China party congress

How to read Xi Jinping’s return to the world stage

  • EIU is not convinced that China will be successful in fostering a more benign international environment for itself in 2023, which we believe is the goal of Xi Jinping’s recent diplomatic engagement—involving more than 30 bilateral meetings with world leaders.
  • Our assessment of the structural constraints in China’s relations with the West points to a challenging outlook. These include frictions over industrial policy, human-rights violations, regional security and more. China will stick to a “divide and conquer” playbook in order to frustrate greater co‑ordination between Western powers.
  • Leaders of India and North Korea are notably missing from the list of leaders with whom Mr Xi has recently met. China’s bilateral ties with the former have deteriorated owing to a military stand‑off along the border. Our expectations that North Korea will resume nuclear missile testing in 2023 also poses a risk to China’s efforts to warm relations with Japan and South Korea.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has met with more than 30 world leaders in the past three months. We see this as a purposeful attempt to “make up for lost time” during the pandemic, when Mr Xi shunned in‑person engagements over concerns tied to covid‑19. This came at a price. By contrast to China’s relative isolation, a flurry in US diplomatic activity in 2021‑22 and the Ukraine war have helped to strengthen consensus among Western (and some Asian) governments in regard to national security, technological competition and human-rights concerns pertaining to China. This has exacerbated Chinese anxieties around US‑led efforts to contain China diplomatically.

The extent of Mr Xi’s recent diplomatic engagement confirms our view that China is looking to foster a more benign international environment for itself in 2023, as domestic economic and political risks grow. However, we are not convinced that China will be successful in these goals. Driving this view is our assessment that China’s relations with the West will remain under significant pressure in the next five years, primarily owing to its deteriorating ties with the US. Our expectations also reflect our pessimistic outlook for China’s ties with Taiwan over the next two years, given our expectations that a more pro‑independence candidate will contest (and win) the Taiwanese presidential elections in 2024.  

Keeping things in perspective

As we have repeatedly highlighted, among China’s chief foreign policy concerns are fears that the US will successfully forge an international coalition aimed at deepening technological, economic and diplomatic pressure on China. To some degree, Mr Xi has aimed to counter this by stabilising China’s increasingly strained relations with the West (and aligned governments). In his recent meetings with state-level counterparts from the US, Germany, France, Australia and Japan, Mr Xi not only emphasised efforts to enhance economic and trade co‑operation, but also stronger alignment between China and these countries around shared issues of global security. These included China’s opposition to the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, as well as quiet reassurance that China is not planning an imminent invasion of Taiwan (although this was publicly conveyed by Joe Biden, the US president, rather than by Mr Xi directly). We see China’s more conciliatory tone, particularly in regard to security issues, as reflecting genuine interest in minimising the risk of future military conflict.

Nonetheless, we maintain our pessimistic outlook on the ties between China and the West. Mr Xi’s tense, highly publicised exchange with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, over allegations of the latter’s leaking of meeting details to the Canadian media represents lingering attachment to a more aggressive style of diplomacy. The cancellation of a last-minute meeting between Mr Xi and Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, was also attributed to the latter’s involvement in an emergency G7 meeting over Ukraine, but may have also reflected Chinese anger at the UK leader’s support for Taiwan.

Our assessment of the structural constraints in China’s relations with the West also points to a more challenging outlook for a potential pivot in diplomatic ties. These include frictions over the Ukraine war, industrial and trade policy, national security, human-rights violations and regional security (not only in regard to Taiwan, but also the South and East China Seas, and AUKUS). These tensions will be hard to unwind. Tit-for-tat sanctions remain in force between the US, the EU, Canada, the UK and China over human-rights violations in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, the effects of which have frozen a planned EU‑China investment deal. In addition to existing US export controls and investment bans on China, new US export controls on Chinese chip firms are rumoured to materialise in the coming days. Alongside US lobbying of Japanese and European officials to tighten their own export controls over China, which we expect as part of the EU‑US Trade and Technology Council meetings in December, this will renew China’s feelings of diplomatic hostility.

In the light of these impediments to a strengthening in bilateral ties, we continue to expect China to stick to a “divide and conquer” playbook in order to frustrate greater co‑ordination between Western powers. This strategy will not always be successful, given general Western alignment on issues of mutual concern, such as human rights and the domestic erosion of democratic values in China. However, there is still enough room for these tactics to take root. The recent decision by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to visit China on his own—rather than agreeing to a joint trip proposed by the French president, Emmanuel Macron—has already helped to fuel wider concerns over EU unity. China was happy to exploit these tensions, including by ostensibly offering business deals to German companies in China that were in fact offered to other European firms (and, as we have noted, many of these deals were repackaged from existing agreements).

We also expect China to see value in taking advantage of the EU’s intra‑institutional divide. On the sidelines of the G20, Mr Xi prioritised bilateral meetings with all five EU national leaders that were present (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy). By contrast, he shunned engagement with Ursula Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and Charles Michel, the European Council president (although Mr Xi later received Mr Michel for a state visit on December 1st‑2nd).

Similar dynamics can be also spotted during Mr Xi’s meetings with Asian leaders. While Mr Xi emphasised that Asia must not become an “arena of big power contests”, he hosted the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Ngyuen Phu Trong, and the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, as the first two foreign leaders to meet Mr Xi after China’s political reshuffle in October. The timing of these visits reflected China’s growing concerns over its Asian neighbours being forced to “choose sides” between it and the West—as well as anxieties over the risk that “friend-shoring” will draw China and its Asian neighbours into a zero‑sum game around economic and geopolitical competition. As with Europe, China has also included “sweeteners” in its engagement with Asia. Days after Mr Xi met with Yoon Suk‑yeol, South Korea’s president, China resumed online streaming of South Korean media content. This marked the strongest effort to normalise China-South Korea relations after China unofficially suspended South Korean entertainment content in China, following South Korea’s deployment of the US‑backed THAAD missile defence system in 2016.

India and North Korea: where words remain unsaid

Two leaders are notably missing from the list of leaders with whom Mr Xi has recently met, namely the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong‑un. Mr Modi was present at the Shanghai Co‑operation Organisation meetings in September and at the G20 in November, but he and Mr Xi only held brief informal exchanges at both. Although India and China have ended their 28‑month military stand‑off in eastern Ladakh, security tensions in other sections of the Line of Actual Control (the de facto border) remain high. India and China each continue to maintain around 60,000 troops and advanced weaponry in the Ladakh theatre, and we expect bilateral ties to remain difficult in 2023‑37.

Kim Jong‑un is the only governing communist party leader (among North Korea, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam) with whom Mr Xi has not held a bilateral meeting. Part of this may reflect China’s anxieties over North Korea’s repeated missile tests this year, which threaten to cool China’s warming relations with Japan and South Korea (as the latter two move closer to the US for security reasons). Still, we expect China to play an increasing role in mediating tensions along the Korean peninsula, given our forecast that North Korea will resume nuclear weapons testing in 2023.

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