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China’s foreign policy must rely on opaque and behind-the-scenes coordination organs to work through a large number of bureaucratic agencies of the state, party, and military, whose primary roles are information gathering and the implementation and recommendation of policy. In addition, some new players, such as think tanks, media, local governments, and transnational corporations, have played a variety of roles to influence China’s foreign policy. This chapter examines the evolving role of the paramount leader, the foreign policy coordination and elaboration organs, the bureaucracies, and the new players in the making and transformation of China’s foreign policy. Providing a historical overview, it also observes how President Xi Jinping has centralized and personalized foreign policy making power in the name of strengthening a unified party leadership.

The concluding chapter summarizes the findings and implications for China’s foreign policy, status politics, and signaling in international relations more broadly. Applying the analytical framework of status signaling, the chapter also provides a preliminary analysis of Xi Jinping’s foreign policy in a new era.

This chapter discusses how the Chinese state has strategically responded to a rising contentious public sphere in China. Throughout, the chapter highlights the novelty and significance of these developments. The emergence of a contentious public sphere in China is a remarkable event—one that warrants further investigation precisely because its future remains so unclear. The chapter focuses on the Xi Jinping's leadership techniques and their consequences. It also compares the rationalities of rule underpinning his and the previous administration as it helps to make sense of why the Xi regime has been so aggressive in its attempt to curb the contentious public sphere.

This chapter explains the historical wellsprings and national interests that motivate China’s increasingly ambitious global policies including the Belt and Road Initiative. It discusses how Chinese security concerns, especially those related to Xinjiang, along with broader strategic aims lead Beijing to play a greater role in continental Eurasia. There China’s involvement tends to start with economic and trade relations, but in recent years (and especially under the leadership of President Xi Jinping), China has moved from “keeping a low profile” to “striving for achievement” in ways that stray from “non-interference.” To accomplish its global aims, China is developing new tools of economic statecraft, security, and diplomacy. These are described in detail, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the China International Development Cooperation Agency, a modernized military with greater power projection capabilities, the port facility in Djibouti, private security contractors, the China Global Television Network, and new technologies for political repression.

Xi Jinping’s foreign policy took the assertive turn that had begun under his predecessor and made it more confident, consistent, and ambitious. From the United Nations to the World Trade Organization, Beijing’s diplomats promoted their vision for global order: a world safe for autocratic rule, preferably bankrolled by China. The change of approach led to a global pushback against China, which led many in the country to feel that Xi had overreached and was now raising the costs of China’s continued rise. As Chinese diplomats played catch-up with Xi’s ambitious agenda, they found themselves hobbled by the same limitations and shortcomings that their predecessors had faced for generations. Diplomatic reforms reinforced the demand for military discipline in the country’s diplomatic corps as its international influence expands.

Today’s rulers have two main strategies of self-preservation. With one hand they purchase legitimacy in the eyes of the ruled; with the other hand they keep down anything that can threaten their hold on power. The way the regime deals with society is through an intricate good-cop, bad-cop act.

This chapter evaluates Chinese mistakes in managing US policy by examining three critical junctures of the relationship during the Obama administration. In President Obama’s first year in office (2009), Beijing failed to fully reciprocate Obama’s positive signals for a cooperative relationship. The second juncture came in February 2012, when Vice President Xi’s visit to Washington ignited high-level diplomacy for building a new model of major-country relationship. With the third juncture in late 2013 and early 2014, the relationship once again took a turn for the worse, and it did not recover during the rest of Obama’s tenure. China lacked a productive strategy for managing its relations with the US, and contradictions between its US and Asia policies undercut its goal of building a new relationship with the US.

How did the issue of sending the armed forces abroad and the defence of interests overseas enter and evolve in the Chinese foreign policy debate? The analysis in Chapter 1 of the speeches and documents released by the Chinese leaders and government institutions reveals three interconnected and important changes that have happened since the late 1980s. First, from Jiang Zemin’s New Security Concept to Xi Jinping’s Comprehensive National Security, the management of non-traditional security issues has consistently been the main driver behind the expansion of Chinese military activities overseas. Second, non-traditional security issues abroad changed from being seen as diplomatic opportunities to be considered, especially after the evacuation from Libya of almost 36,000 Chinese nationals, as threats to the regime’s legitimacy and China’s national security. Third, as overseas non-traditional security crises started to be perceived as threats, the orders from the civilian leadership to the foreign policy bureaucracy and, especially, the armed forces to prepare to play a larger role in peacetime foreign policy became increasingly urgent and clear.

This chapter suggests that the national leader, Xi Jinping, has managed to build a new image of political leadership that corresponds with the discourse on masculinity in contemporary times. The archetypal model is constructed with the assistance of Xi’s wife and her modern First Lady image. There are multiple ethnographic vignettes highlighting the popular response to Xi’s policies and performance, and ordinary citizens’ expressions of militaristic nationalism, directed mainly against Japan. In the midst of this, President Xi is shown to have become the epitome of an able-responsible leader who shoulders responsibilities by his tough stance to fight corruption and poverty, and his call for the resurgence of national greatness. Xi’s prolific citations from classical, traditional, teachings to mundane analogies have special appeal on the grassroots level.

China views the decline of the United States and the West as signal to advance its interests, norms, and values on the world stage. But sentiments that one superpower will replace another miss the bigger picture. China’s rise to the commanding heights of the global economy and world affairs is not preordained. Its potential evolution into a global superpower, with a deep presence and strong influence over economic, political, military, and culture abroad, will rather be conditioned by how China behaves toward the rest of the world, and how the world responds. The world’s other large economies, major militaries, technology leaders, and cultural hubs will be significant in shaping the future world. For developed and developing countries alike, there is recognition that economic engagement with China produces strategic vulnerabilities to their own competitiveness and foreign policy and defense autonomy. China will struggle to realize its political, economic, and military global ambitions.

In recent years the Chinese approach toward global governance has shifted beyond a traditional defensive stance and toward more active engagement. This new alignment in Chinese foreign policy suggests a growing confidence on the part of the CCP leadership in China’s domestic governing arrangements as well as its capacity to lead by example in international affairs. New shifts in Chinese discourses, diplomacy, and responses to key global challenges seem to reflect a new global leadership ambition on the part of the Xi Jinping administration. China’s deepening engagement in global governance is a reflection of its rising power and international status as well as a long-standing aspiration to contribute toward the making of international order on its own terms.

Scholars still debate the very notion of a Chinese grand strategy. Nonetheless, recent leadership and policy statements, and their explicit linkage to historical patterns of Chinese behavior, suggest that China may well have the most forthright example of a grand strategy of any major power today. This chapter is composed of five parts in substantiating that claim. First, it survey’s Xi’s contemporary grand strategy. Second, it discusses the historical foundations of Xi’s initiatives. Third, it lists the modern factors that shape and complicate China’s grand strategic efforts. Fourth, it examines the two major contemporary prongs that link the global to the national strategy: the external Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aimed at binding Eurasia to China through infrastructure and commercial development; and the internal efforts to consolidate societal stability with a stronger surveillance state. Together, the chapter argues, these initiatives are designed to mitigate the impact of demographic decline and an S-curved slowdown in the growth of China’s economy, with the goal of buttressing other elements of national power to facilitate China’s re-emergence.

Since 2012, politics in the People’s Republic of China has been remade. Both institutional and rhetorical changes characterize this neopolitical “new normal,” which coincides with Xi Jinping’s rise to the top of the party-state hierarchy. But these changes extend well beyond Xi himself. Political authority has been centralized and folded back into the Chinese Communist Party, while complaints, self-criticisms, and confessions have begun to air publicly. Repression and humiliation have been used against critics as wide-ranging as Hong Kong booksellers, feminist activists, and rights lawyers, among others. Most ominously, the government has embarked on a massive detention and reeducation scheme in Xinjiang, with the number of those interned estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands or even surpassing a million. This chapter investigates China’s neopolitical turn—its limits, sources, and implications.

Chapter 6 explores developments in Asia’s regional architecture under the Trump government and the rising influence of China under Xi Jinping. The chapter draws explicit connections between Asia’s current regional architecture and the future of Asian order. It makes the case that institutions in Asia, particularly US bilateral alliances, are more resilient than presumed. It then draws on the historical institutionalism and regime complexity literatures to describe how the complex patchwork both complicates and advances institutional cooperation. The chapter concludes by offering a more optimistic outlook regarding the complex patchwork and its potential for improving regional governance.

The chapter traces the changes continuity and change in China’s international relations under Xi. Continuity in terms of building on pre-existing trends evident before his assumption of power, and change in the way that these were accelerated and concentrated after 2012. In particular, it focuses on how reforms implemented under Xi were designed to overcome fragmentation in decision making, and allow for ‘joined-up’ strategic thinking that serves both domestic and international interests. Through a close analysis on Xi’s thinking on international relations (and Chinese scholars’ study of it), it establishes a ‘conceptual flow’ in Xi Jinping’s thinking that links philosophic starting points through action to objectives. It then outlines ten broad ‘strategic strands’ that have been at the heart of Xi’s agenda for global change.

Open Innovation in China is greatly affected by the powerful role of the Chinese Communist Party. Xi Jinping thought introduces a tension between the ‘decisive role of the markets’ to allocate resources and stimulate innovation across the economy and ‘the leading role of the Party’ to guide the development of innovation in the most important industries. This tension plays out differently in different industries in China. In high-speed rail, the tension has been adroitly managed, creating an organization with world class innovation capabilities that is a peer with the best of the rival firms in the world. In automotive and semiconductors, however, the tension has been more problematic. The state-owned enterprises are well aligned with the Party, while it is the privately owned companies and foreign companies that are driving innovation.

The case that China must be contained rests on the premise that it is – or is about to – engage in a coercive expansion of its influence in ‘Central Asia, the South China Sea, the internet and outer space’ and it is only a matter of time before China tries ‘to push the United States out of the Asia-Pacific region, much the way the United States pushed the European great powers out of the Western hemisphere in the 19th century’. China’s rise is cast as dangerous for the security of its neighbours and world peace, with the only guarantee of regional and global stability the maintenance of the leading role of the US, particularly in Asia itself. This chapter examines the truth of these claims in the light of the China’s own explanation of the direction of its foreign policy. It argues that while China’s foreign policy has become more emphatic in pursuing its international interests, especially relating to trade and energy security, that there is a great deal of difference between greater confidence in pursuing China’s national interests and a new aggressive stance.

In China, the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s rules govern the terms and tenures of party and state leaders. This chapter recounts the evolution of the party-state’s term-related rules from the Mao (1949–78) to the Deng (1980s–90s) and post-Deng (1990s–2012) eras. Formal rules developed from the 1980s through the 2010s to govern the tenure of party leaders and officials, which led to formal and predictable elite turnovers within the system, up to its very top level. By the turn of century, the paramount leader, who concurrently serves as general secretary of the Party, state president, and chairman of the Central Military Commission, had been brought under the same set of rules. The current president Xi Jinping appears to have opened a new era in which the rules governing the tenure and replacement of the top leader will have to be rewritten. We examine the various possibilities lying ahead.