In 2015, the United Nations created the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a follow-up to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs were 15-year goals proposed by the United Nations, requiring member states to approach 8 goals between 2000 and 2015.
The MDGs included eradicating extreme poverty, hunger, gender equality, universal primary education, and sustainable development. The main direction was to help developing countries escape poverty, so the themes were poverty alleviation, education, and health. After significant progress was made in various developing countries, the SDGs emerged as an enhanced 15-year goal oriented towards all countries, covering economic, social, and environmental themes.
What? Haven’t heard of the SDGs or MDGs? That’s normal, because for some reason, these goals have been localized. For example, comprehensive poverty alleviation corresponds to SDG 1: No Poverty; guaranteeing the legitimate rights and interests of women and children corresponds to SDG 5: Gender Equality; and various 〇〇 partnerships correspond to SDG 17: Partnership for the Goals.
In other words, what is being implemented is not the SDGs mission released by the United Nations, but characteristic goals with independent discourse power. The advantage is that you can adjust your participation in the SDGs yourself without being required by the public to comply with the details of the SDGs, otherwise there may be promises like joining the WTO in the past, which are often criticized because they were not fulfilled. (For example, both Stephen Ezell and zhouying83213 have studied lists of unfulfilled promises)
Have you heard of them? Then it is possible that you are a Girls’ Frontline player, because in August 2024, Girls’ Frontline partnered with the United Nations’ SDGs and participated in the United Nations’ Midsummer Concert. However, at the time, it seemed that some people had never heard of the SDGs at all, and then randomly found an LGBT X SDGs picture made by an NPO that helps the LGBTQ+ community, and regarded the SDGs as a project to support LGBT. This caused some homophobic and transphobic groups to be hostile towards the SDGs and Girls’ Frontline.
But after all, it is a global project of the United Nations, and many regions mention it in primary and secondary school courses and news reports. Even if it is invisible and invisible in the Simplified Chinese community, as long as you verify it, you will find that there is no LGBT-related content in the SDGs. After someone clarified, the hostility of homophobic and transphobic groups towards the SDGs and Girls’ Frontline disappeared.
PS: On Sina Weibo, there was originally a #GlobalGoals# super topic created by the United Nations, but it has now disappeared, and it is uncertain whether it was censored. The only SDGs video on Bilibili with more than 100,000 views was made by 小Q不是导盲犬, but it only has 180,000 views, which is less than the UP master’s videos in the same period. I don’t know if it is because of traffic restrictions or because the “Sustainable Development Goals” in the title is not attractive.