New order needed to meet global challenges

The world is facing a series of challenges, ranging from financial crisis, grain and energy safety, environmental deterioration, climate change, natural calamities and poverty to terrorism. Directly related with mankind's survival, development and security, these challenges have also accelerated transformation of the established international order.

Founded after the end of World War II, the world's existent structure once suffered severe impacts caused by national liberation movements launched across Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 1950s and 60s, oil and international financial crises in the 1970s, as well as the disintegration of the Soviet Union and upheavals in Eastern European countries in the 1990s.

With development in the past decades, other major powers have continuously narrowed their gap with the US in terms of economic strength, and a kind of power equilibrium among themselves has also taken shape. Under these circumstances, the world is thought to have entered a post-US era. The emergence of some regional groups of economies and the rapid rise of some big developing powers have promoted great changes to the world's decades-long power establishments and accelerated its steps toward multi-polarization.