Xi Looks to Defy Western Backlash, Boost China's Diplomatic Edge Over U.S.

Under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, China has managed to establish the world's largest diplomatic network, surpassing even that of the United States as Beijing's decades-long effort to forge political and economic relations across the globe has intensified over the past decade.

But this intensification has been coupled with an increasing assertiveness in China's approach that has sparked some backlash, especially in the West and among some key regional players, who have grown wary over Xi's vision for the world's fastest-rising power. This blowback has been significantly amplified by Washington, which is fighting to retain its dominant position on the world stage.

As Xi eyes assuming an unprecedented third term in power ahead of this week's Chinese Communist Party National Congress, one priority amid an array of domestic challenges he will seek to address will be strengthening his nation's foreign policy direction to both best serve China's national interests and counter critical narratives emerging from rival countries.

Min Ye, an associate professor at Boston University's Pardee School of Global Studies, referred to China's foreign policy as a "long-term game," one that is rooted in the domestic political climate.

"Regarding China's conflicts with the U.S., Western Europe, India, and Japan, Chinese ruling elites primarily view those as the result of America's anti-China coalition and mobilization," Ye told Newsweek. "Hence China needs to fortify itself to face the new strategic challenges."

"In short, Xi's third term will continue its unyielding posture when facing the U.S.-allied opposition," she added. "But meanwhile, it will be more active to pursue fragmented collaboration that benefits China's domestic agenda and global public goods."

Ye pointed out that, "while there is a lot of criticism and pushback" within certain foreign circles, "there is evidence to show the success of Xi's foreign policy, for example, the initiatives and ideas that China promoted, the launch and elaboration of Xi's foreign policy ideas" to include partnerships and projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, and the more recently established Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative.

Such concepts continue to receive a warm welcome across large swathes of the globe, especially among developing nations that will likely serve as a focus for Xi's continued efforts to promote China's role in the international community.

"The world is diverse, and many countries do not share the western critical views of China," Ye said. "In the Global South for example, while China is not uniformly popular, the U.S. and its advanced allies may be less popular."

"On balance," she added. "Xi's third term can focus on building on its strength and undercutting the narratives from the West."

For China, the National Party Congress marks one of the most important occasions for policymaking. Held just twice a decade, the event helps to determine key positions, offering a rare insight into dominant trends with the Chinese political system.

And though many foreign observers tend to look at much of these events as preordained given the country's one-party rule and Xi's own consolidation of power, Ye argued that there's far more to the story, including on the foreign policy front.

"China's elites are much more divided than recognized by outsiders," Ye said. "There are critical voices from moderates and globalists, but such criticism is not about the overarching directions of Xi's foreign policy but the hawkish domestic groups."

These elements have only been spurred on by Washington's own aggressive turn on Beijing over the past few years.

"The U.S. and Western alliance against China's technology and trade have mostly undermined China's moderate forces while amplifying the hawks' voice," Ye added. "Nevertheless, the moderates and globalists thus far are still present. They are actively working to improve China's foreign relations and pursue China's regional and global influence."

Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior foreign policy program fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., told Newsweek that "those who want to go into isolation" among China's policymaking elite are "a small number of people," emphasizing that "nationalism does not mean they cut off from the outside world" given the prosperity these relations have brought the country.

But in the face of opposing domestic factions, Li said "how Xi Jinping this navigates this is an excellent question." In addressing this, he said the Chinese leader "can move in two different directions."

To improve China's international links, Li said Xi "will promote a lot of technocrats and financial technocrats into leadership." These include rising stars with Western-educated backgrounds specializing in economics, business and foreign relations and hailing from Xi's "power base" along China's wealthy coastal regions.

In order to contend with increasingly fraught geopolitical challenges, such as the tensions surrounding the self-ruled, U.S.-backed and China-claimed island of Taiwan, however, Li explained how Xi would likely tap into "the other group" of China's upper echelon more associated with "propaganda and military-involved affairs."

"The economic and financial team, this is also the foreign policy team because economic policies are really an issue of foreign relations, so sometimes they can be a driving force," Li said. "But when the crisis occurs, Xi Jinping can shift to this other group, this type of propaganda and military in foreign affairs."

An example of such a crisis was Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to launch a war on Ukraine days after the Beijing Winter Olympics, at which he stood side-by-side with Xi to set out a new paradigm for the world order. Li said this conflict and the international response has created "a huge dilemma" for China due to the potential implications for Taiwan, for which U.S. politicians have pushed for greater political and military assistance.

Li said that Chinese leadership "felt they do not have a choice, they have to go along with Russia, despite that the Chinese public, Chinese intellectuals and Chinese elites may not want to go that direction."

This path has not been without consequence, of which Xi remains keenly aware, and he has been careful not to become a party to the conflict by supplying Putin with weapons or even overt political support. Li said that when it comes to the U.S.-China diplomatic competition, "the most intensive fighting will be in European countries," many of which have rallied behind Kyiv.

This, he said, would explain Xi's "hesitance" in throwing China's weight fully behind Russia in the Ukraine conflict, especially as China and the EU are one another's top trading partners.

China, Belt, and, Road, Initiative, world, map

As paramount leader, Xi ultimately has the final say on how he proceeds on diplomacy with the tools available to him.

He has often discussed his foreign policy intentions in line with what has come to be called "Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy." This ideology is part of the broader "Xi Jinping Thought" that has promoted him to a level of power and influence not seen since the days of Mao Zedong, who drove rival Nationalists into exile in Taiwan to found the People's Republic across the mainland in 1949, and Deng Xiaoping, who led his own economic revolution in opening up China to the international trade market three decades later.

Both men are pivotal to Xi's own brand of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Also central to this vision is a consistent focus on "multilateralism" and "shared destiny" in foreign policy, which is viewed by the U.S. and its allies as a challenge to a post-World War II order further institutionalized after the end of the Cold War.

Despite the negativity generated about Xi's diplomatic direction in the West, Li said that an honest evaluation of Xi's efforts "all depends on who you ask."

"China emphasizes multilateralism, the United States seems to emphasize either unilateralism or bloc politics," Li said. "I think that China's multilateralism probably will resonate very well with many other countries except those bloc countries."

The returns of Xi's soft power investments have been on full display in Xi's interactions with multilateral organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), two non-military groupings that have the potential to substantially influence global affairs. Under Xi, China also continues to enjoy especially strong relations with countries across Africa, South America and large parts of Asia.

And the amount of effort China has spent studying the U.S. itself has also come in handy, something Li said may not bode well for Washington in the long run, as a key to Beijing's rapid ascent has been "a deep understanding of the other country."

"To be honest, I'm a little bit worried about the United States because China puts so much emphasis to study, but the U.S. media coverage of China is still very, very small," Li said. "But China follows what's going on in the U.S."

Biden, for his part, has also sought to instill multilateralism and soft power in his diplomacy, a reversal of the "America First" approach led by his predecessor, Donald Trump, who oversaw a period of declining U.S. popularity abroad and a particularly severe downfall in relations with China. And while Biden's leadership has been praised among allies, he has struggled to achieve this same reception in many other countries.

Against this backdrop, Biden contends with a growing hawkishness among his own country's political elites, among whom Xi's global designs are coming to be viewed with at best skepticism, and even outright hostility.

Li said he found fault with the messaging coming out of both Beijing and Washington.

"I basically reject both, both the Chinese thinking that their intentions will always be benign that goes along even with this more aggressive policy," Li said. "I do not think that it always will be defensive. I don't buy that. I think when you reach to the point that you become a superpower you are doing similar things [as other superpowers] because I do think human nature is a thing."

"And at the same time," he added, "I think that the Western countries have really lost our own confidence in ourselves and sometimes exaggerate China's aggressiveness and particularly think everything's predetermined, which it's not."

The prevailing consensus among China's policymakers is that "they do not want to challenge the U.S. leadership so long that the leadership does not seek to just put China down or make China collapse," according to Li.

"So that's the view, but we probably do not see it that way," he added. "We think that they undermine, they want to compete, they want to replace the United States. At least some people think that, but I think it is highly exaggerated."

Huiyao Wang, founder and president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, also rejected such hawkish tendencies, and said both countries would benefit more from "peaceful competition" akin to the Olympics.

"Let's perform and let's get gold medals and see who can get more, but that's all with the international rules and with the international standards," Wang said. "That's perfect, that's improvement."

"So, we have to concentrate on that rather than containing each other or really bashing each other," he added.

Just as the U.S. has grown increasingly concerned with China's assertive turn, however, Wang said "China is certainly worried" about Washington's shift in recent years.

The downfall in U.S.-China relations coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the rise of politically charged discourse in Washington on both the domestic and foreign fronts. In Beijing, Xi's "Zero COVID" approach has tempered some of his diplomatic efforts — even as he directed the release of billions of vaccines and billions of dollars in assistance around the world — and exacerbated Western concerns regarding China's governance.

"Certainly, the pandemic did not help, and it had hugely reduced the exchanges of dialogue, of people-to-people communication," Wang said. "And on the other hand, the reason why the Western countries have some concerns or worries about China is because China has adopted a different system."

But especially as signs emerge that Xi may soon be easing the strict, far-reaching measures he's adopted to prevent a major COVID-19 outbreak among the world's largest population, Wang argued that the current political system "works fine in China," where the GDP has doubled since Xi took power, and the government has touted lifting some 800 million people out of poverty.

These achievements resound globally, even in the face of Western grievances on a range of matters, from human rights concerns to territorial disputes.

Beijing continues to enjoy a solid array of support in blocking Western-led efforts to criticize China's treatment of the Uyghur minority at the United Nations, including from leading Muslim nations. Save for a series of 2020 clashes along the contested border between China and India, even Beijing's issues with neighboring nations have not turned deadly in decades, and none has approached the level of U.S. military interventions abroad or Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine.

Wang argued that the appeal of the Chinese model would likely only grow over time against the "vicious cycle of rotating parties in power" among Western-style democracies.

"The changing of the government after a few years, the changing of the guards and then the politics are toppled and then restart again, this kind of process is not really suited for the fast-changing world," Wang said. "We need continuity, we need stability, we need a strong leadership."

This approach, he argued, has allowed China to develop not only five-year plans, but even a 100-year plan to envision China's place in the world over the course of a century.

"I think that people will gradually realize that this is not the end of history," Wang said. "We have another development model that works fine for China, and we may have to accept that."