By Fernando Castro
Communication and Technology Coordinator of Unión de Trabajadores de Prensa Buenos Aires -/DATA.U, Argentina
Invited to the 2025 Belt and Road Journalists Forum, I came to Jiangxi Province, the cradle of the Chinese revolution. Although we only visited a small part of the People’s Republic of China, the companies, museums, and historic districts we toured offered a holistic understanding of the nation, both spiritually and culturally. It is a civilization that integrates its millennia-old heritage with contemporary top-tier technology, organized as a body with genuine national sovereignty.
Even before this journey, I was convinced that China’s model does not equate development solely with the accumulation of private wealth, but rather harnesses the market for the long-term goal of collective well-being. This intuition was confirmed the moment I left the airport. A government official told us on the bus: “Planning is not a slogan, but efficiency: success always favors the prepared mind.” At the official level, national planning is guided by the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), which explicitly states that “innovation is the primary driver of development.” This is not mere talk on paper. Every stretch of highway and every high-speed rail station connect to R&D centers, battery factories, and digital villages that preserve their community fabric. In 2023, both production and exports in Jiangxi Province registered robust growth, adding 2.4 gigawatts of new photovoltaic capacity, representing a year-on-year increase of 38%, while simultaneously reducing its carbon footprint and improving the quality of life.
In 2020, China achieved the monumental goal of eradicating extreme poverty, lifting 800 million people above the poverty line. The next step is to achieve rural revitalization and modernize without repeating the environmental damage of the past. One afternoon, in the Wenchangli Historical and Cultural District (restored with funding from a cultural revitalization program), we visited the Tang Xian Zu Memorial and then enjoyed a performance of a play by this “Chinese Shakespeare.” The theater lights, street performers, and the roar of fire-breathing acrobats all proclaimed a harmonious coexistence of tradition and modernity.
Jiang Zhong Pharmaceutical Group exemplifies the same logic. Here, millennia-old medical knowledge is revitalized through fully automated factories, which generated 4.39 billion RMB in revenue in 2023 and exported to twenty countries. The same is true for Jiangxi Tongbo Technology Co., Ltd. Through industrial upgrading, the company now produces heat sinks for NVIDIA’s H100 GPUs, a critical component for the global artificial intelligence industry.
Nanchang’s Aixi Lake spans three square kilometers and has been certified by the Ramsar Convention. Strolling along its shore, I witnessed how biodiversity and urban development can reinforce each other. I pictured a public library standing by the water, where reading and research are accompanied by the whisper of wind over lotus leaves—proof that culture and ecology can thrive together.
China offers a clear lesson for Argentina and other Latin American nations: breaking the dependency on raw material exports requires proactive state intervention. This means engaging China as an equal partner in negotiations, making technology transfer a condition for investment, and fostering collaboration between industry, academia, and research institutions. China offers credit to the world, shares its technology, and provides a huge market of 1.4 billion people. Argentina and Latin America must seize these opportunities while safeguarding their sovereignty, abandoning neoliberal logic, responding to President Xi Jinping’s Global Development Initiative proposed in 2021, and relaunching state planning oriented toward social and environmental goals.
All of this requires truthful communication by the news media. If our news organizations fail to document the Jiangxi experience, the narrative will continue to be monopolized by corporate conglomerates which reduce China to stereotypes or a “threat.” As writers and journalists, we must show the scale of China’s production, its mechanisms for distribution, and its ecological considerations. Only in this way can we contend for the right to speak in the battle of ideas and strengthen the collaborative ties that help eliminate poverty, combat climate change, and protect jobs in the digital revolution. In the age of artificial intelligence, truth requires not only “high bandwidth” for its dissemination but also collective organization and collaboration.
*The views and opinions expressed in the articles are solely those of the individual authors and do not reflect the position of the Secretariat of the Belt and Road Journalist Network.