The ruling communist party is omnipresent in decision-making across China’s political apparatus. The all-powerful politburo provides the strategic overview and long-term policy goals of Beijing’s external affairs, including its relationship with the US. Under President Xi, Beijing’s foreign policymaking has evolved from a more pluralistic approach – with various ministries and agencies partially shaping the final decision – into a form of centralized decision-making by President Xi and his lieutenants within the politburo.
As a result, the renamed Central Foreign Affairs Commission, currently headed by veteran diplomat Wang Yi, is now the chief coordinating body for matters related to China’s foreign affairs decisions and deliberation. As Xi pointed out in his own speech at the end of 2023, ‘We must unswervingly uphold the CPC central leadership’s ultimate authority over foreign affairs’. This was on the occasion of the party’s Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs. Such a gathering was the third held under Xi Jinping’s leadership, with earlier iterations held in 2014 and 2018. All three convenings are a clear sign that key Chinese foreign affairs decisions, including the country’s US policy, are no longer determined by the State Council, which reports to the national congress. Instead, it is now the most senior leaders in the communist party central committee that make these decisions. As such, ministries with foreign affairs portfolios that report to the central committee have begun to hold significant sway in shaping Beijing’s ties with the US.
President Xi’s view on China–US relations has shifted from a sense of triumphalism with a belief in the global power shift towards China in 2019 to a more sober evaluation over the last three years.
President Xi’s approach to foreign affairs and to China–US ties is one of the critical components for gauging Beijing’s present policy towards the US. His view on China–US relations has also shifted from a sense of triumphalism with a belief in the global power shift towards China in 2019 to a more sober evaluation over the last three years. Such a fundamental transformation in Chinese outlook is also a direct response to the pursuit of what Beijing sees as a China containment strategy by two successive US presidents.
He Yiting – who is a close adviser to President Xi on party ideology and the deputy dean of the Central Party School of the CPC, where senior Chinese officials are trained – first alerted Chinese leaders to the drastic changes in external attitudes to China. Although he noted that a more limited ‘period of strategic opportunity’ still existed for the country, in a commentary published in the People’s Daily. His view marked a deepening sense of anxiety among senior party leaders, most notably President Xi himself, on Beijing’s volatile relationship with Washington.
Between 2021 and 2022, Xi’s own assessment of China’s external environment became even starker, particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Xi and Chen Yixin, who is the secretary general of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Committee of the CPC central committee, openly referred to ‘three severe shocks’ – the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic recession and intense economic competition with the US – and suggested America’s containment strategy is likely to lead to a protracted war with China. In October 2022, during the 20th party congress, Xi completely abandoned the ‘new type of great power relations’ concept that had previously been used in political strategies, first under Hu Jintao, as an approach to avoid conflict.
The omission of this established concept shows that Beijing has concluded that its fraught relationship with the collective West is here to stay, with little prospect of improvement soon. To mitigate the impact of this deteriorating relationship, China needs to prepare for the worst of decoupling its economy from the West and, at the same time, become more self-reliant in terms of markets and technologies.
Perhaps Xi hinted his clearest thinking on China’s relations with the US on 6 March 2023. During Beijing’s annual ‘Two Sessions’, Xi offered his most honest view on China’s co-existence with the US and the wider collective West: ‘Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China. This has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development’. His own evaluation of China’s external environment has shifted from relatively positive to more pessimistic amid a protracted war in Ukraine and the ongoing challenges for China’s economy because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was also the first time President Xi openly named the US as the leading force in containing China’s rise.
