It is time to say goodbye. Is it not delightful to have friends coming from the South? Our common feeling is that there was never enough time, the room was hot, the energy overflowing, the information rich, the meetings demanding, yet also deeply rewarding, because beneath our feet lies the land of the Global South, and light shines in our eyes, for we share a common ideal.
This is also a moment to give thanks: to all our partner organisations and our media friends from around the world, and to all the friends, teachers, and students who contributed to the forum.
Thank you to the comrades and friends who came from all over the world, travelling thousands of miles to gather at the Global South Academic Forum and share our common stories, scholarship, and feelings. This is our shared forum. The world is small, yet the South is vast.
This year, for the first time, we livestreamed the Global South Academic Forum to audiences worldwide. We hope that the Global South's contribution to the world's fight against fascism can help change the history written by the victors of the Cold War, change the worldview and view of history that prevail under their hegemony of discourse and media, and change the existing world order. We also hope that you will send us your feedback and suggestions on the forum, so that next year's gathering will be even better, and every forum surpasses the last.
The Global South Academic Forum is guided by two mottos: to promote a new order of information and communication for the twenty-first century, and to build a Global South academic community. The Global South's historical practice of resisting imperialism and colonialism from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, through revolution, war, and development, forms the foundation of the Global South's knowledge production and academic community, the foundation of Global South solidarity, and, more than that, the confidence with which we face shared challenges and crises.
The overall rise of the Global South is now unstoppable. Our shared history, and in particular the past eighty years of the Global South's sacrifice and victory in the fight against fascism, is and must be the foundation of a new worldview and view of history, one that breaks the discourse and information monopoly of the Cold War victors, so that the forgotten and suppressed history can return.
Finally, I want to give special thanks to our secretariat, organising committee, and volunteers for their outstanding contribution. Your diligence, dedication, and enthusiasm are the truest spirit of this forum: the spirit of youth, and the spirit of this forum's future. The forum's success rests on your youthful dedication, and we hope that young people from across the Global South will all be able to gather here together, just as our guest from Okinawa wished yesterday when he said he hoped the young people of Okinawa could come and sing and dance here with us.
Film, music, song, and dance: this is the defining spirit of every Global South gathering. It is a dialogue between scholars, an exchange between civilisations, and a bond between hearts. It is also part of China's revolutionary tradition of mass communication, in which the people's art gives theory both its wings and its feet.
See you next year. We hope that before long, the Global South Academic Forum will move beyond Shanghai to other cities across the Global South: Okinawa, as Mr Aragaki Kunio mentioned yesterday; Taipei, as Mr Lan Bozhou mentioned the day before; or Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg, São Paulo, Havana, or even Gaza. This list could go on and on, like a red ribbon stretching across the earth.
Let us work together. We shall meet again before long.
Watch the whole speech here: