At the Global Leaders' Meeting on Women, held on October 13, 2025, in Beijing, President Xi Jinping pledged to continue increasing China's support for the global cause of women's development. The following day, China already began delivering on that pledge, inaugurating the Global Center for Women's Capacity Building at the China Women's University in Beijing. Over the past year, this institution has carried out talent development, multilateral dialogue, livelihood projects and think tank research.

In addition to establishing an open international network for exchange, the center is pioneering a pragmatic path that combines Chinese and international development perspectives and practices, becoming a major platform for contributing Chinese wisdom to the global cause of women's development.

Empowering women's development through talent training stands out as the center's most significant achievement over the past year. It has created institutions offering special training programs for women from other developing countries in areas including leadership capacity, digital literacy, rural poverty reduction and the protection of women's rights. In July, 19 students from 10 countries became the first to graduate from a master's degree program delivered by the center. In addition to classroom instruction, these students conducted field visits to explore the "digital countryside" approach to rural development in Zhejiang Province, pastoral areas in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and villages dedicated to preserving intangible cultural heritage in Shanxi Province, gaining insight into the experiences of Chinese women as they participate in rural revitalization and social development.

China's rural revitalization, a strategy introduced at the 19th Communist Party of China National Congress in 2017, promotes the economic prosperity and overall development of rural areas.

In addition, the center offers short-term training seminars both online and offline. For instance, on June 23-July 6, it organized a training program on capacity building for women's education in developing countries, bringing together 29 participants from countries and organizations including Egypt, Barbados and the African Union Commission. They visited intangible cultural heritage workshops in Zhejiang, including a women's center in Ningbo. The aim of the program was to provide models for using intangible cultural heritage skills to empower rural women that participants could implement in their own countries.

By deepening multilateral exchange and cooperation and broadening channels for dialogue on women's empowerment, the center has emerged as a major hub for communication between women from China and abroad. It upholds the principles of equality, openness and mutual learning, respects historical and cultural differences among nations, refrains from exporting a single model, and calls on countries to explore their own paths of women's development suited to their national conditions. It has organized international exchange events inviting government representatives, professionals and scholars to discuss pressing issues like women's poverty reduction, women in the digital age and girls' education. Through these dialogues, the voices of women in developing countries are prominently presented, steering global governance on women's issues toward greater equity and inclusiveness.

The center has also advanced a number of "small and beautiful" livelihood programs to demonstrate China's commitment to fostering development through concrete action. On August 19-22, 2025, the Genius Mom Friendship Workshop opened in the Lao capital of Vientiane. Female participants from across Laos gathered to learn traditional crafts such as bamboo and rattan weaving from Chinese instructors. Sixteen local trainees produced 128 handicraft items, some of which were sold to Yunnan Province, China. In Pacific Island countries and African countries, the center has been working to promote the growing of juncao, a multifunctional hybrid grass that can be used to prevent erosion and desertification, as a substrate for mushroom farming and as livestock feed. Many local women have gained financial independence through juncao cultivation, which enables them to support their children's education and improve their position within their families.

In today's world, the cause of gender equality still faces severe challenges, and women's development remains constrained by multiple factors in some regions. To narrow the global gender development gap, the international community needs to work together, hand in hand.

The Global Center for Women's Capacity Building is a major platform for contributing Chinese wisdom to the global cause of women's development 

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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