"The Chinese side stated: Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. Countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution -- this has become the irresistible trend of history. All nations, big or small, should be equal: big nations should not bully the small and strong nations should not bully the weak. China will never be a superpower and it opposes hegemony and power politics of any kind."
Joint Communique of the United States of America and
the People's Republic of China
(Shanghai Communique)
February 28, 1972
China’s overriding foreign policy objective was to secure energy to fuel domestic growth. Technical shortcomings restricted China from building an ocean-going navy to defend its sea lanes all the way to the Middle East. China remained uncomfortably dependent on US naval power to ensure the safety of its tankers to and from the Middle East.
China seeks to overturn the existing rules-based structure, which has benefitted many nations in the Indo-Pacific region. The United States and its allies seek to continue the free and open environment in the region. China makes comprehensive use of all elements of national power to bend other nations to its will.
Chinese leaders have increasingly sought to assert China's model of authoritarian capitalism as an alternative (and implicitly superior) development path abroad, exacerbating great-power competition that could threaten international support for democracy, humanrights, and the rule of law. The actions of Xi and his advisers (doubling down on authoritarianism at home and showing they were comfortable with authoritarian regimes abroad) along with China's opaque commercial and development practices, reward compliant foreign leaders and can be corrosive to civil society and the rule of law.
China seeks to fortify the narrative that the Chinese governing model was better than that of Western democracies during the pandemic, and it works to manipulate recent hate crime incidents against Asians in America – widely covered in the U.S. media – to promote China as the power best suited to maintain world order. China wants to create a narrative that China, as the big brother, will protect Chinese people and all ethnic Chinese populations.
Beijing was engaged in building a new, multipolar world order. Beijing simply won’t accept anymore a geopolitical order that it did not create. The Beijing leadership under Xi Jinping clearly sees the so-called international “order” as a rigged system set up at the end of World War II. A resurgent China will not indefinitely comply with extraneous “rules”. Admiral Sun Jianguo, Deputy Chief of the Joint Staff Department of China's Central Military Commission, to cut to the chase, at the June 2016 Shangri-La Dialogue, organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). "We do not make trouble but we have no fear of trouble."
Since no other country claims a more powerful link to its ancient past and classical principles, any attempt to understand China's future world role must begin with an appreciation of its long history. For centuries, China rarely encountered other societies of comparable size and sophistication; it was the "Middle Kingdom," treating the peoples on its periphery as vassal states. At the same time, Chinese statesmen - facing threats of invasion from without, and the contests of competing factions within - developed a canon of strategic thought that prized the virtues of subtlety, patience, and indirection over feats of martial prowess.
Xi Jinping penned an op-ed 12 December 2023 for Vietnam's main state newspaper: "Hístory has proved time and again that a country or a region can onlY prosper when it follows the logic of history and keeps pace with the trend of the times. Asia's future is in the hands of no one but Asions. Over the past decade, the Asian people have more and more realized that they can only keep abreast with the trend toward peace, development and progress by jointly acting on the principles of omity, sincerity, mutua| benefit and inclusiveness and promoting the Asian values of peace, cooperation, inclusiveness and integration. They can only further unclog the regiona| economic circulation and upgrade it to deliver more benefit to Asians by staying committed to win-win cooperation, promoting the BRI under the principle of planning, building and benefiting together, and opening their door wider to the world. They can only build a peaceful, tranquil, prosperous, beautiful, amicable and harmonious home in Asia by vigorously working together for an Asian community with a shared future and making one country's development part of the common development of all countries.""
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