Other News

Professor Shaun Breslin has written for Chatham House on how Chinese President Xi Jinping's speech at the UN highlight China’s latest strategies for shaping its vision of a new type of global leadership.

It has become routine for China’s leaders to use high profile international events as a means of projecting a preferred image of what China stands for and how it will act as a great power, one that is perhaps now second only to the US in the league table of global powers. So it is no surprise that Xi Jinping has used his interventions at the UN development summit and his address to the General Assembly to showcase China’s growing role as a global aid actor, and to call for greater ‘democratization’ of global governance institutions (or, in other words, a greater role and say for China and other developing countries). China’s alleged and self-proclaimed (and challenged) predilection for peace, a desire to build a ‘new type’ of (vaguely defined) international relations, and support for the UN as the sole arbiter of when sovereignty might possibly be put aside (instead of the US or a coalition of the willing) are also now relatively well-established and rehearsed Chinese positions.

In addition to wielding China’s financial power in support of this national image projection, Xi’s activities also represent a move towards mobilizing discursive power (话语权) as well. To date, and for a number of years, this discursive power has been primarily deployed in a defensive manner, with the aim of denying the supposed universal nature of many of the norms and principles of the international order. These norms, as articulated by both Chinese government officials and some supportive academic scholars, are not universal at all, but merely the product of a small number of Western countries’ histories, philosophies and developmental trajectories. So, in this formulation, while it is important to have a common set of principles and responsibilities as the basis for international interactions, each country should be free to develop its own nation-specific definitions based on its own unique histories and contexts. And it is only these Chinese-inspired definitions and aspirations – of human rights, for example, or development – that China should be judged against.

To read the rest of Professor Breslin's article, please see the Chatham House website.