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Understanding Xi Jinping’s Worldview: Ten Concentric Circles of Interest

To understand China’s long-term strategy toward the United States and how the US might most profitably respond to it is to understand where America fits within the wider framework of the Communist Party’s worldview. While Xi Jinping, given his unprecedented power within the party, has had a profound impact on how the CCP sees its and the country’s future, there are also many consistencies from the past. If Xi is not China’s paramount leader tomorrow, much of what is described in this chapter would remain in place. In many respects, what Xi has done is intensify and accelerate priorities and plans that have long been part of the party’s strategy. Where Xi has changed China’s worldview has been in the reinvigoration of the party’s Marxist-Leninist foundations, the turbocharging of Chinese nationalism, and the sharpening of the country’s national ambitions.

I argue that Xi Jinping’s worldview is made up of ten concentric circles of interest—starting from the most important, concerning Xi’s position in the party itself, and moving out to other domestic political priorities and then to his unfolding international aspirations for the country. In this schema, each layer builds on the other. For those familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and its relevance to political psychology and behavior, this is an attempt to apply a similar framework to the priorities of the Communist Party as set by Xi Jinping. They are summarized as follows:

1. The centrality of Xi and the party and the hard business of staying in power: Core to the CCP is its overriding determination to remain in power. While radically different from the worldview of Western political parties, this deeply Leninist reality should never be forgotten. Under Xi Jinping, this fundamental interest dictates every other interest of the Chinese party and state. In that context, Xi himself is also determined to secure his position, including an enduring legacy in national and party history superior to that of Deng Xiaoping and at least equal to Mao Zedong.

2. Maintaining and securing national unity: Xi’s second core interest is the unity and territorial integrity of the motherland. Maintaining firm control over Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Hong Kong is nonnegotiable for the CCP. Even more fundamental is the “return” of Taiwan, which remains the holy grail of party politics because it would complete the sole task left unfinished following Mao’s revolution and establishment of the PRC in 1949. These internal security priorities will always remain central to the party’s perception of its continuing political legitimacy, given that Chinese history has always been kind to those emperors who have held the empire together and unforgiving to those who have allowed it to fall apart.

3. Growing the Chinese economy: Continued economic prosperity forms a key part of the unofficial social contract between the party and the people. If growth were to falter badly, this contract would come under severe strain. That’s why the party has been adamant for so long about ensuring sufficient economic growth to sustain living standards, employment, and social stability—and why it is also increasingly concerned about the problem of high economic inequality. Xi also recognizes that the basis of all national power ultimately hangs on economic power and no longer simply “from the barrel of a gun,” as Mao used to say. This includes China’s ability to defend itself and assert its role in the world. But Xi is also seeking to build this power without China becoming permanently and structurally dependent on the international economy, the dollar-denominated global financial system, or foreign manufacturing and technology.

4. Environmental sustainability: A parallel dilemma arises from the litany of challenges posed by water, soil, and air pollution, as well as food safety. The tragedy of China’s rapid economic development over the last forty years was the relegation of the environment as a secondary concern. Now, environmental sustainability has become a major problem, intricately connected to China’s economic and political future. Increasingly, the Chinese public demands a clean environment and not just jobs as part of its social contract with the party. Moreover, the party has also realized that environmental devastation, including the global climate crisis, threatens the future of China’s economic development, international image, and ultimately its national security.

5. Modernizing the military: Xi sees China’s military and its technological capacity as the linchpins not only of the party’s security but also of China’s ability to project power throughout the region and the world. Xi also sees himself as a military man and a grand strategist and was appalled, on coming into power, by what he saw as the military’s corruption and lack of “war-winning” capabilities. He has significantly transformed the leadership, institutional structure, and capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army, turning it from a mass land army concerned with internal security and the defense of China’s continental borders to a technologically advanced fighting force capable of rivaling any leading competitor and projecting power beyond China’s shores.

6. Managing China’s neighboring states: Neighboring states—of which China has fourteen, the largest number of contiguous borders of any country in the world along with Russia—occupy a particular place in China’s strategic memory. Historically, they’ve been the principal avenue through which China’s national security has been threatened, resulting in successive foreign invasions. In Chinese strategic thought, this has entrenched a deeply defensive view of how to maintain China’s national security. But Chinese historiography also teaches that purely defensive measures have not always succeeded. For these reasons, modern Chinese strategic thinking has explored an approach prioritizing political and economic diplomacy with which China aims to secure positive, accommodating, and—wherever possible—compliant relationships with all its neighboring states.

7. Securing China’s maritime periphery in East Asia and the west Pacific: China may see its continental periphery as problematic, but it sees its maritime periphery as deeply hostile. Here, China perceives a region strategically allied against it—with a ring of US allies from South Korea to Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines and Australia. China’s strategic response to this is clear. It seeks to fracture US alliances. It has said as much repeatedly in its declaratory statements, claiming that they are relics of the Cold War. Meanwhile, as noted above, Xi has overseen a transformation of China’s military capabilities in which the army continues to shrink and its naval and air forces continue to expand, along with an arsenal of missiles and other asymmetric weapons. China’s overall political-military strategy is clear: to cause sufficient doubt in the minds of American military commanders and policy makers about its ability to win any armed conflict against Chinese forces in the region, including in the defense of Taiwan, that the United States would choose not to fight. Xi’s objective is to secure China’s territorial claims in the East China Sea, the South China Sea, and Taiwan without ever having to fire a shot—and eventually displace the United States as the dominant military power in the Asia-Pacific.

8. Securing China’s western continental periphery: China also seeks to establish strategic and economic depth across the vast Eurasian continent, reaching as far as Western Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. We see this in China’s political, economic, and military diplomacy across its vast continental flank, including most dramatically in China’s Belt and Road Initiative across (and around) Eurasia. As with its immediate neighboring states, China wants to secure a benign strategic environment, cultivating a vast landmass hospitable to Chinese interests and much less susceptible to American strategic influence than its maritime periphery to the east.

9. Increasing Chinese leverage across the developing world: Beyond China’s immediate region, the party devotes substantial effort to building China’s ties in the developing world. This has long historical roots going back to Mao and Zhou Enlai’s role in the Non-Aligned Movement (a Cold War organization of developing states that were not aligned with any great power), particularly in Africa. Over the last twenty years, much of the developing world has seen their economic relationships with China become much more important than those countries’ relationships with the United States—the product of large-scale public and private Chinese trade and investment across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. While China is looking to secure commodities and other resources, its ability to build close relationships by meeting the needs of developing states has proven remarkably adaptive. As a result, when China needs support for its interests in the UN or other international institutions, it enjoys the ability to pull in unprecedented political and diplomatic leverage from across the developing world.

10. Rewriting the global rules-based order: Finally, China aims to reshape the institutional rules and norms that govern the international order. As the victors of World War II, the United States and its closest allies constructed the underlying architecture of the postwar liberal international rules-based order and have dominated its key institutions ever since. The CCP has always argued that it was never included in that process. But China now finds the world in a period of great change and challenge and sees the time as ripe—as it grows in economic, diplomatic, and military might—to challenge American leadership of that order and to change the nature of the order itself. China has done this through three approaches: drawing on its growing support across the developing world to secure changes to existing international norms and procedures deemed to be offensive to Chinese interests and values, installing Chinese or China-friendly candidates in the senior leadership of a growing number of existing international institutions, and creating its own network of new multilateral institutions outside the framework of the post-1945 UN and Bretton Woods system. While Xi has not described specifically what a future international order of the CCP’s choosing would ultimately look like, he has made plain that he does not intend China to simply replicate the current US-led liberal international order. Rather, China will seek an order much more conducive to its political, ideological, and economic interests.

This list of ten core priorities will never be found neatly laid out in China’s strategic literature. The Chinese system is more opaque than that. Rather, it is my attempt to distill Xi’s principal objectives out of what I’ve learned from many conversations with a multitude of Chinese interlocutors and other sources over many, many years. I first met Xi in 1986, when he was vice mayor of Xiamen and I was an embassy staffer preparing then Australian prime minister Bob Hawke’s visit to the embryonic Xiamen Special Economic Zone (one of only four in the country) on China’s southeastern coast opposite Taiwan. Later, as prime minister myself, I hosted Xi in Australia when he was Chinese vice president in 2010 and already Hu Jintao’s designated successor. During that visit, I spent a total of ten hours in conversation with Xi in six separate meetings, including about three hours around a winter fire at the prime ministerial residence in Canberra with just the two of us and our ambassadors. That meeting was almost exclusively in Chinese and covered a vast range of topics. I also talked with him by telephone after he became general secretary and president in 2013. Since I left office in Australia in late 2013, I have been in several small group meetings with Xi in Beijing as head of an American think tank (the Asia Society Policy Institute). I have found Xi to be an impressive, knowledgeable, engaging interlocutor who rarely uses notes in his dealings with either foreigners or locals. He rarely reads a speech. Like Mao, and to some extent Deng, Xi speaks his mind directly and forcefully. He is firm in his position but without thumping the table. More importantly, I have spent a lot of time with many of Xi’s most senior officials, formally and informally, fleshing out the impressions I gleaned from across the Chinese system on how China views the world over many years.

What follows are my conclusions from all these conversations, observations, and readings over the decades. They are not all-encompassing, but by and large, I believe they are a reasonable representation of the strategic prism through which Xi’s China observes and responds to its domestic and international circumstances. And, as we shall see, the United States is relevant to all of them, and in some cases decisively so.