CHINA FOREIGN POLICY

 Source: indianexpress

1.CONTEXT

As Mr. Xi completes a decade in office and begins an unprecedented third term at the Communist Party’s 20th Party Congress which begins on October 16, “qiang guo” has become the short but sharp phrase of choice that sums up his view of China’s place in the world. Past maxims of China’s “peaceful rise” and “biding time, hiding brightness” have been given a quiet burial.

2.CHINA ‘S FOREIGN POLICY

• This inherent contradiction in Mr. Xi's worldview, of a world that is simultaneously China’s to lead and one that is full of external threats has arguably, more than any other factor, shaped China’s diplomacy in the past decade.
• China’s foreign policy appears to be caught between, on the one hand, presenting itself is the saviour of the UN-centered world order and globalization building, as Mr. Xi has christened, “a community of shared destiny” and on the other, pursuing China’s core interests ever more aggressively, (dubbed the ‘wolf warrior ‘approach after a Chinese action hero) regardless of the consequences, from the mountains of Ladakh and the South China Sea to most recently, the waters around Taiwan.

3. RISE OF CHINA

• The launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 was Mr Xi’s signature foreign policy initiative and a platform to stake China’s claim to global leadership.
• More than the infrastructure projects and investments in connectivity, the biggest success of the BRI, which ten years later remains an amorphous and hard-to-define initiative, than an actual project  that  has been in furthering narrative of the inevitability of China’s rise

4.BEIJING CRITICISM

• Beijing is facing criticism for rising debt levels in many partner countries and unsustainability in some of its projects.
• Criticism aside, the fact that indebted partners have only returned to Beijing for more assistance underlines the reality of China’s economic muscle, as well as an apparent push to evolve the BRI away from a hard infrastructure focus to a wider array of financial assistance.
• Consider Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which have received more than $26 billion from China in the past five years, and dealing with financial crises, are turning not only to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) but again, to Beijing.

5.POWER RIVALRIES

• The Deepening of China-Russia ties has been perhaps the clearest marker of the direction of China’s foreign policy in the Xi era.
• As relations with Washington torpedoed during the Donald Trump administration, Beijing has increasingly sought to present itself as the defender of a world order that in its view the U.S. was seeking to wreck.
• Worsening relations with the U.S. have been accompanied by warming ties with Russia, described by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently as being “the best in history”, as well as a declaration in February this year, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which Beijing is yet to condemn, of a relationship with “no limits”.
•  Fixated on its problems with Washington, Beijing has sought to shore up relations with its Southeast Asian neighbors - it has, with its deep economic ties in the region managed to blunt criticism over its militarization of the South China Sea, which during the Xi era has come under greater Chinese control

6.INDIA AND CHINA

• The see-sawing India-China relationship during the Xi decade, from the highs of two “informal summits” in Wuhan in 2018 and Mamallapuram in 2019, to the still ongoing border crisis triggered by the Chinese military’s multiple transgressions that plunged relations to the lowest level since the normalization of ties in the  1980s have reflected the tensions in China’s diplomacy during the Xi period.
• Under Mr. Xi, China has come to view territorial problems with neighbours not as “disputes” to be mutually resolved but as threats to China’s “sovereignty”, thus reducing the space for resolution.
• Relations with India have also been shaped increasingly by the all-consuming focus of Chinese diplomacy on its great rivalry with the U.S., which has become the lens through which Beijing has come to view relations with much of the world, including India