FUTURE-ORIENTED VISION

In the eyes of former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Xi is "a man of a future-oriented vision."

During his tenure as the UN chief, Ban interacted with Xi on many occasions. One of the most unforgettable, he told Xinhua in a recent interview, was how Xi went to great lengths to promote the ratification of the hard-won Paris Agreement on climate change, a grave threat to humanity that had long been at the top of the UN agenda.

A major breakthrough came when Xi invited Ban and then U.S. President Barack Obama to visit China's eastern city of Hangzhou on Sept. 3, 2016, one day ahead of the opening of the G20 Hangzhou summit.

At a "very unexpected event," Ban recalled, Xi and Obama both presented him with the instrument of ratification of the Paris accord.

"That was historic," said Ban, explaining that such a joint move by China and the United States was "vital" as it galvanized other parties into accelerating the ratifying process. Two months after the Hangzhou event, the deal officially came into effect.

"Had (there) not been President Xi Jinping's initiative, we would not have the Paris climate change agreement even now. Then I really sighed with a deep relief," Ban told Xinhua. "The world was saved."

From then on, China has further intensified its painstaking transformation towards green development. Now Xi has announced that China aims to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, which means the developing country will complete the world's largest reduction in carbon emission intensity in the shortest time in global history.

"There is only one Earth in the universe and we mankind have only one homeland," Xi said at the UN Office at Geneva in 2017. "We should not only think about our own generation, but also take responsibility for future ones."