914467

research-article2020
BPI0010.1177/1369148120914467The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsFoot and King

Special Issue Article

The British Journal of Politics and

China’s world view in the Xi International Relations

1­–18
© The Author(s) 2020
Jinping Era: Where do Japan, Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Russia and the USA fit? DOI: 10.1177/1369148120914467
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120914467
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi

Rosemary Foot1 and Amy King2

Abstract
A ‘world view’ perspective is deployed to show President Xi Jinping’s dominance of China’s policy-
making environment and the ideas that he and his leadership group have tried to promote. We use
this framework to explain China’s relations with three major countries that are crucial to manage
successfully in order for China to consolidate its global and regional ambitions – Japan, Russia and
the United States. The article shows how the degree of alignment between China’s and these
great powers’ world views influences their levels of resistance or acceptance of the policies that
flow from Beijing’s world view. We find that, while the United States and Russia lie at opposing
ends of the resistance-acceptance spectrum, Japan represents an important middle ground along
it. This finding encourages movement away from the overly simplistic dyadic depictions of global
politics associated with ‘new Cold War’ or ‘authoritarian versus liberal’ labelling.

Keywords
China-Japan, China-Russia, China-USA, China’s world view, cognitive and normative approaches,
global order, ideational approaches, Xi Jinping

Introduction
The dramatic changes in China’s material and political status since the advent of ‘Reform
and Opening’ in late 1978 finally seem to have resulted in the Chinese leadership’s clearer
articulation of its intention to reshape global order in ways that better reflect its world
view, and its need to reorder its relations with countries of importance to it. As the Party’s
General Secretary and President, Xi Jinping, put it during his lengthy 19th Party Congress
speech in October 2017, the country’s development had reached a new ‘historical junc-
ture’. The Party had propelled China ‘into a leading position’ in all major areas of policy,
and had ensured the country had ‘crossed the threshold into a new era’ (Xi, 2017b: 9).
In this contribution to the Special Issue, we make the following two main moves: first,
we place President Xi Jinping’s world view at the centre of our exploration of some of the
foreign policy consequences of this perceived change in China’s status. Second, we relate

1
St Antony’s College and Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
2
Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

Corresponding author:
Rosemary Foot, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 62 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6JF, UK.
Email: [email protected]
2 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)

that world view to China’s relations with great powers – that is, those states that have the
greatest influence over the trajectory of China’s objectives in world politics – choosing
Japan, Russia, and the United States because Beijing views them as crucial to consolidat-
ing China’s place in this ‘new era’ of international relations (IR). Japan stands as China’s
main economic and political competitor at the regional level, and its alliance with the
United States also enables Tokyo to compete with Beijing in strategic terms. Yet, Japan
has also been important to China as an investment and trading partner, and bilateral coop-
eration holds out the prospect of thwarting any US desire to isolate or contain China.
Putin’s Russia offers China’s Xi a close strategic relationship, together with economic
and military ties that help China to consolidate its position as a strong state. Russia also
plays a role in constraining US power and in bifurcating US attention to two states that
Washington, in its national security documents, has identified as its most significant stra-
tegic rivals. The relationship with the United States, the most complex of the three for
China, is key to China’s global and regional ambitions. Governments around the world,
including China and the United States, typically describe that bilateral relationship as the
most significant in world politics. Beijing recognises that Washington remains the most
capable of the three states – militarily, economically, and politically – of frustrating
China’s return to greatness. Successful management of the relationship is crucial to
Beijing, but the deterioration in ties seems to be accelerating.
Our analytical approach allows us to make two key contributions to the literature.
First, it is puzzling as to why any single policy initiative, whether it be Chinese invest-
ment in developing countries, or island construction activities in the South China Sea,
generates resistance from some states in the global system but acceptance from others. In
demonstrating how these individual policies derive from Xi’s underlying world view, we
show that the degree of US, Russian or Japanese resistance or acceptance lies in the extent
to which Xi’s world view aligns with their own. Second, by analysing collectively China’s
relations with these three great powers, we move beyond the overly simplistic dyadic
depictions of global politics that dominate the IR literature generally, and the study of
China in particular. Indeed, since the advent of the Xi Jinping government, considerable
attention has been devoted to analysis of the China-US relationship, and to a lesser extent
the China-Russia relationship, with that debate often seeking to prove or disprove the
emergence of a ‘new Cold War’, or the rise of authoritarian states seeking to overturn the
liberal international order. We suggest that this is the wrong starting point. Instead, our
approach allows us to conclude that a more complex spectrum exists in China’s relations
with the United States, Russia, and Japan. While the United States and Russia exist at
either ends of this spectrum, Japan represents an important middle ground along it, and is,
most likely, an exemplar of many Asia-Pacific states whose relations with China similarly
defy ‘new Cold War’ or ‘authoritarian vs liberal’ labels.

A world view perspective

More than a decade ago, Jeffrey Legro (2007) highlighted the challenge that China posed
to IR’s two dominant analytical approaches, realism and liberalism, both of which offered
radically different conclusions about a rising China’s future behaviour. Rather than focus-
ing on power- and economic interdependence-based explanations, Legro (2007: 515)
instead advocated a focus on ‘intentions’ or those ‘dominant ideas’ within China that
shaped ‘enduring patterns of national behaviour’. This article takes up Legro’s call, and
the wider social turn that is evident in the study of IR, by exploring China’s relations with
Foot and King 3

these three great powers through the lens of Xi Jinping’s ideas about the world. Ideas
allow us to examine how key decision-makers understand and operate in the world: how
they define their goals and interests, how they wrestle with and attempt to solve policy
problems, and how they communicate their policies to difference audiences (King, 2016:
7–8). Our analytical framework divides ideas into the following two types: background
‘world views’ and foreground ‘policy proposals’. At the background level, world views
are underlying normative and cognitive assumptions about how the world should or does
work. World views may be derived from ideology or from a country’s past experiences,
for instance, and shape behaviour or policy in a deep, constitutive way by constraining the
range of policies considered possible or legitimate. At the foreground level, policy pro-
posals are ideas that flow from background world views. These foreground ideas exert a
more direct, causal effect on actual policy decisions and behaviour by providing specific
solutions to problems or goals defined first at the background level (Campbell, 1998;
Goldstein and Keohane, 1993; King, 2016). In our analysis of Xi’s world view and policy
proposals, we are not attempting to ‘get inside’ Xi Jinping’s mind, or to mine his biogra-
phy as a way to understand his personal beliefs. Rather, our source for these ideas derives
from Xi’s speeches, writings, and other official records.
Legro’s call is even more pressing in the era of Xi Jinping because there is a closer
alignment between Xi’s ideas and the construction of China’s policy thinking and behav-
iour than was the case during his predecessors’ period in office. Earlier, the Chinese
government had adopted a collective leadership model that was characterised by creep-
ing decentralisation of foreign policy decision-making (Economy, 2018: 9; Hu, 2019: 3).
Xi recognised both a weakening in the Party’s stature as a result of high levels of corrup-
tion as well as the widespread adoption of capitalist economic principles, and an unwill-
ingness to recognise that the strategic opportunity for China to rejuvenate – defined in
what follows – was closing. Once in power from late 2012, Xi made haste to establish
himself as China’s ‘core leader’, with greater control over foreign and domestic policy-
making. For example, Xi chairs the Central Military Commission, and has placed him-
self in charge of a swathe of Leading Groups, including those most important in foreign
affairs and national security. By his second term, ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with
Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ had been elevated into China’s written constitu-
tion, giving Xi a status in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history not enjoyed by any
leader since Mao Zedong. Xi’s hold on power became even further entrenched when he
abolished the two-term limit for the state presidency in March 2018 (Economy, 2018:
9–18; Hu, 2019: 13). Finally, Xi has paid considerably more attention to foreign policy
than either of his predecessors (Wang, 2019: 15). Whereas, they stuck closely to Deng
Xiaoping’s maxim of maintaining a low profile in international affairs, Xi quickly has
initiated a host of work conferences and high level meetings to set out his personal vision
for Chinese foreign policy; has made dozens of overseas trips; and has ensured that
China has been an active participant in multilateral institutions and platforms spanning
the region and the globe (Hu, 2019: 10).
In observing Xi’s ideas, we do not suggest that he represents a complete break with
China’s past, for elements of his ideas have powerful antecedents. However, Xi is distinc-
tive in two ways. First, Xi’s world view is a confident one. Whereas, past Chinese leaders
have placed relatively more emphasis on China’s victimisation at the hands of foreign
powers (see, for example, Callahan, 2010), Xi instead places emphasis on China’s ‘great
revival’, ‘renewal’, or ‘rejuvenation’, which he sees as a return to China’s glorious past and
its leading role in world affairs. Indeed, Xi sees China as being on the cusp of achieving
4 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)

that leading role. In his speech to the 19th Party Congress, Xi (2017b) declared that China
‘has stood up, grown rich, and is becoming strong’, and that China could offer ‘Chinese
wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind’. Following that
speech, a more obvious domestic economic slowdown, occasioned by efforts to reduce
Chinese debt levels and reform lax lending practices, as well as by the effects of the
US-China trade dispute, has reduced Xi’s confidence. Yet, while he has noted the new risks
and challenges facing China, Xi has continued to argue that global historical trends favour
China and that, as a great country, China ought to have ‘lofty aspirations’ (xiongxin zhuang-
zhi) about its role in world affairs (Medeiros, 2019; Xi, 2018).
Second, Xi’s ideas are distinctive because of the level of attention he and his leader-
ship team have devoted to conceptualising how Chinese diplomacy can help China to
achieve national rejuvenation. At the 2014 Foreign Affairs Work Conference, Xi called on
China to ‘develop a distinctive diplomatic approach befitting its role of [sic] a major
country’ (quoted in Swaine, 2015: 5). Since then, and under the banner of, variously, the
‘Theory of Major Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics’ or the system of ‘Xi
Jinping diplomatic thought’, Xi and his senior leaders have put forward a series of new
concepts that are not only designed to guide Chinese foreign policy but, even more impor-
tantly, are designed to ‘inject’ more Chinese discourse into international affairs (Wang,
2017b, 2019: 19; Yang, 2018).
Rather than simply listing each of these new concepts in turn, instead we generalise
across their range, identify what we see as the key cognitive and normative assumptions
underpinning them, and illustrate how they have been made operational through discourse
and empirical observation of China’s policy behaviour. The following three major themes
are prominent: developmentalism, security partnerships, and the idea of sovereign equal-
ity. They have been emphasised in Xi’s world view not only because they represent the
Chinese leadership’s most salient cognitive and normative assumptions about how the
world does or should work, but also because they are seen as the best means of advancing
China’s interests in the world. That is, in analysing Xi’s world view and policy proposals,
we take the position that ideas are phenomena that can be both deeply held (for instance,
as a result of ideological conviction or lessons learned from China’s historical experiences)
and deployed instrumentally by policy makers seeking to advance China’s interests. In
what follows, we explore each of these three dimensions of Xi’s world view, and apply
them to Beijing’s relations with the major states of Japan, Russia, and the United States.

Developmentalism
Background cognitive and normative world view
A core role for development, more than any other concept, underpins Xi’s approach to
domestic and foreign policy. Certainly, the idea of development – understood through
Marxist-Leninist ideology and Chinese observations of past rising powers – has been a pow-
erful driver of CCP policy since the Party came to power in 1949 (King, 2016). However, Xi
has enhanced this focus on development, arguing at the 19th Party Congress that the ‘princi-
pal contradiction’ facing China at the domestic level was imbalanced and inadequate devel-
opment, and Chinese citizens’ need ‘for a better life’. Consequently, Xi (2017b) explained
that ‘development is the underpinning and the key for solving all our country’s problems’.
Moreover Xi, more than his predecessors, has projected development as not simply a domes-
tic policy agenda, instead articulating how development can serve as the linkage between
Foot and King 5

China’s domestic and international policies. Cognitively, he understands China’s economic

development as contributing to ‘the development of the world as a whole’ (Xi, 2013c; see
also for example, Xi, 2017b, 2017c), a justifiable claim in some respects given that, even
under slowing domestic growth conditions, China remains the world’s largest contributor to
global economic growth (International Monetary Fund (IMF), 2018).
Xi has also added a strong normative dimension to his view of development, arguing
that China’s development will be pursued in line with the ‘common development’ of other
countries. This idea is premised on Xi’s (2013b) view that ‘sustainable development’ is
not possible ‘when some countries are getting richer and richer while others languish in
prolonged poverty and backwardness’. Though having its origins in China’s own histori-
cal experiences and thinking, Xi’s normative emphasis is clearly designed to appeal to the
Global South. Indeed, language about ‘common development’ has been a key theme in
Xi’s speeches to foreign audiences since 2013, and to developing country audiences in
particular. In landmark speeches in Kazakhstan and Indonesia during his first year in
office, Xi (2013d, 2013e) introduced the world to his plans for the Belt and Road Initiative
(BRI), and argued that China shared the same ‘strategic goals’ as fellow countries in
Central Asia and Southeast Asia, namely, to achieve national rejuvenation and strength
through the pursuit of economic development. This idea was further elaborated at the
2015 Bo’ao Forum for Asia, where Xi (2015) described a ‘community of common des-
tiny’ as one in which ‘the interests of others must be accommodated while pursuing one’s
own interests, and common development must be promoted while seeking one’s own
development’. Xi (2015, 2017b) has also consistently argued that China’s strategies for
development would be ‘open and inclusive’, rather than ‘closed’ and ‘exclusive’, thereby
trying to persuade its intended economic partners that China will not pursue economic
growth and development at the expense of developing countries.
Yet, there is a harder edge to Xi’s developmentalist world view, for it is one that paints
China’s approach to development as sitting in competition with approaches offered under
a US-led order. For instance, at the 2015 Bo’ao Forum, Xi defined his vision of a ‘com-
munity of common destiny’ and ‘win-win cooperation’ in terms of how it was distinct from
‘old mindsets’ that offered ‘zero-sum’ and self-interested approaches to development.
Instead, Beijing would be ‘shouldering greater responsibilities for regional and world
peace and development, as opposed to seeking greater monopoly over regional and world
affairs’ (Xi, 2015). Xi’s sub-text is that China’s vision will be more beneficial to develop-
ing countries than that offered by older, established powers. Moreover, under Xi, the
Chinese leadership has championed multiple paths to development for developing coun-
tries, and a development-centric view of human rights, contrasting this with a western
emphasis on neoliberalism and civil and political rights. In 2013, Xi (2013a) argued in
Tanzania that ‘there is no one-size-fits-all development model in the world’, while Wang
Yi (2017c) has argued that the new world order ‘cannot be just dominated by capitalism
and the West’. By the time of the 19th Party Congress in 2017, the Chinese leadership was
not only advocating multiple paths to development, but somewhat contradictorily also
endorsing the Chinese development model – socialism with Chinese characteristics – as a
‘new path’ to modernisation for ‘all developing countries’ (Wang, 2017c; Xi, 2017b).

Foreground associated policies

Investment in developing countries, particularly through the funding of infrastructure,
has been the chief policy manifestation of Xi Jinping’s commitment to development. This
6 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)

type of funding serves Xi’s domestic and foreign policy agendas, allowing the Chinese
leadership not only to solve the domestic dilemma of what to do with excess domestic
capacity in the heavy industry and construction sectors, but also allowing China to furnish
its global leadership ambitions by supplying a key public good – infrastructure – for
which there is considerable global demand. Xi’s government has invested in developing
country infrastructure through the much touted BRI and its associated ‘Silk Road Fund’,
as well as through a range of Chinese state and commercial banks, and through multilat-
eral platforms such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New
Development Bank (NDB; formerly known as the BRICS Development Bank).
In the United States, both the Obama and Trump administrations have viewed Xi’s
enthusiasm for infrastructure investment as a means for China to project its influence
around the globe in ways that are inimical to US interests. The Obama administration
tried unsuccessfully to pressure its major allies not to become AIIB members by ques-
tioning the AIIB’s governance, and its environmental and social lending standards
(Reuters, 2015b). Criticism has deepened under the Trump administration, with Vice
President Pence (2018) arguing that China is using ‘debt diplomacy’ to expand its influ-
ence among developing countries. US analysts and former officials outside the Trump
administration have echoed Pence’s concerns about ‘debt dependencies’ among target
states; have emphasised the lack of environmental, labour, and financial standards
within BRI projects; and have argued that China is investing in infrastructure such as
ports that, while ostensibly commercial, will enhance Chinese military capabilities in
ways that could undermine America’s own ability to project power globally (Schell and
Shirk, 2019: 34).
The harder edge of Xi’s developmentalist world view has also deepened tensions in the
US-China relationship. Xi has labelled China’s approach to development as ‘open’,
‘inclusive’, and ‘sustainable’ in part as a way to present China as a counterpoint to an
increasingly protectionist and isolationist Trump-led United States. At the 2017 World
Economic Forum in Davos, Xi (2017a) depicted the tremendous successes of China’s
development path since the embrace of market reforms and opening-up in 1978, and
called for an evolved international economic order in which the benefits of economic
globalisation were shared more equally both within societies and around the globe. Xi’s
views have particular global appeal at a time when the politico-economic model offered
by the United States has been tarnished by the global financial crisis and there is rising
inequality within developed economies. Yet, as US critics have pointed out, Xi’s rhetori-
cal commitment to ‘openness’ is inconsistent: China expects greater economic openness
on the part of other states in trade and foreign investment than it is willing to commit to
itself. Moreover, Xi’s championing of the market sits in tension with his government’s
state-led investment in advanced science and technology, the more prominent role he has
given to state-owned enterprises in the Chinese economy, and Chinese theft of foreign
intellectual property (Schell and Shirk, 2019: 9, 16–17).
China has had more success in lining up qualified support for its development pol-
icy initiatives from Japan. In June 2017, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared
that Japan was ready to extend cooperation with the BRI and the AIIB, providing that
the infrastructure funded through these mechanisms is ‘open to use by all’, is procured
through transparent and fair processes, is economically viable, and does not cause
harm to debtor nation’s finances (Abe, 2017). Moreover in 2018, Japan agreed to
jointly develop 50 infrastructure projects with China. This announcement signalled the
first substantial turnaround in the China-Japan relationship which, since 2010, had
Foot and King 7

been marred by tensions in the East China Sea and the historical legacy of the Second
World War (Kawashima, 2018). China’s improved ties with Japan were necessitated in
part by Xi’s fears about the domestic security and social stability consequences of its
economic slowdown; Japan remains China’s third largest trading partner and the most
important source of foreign firms operating in China by some margin. Xi’s efforts to
engage Japan on the BRI also found favour with Abe, who, unlike his US ally, has
combined cooperation with competition as an attempt to make BRI conform to inter-
national standards or, in Abe’s words, a ‘common frame of thinking’ (Abe, 2017).
Supportive of the idea of an ‘open’ and ‘inclusive’ economic order, Abe has cautiously
agreed to pursue joint infrastructure projects with China, while simultaneously increas-
ing Japan’s own regional investments in infrastructure through the ‘Free and Open
Indo-Pacific Strategy’ and through trilateral cooperation with the United States and
Australia (MoFA, Japan, 2018; Yoshimatsu, 2018: 723, 730). In so doing, Japan has
sought to differentiate its ‘high quality’ approaches to infrastructure from those offered
by China, and to reclaim Xi’s language of ‘openness’ and ‘inclusivity’ for Japan and
the states with which Japan is aligned.
Of the three great powers, Russia enjoys the most formalised institutional cooperation
with China’s infrastructure and development initiatives. As a fellow NDB founding mem-
ber, Russia shares Xi’s vision for reforming global governance architecture, welcoming
the rise of emerging market countries, and championing the World Trade Organisation as
the ‘cornerstone of modern international trade’ (Xinhua, 2016). Russia also became a
‘prospective founding member’ of the AIIB in 2015, and now holds the third largest vote
share in the Bank after China and India. Since 2015, Russia and China have held multiple
rounds of talks to negotiate formal linkages between the BRI and Russia’s own ‘Eurasian
Economic Union (EAEU)’ and the two sides have signed a host of bilateral trade, finance
and energy agreements since 2016 (Christoffersen, 2018: 447).
However, formal cooperation between Russia and China belies an element of competi-
tion in the bilateral relationship over Xi’s infrastructure plans. Russian President Vladimir
Putin sees the BRI as an attempt by China to extend influence among Russia’s closest
neighbours, to secure a ‘strategic rear area’, and to obtain a supply of industrial raw mate-
rials in Russia’s Far East, and is uncomfortable with China taking the lead on the integra-
tion of the BRI and EAEU. Subsequently, Putin has sought to counterbalance China’s
BRI by putting forward his expansive though still nascent proposal for a ‘Greater Eurasian
Partnership’; by pursuing closer economic ties with Japan in order to diversify Russian
sources of foreign investment; and by taking care to portray China and Russia as ‘equal
negotiating partners’ on the BRI and EAEU (Christoffersen, 2018: 444–450).
Beyond infrastructure, development has also become central to the Chinese leader-
ship’s view of human rights and the specific policies it has pursued in this domain. In
2017, while hosting the first ever ‘South-South Forum on Human Rights’, Foreign
Minister Wang Yi identified the right to development as ‘the primary human right for
developing countries’ (Wang, 2017d). At the UN’s Human Rights Council in 2017, for the
first time, China introduced a resolution entitled ‘the Contribution of Development to the
Enjoyment of all Human Rights’, a resolution that split the Council with western states
voting against (A/HRC/RES/35, 2017). Importantly, China underpins the priority given
to development with an argument that success depends on ensuring domestic social sta-
bility and an emphasis on state-identified collective, predominantly economic, rights
rather than individual rights (Xi, 2017c). Beijing has, therefore, championed goals such
as the eradication of poverty and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as a way
8 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)

of boosting domestic stability. In its view, development is the fundamental right from
which others may flow (Foot, 2016b: 940–941; Foot, 2020). In this stance, China lines up
with Russia, which shares China’s position in calling for more emphasis to be given to
economic development rights, and opposing evolution of the norm of ‘the Responsibility
to Protect’ (R2P) in such a direction that would allow large-scale human rights abuses to
be used as an ‘excuse’ for interference in countries’ internal affairs (Xinhua, 2016).
China’s linkage of human rights and development also finds some favour in Japan,
where the limitations posed by Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution and by strong domestic
attachment to the norm of pacifism, have led Japan to focus on ‘human’ and other non-
traditional forms of security in its foreign and security policy since the 1990s. Importantly,
in terms of Tokyo’s and Beijing’s alignment in this area of policy, Japan’s interpretation
of ‘human security’ emphasises ‘freedom from want’ over ‘freedom from fear’ with Abe
placing emphasis on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in his ‘Proactive
Contribution to Peace’ policy (Abe, 2015).
However, China’s position sows even further divisions between it and the United
States, and a distinct mismatch in the United States and Chinese discourse on human
rights. While Xi’s China promotes improved standards of living, access to clean drink-
ing water and other sustainable development goals in its human rights agenda, the
United States instead homes in on Xi’s failure to protect civil and political rights,
describing China as ‘more explicitly in opposition to liberal values’ under Xi’s tenure
as a result of creeping authoritarianism, imprisonment of human rights lawyers, and the
incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang (Schell and
Shirk, 2019: 9; Pence, 2018).

Security partnerships
Background cognitive and normative world view
The security framework developed under Xi relates closely with the leadership’s beliefs
about the positive role that development can play in generating not only regime security
but also state and international security. Although protecting the security of the regime is
depicted as important to many of China’s developing world partners (as well as to Russia),
it is also important to a one-Party system like China’s that spends more on internal secu-
rity than on external security, and which views economic development as the trade-off
under which China’s citizens continue to tolerate one-Party rule. Sound development
practices are understood, then, as both a source of domestic political security and social
stability, as well as crucial to the establishment of international peace and security. As Xi
put it in May 2014, for example, ‘development is the foundation of security, and security
the precondition for development’, adding for good measure that for security to be sus-
tainable and ‘durable’ it was necessary to ‘focus on both development and security’. In
reference to the needs of Asia, Xi explained, ‘[f]or most Asian countries, development
means the greatest security and the master key to regional security issues’ (Ferchen, 2016;
Xi, 2014). In a 2018 article, state councillor Yang Jiechi noted that China’s objective of
building a community of shared destiny was not only aimed at achieving the world’s com-
mon development, but also a strategy to safeguard world peace (Yang, 2018).
Xi has also laid emphasis on China’s ‘new security concept’, an idea first outlined in
the late 1990s, but given more attention after 2014 because of its particular focus on the
creation of a new security architecture for Asia. As Xi put it,
Foot and King 9

We believe that it is necessary to advocate common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable

security in Asia. We need to innovate our security concept, establish a new regional security
cooperation architecture, and jointly build a road for security of Asia that is shared by all and
win-win to all.

While the translation of this next phrase is under debate (Jakobson, 2016: 220), Xi
(2014) added: ‘in the final analysis [or ultimately], it is for the people of Asia to run the
affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia’.
Cooperative security in the Chinese leadership’s definition necessarily implies the
replacement of alliances – notably, those between the United States and its allies in North
and Southeast Asia – that target particular opponents. The idea of cooperative- or partner-
ship-based security stems from China’s experiences of alliances during the Cold War, and
Xi’s cognitive view of the way in which US alliances enhanced the security of the United
States and its allies, while undermining that of China. As Xi (2017c) pointed out in a
speech in Geneva, ‘[n]o country in the world can enjoy absolute security. A country can-
not have security while others are in turmoil’. Instead, China advocates the establishment
of a ‘global partnership network’. According to China, to create global partnerships
requires different forms and levels of cooperation with all the world’s constituencies,
from the major states to the developing world.
The security framework also requires a high priority be given to protection of China’s
territorial integrity and national unity under the leadership of the CCP. Xi has emphasised
protection of China’s ‘core interests’, to include a defining role for the Party (as he stated
at the 19th Party Congress, ‘[t]he Party exercises overall leadership over all areas of
endeavour in every part of the country’ (Xi, 2017b)), and the development of a strong
military with a war-fighting capacity able to engender the respect of others for the coun-
try’s sovereign claims. As Yang Jiechi put it, on September 2013: ‘President Xi has
stressed that while firmly committed to peaceful development, we definitely must not
forsake our legitimate interests or compromise our core national interests’. He went on,
‘No country should expect us to swallow the bitter fruit that undermines our sovereignty,
security and development interests’. Under Xi, the definition of the country’s core inter-
ests has broadened and the enforcement of sovereignty claims has been tackled with
greater vigour (Economy, 2018: 201–202). Leading officials refer regularly to expected
regional deference to China’s core interests as a ‘principled bottom line’ that brooks no
opposition (quoted in Heath, 2013). Beijing has also emphasised its fears of a world order
that rejects diverse ways of governing, allows for unilateral military intervention outside
the remit of the UN Security Council, or otherwise interferes in a country’s domestic
affairs as a route to destabilising domestic societies.
These, then, are some of the broad background cognitive and normative ideas that
have shaped security thinking in the period of Xi Jinping. Inevitably, many of these
aspects are self-serving as in the overriding role given to a supervisory Communist
Party; others have been interpreted inconsistently as in the cases of China’s use of
informal sanctions against South Korea during debates over the establishment of the
US THAAD system to protect against North Korean missile attacks, or Russia’s takeo-
ver of Crimea which led to Chinese statements that indicated its ‘understanding’ of
these Russian moves (Wishnick, 2018: 370). Above all, these ideas relate to China’s
seeming determination to weaken or delegitimise the current form of the United States
presence in the Asia-Pacific region as well as Washington’s presumed hegemonic role
in maintaining global order.
10 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)

Foreground associated policies

Indeed, the United States is frequently the sub-text of the security world view outlined
here. For example, Xi’s May 2014 speech also included the sentence: ‘One cannot live in
the 21st century with the outdated thinking from the age of Cold War and zero-sum game’,
an argument that has been referenced in many Chinese official speeches and that is
directed at the US alliance framework in the Asia-Pacific. Beijing’s statements have also
struck at the US refrain that it is the benign hegemon in the Asia-Pacific, that for 70 years
‘has played a vital role in undergirding regional peace, stability, and security’ and in ena-
bling ‘tremendous prosperity and economic growth’ (U.S. Department of Defence (DoD),
2018). In the Xi era, and particularly after the formal introduction of the 2011 US ‘rebal-
ance’ policy to Asia, China has argued that America’s military surveillance and naval
manoeuvres, together with its reinvigoration of alliances, particularly, that with Japan, are
disruptive of regional order. US criticisms of China’s human rights practices are inter-
preted as a deliberate threat to China’s domestic political system. Variously, China has
described these actions as designed to weaken, possibly to otherthrow, CCP rule, or con-
tain China’s rise, divide the region into friends and enemies, and embolden Japan as well
as China’s other Asian neighbours into reckless behaviour over sovereignty disputes
(Foot, 2016a: 9–11; Zhou, 2016: 208–209).
Undoubtedly, contention between the United States and China has risen sharply in the
Xi Jinping era in all areas of the relationship. However, their strategic competition is
influenced by a number of contradictory trends that complicate China’s policy-making
environment. China has developed a military position in the Asia-Pacific that constrains
some of a still-predominant America’s military and strategic choices, but China ranks
second only to North America as a US export market despite an unfavourable trade bal-
ance that is the focus of difficult and so far unproductive China-US negotiations. For
China, meanwhile, the United States remains its major single-state trading partner, and it
does not see a trade war as in China’s interests. Beijing has tried restraint in its responses
to the Trump administration’s economic actions, but it has also made it increasingly clear
that it is prepared to fight a trade war (Medeiros, 2019; State Council Information Office
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), 2019).
These contradictory trends are reflected in official Chinese depictions of the United
States. Foreign Minister Wang Yi in his annual round-up of China’s diplomatic action in
2017 described the contacts between Presidents Xi and Trump as providing a ‘strategic
anchor to what is the most complicated and consequential relationship in the world’, but
he also called on the United States to ‘accept a China that is following its own path of
socialism with Chinese characteristics’, noting that the world (or more accurately if
implicitly, the China-US relationship) was at a ‘crossroads of history’ and facing ques-
tions of ‘openness or isolation, cooperation or confrontation, win-win or [a] zero-sum
game’ (Wang, 2017a).
That anchoring is increasingly adrift. Three years into the Trump administration, the
Chinese government has appeared to give up on arresting the deterioration in bilateral ties,
with the 2017 US National Security Strategy (U.S. NSS, 2017) as well as the US National
Defense Strategy (U.S. DoD, 2018: 2) both depicting China as a key rival and, according
to the DOD, as ‘leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory
economics to coerce neighboring countries’. Washington no longer perceives the eco-
nomic interdependence between the two countries as working to bind them together at
times of strategic tension, and Beijing sees the United States as intent on containing its
influence and blocking its rise. As Wu Xinbo (2018) has put it, the stabilisation previously
Foot and King 11

provided by China-US economic ties has given way to a perception that the economic
relationship favours China and represents a major challenge to the prosperity and security
of the United States. In particular, there is strong competition over the new frontiers of
technology – important economically as well as militarily – and which of the two countries
will be the first fully to exploit them (Foot and King, 2019).
This deterioration in China-US relations is in marked contrast to China’s relationship
with Russia, a partner that Beijing alleges is like a ‘ballast stone in safeguarding global
and regional peace and stability’ (Wishnick, 2018: 359), but which significantly also
shares Beijing’s view on the need to safeguard domestic regime security against western-
led interventionist forces. Xi has led this relationship towards a ‘comprehensive strategic
partnership of coordination for a new era’, the pinnacle of China’s classification system
for its foreign relations (Xinhua, 2019). Each accords great respect to the other, with
President Putin given the honour to speak first at any international gathering that China
hosts, as appropriate for someone Xi has described as his ‘best, most intimate friend’ (Lo,
2019: 1–2). At a time of western sanctions and diplomatic chastisement of Russia, China
chose to award Putin its Medal of Friendship and later Russia returned the favour award-
ing Xi in 2017, the highest order of Russia. Putin has also made some attempt to undercut
the underlying rivalries in this asymmetric relationship with China, inviting Xi to be the
first Chinese President to attend Russia’s annual Eastern Economic Forum meeting in
Vladivostok in 2018 (Yu, 2019), and elsewhere stating ‘the main struggle, which is now
underway is that for global leadership and we are not going to contest China on this’
(Allison, 2018).
Bobo Lo (2019: 4–5) regards developments such as these as mostly rhetorical rather than
substantive and the structural asymmetry in the relationship as a continuing source of ten-
sion. However, in the current international circumstances, the two governments have
worked to give ballast to Russian statements that this is a ‘trust-based partnership’, with the
Chinese PLA being invited in 2018 and 2019 to Russia’s largest military exercises since
Soviet times. Deploying some 3200 PLA forces in 2018 and 1600 in 2019 – record numbers
for China to send to military exercises overseas – the PLA participated in operations to
expel the ‘“illegal forces” of a hostile state or group of states’ as well as counter-terrorist
activities. According to the Moscow Times in 2018, this was the first time that Russia had
invited a foreign country that is not a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation
to take part in such an exercise (see also Gady, 2019). Russia has also implicitly endorsed
China’s sovereignty concerns associated with disputed claims in the South and East China
seas, participating in naval drills with the Chinese navy in these waters in 2016 and 2017,
and joint aerial patrols in 2019 (Gady, 2019; Yu, 2019: 116–119). Moreover, Russian arms
deals with China show a willingness now to provide Russia’s most sophisticated equipment,
where once that had been denied to China, but not to India (Cox, 2018: 340).
The basis for this high level of strategic cooperation in the current era rests on a strong
alignment in their security perspectives with both fearing an interventionist West sup-
portive of regime change in their own societies given the political authoritarian models
that they both have established and espoused. Western interventionist rhetoric and behav-
iour associated with ideas such as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) add to the sense
of threat, backed up by western support for the ‘colour revolutions’ and ‘Arab Spring’,
and role in the overthrow of both Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Muammar Gaddafi in
2011. They perceive the United States as able and often willing to engage in unilateral
uses of force outside the structure of the UN Security Council, the one global governance
mechanism that through veto power provides them both with some means of equalising
12 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)

relationships in a hierarchical world. From their respective security perspectives, it is

imperative to work together to ‘maintain the UN’s authority and core status in interna-
tional affairs’ (MoFA, China, 2017).
The chances of China developing these levels of trust or stability in relations with Japan
are, of course, far slimmer if not impossible. China-Japan relations have improved since the
serious deterioration in 2010 as a result of the clash between a Chinese trawler and Japanese
naval vessel in disputed waters, the Japanese decision to nationalise three of the islands in the
Senkaku/Diaoyu island chain in 2012, and the stepping up of Chinese sea and air patrols in the
vicinity of the disputed territory. However, China’s security thinking does not afford much
basis for establishing deep forms of trust with Japan. Certainly, Xi has made it clear that to
achieve ‘rejuvenation’, China will need to manage its regional sovereignty disputes, and
establish crisis management mechanisms in order that conflict can be avoided (Heath, 2013),
and these aims have been furthered in recent discussions with Japan’s leaders. For example,
during Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Japan in May 2018, the two sides announced a Maritime
and Aerial Communication Mechanism to establish rules for direct communication in the
event of accidental military clashes at sea between Chinese and Japanese vessels and to set up
a military hot line (Xiao, 2019). During Prime Minister Abe’s visit to China in October 2018,
the two sides agreed additional military confidence building measures, and more ambitiously
to realign their relationship in accordance with such principles as ‘shifting from competition
to cooperation’, and ‘forging a relationship as partners, not as threats’ (Kawashima, 2018).
However, despite these potentially helpful developments, Japan’s attempts at internal
and external balancing during the Xi era have cut across the Chinese leadership’s
expressed view that the balance of power should be replaced with cooperative networked
partnerships. Thus, instead of moving away from the US alliance and towards ideas of
cooperative security as China claims as its key normative goal, Japan in 2015 signed with
the US revised ‘Guidelines for Defense Cooperation’, the first such revision since 1997,
and in a Joint Statement, the two allies reaffirmed the ‘indispensable role of the Japan-
U.S. Alliance in promoting regional peace, and security’. Of particular import to Japan,
that Joint Statement also included an unequivocal pledge that the Senkaku Islands are
covered ‘within the scope of the commitments under Article 5 of the Japan-U.S. Treaty of
Mutual Cooperation and Security’ – a pledge repeated by the Trump administration.
Tokyo has reciprocated and has put itself forward as a key supporter of Washington’s
Indo-Pacific Strategy and the resurrected Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving
Japan and the United States together with Australia and India.
Bringing Japan in to support China’s world view on security matters is, therefore, far
more of a challenge than is the case with Russia. Tokyo’s long-standing alliance relation-
ship with the United States, its suspicions of deepened Chinese-Russian ties, the territo-
rial disputes and historical grievances that are on-going with China, together with Japan’s
identification with the democratic world, all throw up obstacles to the declared desire to
move towards ‘a relationship as partners, not as threats’. For any improvement in ties,
much depends on the economic relationship and Japan’s involvement with the BRI, as an
earlier section has established.

Sovereign equality
Background cognitive and normative world view
A final major element of Xi’s world view involves the concept of legal sovereign equality.
China’s leadership has long demonstrated its attachment to protecting state sovereignty,
Foot and King 13

but since 2013, there has been particular mention of the benefits of a world order based
on the notion of the sovereign equality of states. In many respects, this idea fits with
China’s cognitive understanding, based on its own historical experiences, of the sources
of insecurity in world politics – the notion that sovereign equality provides some protec-
tion in a world otherwise marked by hierarchy. As Xi has explained Chinese thinking, ‘[s]
overeign equality is the most important norm governing state-to-state relations over the
past centuries and the cardinal principle observed by the United Nations and all other
international organizations’. Its essence is that the ‘sovereignty and dignity of all coun-
tries, whether big or small, strong or weak, rich or poor, must be respected, their internal
affairs allow no interference and they have the right to independently choose their social
system and development path’ (Xi, 2017c).
Associated with these ideas of a pluralist state-based world order is new normative
emphasis on the concepts of ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’, especially important when the Xi era
leadership considers how best to reform global governance (Yang, 2018). China’s Foreign
Minister (Wang, 2017a) has defined justice in terms of non-interference in internal affairs
and rejection of the imposition of the demands of the strong on the weak in world politics.
Fairness is related to the idea of expanding the voice of the weaker states in global gov-
ernance and the rebalancing of international organisations in order to decrease the deci-
sion-making weight of the western world. In China’s view, only through the adoption of
these ideas can the world truly move towards a ‘shared community of humankind’.
These ideas clearly underpin China’s strong support for the United Nations which its
official statements frequently describe as playing an ‘indispensable role in international
affairs’. Beijing also sees the UN as ‘the most universal, representative, authoritative
inter-governmental international organization . . . the best venue to practice multilateral-
ism, and an effective platform for collective actions to cope with various threats and chal-
lenges’ (MoFA, China, 2005). It is a perspective on the UN that also coheres with its
security world view, with the UN Charter, and particularly Article 2(7) which stresses the
domestic jurisdiction of state members, being interpreted as a weapon to use against inter-
ventionist principles that could result in regime change.

Foreground associated policies

These ideas map on strongly to Russia’s perspectives helping to align Beijing’s and
Moscow’s policies at the UN on such topics as R2P and the crisis in Syria. In addition,
they have chosen jointly to promote the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a model
example of a new global governance mechanism that has protected the principle of non-
interference, focused on stability, and supported diversity (Cox, 2018: 336).
One clear China-Russia statement equating legal sovereign equality with their own
interpretation of non-interference came in a Declaration signed in June 2016 (MoFA,
Russia, 2016) during Putin’s visit to Beijing. The Declaration stated the two sides’ ‘full
commitment’ to the UN Charter, and the guidance ‘enshrined in the Five Principles of
Peaceful Coexistence’. It also reaffirmed the principle of sovereign equality as ‘crucial
for the stability of international relations’, stressing in particular, the importance of equal
treatment, and mutual respect. In one of its most explicit passages, it noted the import of
the principle of non-intervention and condemned as ‘a violation of this principle any
interference by States in the internal affairs of other States with the aim of forging change
of legitimate governments’.
The sub-text, as in many areas associated with Xi’s world view again was directed at
western interventionist practices, the particular sanctions then being imposed on Russia,
14 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)

and the condemnation and reactive behaviour that China had attracted as a result of its
creation of artificial islands in the South China Sea. For the United States, China’s actions
in the South China Sea raised questions about how best to protect freedom of navigation
in waters that China looked set soon to be able to control. A constant refrain from US
administrations has been that the United States will ‘fly, sail and operate wherever inter-
national law allows’, in the South China Sea (e.g. Reuters, 2015a). This intention to oper-
ate has been enforced with greater vigour during the Trump era, and has gained the
enthusiastic support of the Abe administration. Tokyo too has joined with the United
States in military exercises emphasising amphibious operations, including practicing the
recapture of an island, and is also on record as reaffirming the importance of maintaining
a ‘rules-based order in the maritime domain based on the principles of international law,
as set out in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea’ (UK-Japan Defence
Ministerial Meeting, 2017).
Neither are Chinese suspicions of Japan diminished by its championing of a postwar
international order in which the United States has played a hegemonic role, as well as its
references to a ‘rules-based order’ based on liberal democratic principles. Moreover,
China’s defensive references to the sovereign equality of nations as a fundamental princi-
ple in IR, one that undergirds the UN Charter, would not be the focus of Japanese state-
ments on the United Nations. Instead, Japan prefers to emphasise the UN’s collective
endeavours with which it has engaged throughout the UN system, including the protec-
tion and promotion of human security (e.g. Abe, 2015).

Conclusion
Xi’s ambitious global agenda – articulated through a world view rooted in developmen-
talism, security partnerships, and sovereign equality – has decisively shaped China’s rela-
tions with the United States, Russia, and Japan. Yet, Xi’s world view – and the associated
policies that flow from it – has prompted a spectrum of responses from the three states.
At one end of the spectrum is Russia, where Xi and Putin’s world views align particu-
larly closely around the vision of a more pluralist state-based world order based on sov-
ereign equality and non-interference by the West in other country’s internal affairs.
Despite some friction between China and Russia over the BRI and China’s increased
presence in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood, this is the most positive of the three rela-
tionships because of the alignment in world views.
At the other end of the spectrum is the United States, where Xi’s world view has met
greatest resistance. By describing the US-led order as ‘self-interested’ and ‘hegemonic’,
and presenting a more exclusionary vision of Asian security cooperation architecture that
undermines the United States forward operating presence, Xi has attempted to circum-
scribe the legitimacy of US regional and global leadership. In its most ambitious form,
Beijing has offered an alternative, and what it sees as a successful, politico-economic
model superior to that of a flailing western-led liberal capitalism, with the former built on
a combination of economic development, support for the government in power, and an
emphasis on domestic social stability. More parochially, Xi’s failure more fully to open
China’s own economy, and actions that place greater emphasis on defending the country’s
‘core interests’, particularly with regard to the enforcement of China’s sovereignty claims
in the South China Sea, add to this sense of a challenge to US hegemony. When com-
bined, the policies emanating from Xi’s world view have resulted in a pronounced down-
turn in China’s relations with the United States.
Foot and King 15

Japan lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. As a US ally, Tokyo shares
Washington’s concerns about Xi’s efforts to undermine the US-led order in Asia, particu-
larly at a time when Japan views China as a growing security threat. Yet, there are areas
where China’s and Japan’s world views come into closer alignment. Xi’s support for
infrastructure investment in Asia and his championing of an ‘open’ economic order has
found some favour in Japan precisely because of Tokyo’s alarm that a sharp deterioriation
in the US-China economic relationship will undermine the global economy in ways that
are also harmful to Japan. Of the three states, then, Japan has been perhaps the most suc-
cessful in selectively engaging with Xi’s world view where it benefits Japan, while simul-
taneously pursuing competitive balancing strategies that might help to bolster Japan’s
preferred order.
Ultimately, our analysis of Xi’s world view and its impact on China’s relations with the
great powers reveals the loftiness of Xi’s ambitions but also the limitations facing his
global agenda. In his calls for a plural, open, and development-focused world order, Xi
has been more successful than previous generations of Chinese leaders in articulating a
world view that is less inward looking. Instead, he has paid notable attention to the ambi-
tions and interests of the developing world. Yet, Xi’s world view still demonstrates a
failure to understand how the interests of the great powers might serve to frustrate China’s
ambitions. Xi has failed to reassure the United States in particular, but also Japan, that his
world view is of mutual benefit to them, and that their security and prosperity can be
preserved in what might become a more China-centred world, with Beijing aligned
closely with an increasingly authoritarian Russian government.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: Amy King’s research was supported by the Westpac Scholars Trust, and an Australian
Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, grant number DE170101282. Rosemary Foot
received no financial support for the research, and/or publication.

ORCID iD
Rosemary Foot https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3538-7626

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