to abstain from unreasonable interruption of the environment.”

“A common fallacy to the issue of diseases such as AIDS would be the perception that they are relatively “less urgent.” Some people with this misconception may also believe that those diseases are irrelevant to any environmental issues or human’s development, at least without observable causality, and thus there would be no need to address this very issue at this given point. However, the historical records recommend us to perceive the presence of this illness as a harbinger to potential calamity. Specifically, according to historical documentations, disease outbreaks have always been foreshadowed by harbingers indicating the overburdening of the ecosystems. For instance, The Book of Later Han recorded a series of abnormal events decades before the Jian’an Plague outbreak at alarming scale and frequency. This includes earthquakes, flooding, and smaller level plague outbreaks. However, people at that time took no notice of this series of abnormalities. Thus, we shall not overlook indicators of environmental failures such as infectious diseases. As a foundation focusing on the prevention of AIDS, we advocate to control the transmission of AIDS and any other infectious disease by means of providing education, and we also advocate to protect victims of AIDS and any other similar diseases by means of ensuring their right of survival and equality.”

“In addition, we need to be advised that the regions on the entire planet Earth are connected. This is true even in antiquity. Prior to the Chinese Jian’an plague in the 210s, numerous national level outbreaks were also recorded in the 170s, wherein I am currently examining its potential relationship with the Roman Antonine Plague. In addition, burials in Palmyra also exhibited abnormalities in burial practices in both 170s AD and 210s AD, indicating this Mesopotamian city on the silk road may be affected by both the Roman Antonine Plague and the Chinese Jian’an plague. While no individual states may be spared at times of worldwide calamity, individual states’ collaboration could contribute to the effective control of infectious diseases.The eradication of smallpox by international collaborations put forwarded by W.H.O. is one example of success. We thus argue against recriminations among nations and advocate international collaboration to address issues such as infectious diseases and environmental changes. We also argue against localism and protectionism, and advocate the universal accessibility to affordable medical resources such as vaccines.”

Mrs. Emma Chen-Banas, the UN representative and Special Director for North America of Beijing Changier Education foundation, also voiced her standpoint: “As a part of international civil society, our foundation has long followed our mission to focus on the rights of women and children and the Prevention of AIDS for the purpose of promoting a better world. We align people in societies to protect the dignity of every person, under the framework of Human Rights, which have been emphasized by the summit. While the COVID pandemic magnified and catalyzed people’s fragility, the pandemic also shows us the only approach to defeat the virus is international collaboration wherein knowledge, resources, and experience could be shared. The pandemic also unveils an unprecedented world, in which there are no differences between developed nations and developing nations. And nations regardless of their ‘developing status’ all have room for further development. Thus, all countries around the world must collaborate closely to promote justice and individual dignity, attaining a sustainable mode of development while ensuring human rights and equality.”

The C20 Summit is an affiliated event of the Summit of the G20 Heads of State and Government, wherein civil societies address their standpoint concerning G20 summit’s main topic. The C20 Summit started in 2013, and have, since then, taken place in Mosco (2013), Melbourne (2014), Istanbul (2015), Qingdao (2016), Hamburg (2017), Buenos Aires (2018), Tokyo (2019). The summit in 2020 was held online by Saudi Arabia due to the pandemic, in which nearly one hundred representatives from more than sixty Chinese NGOs, including our foundation (Beijing Changier Education Foundation), CNIE, CFPD, CFPA participated. The representatives advocated socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new area put forward by President Xi Jinping, and voiced plans to address issues pertaining to global governance, COVID prevention, targeted poverty alleviation, sustainable development, and combating corruption.

The summit, based on its emphasis on “People, Planet, and Prosperity,” advocates that:

On People:

“Under the framework of the human rights, we have been guided by four overarching principles: the stubborn determination to leave no one behind; the necessity of a gender-transformative approach; the need for a comprehensive vision for a real sustainability and the policy coherence to link together the future of the planet and of humankind. This means taking care of vulnerabilities, protecting diversities and biodiversity, putting at the center of the policies women and girls in all their diversity.”

“Looking both at the current emergency situation today, and the ongoing need for strengthening global and national health systems, the G20 must be proactive in fostering the multilateral initiative on Prevention, Preparedness and Recovery based on a renewed and stronger leadership of the WHO. This commitment has to be fulfilled within a concrete responsibility to ensure Universal Access to Health Coverage, a goal that can be reached only through robust public health systems.”

On Planet:

“We call on the G20 to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis head-on, and moving out of rhetoric, working towards a collective commitment to limit global warming to 1.5°C and reviewing national commitments (NDCs), which the UNFCCC Synthesis Report currently shows are leading to a global temperature increase of at least 2.4°C.”

“G20 must support the imperative of conserving and restoring ecosystem integrity to biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the prevention of future zoonotic pandemics.”

On Democracy:

“Protecting peoples’ and the planet’s life is not enough if fundamental rights and freedoms are not ensured. The first concern comes from the burden of the gender inequality that we still see in all aspects of our societies. Too often women and girls are victims of exclusion, discrimination, and violence, which acts to stifle their potential as agents of change and hurts their opportunities to be included in the design and the implementation of all policies and in all decision- making processes thus ensuring their full political participation. A preliminary step is the role assigned to education as a fundamental tool to foster awareness of human rights and to build global citizenship. Also, education is strictly linked with lifelong learning that has to be ensured to all persons and workers to build a democratic culture.”

“We dedicate our actions and commitments, as international civil society and Civil 20, to all the victims of any kind of violence and in particular to those who are deprived of freedom. No goals on People, Planet, Democracy and Prosperity are achieved when at least one is left behind, under the violence and the deprivation of freedom. Let us learn the hard lessons of this pandemic, and let us acknowledge and take action on this fact we have seen demonstrated: that what affects one, affects all.”