Leader Asserts China’s Growing Importance on Global Stage

Asia Pacific |NY Times

Leader Asserts China’s Growing Importance on Global Stage

By JANE PERLEZ NOV. 30, 2014

BEIJING — Sounding confident after a burst of high-profile diplomacy, President Xi Jinping told Communist Party officials in a major address here over the weekend that China would be nice to its neighbors in Asia but that he would run an active foreign policy and be relentless in promoting China’s rejuvenation onto the global stage.

Mr. Xi did not mention the United States by name but took an unmistakable jab at Washington, saying, “The growing trend toward a multipolar world will not change,” a reference to the Chinese view that America’s post-Cold War role as the sole superpower is drawing to a close.

China now had the power, he added, to steer world crises and turn them to China’s advantage, a declaration, analysts said, of how Mr. Xi sees China’s growing pre-eminence.

This is the second time that Mr. Xi has spoken to the leadership in public about foreign policy — he did so a year ago — but his speech on Saturday, televised by the state broadcaster, CCTV, was more emphatic and sweeping, analysts said.

“It reflects Xi’s passion for foreign policy and the fact that he is overseeing the final phase of the rise of China,” said Zhang Baohui, a professor of political science at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “This is about China’s grand strategy; it’s about everything.”

With the six other members of the standing committee of the Communist Party flanking him in chairs, and several hundred high-ranking party officials, military officers and Chinese diplomats brought home from abroad in the audience, Mr. Xi was making his mark as a “foreign policy president,” Mr. Zhang said.

Mr. Xi has just completed two months of fast-moving diplomacy: hosting leaders of nearly two dozen Asian and Pacific nations at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Beijing; meeting with President Obama in the Chinese capital; and sweeping through Australia, New Zealand and the tiny island of Fiji, bestowing economic gifts along the way.

China recently announced the formation of an Asia investment bank envisioned as a rival to the World Bank, and began a $40 billion long-term Silk Road infrastructure project intended to knit Central and South Asia more closely to China.

Mr. Xi, particularly in his Australian visit, tried to offer reassurances, stressing that even though China was the “big guy,” as he put it, it was not a threat.

The speech to the senior party cadres combined many of those elements, but there was one outstanding motif, said Christopher K. Johnson, senior adviser on China at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Xi is telling the assembled audience that China now is a great power, and should start acting like one,” Mr. Johnson said. Under Mr. Xi, China would no longer stand by the famous dictum of one of his predecessors, Deng Xiaoping, that China should wait its turn on the world stage and “hide and bide,” an idea that has remained popular among some party officials.

“Xi is clearly rejecting that thinking,” Mr. Johnson said.

Referring to the Chinese dream, a phrase that he uses repeatedly before domestic audiences to emphasize how China will soon realize its full economic, military and social potential, Mr. Xi said it was now time to take that dream to the world. China, he said, must “highlight the global significance of the Chinese dream.”

It was vital, he said, to “increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China’s message to the world.”

He mentioned China’s efforts to build a “new model of major country relations” with the United States, though again, he did not name the United States, and used the phrase almost in passing.

Asia, rather than the United States, seemed to be the focus: China, he said, was pursuing a “neighborhood policy featuring amity, sincerity, mutual benefit and inclusiveness.”

The emphasis on the region signaled that under Mr. Xi, China would probably focus less on managing relations with the United States, Mr. Johnson said. This did not mean, he said, that the Chinese leader was downgrading relations with Washington, but given Mr. Obama’s recent setbacks in the congressional elections, Mr. Xi saw an opportunity for China to drive home its leadership role in Asia.

“He is unlikely to be as solicitous or desirous of pursuing relations with Washington to the detriment of other relationships,” said Mr. Johnson, a former China analyst at the C.I.A.

Mr. Xi appeared to be uncompromising in the speech about China’s core interests, saying, “We will never relinquish our legitimate rights and interests, or allow China’s core interests to be undermined.”

The Obama administration has been lukewarm about Mr. Xi’s formulation of a major power relationship, in part because China has declined to delineate the core interests and say whether they include the South China Sea and the East China Sea, where the United States also has major interests.

Since Mr. Xi took power, China has rattled Asian neighbors with its assertive actions in the South China Sea and alienated Japan over territorial disputes in the East China Sea. But Mr. Xi deliberately chose not to talk about specific strategic moves, although they remained extremely important, Mr. Zhang said.

“If he hammers at territorial issues, that worries other countries and gets the United States more active,” he said. “Xi wants to take actions and move towards strategic goals but they don’t want to say it.”

The message for the moment, he said, was for China to be cooperative rather than competitive, but all the while keeping the focus on moving China toward the goal of “global eminence.”

In Asia, Mr. Xi’s references to China’s soft power would most likely be welcomed because there is a desire to channel Chinese nationalism away from “excessive risk-taking and adventurism” of the past year, said Rory Medcalf, director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia.

“In the past few months, Chinese diplomacy has worked variously to sidestep, repair or move beyond that damage,” he said. “Xi’s speech can be read in part as the capstone of this new campaign.

__._,_.___