A milestone in shaping a better world order

Chinese President Xi Jinping returned home Friday after wrapping up his second visit to Latin America since taking office in March 2013. [Special coverage]

The nearly two-week-long tour not only remarkably consolidated China's relations with Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba, but also opened a new chapter in the win-win cooperation between the Asian giant and the booming region across the Pacific with the establishment of a China-Latin America forum.

Yet that is not all there is to it. The trip, which also took Xi to the Brazilian port city of Fortaleza for the sixth summit of the emerging-market bloc of BRICS, yielded fruit that bears far-reaching global import.

In a purposeful, giant stride forward in their cooperation, the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa decided to set up a development bank and a contingent reserve arrangement.

The significant solidification of the BRICS partnership, along with the substantive strengthening of China-Latin America cooperation, falls in line with the aspirations of the broader developing world for a more equitable and reasonable international order.

The global landscape China and its developing peers strive for is one that features win-win cooperation based on equality and mutual respect. It is neither a zero-sum game of rivalry, nor a system of spheres of influence that places one country in another's "orbit" or reduces one region to some big power's "backyard."

For example, the BRICS development bank is by no means designed to undermine or rival the existing Bretton Woods institutions. It is indeed intended to supplement the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and cover the corners which are crying for help but left untended by the pair due to lack of either resources or willingness.

In the same vein, China's increasingly close interaction with Latin America is never aimed at nibbling U.S. influence and interests in the region or counterbalancing Washington's so-called "rebalancing" to Asia. It is nothing but a natural outcome of the development needs of both sides that poses no threat to anyone.

That is the most resounding message Xi's trip imparts. It is a reaffirmation of Beijing's eagerness for and commitment to a world order that better accommodates the interests of developing countries. And it is a call for global action toward that end.