China Is Starting to Act Like a Global Power
Beijing grows bolder in challenging the U.S.-led global order
BEIJING—China now sees itself as a global power—and it is starting to act like one.
Long reluctant to inject itself into conflicts far from its shores, Beijing is showing a new assertiveness as Xi Jinping begins his third term as the country’s head of state, positioning China to draw like-minded countries to its side and to have a greater say on global matters.
China is emerging from three years of “zero-Covid” isolation to a far more unfriendly West, and signaling that it feels it has the military and economic heft to start shaping the world more to its interests.
Earlier this month, Beijing surprised the world by brokering a detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a bold foray into the Middle East’s turbulent rivalries.
Now, Mr. Xi says he wants to insert himself into efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war, as he returns home from several days of warm meetings in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and plans his first conversation since the beginning of the war with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The moves might not result in lasting diplomatic breakthroughs, and China’s perceived inclination toward Russia on the Ukraine war, highlighted again this week in Moscow, has undercut Mr. Xi’s credibility as a neutral arbiter among Kyiv’s backers. Early Wednesday, as Mr. Xi was preparing to depart Moscow, Russia launched a new wave of missiles and armed drones into Ukraine, killing four people in a school dormitory in the Kyiv region.
But China’s willingness to wade into these conflicts in such a strident way marks a new phase in the country’s vision for itself and its role in the world. It sends a message that China and its friends are no longer obliged to conform to a U.S.-led global order, and that Beijing poses a challenge to Washington as it tries to shape a world it sees as divided between democracies and autocracies.
China long hewed to a policy of biding one’s time while slowly building up its economic, political and military might.
That began to shift as China’s economic and political interests came to span the globe, with infrastructure projects tied to its Belt and Road initiative in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. It has hundreds of billions of dollars of investments and growing diasporas worldwide that must be protected, as well as a voracious appetite for strategic resources abroad.
In addition to his interventions on the Russia-Ukraine and Saudi-Iran conflicts, Mr. Xi has in the past few weeks promoted three new initiatives expanding his vision for the world, titled the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative. Though short on the particulars, their sweeping ideals seek to position China as a country with which nations that are wary of U.S. hegemony can do business, seek security guarantees and find respect.
“In advancing modernization, China will neither tread the old path of colonization and plunder, nor the crooked path taken by some countries to seek hegemony once they grow strong, “Mr. Xi said in a speech this month as he unveiled his Global Civilization Initiative, cautioning unnamed countries to “refrain from imposing their own values or models on others.”
Mr. Xi also warned darkly of a U.S.-led effort to contain and suppress China at legislative sessions this month that confirmed his third term as China’s president.
Mr. Xi’s sharpened rhetoric reflects a belief that China can serve as a counterpoint to the West and its framing of a showdown between democracy and autocracy. Rather than an authoritarian country, as President Biden would have it, Mr. Xi wants nations around the world, particularly in the Global South, to regard China as a voice of reason, an economic model and a benign power that can stand up to a U.S.-led Western order that it sees as hectoring and bullying.
“Coming out of Covid, there’s an attempt to put China forward in a different light, and a large part of it is to create a contrast between the roles that China and the U.S. play,” said Paul Haenle, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They honestly believe they have a different way of being a major power and exerting its influence in the world and they believe the U.S. is too security-focused, that it uses its military too often.”
Mr. Haenle represented the U.S. at the Beijing-organized six-party talks aimed at addressing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program—a tentative foray by Beijing into international diplomacy in the mid-2000s that eventually fell apart. Today, he sees a strikingly different approach from China, particularly in its willingness to take risks on the global stage.
“Xi Jinping is much more tolerant of risk than anyone had anticipated,” he said. “He’s also taking bolder steps than China has been willing to do in the past, both with Iran-Saudi Arabia, and with regards to Ukraine.”
Photos: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin’s Friendship and Foreign Policy
Mr. Xi has been emboldened by his success in asserting Beijing’s authority in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea, despite Western denunciations of his actions. In some of these cases, Beijing found considerable support among developing nations for its portrayal of the U.S. as hypocritical and self-serving, seeking only to block China’s rise.
In Xinjiang, the far western region of China where the U.S. and its allies have accused Mr. Xi of carrying out forms of genocide against Muslim minorities, China’s vigorous diplomatic efforts have resulted in virtual silence from Muslim-majority countries—including from Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two rivals that China brought together in secret meetings in Beijing this month.
Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said that while some of China’s rhetoric falls flat in Western capitals, “there are a lot of studies that show that those themes work particularly well in the developing world—the idea of the U.S. resorting to military intervention, and the idea of China being peacemakers.”
There is also an element of defense in Mr. Xi’s newly energized diplomacy. In the three years that Mr. Xi’s strict zero-Covid policy effectively sealed his country off from the outside world, Mr. Biden’s efforts to rally a global coalition of wealthy Western-aligned countries have in many ways created a far more daunting international environment for China.
Mounting suspicion of China’s motives has replaced the largely welcoming embrace that China had grown accustomed to in previous decades, a shift that began toward the end of the Trump administration.
Then-President Donald Trump was largely alone in taking a more confrontational approach to Beijing. But a post-Covid China can now look out around and find a ring of countries, including South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia and India, that are far more suspicious of China’s intentions and more inclined to align themselves with Washington—a development Mr. Xi attributes to Mr. Biden’s efforts at “containment, encirclement and suppression,” a charge that Washington denies.
Farther afield, China’s perceived alignment with Russia has sapped any momentum that Beijing had enjoyed in Western European capitals, and even in the far more favorable Eastern European countries that, before the Ukraine war, had appeared to be falling more closely into Beijing’s orbit.
Mr. Xi is also concerned about growing international attention and sympathy for Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own. The island’s leaders have awakened and rallied its public to the potential for conflict and moved quickly to upgrade its capabilities—all while raising its profile among Western powers and emerging as a symbol of defiance against Mr. Xi.
Scoring diplomatic victories on the global stage helps serve as testimony that Washington’s efforts to isolate or challenge China won’t work.
Back home in China, Mr. Xi’s message that the U.S. is encircling the country to forestall China’s rise offers a powerful narrative of grievance that feeds nationalism. It builds on the Communist Party’s longstanding interpretation of modern history as a period in which predatory Western nations, taking advantage of China’s weakness in the late 19th century, exploited the country for selfish ends and held it back.
On Tuesday, Mr. Xi told Mr. Putin that the world was going through changes unseen in a century, using a favored formulation of the Chinese leader to reference this dark period in the country’s past—and to point ahead to the brighter future he hopes to bring.
While jumping into the fray on Russia-Ukraine and Saudi-Iran diplomacy, China has been active on other fronts recently, winning diplomatic recognition from Honduras, one of Taiwan’s last remaining allies, and prompting Washington to race to reopen its long-shut embassy in the Solomon Islands, where diplomatic advances by Beijing have raised concerns in Washington of rising Chinese influence across the Pacific islands.
China has also stepped gingerly into Afghanistan, where the U.S.’s hasty retreat in August 2021 offered it a chance to establish itself as a more influential player. In Myanmar, rebels called this month for Beijing to intervene in that country’s civil war, another reflection of China’s growing stature. China last year positioned itself as a neutral mediator in the Horn of Africa.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Xi’s efforts will allow Beijing to carve out a role for itself on the global stage similar to the one Washington has. Like the U.S., China has found that its growing overseas footprint, particularly in countries such as Pakistan, can get it bogged down in security concerns and complaints it is acting as an imperialist power, precisely the charge Beijing has leveled against the U.S.
Entanglements in overseas conflicts could sap China’s dynamism, and if its peace deals fall apart, it could set back Beijing’s objectives by making the country look naive or impotent, undermining confidence in China among the countries that it is trying to win to its side.
Saudi-Iran mistrust runs deep, and making further headway might prove difficult. On Russia-Ukraine, even Beijing’s backers say that its 12-point peace plan sidesteps the most nettlesome issues dividing Moscow and Kyiv.
Even so, said Dr. Mastro of Stanford University, Beijing might not need to deliver world peace to advance its interests. It merely wants to position itself as a benevolent power in a world dominated by Washington and U.S. military power.
“They are saying how embarrassing it is to the U.S. that they were able to do this on Saudi-Iran,” said Dr. Mastro, who is also a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. “They’re trying to show the world that they are not a threat, that the United States is a threat, and this is another data point.”
Write to Jonathan Cheng at Jonathan.Cheng@wsj.com