Chinese president Xi went to extraordinary lengths to soften China’s hardline image at the APEC forum. It was the perfect place for some good PR. APEC is the local Asian economic forum, including a large amount of the world’s population. This image reboot comes after several years of noisy and counterproductive confrontations with the US, Australia, and various other countries.
“Why” might be a bit more straightforward than it looks. Xi said a lot in that forum, including “no hegemony”, “no spheres of influence”, and generally worked to defuse the abrasive relationship with the US. This is realism, not spin.
For a world leader who commendably doesn’t usually say much, he said plenty. This series of statements was a sort of GPS reference to a much less cluttered relationship between China and the world.
Xi is a career CCP executive. He does know the political environment, and apparently, he wants change as much for practical reasons as for appearances. China hasn’t benefited at all from the various strident rhetorical positions over the last few years.
It’s been a mess. Unlike Mao, Xi could hardly be accused of being lost in his own verbosity. Unlike other world leaders, many of whom should have been muzzled from birth, when he speaks, he tends to be objective. He doesn’t respond to just anything blowing in the breeze that day.
Uniquely, he doesn’t just spout the party line. He IS the party line. His overall effect is to direct events, not just flutter around like a shopping bag in a tornado.
… So, this repositioning has to mean something. If this is a rethink, it’s a good one. The destructive rhetoric has apparently ceased. There are still obvious issues, but at least the thematic stage for a dialog has been set.
If the US can keep its feet out of its mouth, this could work. The world’s two largest economies are in synch, whether they like it or not, directly, or indirectly. The world’s factory and the world’s markets have to have viable talking points.
China is not the USSR. It’s not an obsolescent museum of ideological relics. The USSR went off track fatally with its refusal to adapt to a different world. China has obviously been doing the opposite, perhaps a bit clunkily, but its relationship with the world is totally different. That makes this repositioning a lot more credible. China can trade its way out of its various current issues quite easily.
On a purely pragmatic note, China has absolutely nothing to gain from conflict. A good reason to drop some of the more high-friction confrontations is all it needs to drop the massive costs and liabilities of those confrontations.
The major point to be noted is that Xi CAN do all these things. That’s worth some educated cooperation.
