The third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation will be held in Beijing. (PHOTO / VCG)

The Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by China in 2013, has its roots in the ancient Silk Road, which our ancestors created to travel, trade and exchange ideas and thoughts with people from Asia, Europe and Africa, thus linking the East and the West.

As the world is more interconnected today than ever before thanks to modern means of transportation and mobile internet- and smartphone-based social platforms, the ancient wisdom that prompted the Chinese people hundreds of years ago to open the land and sea routes of the Silk Road should be the zeitgeist of today and pave the way to tomorrow.

The ultimate goal of the Belt and Road Initiative is to help build a global community with a shared future, by improving infrastructure connectivity and promoting development projects. The initiative is an important public good for improving global governance, too, with its founding principles — "extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits" — laying the basis for all countries to share the fruits of development.

The Belt and Road Initiative's concept of "open, green and clean cooperation" ensures all participants work together to achieve quality growth, while its objectives aim at "high standards, sustainability, and better lives", promising a better future for all. And its vision points to the path to achieve global well-being with the ultimate goal of making the world a better place for all.

From all aspects, the goal of building a global community with a shared future, which a white paper, "The Belt and Road Initiative: A Key Pillar of the Global Community of Shared Future", released on Tuesday emphasizes, is to improve all-round connectivity in multiple fields including infrastructure and financial institutions for the betterment of humankind as a whole.

Yet despite being more interconnected than ever before, the world today is not as peaceful and uniformly prosperous as it should be. The Belt and Road Initiative calls for strengthening global trade and communication, increasing people-to-people exchanges, and boosting economic development with the goal of building a global community with a shared future for humankind. This means the world the initiative envisions is a world of prosperity and development, a world of peace and friendship.

That's why, as the white paper says, the Belt and Road Initiative, which connects the past, the present and the future, despite being proposed by China, belongs to the world and benefits the whole of humanity.