Author: Joshua Eisenman, University of Notre Dame
Not since the Mao era has the developing world played a larger role in China’s geostrategy. Over the last decade, China’s leaders have come to believe they can reshape the world to conform with their interests. China is employing economic tools like policy lending and ‘memorandum-of-understanding diplomacy’ to achieve political ends, and stepping up party-to-party outreach and educational activities to deepen relations, improve the image of the country and its political system, and enhance policy coordination.
China’s foreign policy practice differentiates the relative status of bilateral relationships based on the characteristics of partner states — specifically major powers, states on China’s periphery, developing countries and, since the 18th Party Congress in 2012, multilateral international forums. The boundaries between these categories are often ambiguous, and many states traverse two or more of them.
Major powers are large, economically developed states, including the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, Britain, or the European Union as a whole. Peripheral states include both developing states and major powers in East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Russia and Southeast Asia. Former president Hu Jintao declared, ‘Major powers are the key, surrounding (peripheral) areas are the first priority, developing countries are the foundation and multilateral forums are the important stage’.
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, relations with major powers, especially the United States, remain Beijing’s top priority. But developing states are assuming a larger role in China’s thinking in both political and economic affairs.
In 2013, Xi launched his signature policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — an ambitious strategy to reshape the world by loaning over a trillion US dollars to developing states for infrastructure development. The BRI has now expanded to include nearly every aspect of China’s foreign policy toward the developing world. This assertiveness marks a rapid and dramatic departure from more than two decades of adherence to Deng Xiaoping’s admonition that China should ‘keep a low profile’.
Over the last two decades, strategists in China adopted a more nuanced view of the developing world, differentiating ‘major developing states’ or ‘newly emerging powers’ from ‘other’ developing states. While there is no definitive list of major developing states, they appear to include a handful of large, rapidly developing and politically influential states such as the developing members of the G20 — Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and Thailand.
Part of the developing world falls within China’s ‘periphery’, which constitutes a strategically important geographic belt around China. Previously, the periphery was limited to Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Central Asia. But under the Xi administration the ‘greater periphery’ expanded in accordance with Beijing’s growing power and influence to…
