Has Xi’s optimism about fortuitous global conditions for China been a miscalculation? Has the president been misled by acolytes to gratify his own ambition? It is hard to tell.

However, one could look closely at the central point of contention: China’s composite national power vis-à-vis that of the US. While some of the indicators’ constituent elements, such as gross domestic product, population and military spending, are easily quantifiable, its most crucial one – political leadership, which acts as the multiplier – is a qualitative variable open to subjective estimations.

Xi and his strategists have realised that America’s political predicament presents China with an opportunity to strategically fill the vacuum. After careful consideration of global structural changes, they have reached a strategic “Eureka moment”. However, the international policies that China has pursued motivated by this window of opportunity deserve a rethink.

Watch: Xi Jinping’s principles of foreign policy

The American political strategist Edward Luttwak described the situation of a “fat Mr China” entering an already crowded elevator. However well mannered, his mass alone would make the other occupants uncomfortable. Add arrogance and a lack of contextual intelligence and the situation would end in a quarrel, with occupants balancing against the impolite intruder.

China needs to radically re-evaluate its neighbourhood policy, starting perhaps with calling a new conference on peripheral diplomacy and strategise more gentlemanly regional conduct.

At the foreign affairs conference, Xi also stressed the interaction between the domestic and the external environment, whereby China actions at home will influence external conditions and vice versa. Having become the big elephant, China cannot return to the status quo ante pretending to be weak. This would only weaken the global system and eventually harm China’s own development.

Xi and his advisers have accurately evaluated the external environment. If the US political crisis deepens into a constitutional one, it will offer an opportunity to China to step in. Yet the challenge in execution demands attention.

Can Xi take China to the global stage peacefully by undertaking key obligations not rhetorically but practically and within China’s resource abilities? Is he willing to change course, open up his country to the world and endorse a truly cosmopolitan vision both at home and abroad?

Xi has not miscalculated the external front, but he may need to re-evaluate his home front.

Vasilis Trigkas is an Onassis Scholar and research fellow in the Belt and Road Strategy Centre at Tsinghua University