The Chinese government promotes the country’s openness to the world, even as it adopts increasingly aggressive and at times punitive policies that force countries to play by its rules.
With the United States and others wary of its growing dominance in areas like technology, China wants to become less dependent on the world for its own needs, while making the world as dependent as possible on China.
China’s strategy is born out of strength. The coronavirus has practically disappeared within its borders. The country’s economy is growing strongly. And China’s manufacturing sector has become the world’s largest by a wide margin, leaving other nations heavily dependent on it for everything from medical gear to advanced electronics.
In a flurry of speeches, Xi Jinping, China’s ambitious, authoritarian leader, laid out his vision for this new world order, while making clear his terms for global engagement.
“Openness is a prerequisite for national progress, and closure will inevitably lead to backwardness,” Mr. Xi said in remarks that seemed to take a swipe at Mr. Trump’s America-first agenda.
Mr. Xi wants to tether other countries ever more tightly into China’s economic and thus geopolitical orbit. In a speech to other Chinese leaders, recently published by a Communist Party journal, he called for Beijing to make sure that other countries remained dependent on China for key goods, as a way to ensure that they would not try to halt their own shipments to China.
Mr. Xi’s strategy, of course, grew out of the Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to isolate China, which show no sign of waning in its last weeks.
In the Asia-Pacific region, few governments view the choice so starkly. With many of them more dependent on trade with China now than with the United States, they cannot easily turn away. China, by far, is the largest market for Australia’s goods, buying nearly 38 percent of its exports; the United States accounts for 4 percent.
Mr. Trump’s go-it-alone approach has given China an opening to portray itself as the champion of globalization. In Beijing’s argument, it is the United States that has now retreated by trying to restrict Chinese investments.
China is not only trying to capitalize on American political disarray but also to repair the damage that the pandemic has caused to China’s image, especially in Europe.
“China is angry,” one embassy official explained to The Sydney Morning Herald. “If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy.”
