In his decade in power, Xi Jinping has shaped Chinese foreign policy.
As president of the People’s Republic of China, chairman of the Central Military Commission and, perhaps most important, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi has exerted tremendous influence in his country and on the world stage.
What does this mean for China, the United States and the rest of the world?
Bates Gill, the head of the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, examined Xi’s accomplishments, errors and goals in a new book, “Daring to Struggle: China’s Global Ambitions under Xi Jinping.”
Gill, a policy adviser and author whose work focuses on Asia-Pacific politics, foreign policy and security, especially on China and its relationship with the United States, discussed China, Xi and his book on May 17, with Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Blanchette, himself a China scholar and the author of the 2019 book “China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong,” asked what the Chinese wants most from the world.
“That’s the opening line of the book, is a conversation that I had with a friend, one of the most privileged people in China living in Shanghai,” Gill said. “I asked him that question and the response didn't startle me, but it made me concerned and was a driving factor in wanting to get this book out. He said, ‘We want to be accepted and respected and you'd better get used to it.’”
Gill said the CCP wants to be acknowledged and admired by other nations and needs that respect to retain control of a country of nearly 1.5 billion people.
“We get back to this word acceptance and respect when I think about legitimacy," Gill said. "I think the party is desperate, especially with its international relationships, to be seen as an acceptable form of governance. Not only acceptable, but one that ought to be applauded in many respects because of the accomplishments that the party wants us to believe they've made. And maybe even going further, accepted and respected for what the party could achieve going forward or even what lessons can be learned from them, from the party’s experience that could be applied internationally.
"And this is critically important." he added. "This is a Leninist party state that rules purely on its ability to convince the population that they deserve it. There's no elections. It's purely based under the belief of a relatively small portion of society. [Only] 7% of the Chinese population is Communist Party members, that they get to rule because they're better than anybody else and they know what they're doing."
Gill said Xi Jinping is stressing that the Chinese Communist Party understands the tides of history and is the only choice to guide the country forward.
“These are legitimacy narratives that are extremely important in order to convince two important audiences,” he said. “One is the domestic audience in China that because of these achievements and accomplishments and abilities, the population should continue to grant the mandate of leadership to the party and not only just grant it, but be thankful and appreciative of it.
“And then I think it's also important for an international audience to convince the outside world that the party deserves to be where it is and it ought to be granted the proper respect that it wishes to have,” Gill said.
Gill said China’s leaders want that respect for their goals and missions.
“It means to have their interests respected, to have their claims to territory respected,” he said. “It means to have their aspirations toward leadership and even their aspirations to disseminate their own sort of way of looking at how the world should work. You know, in terms of an acceptance, especially of their form of governance domestically to be accepted and respected, I think that's what China wants."
Explaining China
Blanchette asked what drove Gill to write his book.
“I think what really drew me to it was I was increasingly interested and concerned about the role that the party plays in life in China these days,” he said. “In addition, not just in terms of domestic politics and the economy, but noting that it seemed to be increasingly involved, more active, having a bigger voice, a bigger mandate to pursue foreign policy activities as well.
“I think we do have to link that to Xi Jinping," Gill added. "And we're coming to the 10 years that he's been in power, we know that he wants to continue on for another five, 10, who knows how much longer, so I thought it was an appropriate moment to try and look back on this last decade of power that he’s been there. What are the implications of that going forward for the United States and for the world?”
He framed the book around six fundamental objectives: legitimacy, sovereignty, wealth, power, leadership and ideas.
“I was purposeful in thinking about the book that I wanted it to try to appeal to a wider audience, that it might be useful for people who are just getting into the field, maybe students,” Gill said. “It might be useful for people who are … had never really studied China, but they're well-informed citizens of the world.
“What can you come up with as a five- or six-point set of issues or topics or umbrellas under which you can collect all this? And so these are the six I thought were important,” Gill said. “In some ways the framework isn't staggeringly new. Others have also tried to boil down the essence of China's foreign policy to a handful of key objectives."
Blanchette asked if the book can be seen as detailing a clash of interests between Western democracies and China’s government and how it conceptualizes and holds power, as well as a look at the Chinese quest for respect and acceptance.
“We have been in this intensifying competition with China around economic matters, as China has become a more powerful economy,” Gill said. “I think that was an acceptable kind of competition. We still talk about it in those sorts of terms, at least rhetorically, that we're prepared to engage in that type of competition with China.
“We're learning how to do that and we're figuring out how that can be done,” he said. “More recently, let's say in the last 10 or 15 years, that spectrum of competition has expanded to more increasingly encompass, let's call it, just military forms of competition as we increasingly recognize that our ability to defend what we as Americans see as their interest or what some of our allies and friends in the region see as their interests is coming under pressure as China becomes a more powerful military."
He said ideological competition is probably too strong of a word because it refers to the longtime struggle with the Soviet Union and the Cold War, or it implies that China wishes to impose its form of governance upon other nations.
“I don't think that's really accurate,” Gill said. “But it is a new form of competition that we've never really experienced. Maybe you could go back to the days of Mao Zedong and so on. But in those days, China was a much weaker, a less prominent international player. Now you have this confluence of three major areas of competition at a time when China is the second-largest economy, by some measurements, much more powerful actor and led by a party, not just one man, but by a party, that is absolutely determined to compete on these grounds and to win it.”
China’s massive economic gains in recent years must be part of these discussions, he said.
“It's certainly more powerful economically, militarily, diplomatically than it's ever been," Gill said. “We look across the last 100 years of history, the Communist Party, nearly half of it was chaos, a mess. The fact that they've emerged from that earlier era to where they are today, I think arguably it's pretty clear they're in a better place now than they've ever been to achieve.”
What will happen as the Chinese economy continues to cool? Will that threaten Jinping, or the party itself?
“I think it's still absolutely critical," he said. "And it has been a foundation element of the party's claim to legitimacy. I think it continues to be. But as we know, there are diminishing returns on that. The ability for that aspect of the performance legitimacy narrative can't be sustained forever. Sometime, this economy is going to slow down. It already is. And it's going to become more difficult for that element of their legitimacy narrative to work. But I think the party certainly knows that and are looking to other ways of buttressing their legitimacy, including through economic measures.”
Gill said that explains efforts to develop indigenous innovation, to become less dependent on external sources of capital, of technology, of know-how.
“We'll see where that goes,” he said. “But I think it's an indicator that if this economic narrative is going to continue to work for them, they're going to have to figure out a way to get out of the middle-income trap that they're in at the moment and continue to find new forms of productivity for the economy in order to maintain that economic narrative."
A man of the party
Jinping has been driven to accomplish the goals of the party, which is how he has gained so much authority. Blanchette asked if Jinping was the primary power, or a representative of the CCP as a whole.
“I'm more drawn to the latter interpretation that he's received a mandate from the larger collective of party leadership to take on this strongman role, to pursue this more proactive, assertive policies at home, to promote the party," Gill said. "And it's a value from their perspective to China's success and so on. Obviously, he was chosen for a reason because of the kind of person he is. You couldn't just put anybody into that job to pursue that mandate as we're seeing it unfold."
Blanchette asked Gill if Jinping has made errors and opened himself up for challenges? The “no limits” partnership with Russia, announced Feb. 4 at the Winter Olympics, has been seen as a possible misstep.
“Friendship between the two states has no limits, there are no 'forbidden' areas of cooperation," China and Russia said in a joint statement as the Beijing Winter Olympics opened. Days later Russia invaded Ukraine, and China was criticized for not doing more to ease tensions.
“Premier Li Keqiang told EU leaders that Beijing would push for peace in ‘its own way,’ while Jinping said he hoped the EU would treat China ‘independently,’ in a nod to Europe's close ties with the United States,” Reuters reported.
Blanchette mentioned when President Obama chided China as shirking its international responsibilities and being a free rider, failing to show leadership.
“When China unveiled the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the AIIB, there was pretty vociferous pushback against that,” he said.
Gill said there are very few examples of Chinese global leadership, in part because established powers fear the “new kid on the block with different ideas” trying to change the system.
“And I also I think it's important for us to be honest with ourselves in the West that a part of this concern has to arise from the fact that we ourselves, we're failing or we're having a lot of trouble, let's put it that way,” he said. “You have this combination of, again, will and capacity on China's side to pursue leadership roles and real resources, serious resources to devote to trying to fix some of the real problems at the same time that we ourselves are flailing a bit in trying to generate our own good ideas and sort of reassert our our leadership. So that I think that that explains a lot of the fear that we have.”
It seems as if when China does try to exercise some leadership, the West resists. But he said for the most part, China is hesitant to take those steps now.
Blanchette said the reluctance of China to act in such a manner was very evident at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was in a “fairly good position” by containing the spread of the virus when the United States and other nations were failing to do so.
“It seemed at the time there was a worry that China was really going to sort of push on an open door and assert the leadership in the public health sphere globally. And I never saw that happen,” he said. “And the second is, after Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a month or so where there was this hope or expectation that China was going to step up and play some sort of mediating role. Probably both of those were more aspirational than they were accurate reflections of where China's political system was at the time. But it is interesting.”
Blanchette said it appears when there are controversies, Jinping has others step to the fore, ensuring he will not be blamed directly for any failures. He has done the same during trade discussions with the U.S.
Gill said China has a lot of cash to spend, and it is funding United Nations initiatives, including development programs.
“I think it's characteristic not just of Xi Jinping's leadership, but I think we can go back to other Chinese leaders of attempting something, testing waters, seeing what might work,” he said. “See what doesn't get too much pushback and do it in a more quiet way and then scaling it up.”
Blanchette asked about bilateral security cooperation agreement signed in April between China and the Solomon Islands.
“I want to ask for your assessment of how big of a move was this by China?” he asked. “Does this fundamentally affect the security architecture in your region? Was this a failure by Australia or the United States?”
“I think it's a big deal,” Gill said. “I don't think it is as important necessarily quite yet as some sort of fundamental alteration of strategic balance in the region. I think it's way too early to know if that's what this really is going to end up portending.
“But what I find interesting, as a China watcher, is that this was a pretty bold move for China to do because they would surely know what the response was going to be in the region," he added. "They’ve tended to be relatively reluctant about unilaterally sending their own law enforcement authorities over the borders and other countries. It’s a relatively rare thing."
Gill said the United States doesn’t pay much attention to the Solomon Islands, and although Australia refers to it as being in their “back yard,” they also haven’t been overly concerned or involved.
He also noted that the Chinese remain very sensitive to real or perceived attacks or slights.
“Just taking the Ukraine example," he said. "The second or third sentence out of any official statement these days about what the situation in Ukraine is, ‘Well, don't forget NATO in Belgrade. Don't forget the bombing of our embassy and the spilled blood of Chinese martyrs in our embassy in Belgrade, thanks to NATO.’ This has not gone away. It's always been an element of the party's effort to bolster its position domestically and. As I think Henry Kissinger once said, ‘Even paranoids have real enemies.’”
The book’s opening chapter is titled ''Opportunity'' and it explains where China was when Jinping was being groomed to take the helm of state. The country was ready to achieve major things and take a significant step onto the global stage.
The book's concluding chapter is titled "Challenges" and it details the pursuit of those six objectives Gill framed. They are “substantially responsible for the very pushback and headwinds that they're facing across all six of them,” he said.
“And so it's a fundamental dilemma that now that you've staked your claim to these six important objectives and you put in place a process by which to promote them, in which the party believes is the correct pathway to achieving them, how do you walk back from that?” Gill said. “How do you readjust? How do you rethink or, you know, admit failure and try to take a different direction?
“The way I concluded the book is that that's not going to happen," he added. "I just don't believe that under the current leadership in China, which I think we have to presume … is going to be Xi Jinping, at least for the foreseeable future, for the next five years or so.”
Gill has worked as a scholar, policy adviser and author for three decades, focusing on Asia-Pacific politics, foreign policy and security, with a particular focus on China and U.S.-China relations, according to an online biography.
He has held positions with the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Sydney, and the Australian National University, the biography states.
Gill is the author of eight books and more than 150 other publications, including “China Matters: Getting it Right for Australia,” and this new book focused on China's foreign policy under Xi Jinping.
