What China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s focus on better ties with US this year says about Beijing’s foreign policy priorities in challenging times

Wang’s annual policy address offers important clues about how Beijing wants to react to concerns about its economy and frayed relations with the wider world
Although Beijing remains committed to its partnership with Russia, the fact that Washington is the main focus highlights the limits of that relationship

Shi Jiangtao

Published: 4:42pm, 23 Jan 2024

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The Chinese foreign minister’s annual policy address earlier this month offered some hints about how Beijing plans to adjust its diplomatic priorities in the face of the new reality.

In his speech to a think tank affiliated to the foreign ministry, Wang Yi indicated that Beijing would change its focus and prioritise stable ties with the United States over its relations with other major powers, including Russia.

It marks a subtle but important shift in the face of potentially serious economic and political headwinds, including an authoritarian, inward-looking turn at home and an external environment that has raised increasing concerns about how the country’s global ascendance may be affected.

Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University, has previously argued that China needs to sort out its diplomatic priorities to deal with these changing realities, warning that this is a “vital strategic issue”.

Last year he told the Hong Kong-based China Review News Agency there is a growing risk of a strategic overdraft in the face of growing economic difficulties and external challenges.

He argued that the number of Beijing’s strategic priorities looks “set to shrink” and believes that Taiwan and the great power competition with the US should “take precedence over other strategic matters”, including Russia, the South China Sea and Belt and Road Initiative.

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In his address to the China Institute of International Studies, Wang put Washington at the top of Beijing’s list of its “global network of partnerships” and pledged to “follow through on the common understandings” reached between presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in San Francisco two months ago.

The aim, according to the transcript of his speech published on the foreign ministry’s website, is to “explore the right way for the two major countries to get along with each other”.

Considering the years of enmity and mutual mistrust between the two superpowers, it is a modest but challenging goal – and possibly scales back previous ambitions to get relations “back on the right track”.

More importantly, it is the first time in many years, probably since 2016, that Beijing has acknowledged the overriding importance of the US to its global diplomacy.

It is no secret that this complex relationship remains the most important in its hierarchy of diplomatic ties, but Beijing does not often admit so publicly.

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Instead it has looked to cultivate “friendship, mutual trust and convergence of interests” with its neighbours in Asia and tried to boost ties with Europe to help offset the pressure.

At the same time, Beijing has often chosen to highlight Xi’s bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin as a counterbalance to Washington and other Western democracies.

In December 2021, two months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Wang said the country’s “shoulder-to-shoulder, back-to-back strategic cooperation” with Moscow was “a pillar of global stability, a bedrock for peace and a force for fairness and justice”.

On the surface, Beijing appears to have not been deterred by the international condemnation of Putin’s war against Ukraine and repeated warnings from the US and its allies against providing military aid to Moscow.

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Wang has continued to vow to “deepen strategic mutual trust and mutually beneficial cooperation” with Moscow and “cement the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination”.

But moving Russia down this year’s list of priorities shows the limits of this so-called “no limits” partnership, especially since the Ukraine war has weakened Moscow and made it more of a junior partner to Beijing.

However, this does not necessarily mean that China is revising its grand strategy of forging a network with like-minded partners, especially authoritarian powers such as Russia, North Korea and Iran, to counter the West.

Shortly before former US president Donald Trump’s inauguration Wang sounded upbeat in his annual policy address, setting as a goal the “sustained, sound and steady growth” of ties with the US and pledged to work with the new administration to “properly manage differences”.

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But four years later, ahead of Biden’s inauguration, Wang voiced frustration about the decline in relations and urged the new White House to “reflect on the lessons from setbacks in bilateral relations in recent years”.

“China-US relations have come to a new historical juncture,” he said, adding that Washington should view China’s rise in “a positive and constructive way” rather than “a threat”.

In fact, as perceptions of China are undergoing a sea change in the US, Asia and Europe, there is little sign that Beijing still harbours any illusions that its ties with Washington can be restored to the level in the pre-Trump era.