The worldwide ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic have made South-South cooperation even more important, and China is playing a major role in achieving this.

Xiong'an, in China's Hebei province, will be built into a "city of the future," and its planning process demonstrates a systematic exploration of new urban development paradigms.

Having already had more than 850 million people exit poverty, China is making the final push to achieve its goal of eliminating poverty by the end of this year.

Despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the goals of China's current 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) are on course to be achieved, which is good news for the rest of the world.

It is critical that the UN system spearheads the efforts to build and maintain partnerships through a networked multilateral system, which must respond to the hopes, fears and insecurities of the people we serve. And only with that, the future we want can be secured.

Finding a real solution for global cooperation for the immediate goal of addressing COVID-19 carries existential implications far beyond those already associated with the pandemic. The pressing need to cooperate on multiple fronts through multilateralism indicates that not doing so only increases health and security risks for all.