International Order, Normative Power, and President Xi’s New Global Initiatives

• In Event: Public Attitudes on China

Abstract

This paper uses an International Relations Constructivist approach centered on normative power and relationality to analyze the four Global Initiatives launched by President Xi in the fields of development (2021), security (2022), civilization, and artificial intelligence governance (2023) as instruments that complement and partly replace the Belt and Road Initiative in Beijing’s wider effort to construct a new, Chinese-led international order.
As I have argued in my books China’s International Socialization of Political Elites in the Belt and Road Initiative (Routledge, 2021) and The Geopolitics of the Belt and Road Initiative (Routledge, 2024), as well as in the manuscript of a book titled China’s Two Identities: Territorial Empire and Postmodern Global Power (currently under review at Springer), President Xi launched a complex and sophisticated grand strategy intended to create a new international order. This has been done using a network of new multilateral institutions and especially the Belt and Road Initiative, which projects China’s relationality-based normative power in the Global South. More specifically, processes of normative suasion and cognitive role playing – that are respectively based on micro-processes of persuasion and role playing/mimicking – have been employed to socialize the political elites of Global South countries. Their remarkable success is due to material incentives represented by a large number of prestige infrastructure projects that benefit the political elites individually and as a group, as they are calculated to increase their political legitimacy and electoral support. In most cases, Beijing’s efforts have achieved Jeffrey Checkel’s role playing, Type I socialization of these elites. The latter accordingly change their geopolitical preferences, align their states’ foreign policy with Beijing’s interests, and join the emerging Chinese-led international order. This process is greatly enhanced by the reliance of the Belt and Road Initiative on relationality (guanxi), which gives priority to relationships over short-term material gains. Exploitative patterns of interaction clearly exist, which structure the BRI and the new order as a center-periphery system. But China’s relationality does lead to a degree of cooperation and benevolence largely superior to those of previous counterhegemonic powers such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
However, in recent years, the dynamic of this process has dramatically changed. Causes include the significant reduction of China’s annual growth rate and the inability of many BRI partner states to repay the huge loans received from Beijing for economically inefficient prestige infrastructure projects. The resulting financial problems are well illustrated by the 2020 halving of the Belt and Road Initiative’s budget. Equally important, the United States and its allies have launched a large number of initiatives – ranging from the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework to the European Union’s Global Gateway, the Japan-World Bank Quality Infrastructure Investment Partnership, and Japan and India’s Asia-Africa Growth Corridor – that offer alternative sources of infrastructure projects to developing countries. The resulting new balance between Chinese and Western material incentives is seriously threatening the Type I socialization of the BRI political elites, which might stop and roll back the expansion and reinforcing of the Chinese-led international order.
In response, the leadership in Beijing has tried to restructure the Belt and Road Initiative as a smaller but ‘cleaner and greener’ Initiative. Still, in terms of effectiveness, this cannot replace the massive infrastructure projects that had made China attractive to Global South political elites. Consequently, since 2021, President Xi has launched four Global Initiatives that complement the BRI by extending the Chinese projections of normative power to new fields. The Global Development Initiative tries to reduce costs by shifting the focus from huge infrastructure projects to much smaller and cheaper development assistance projects concerning issues such as poverty reduction and food security. The Global Security Initiative intends to establish a security community that provides a hard power component to the Chinese-led international order, thus bringing it closer to a fully-fledged, mature order. The Global Civilization Initiative is meant to reinforce the ideological dimension of Beijing’s ‘community of shared destiny.’ Finally, the Global Artificial Intelligence Governance Initiative has the goal of imposing China as the leader of the Global South in a high-tech domain with tremendous social impact.
The paper analyzes the ability of these Global Initiatives to reinvigorate the process of Chinese socialization of the Global South political elites and the associated construction of the new, Chinese-led international order.

Author

• Theodor Tudoroiu, University of the West Indies