Senior UN official hails Beijing's role in growth, South-South cooperation

Alexander De Croo, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, has underscored China's growing contribution to South-South cooperation and global efforts for sustainable growth.

In an interview on Friday, he hailed the "incredible development journey" that China has gone through alongside the UNDP in the past 50 years.

China has been "inviting other countries to export toward China" and "to share the success story of the Chinese development model to the rest of the world", said De Croo, who concluded his three-day official visit to China.

As part of his packed schedule, the UNDP chief witnessed the signing of an agreement setting the framework for establishing and operating the UNDP Global Centre for Sustainable Development in Shanghai.

The center "will serve as a global platform for South-South and triangular cooperation with China, connecting countries, institutions, and partners to share knowledge, scale innovation, and advance development solutions", the UNDP said in a release.

De Croo called the center "an example of how our relationship is evolving", saying its goal is "to share the elements of the Chinese development success story".

"It is going to focus on the green transition where China is leading in many of the technologies that the world needs today to be able to fight climate change, (and) it is going to work on the digital and the AI transition," he said.

Also during the trip, De Croo signed a renewed global memorandum of understanding with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and attended the opening ceremony of the 2026 China International Import Expo in Shanghai.

In the interview, De Croo highlighted China's zero-tariff policy for least developed countries and African countries with which it has diplomatic ties, saying that is "important for trade with China" as well as "for the rest of the world".

"Because if countries are able to trade with China, they're able to trade with other countries around the world as well," he said.

When asked about advancing global governance in AI together with China, De Croo referred to the speech delivered by President Xi Jinping at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in July.

In the speech, Xi announced the creation of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization.

"President Xi was very clear on the need for just access to AI, on the need to base it on open resources and also on the need to have countries work together to manage the dangers of AI," De Croo said.

He highlighted the potential risk of some AI models being abused, saying "the best way of addressing it is by countries coming together and doing it in multilateral format".

"We are big believers in technology, and we think that technology has an incredible potential to give more people in a more rapid way access to the benefits of progress, but it will not go by itself. It will be based on policy; it will be based on building capacity," he said.

In the light of China's decades-long cooperation with the UNDP, De Croo has underscored the driving force provided by such collaboration for South-South cooperation.

"Development in the world used to be seen as the problems were in the South and the solutions were in the North. That's not the world of today," he said.

"China has been a long-time supporter of what we call South-South cooperation. In our cooperation agreement in the '80s, we have already talked about South-South cooperation and sharing the learnings of how to do development to the rest of the world," he said.