Appunti esame Cinese 2

28/10/26

Foreign policy under Xi Jinping

The goals of this lecture are quite a few: there is a narrative component of the lecture that, as usual,

will describe concepts of sovereignty that you should understand and try to remember, and this part

of the lecture will also describe how ideas about security and the rhetoric of national rejuvenation

have changed foreign policy under Xi Jinping. So, the initial part of the class would be quite a

conventional one, focusing on goals, on objectives, priorities, and the means that are used in foreign

policy. Whereas the second part of the class will be used to perform an in-class exercise. I prepared

quite a few slides, 20 of them, that will be used during the second part of the class to read, to evaluate

and to discuss several claims rather than small pieces of text about the foreign policy of the People's

Republic of China. And this is Important because I have noticed the tendency to, sometimes, confuse

the goals of foreign policy with the rhetoric that is used, by Xi Jinping in particular, with the means

that the People's Republic of China uses to try and achieve its own goals.

Let's start reasoning on means, in particular. Now, on this slide, you can see a choice of six different

actions that are related to foreign policy. And each one of them is addressed to one audience that

might be a domestic audience, that is an audience situated inside of the People's Republic of China

or a foreign audience, a global audience.

Those of you who want to join the discussion may choose one of them and explain whether, in their

opinion, the audience of that specific action is foreign, domestic or as usual, can be both foreign and

domestic.

Let's discuss the naval blockade of Taiwan. Which audience would such an action be addressed to

in your opinion? A domestic audience, a foreign audience, or both perhaps.

Student: I think it could be directed to both foreign audience and domestic audience. For example,

concerning the domestic audience, we could say that another blockade could reinforce nationalism

and so the legitimacy of the CCP. Whereas concerning the foreign audience, well, it could send

messages to the international community.

Professor: Yeah, it could send messages to the international community or to some specific states,

messages about the result of the People's Republic of China, about its intentions. It could send

messages about the efficiency of the military, about the capabilities of the People's Liberation Army.

So, you can see each one of the actions that you see in this slide could be addressed to both

domestic and foreign audience. And it could serve not just one goal, but multiple goals at the same

time. And the same goals, for instance, as far as allowed, even to build a port project in Naples could

be. Because superficially, a loan given to construct a port in our city could be a foreign policy move.

But again, considered that such large projects are normally built by state-owned enterprises, so this

project could also address a domestic audience proving the reach of China's state-owned

enterprises, and proving also the successes that are achieved by the Belt and Road initiative.

So, you do have foreign policy, particularly in the foreign policy of the People's Republic of China,

these two audiences and the series of moves that can address both domestic audiences, foreign

audiences, and mean different things to different actors. Specifically, the construction of a port in

Naples would be welcomed by quite a big section of the public opinion. Whereas the same move

would be interpreted very differently in Brussels, not to mention Washington. This is just to give you

an idea of the identifications of foreign policy in the new era of Xi Jinping. And of course, listing

foreign policy moves and acts might be interesting, but what we see around us needs to be placed

within the broader context of the goals that foreign policy in the new era of Xi Jinping is trying to

pursue.

Before describing the goals, which are really simple, I want to briefly pause and reflect on the three

aspects or three levels of analysis of foreign policy that you can see here in this slide. The first one

of them is official discourse. Then a second aspect is given by the goals by what the leadership

seeks to obtain. Last but not least, there are the various moves, the various projects, initiatives, the

means that the People's Republic of China uses to try to fulfill its objective.

Now, the effort that students should make in analyzing and in studying the foreign policy of the

People's Republic of China, is to keep these three different aspects separate and distinct without

confusing them. Because what I've noticed during my teaching in the last few years is that,

sometimes, official rhetoric is understood as if it was actually a goal, or it is understood as if it was

true, and it is confused to what the People's Republic of China actually does on the ground.

To simplify: what I've noticed during teaching, but even more so during the oral examinations is that,

for example, a few people sometimes read what Xi Jinping or any other leader of the People’s

Republic say, and they interpret or understand those speeches as fully and accurately describing

what goes on in the field of foreign policy. And here we might briefly go back to line ports, enacting

military blockades or prohibiting, restricting the export of certain minerals and resources and so on

and so forth. So that is an important distinction to make. And, do keep in mind that a single initiative,

a single foreign policy tool or measure, can contribute to realizing more than one goal at the same

time.

So, in this aspect, foreign policy can be quite complex. When it comes to the official vision, of course,

things get a lot easier to understand, particularly because the official vision of foreign policy in the

People’s Republic of China is a vision each one of us should be familiar with. We have been exposed

to this vision through our mass media, with our debates taking place in Italy and beyond in the rest

of the European Union.

So, the vision, the way which officials describe the foreign policy of their country is that China is

already a responsible power and that the country is ready to construct an international order that

differs from the international order that was created immediately after World War II by the United

States. So ideally, in the vision that is disseminated, that is publicized by the media, and not just by

them, this future international order rests upon 3 pillars:

1. United Nations that would give a broader representation to all countries of the Asian, African,

African and Latin American continent.

2. A policy where all states are equal and independent and a vision in which no single state

would act as the coordinator of the international system to impose its own views on other

states.

3. Different mechanisms of global governance.

This is the vision as it has been articulated, the vision of a responsible power that is ready to take

over the international system, and to change it in ways which will be productive of greater equality

among states. And of course, a corollary of this vision is given by a series of concepts such as those

of peace, security, economic prosperity for all countries of the world.

Then there are, of course, great challenges that the international system is facing. Environmental

sustainability is one of them; political inclusion is another. This is the vision and it's a simple one.

This vision, however, suffers from an internal tension which is, while of course we want to build a

new global order that is unlike the global order created by Washington; we, at the same time, want

that global order to be led by the People's Republic of China. So, there is a big tension. And the

problem is whether China's vision is compatible with any form of international order premised on the

sovereign equality of state.

At its simplest, the tension exists, given the notion that all states are sovereign and independent,

and the idea that the community of state should be led by one of them, in this case, the People's

Republic of China. Because the idea and the goals of foreign policy in the new era of Xi Jinping are

simply that the People's Republic should become the new core, the new center of the global order,

and that the system of international relations should follow a sort of hierarchy, a sort of organizational

pyramid with the People's Republic at the top.

Of course, placing a single state as the leader, as the coordinator, as the head of the new of any

form of international order also means that the goals of that state will somehow influence the goals

and the priorities of the international order and more specifically of international organizations such

as the United Nations. Because the thing is that, while the People's Republic of China criticized the

international order under Washington because it believes that it is a global system premised on

hegemony of military mind, on interference in the affairs of domestic government, at the same time

the People's Republic of China, or at least foreign policy under Xi Jinping, has precisely the goal to

replace the leadership of Washington with the leadership by the People's Republic.

And this creates a tension because the People's Republic of China expresses a vision of foreign

policy and of the international system that rests upon premises that are very different from those of

the international order as it exists now.

These slides should be taken as expressing ideas and concepts that are essentially normative.

Considering this slide with the notion of Westphalian sovereignty and Westphalian international

system, and reviewing the next slide, on the Tianxia system. Keep in mind that both ideas of

Westphalian sovereignty and of Tianxia are ideas about things as they should be “ideally”. Neither

of these concepts fully reflects how things are in the world now.

This is entirely normal because concepts in foreign policy almost always work at a normative level,

at the level of how things should be, not of how things really are in the world. So, what's the problem

to even the vision articulated by Xi Jinping and the international order under the idea of Westphalian

sovereignty?

To put it simply, on a normative level, so in the world of how things should be, in the world of the

ideals that the international community should pursue, all states are sovereign and all states are

therefore morally equal in the eyes of international law. Of course, we know that in the world there

are some states that are smaller, some