Ben Phiri’s China study tour reflects growing Global South interest in shared development wisdom

When Malawi’s Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Dr. Ben Malunga Phiri, stood before an audience at Peking University to reflect on the Communist Party of China’s governance experience, he was doing more than delivering a courtesy speech during a ministerial study tour.

He was articulating a sentiment increasingly common among policymakers across the developing world: that China’s extraordinary journey from poverty to prosperity offers not just inspiration, but practical lessons for nations still charting their own path toward transformation.

Phiri’s observation deserves serious attention.

In the space of 77 years, China has transformed itself from a predominantly agrarian society into the world’s second-largest economy, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the process — an achievement without precedent in human history.

That this transformation was accomplished under the continuous, stable leadership of the CPC, through a development approach tailored to China’s own conditions rather than imported wholesale from elsewhere, is precisely what makes it instructive for countries like Malawi.

The minister’s emphasis on China’s effective mobilization of land and human capital as “means of production” reflects a sound reading of China’s development philosophy.

Rather than treating natural endowments and population as passive statistics, China’s development strategy has consistently sought to convert these resources into productive capacity through sustained investment in infrastructure, education, and industrial capability.

This is a lesson relevant well beyond China’s borders.

Equally significant is Phiri’s identification of Malawi’s youthful demographic as a potential dividend. With around 22 million people, a majority of them young, Malawi possesses precisely the kind of human capital that, if matched with the right investments in skills and opportunity, could become a genuine engine of growth — much as China’s own workforce did during its decades of rapid industrialization.

The comparison is apt, and it is encouraging to see a Malawian policymaker framing his country’s demographic profile not as a burden but as an asset awaiting mobilization.

China’s own experience of eliminating extreme poverty in recent years, following decades of targeted, data-driven poverty alleviation work, stands as one of the most closely studied development achievements globally.

It is only natural that visiting officials from Malawi and other developing nations would wish to understand the mechanisms behind this success, from land policy to rural industrialization to human capital development, and consider how such approaches might be adapted to their own national contexts.

Phiri’s call for the international community to support Malawi’s development through trade, investment and tourism — including highlighting the untapped potential of Usisya in Nkhatabay — is a reminder that study tours of this kind are not simply exercises in admiration.

They are part of a broader, mutually beneficial exchange between China and developing partners, one grounded in shared experience and a recognition that no single path to development is universal, but that principles of self-reliance, resource mobilization and long-term planning travel well across borders.

As more developing nations engage with China’s governance and development experience, such exchanges — hosted by institutions like the 127-year-old Peking University, long a center of learning and international dialogue — will continue to play a meaningful role in fostering South-South cooperation and mutual learning among nations pursuing their own roads to prosperity.