The World According to China. Elizabeth C. Economy

coerce thanks, and bolster CCP legitimacy, for example, caused Beijing’s international standing to plummet and countries to begin considering how to move their supply chains out of China. What began as a diplomatic triumph transformed into a diplomatic debacle.

A Pandemic High

      At China’s annual gathering of its nearly 5,000 representatives to the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing in March 2021, Xi Jinping stated that the country had been the first to tame the coronavirus, first to resume work, and first to attain positive growth. It was the result, he argued, of “self-confidence in our path, self-confidence in our theories, self-confidence in our system, self confidence in our culture. Our national system can concentrate force to do big things.” And he further shared his pride that “Now, when our young people go abroad, they can stand tall and feel proud – unlike us when we were young.”³ Former Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Zhang Chunxian shared Xi’s confidence, asserting that “the phenomenon of China advancing and the US retreating has also been conspicuous” and reiterating an earlier Xi claim that “the East is rising and the West is declining.”⁴

      China’s robust response to the pandemic marked a defining moment in Xi’s almost decade-long drive to reclaim Chinese centrality on the global stage. At his very first press conference as CCP General Secretary in November 2012, he had called for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” – a China that would “stand more firmly and powerfully among all nations around the world and make a greater contribution to mankind.” This was not a new notion. Chinese leaders since Sun Yat-sen, the first provisional president of the Republic of China in 1911, have all invoked the theme of rejuvenation to remind the Chinese people of the country’s past glories and future destiny. As Tsinghua University scholar Yan Xuetong wrote in 2001,

The rise of China is granted by nature…. Even as recently as 1820, just twenty years before the Opium War, China accounted for 30 percent of the world’s GDP. This history of superpower status makes the Chinese people very proud of their country on the one hand, and on the other hand very sad about China’s current international status. They believe China’s decline to be a historical mistake, which they should correct.⁵

      China had experienced a similar burst of national pride during the 2008 global financial crisis. Its economy had emerged relatively unscathed, while the United States experienced its worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. At the time, Vice Premier Wang Qishan told US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson: “You were my teacher. But now I am in my teacher’s domain, and look at your system, Hank. We aren’t sure we should be learning from you anymore.” The official Chinese news service Xinhua captured the zeitgeist: “The changing posture is related to the new reality. The depreciating US dollar, sub-prime crisis, and financial market instability have weakened the American position when dealing with China. In the meantime, China’s high-speed economic growth has massively increased the country’s confidence.”⁶

      Yet the country did not truly capitalize on its economic success until Xi Jinping took the reins of power. Xi is the first Chinese leader to align the country’s capabilities with a vision and strategy to realize the long-held dream of rejuvenation. He and the rest of the Chinese leadership are not satisfied with their country’s position within the international system, the values and policy preferences that the system embodies, how power is distributed, and how decisions are made. They want to reorder the world order.

      To begin with, China’s leaders want to reclaim their country’s centrality on the global stage. A frequent refrain among Chinese officials today is that the last two centuries in which China was not the dominant global economy were an historical aberration. The current period, however, in which China’s economy will soon surpass that of the United States, will mark a return to its rightful place and cement a shift in the two countries’ relative influence on the global stage.

As a new geostrategic landscape emerges, China will be at the center, but with an altered geography that includes Chinese control over contested territories. There is no rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation without reunification. Chinese leaders are particularly focused on maintaining control within their own border regions, including the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the Hong Kong Special Adminstrative Region, and asserting control over areas they consider core interests, such as Taiwan and a vast swath of the South China Sea. China also has outstanding territorial disputes that it wants resolved in its favor with other countries, including India, Japan, Nepal, Bhutan, and South Korea. In 2018, speaking before the National People’s Congress, Xi stated, “It is the shared aspiration of all Chinese people and in the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation to safeguard China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and realize China’s complete reunification … [A]ny actions and tricks to split China are doomed to fail.”⁷ Xi is particularly insistent that Taiwan, which thus far remains out of his grasp, is already part of China: “People on both sides of the Straits are one family, with shared blood” and, as such, “no one can ever cut the veins that connect us.”⁸ Although Chinese leaders often discuss the country’s rejuvenation as part of a peaceful and inevitable trend in international relations, Xi also makes clear that peace and stability will never come at the cost of China’s sovereignty: “While pursuing peaceful development, we will never sacrifice our legitimate rights and interests or China’s core interests. No foreign country should expect China to trade off its core interests or swallow bitter fruit that undermines China’s sovereignty, security or development interests.”⁹

From there, Chinese influence and power extend through the Asia Pacific, which Chinese leaders portray as seamlessly integrated through Chinese-powered trade, technology, infrastructure, and shared cultural and civilizational ties. Xi likens the nations of the Asia Pacific to a “big family,” in which “the region cannot prosper without China” and “China cannot develop in isolation from the region.”¹⁰ While much of Xi’s emphasis is on the value of integration through trade, security also plays a central role. In 2014, Xi proposed the establishment of a new regional security cooperation architecture for Asia, arguing: “In the final analysis let the people of Asia run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia.”¹¹ According to Xi, cooperation could include a code of conduct for regional security, an Asian Security partnership program, and coordination on law enforcement. He reiterated the idea in 2015, when he proposed a uniquely “Asian community with a shared future.”¹² Implicit in Xi’s “Asia for Asians” construct is a much-diminished role for the United States, which is the current dominant power and guarantor of regional security. In the new world order, the United States has largely retreated back across the Pacific, returning to its historic role as an Atlantic power. Wang Jisi of Peking University (PKU) explains the Chinese leader’s views as natural and designed to “solidify China’s role as a regional power.”¹³

      Chinese influence further radiates through the rest of the world via infrastructure, ranging from ports, railways, and highways to fiber optic cables, e-commerce, and satellite systems. In the same way that US, European, and Japanese companies led the development of much of the world’s 20th-century infrastructure development, Chinese companies are competing to lead in the 21st century. The spoils of the competition will be long-lasting, entrenching the winner’s technology, standards, and know-how throughout the world for decades to come.

      Xi Jinping’s ambition to embed Chinese influence globally also extends beyond physical constructs. One of his most dramatic foreign policy innovations has been the promotion of China’s political model and the export of some of its authoritarian elements, such as state control over the internet. Although scholars and officials had engaged in initial discussions of a China model after the global financial crisis – web entries on the topic jumped from approximately 750 in 2008 to 3,000 in 2009¹⁴ – the Chinese leadership at the time rejected the notion of an exportable Chinese model. Then premier Wen Jiabao stated definitively that “China never sees its development as a model…. All countries have their own development paths that suit their national conditions.”¹⁵