China’s new world order: looking for clues from Xi’s recent meetings with foreign leaders
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Freitag, April 19, 2024
This has also meant that Chinese foreign policy has become more personalised and that Xi’s own diplomatic engagements offer potentially important clues about its direction.
Key Points:
- This has also meant that Chinese foreign policy has become more personalised and that Xi’s own diplomatic engagements offer potentially important clues about its direction.
- The international order is clearly in flux and a key driver of this change, by its own admission, has been China.
- Read more:
Xi and Biden spoke on the phone for 105 minutes: what does this say about their relationship?
The European dynamic
- Engagements with Germany, however, also have a broader European, and especially EU dimension.
- Germany now has its own moderately hawkish China strategy, aiming to reduce economic reliance on Beijing.
- But Berlin is still considered softer than many other EU member states and therefore an important ally for Beijing within the EU and in EU-US deliberations on China policy.
- From a German and European perspective, the Russian conduct in the war against Ukraine remains a key concern.
Scholz and Xi on diplomacy
- These included sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the importance to explore diplomatic ways to end the war.
- What is significant is Scholz’s statement that rather than western military support for Ukraine, diplomacy now takes centre-stage.
- China’s approach to managing, and shaping, the fluidity of the international system relies predominantly on diplomacy, albeit with a significant coercive streak.
Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU's Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.