Grand Designs: Does China have a ‘Grand Strategy’? / China’s ‘New Era’ with Xi Jinping characteristics

About China Analysis
Each issue of China Analysis focuses on a specific theme and draws on Chinese sources to introduce European audiences to a strategic debate within China’s expert and think-tank world. The series aims to help the European policy community understand how China’s leadership thinks about domestic and foreign policy issues.Do China’s leaders have a strategy for the long-term direction of their country? For a while now Chinese thinkers have been discussing this very question, even speaking about the parameters of an all-encompassing 'grand strategy' for China.

Chinese scholars largely agree that China needs a grand strategy that binds its strategic interests in the economy, domestic politics and its foreign policy.

The Chinese Communist Party Congress in October 2017 would indicate whether China has departed from its ‘peaceful rise’ in favour of an ambitious grand strategy.

The report, Grand designs: Does China have a 'grand strategy'?, brings together the views of prominent Chinese scholars to document the evolution of strategic thinking in China since the 1970s to the present day.

In the December 2017 China Analysis the authors offer their insights into what the 19th party congress meant in terms of ideology and China’s domestic and foreign policy.

Xi’s China has been gradually changing; its domestic policy was drifting from authoritarianism to a totalitarian approach. Foreign policy was steadily becoming more assertive. In many ways the 19th party congress solidified Xi’s domestic and foreign policy trajectory of the past five years. The key question arising from the congress, however, appeared to be whether Xi was also changing China in a more thoroughgoing way. Xi’s ideological campaigns sought increased control over Chinese society. And indeed, Chinese society appeared to be more and more muted. The question remained of whether that silence was the product of trust in the CCP and its leaders, or whether it was the product of fear.

• Primary Source

ECFR: China Analysis, December 2017: China’s 'New Era' with Xi Jinping characteristics http://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/China_Analysis_New_Era_with_Xi_Jinping_characteristics.pdf

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