China’s Xi has met more than 25 world leaders in about a month

BEIJING — One month after consolidating his power at home, Chinese President Xi Jinping has stepped onto the world stage to strengthen relations with the US and other countries.

In all, Xi has met more than 25 heads of state, including US President Joe Biden, since Oct. 31, according to a count of CNBC press releases on the ministry’s English-language website. of Foreign Relations of China. In early October, Xi oversaw a leadership shakeup of the ruling Chinese Communist Party that filled top posts with his loyalists and paved the way for him to win an unprecedented third term as president.

Most recently, Xi received European Council President Charles Michel in Beijing on Thursday. That followed a visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in early November, the first Western leader to do so since the pandemic.

“This year we see [Xi] leaving from his [September] OCS travel, get out more and engage more with the international community,” said Michael Cunningham, research associate, China, at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Asian Studies. “That will be challenging for the US.”

Cunningham said US efforts to build coalitions abroad have been helped by Xi’s absence from the international stage for much of the past three years.

The meetings come after the Russia-Ukraine war and Covid travel restrictions have separated Beijing and the West. Tensions over Taiwan this summer further strained US-China relations.

“Xi is restoring his pre-pandemic level of diplomacy through bilateral meetings with many state leaders attending the G20 summit in Bali,” Eurasia Group analysts said in a Nov. 18 report. “He met with leaders of advanced industrial democracies for the first time since the pandemic began and amid tense relations between China and the West. Most of Xi’s meetings pushed a positive outlook to stabilize relations.”

Xi finally met Biden in person for the first time as US president on November 14, marking a pause in this year’s downward spiral of relations between the world’s two largest economies. The following week, the countries’ military leaders met for the first time since US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan in August.

The high-stakes Xi-Biden meeting signaled to some in China that relations with the US were aligning more with the vague terminology Beijing often uses, such as “mutual respect” and “win-win cooperation.”

“For China, the wording carries symbolic symbolism, which is equality,” said Shen Yamei, deputy director and research associate in the department of American studies at the China Institute of International Studies, a state-backed think tank. “We need to manage our relationships on an equal footing, respecting one another and cooperating for mutual benefit, rather than, as the US said, the US dealing with others from a position of strength. That’s not the same “.

Shen said China and the US can more easily work together on issues of climate change, public health and macroeconomic coordination. She said that “it will be a bit difficult on issues more related to traditional security issues, like our understanding of the Ukraine crisis and the way we work.” [it] outside.”

“The important thing is that we [keep] take into account the responsibility of a major country in the world in cooperating with each other,” he said.

The Biden administration has called China a competitor, while strengthening US ties with other countries, especially in the Indo-Pacific.

The heads of Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia and Italy have met with Xi and Biden in recent weeks, according to government announcements.

“Right now, the political environment in China is different,” Cunningham said. Xi “is trying to get relations back on the right track so that conditions are positive for China.”

“The way China sees it, the right path and positive conditions is where the most powerful countries in the world, the US, Western Europe, some of the East Asian countries, are not actively opposing China’s rise as world power,” he said. “That was the path we were on largely prior to 2018, when the US-China trade tensions really boiled over.”

In his speech at the Chinese Communist Party congress in October, Xi said the Party has “safeguarded China’s dignity” in the face of international changes and warned of “dangerous storms” ahead.

Just before that political meeting, Xi made his first trip out of the country since the pandemic, to Uzbekistan to attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Eurasian intergovernmental group. While there, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, among other country leaders.