Source: Institut Montaigne

The packaging and selling of China’s foreign policy and diplomacy has become a hard task, even for China-based experts who try not to depart too much from the Party-state’s scripts.

The examples glimpsed for the three articles in this issue of China Trends cover only a few of the issues and conflicts that Xi Jinping’s "new era" has brought to the fore. Discourse management – an issue that is often divorced from reality -, the explanations now used for the South China Sea, and the reasons for the deviation from normal diplomatic behavior by several envoys in the past year – are considered here. But other issues could be added: China’s stepped up naval and air actions around Taiwan (which of course is NOT considered an act of foreign policy for China), ever more persistent action in the area of the Senkaku islands, and a violent border confrontation with India around irredentist Chinese claims.

In a broader view of things, China’s rising military strength has so far not led to out of the region confrontations. China has even restrained its "showing the flag" actions around Europe since the 2017 circumnavigation of our continent, and it concentrates on commercial penetration, technology acquisition and…discourse management. Yet even there a grey zone has appeared, with more and more high-profile cyber actions, manipulation of information through social media, including bots. International organizations would seem to be an ideal ground for increased influence from China, since the Trump temptation to withdraw dismays its partners. Our Chinese experts in fact cite this opportunity. But one should never try to second guess what China’s leaders – currently, Xi Jinping – consider to be their own interest. The reality is that China has not made any openings to reforms in these international organizations, even when increased inefficiency or irrelevance threaten their future. Europeans would have liked nothing more than an updated WTO, or a WHO with more enforcement capacity of its (in principle) mandatory guidance. They would also have liked nothing better than progress in emissions and climate mitigation agreements.

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This article was originally published by Institut Montaigne as part of the sixth issue of the Asia Program’s quarterly publication, China Trends.