World Economic Forum founder and Chair Klaus Schwab recently sat down for an interview with a Chinese state media outlet and proclaimed that China was a “role model” for other nations.
Schwab, 84, made these 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 “tremendous” achievements at modernizing its economy over the last 40 years.
FILE: World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab sits, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (not pictured) addresses the delegates, during the last day of the WEF in Davos, Switzerland May 26, 2022.
(REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann)
“I think it’s a role model for many countries,” Schwab said, before qualifying that he thinks each country should make its own decisions about what system it wants to adapt.
“I think we should be very careful in imposing systems. But the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries,” Schwab said.
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Schwab did not elaborate on what aspects of the Chinese model appealed to him, nor which ones would be beneficial to other countries.
China is governed by the absolute rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which does not allow people to practice the religion or belief of their choice, and has no tolerance for dissent or criticism.
FILE: German Klaus Schwab, founder and president of the World Economic Forum, WEF, gestures during a press 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 companies are ranked based on social credit. Comparisons have been drawn to environmental, social and governance, or ESG, scores being used by major 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 a half-century ago, positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges,” he wrote. “We should seize this moment to ensure that stakeholder capitalism remains the new dominant model.”
In 2020, without any accountability or transparency, the Chinese government rammed through a “national security” law for Hong Kong, which critics say gave authorities a pretext to brutally crackdown down on pro-democracy activists.
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More recently, western countries have accused China of sweeping at least a million Uyghur and other ethnic minorities into detention camps, where many have said they were tortured, sexually assaulted, and forced to abandon their language and religion.
Beijing has denied these accusations as a fabrication cooked up by Western nations.
FOX Business’ Teny Sahakian contributed to this report.
