China is willing to work with all countries to promote the shared values of humanity—peace, development, equity, justice, democracy, and freedom. We will build consensus among people of different ethnicities, faiths, cultures, and regions and advocate for an equal and orderly multipolar world and a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization. Together, we will build our shared planet into a peaceful, harmonious, and congenial home.

This and similar statements from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader and China’s president, Xi Jinping promote an almost utopian global vision as part of a diplomatic drive to burnish China’s image as a responsible great power.

Nearly half a century has passed since the start of the “opening up” era, which transformed an impoverished Chinese nation into the world’s second-largest economy. China’s current leadership has rolled back previous political reforms of cautious liberalisation, and separation of Party and state and is expanding its control over all aspects of society. Under Xi, the Party is doubling down on efforts to achieve full modernisation through technological and scientific progress and demands a major role for China on the world stage as part of what Xi calls the country’s “rejuvenation”.

China has long abandoned its previous foreign policy of “keeping a low profile and biding one’s time”. Instead, it has become a “norm entrepreneur” in the UN and other multilateral fora, in line with its economic and geopolitical clout. As Xi Jinping has called for on numerous occasions since 2013,  “Chinese values” and “solutions” should be promoted internationally. Beijing is on a mission to infuse international norms and principles, such as the rule of law, human rights and democracy, with new meaning.

Reining in debates and ensuring ideological security  

While invoking international concepts of freedom, democracy, rule of law and human rights, China often uses these terms differently. Its conceptual framing, however, is no coincidence. It is the outcome of decades of coordinated initiatives by the Chinese leadership to build its own discourse power. The influx of liberal values in the 1980s, such as democracy and human rights, was seen as a root cause of the student protests of 1989 and a threat to the survival of the CCP. China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping stated in 1989 that he considered insufficient ideological and political education to be the biggest reform failure of the 1980s.^[1] But the long-term approach taken by the government was not the blanket repression of these terms, but rather their integration into the CCP’s ideological canon and redefinition in a way that renders them harmless to its claim on power. From the early 1990s, new research institutes and organisations were founded and tasked with developing a Chinese discourse and perspective on core terms and concepts.

Language from international norms and standards continued to filter into official CCP language in what became known as the era of reform and opening that commenced in 1979 and lost impetus in the late 2000s to early 2010s. The reforms of that era laid the groundwork for China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 sparked hopes that a further convergence of values and systems would occur. And indeed, the term human rights was introduced in the Chinese Constitution in 2004, which initially was hailed as a new era of constitutional rights protection.

Today democracy, freedom and rule of law are part of the canon of core socialist values promoted under Xi Jinping, whose writings on human rights, diplomacy, security, and modernisation have been published in an ever-expanding canon of Xi Jinping Thought. But over the past decade, measures to construct an independent Chinese value system have intensified, and liberal concepts have been almost completely redefined to make them compatible with the CCP’s political and ideological system. Document No. 9, issued by the Party leadership in 2012, was a mission statement to guard against constitutional democracy, universal values and civil society in their liberal sense.

The concern that liberal or “Western” values are a threat to China’s unity and political stability is equally reflected in a set of security-related laws and regulations introduced in the last decade, such as the Hong Kong National Security Law. Propaganda efforts and legal codification of Party-defined norms have gone hand in hand with policy action such as increasing internet regulation and censorship, and criminal investigations and crackdowns on lawyers, rights activists and public intellectuals. A range of rules have curtailed activities of China’s civil society organisations and restricted what can be discussed in academia, tightening the space for discussion and ideas within China. Since 2019, the Party is strengthening efforts to boost national identity and patriotism through education and public campaigns.

Not all government policy is repressive. China’s leadership pursues a range of efforts to increase efficiency in public services, strengthen legal certainty in finance and trade, improve consumer rights, environmental protection, and AI safety. There are many areas of joint concern and overlapping interests with international stakeholders, including with Western states. But crucial differences remain and have in fact become more pronounced. Chinese leadership prioritises stability – as the collective interest of the “people” – over the rights of the individual, and uses this to legitimise repressive measures. For example, the crackdowns in Xinjiang and Hong Kong are routinely framed in terms of human rights protection and good governance.

Today, the Party positions itself as the sole arbiter and defender of China’s values and collective interests. But the evolution of many of the concepts within China also tells a story of contestation and differing views, challenging the framing that liberal or universal values are anathema to Chinese culture and citizens’ aspirations. Chinese philosopher and diplomat Peng-Chun Chang, then Vice-Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, played an instrumental role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From scholars and lawyers advocating for rule of law and government transparency in the 2000s, to protesters holding up signs demanding democracy and human rights in the White Paper protests in late 2022, there are many examples that the Party does not speak for all.

Even in the current environment, there are scholars who dare to speak truth to power and critique the government, despite the risks involved. Xu Zhangrun, a liberal constitutionalist, emerged as a critical voice against Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power and the abuse of power in China’s political system, particularly during the pandemic. His 2020 essay “When Fury Overcomes Fear” led to his detention, subsequent dismissal from Tsinghua University, and a harsh isolation, effectively rendering him a social pariah. More subtle academic and public debates occasionally emerge and even regain traction where commentators perceive windows of opportunity, for example, ahead of important political meetings or global events.

Global battle of narratives: The rise of Chinese concepts

When foreign countries criticise China’s domestic practices or international behaviour, diplomats often lament that “the West” misunderstands China. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed the importance of “telling China’s story well” and boosting its voice in order to “create a favourable climate of international public opinion”. After reining in debates domestically in the early 2010s, the Chinese government now expends significant efforts on “external propaganda” promoting what it calls a “correct understanding” of China internationally.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to strengthen China’s influence in global governance and has identified increasing the country’s international discourse power as key to achieving this goal. China’s struggle for discourse power takes place both at the micro level in negotiations over specific words and formulations in treaties and resolutions, and at the macro level in competing narratives about the purpose and future of international order.

Ideas and initiatives promoted by the Party have made their way into UN documents and international cooperation. In just over a decade, the “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure initiative has been rebranded as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and gained global prominence. China now regularly describes the BRI as a key pillar contributing to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Similarly, the concept of a “shared community of mankind” (人类命运共同体) and references to a “shared future” have risen from an obscure internal policy slogan to ubiquitous phrasing in China’s policy statements that is regularly making its way into international declarations and bilateral statements. All new Chinese efforts are rhetorically framed as contributing to this overarching goal – a global community, where countries follow their own path, cooperate where desired, and refrain from criticising each other.

Increasingly, normative ambitions are flanked by specific initiatives on a range of issues that are important to the Party. When the Global Data Security Initiative was introduced by Foreign Minister Wang Yi in 2020, it was still relatively low profile. But in 2021, Xi Jinping announced China’s new Global Development Initiative at a UN General Assembly with much fanfare, a grand framework that encompasses the BRI and other smaller initiatives. Xi followed up with a Global Security Initiative (GSI) in April 2022 at the Boao Forum for Asia, elaborated in a concept paper.

These were followed in 2023 by the Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI) and Global AI Governance Initiative (GAIGI). The GCI claims to represent a “new form of human civilisation” that has surpassed modern Western civilisation and presents the world with a new aspirational model. It reflects China’s vision for the UN human rights pillar and posits that different civilisations can have different human rights standards, whereas the GAIGI encapsulates China’s ambitions to set standards in governing new technologies. Most recently, the Global Governance Initiative (GGI), introduced in September 2025 ahead of the 80^th anniversary of the United Nations, promises new solutions for enhancing global governance – with China leading the way into the new global order.

All the above initiatives position China as a provider of global goods through aid, opportunities for development, geopolitical rebalancing, and forward-looking standard-setting. Ultimately, China’s leadership strives to present the country as a responsible international power, a champion of multilateralism, a leader of the developing world and a model that other countries emulate. This is evident in its efforts to present China as a “democracy that works” in a White Paper in December 2021 and at various events. It is equally apparent in China’s rhetoric around its partnership with Russia, portraying both as “progressive forces” against Western hegemony and as defenders of peace and sovereignty.

The CCP’s discourse is framed around the notion of a global anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggle. It positions China as a developing country in the Global South that is challenging the hegemony of the Global North – particularly the US-led West. This debate is not new at the UN, where member states have been divided along different ideological lines of North, South, East and West since its founding in 1945. When human rights concerns are raised, China accuses its critics of “politicisation” and of having an “imperialist” or “Cold War mentality”. Instead, it calls for democracy at the UN, respect for all countries’ right to development, and mutually beneficial cooperation based on “common values” and “shared interests”.

China’s narratives on democracy, human rights and development have gained traction because they speak to real grievances about perceived Western hypocrisy and global inequalities in many parts of the world. The US retreat from multilateral cooperation under President Trump has also given China a larger strategic space and platform for exerting influence.

Chinese leaders recognise that the existing international order is still based on liberal values such as human rights, the rule of law and democracy, values that partly conflict with the CCP’s monopoly on power. By strengthening its discourse power, however, Beijing aims to reshape international norms in ways more aligned with government interests. As Xi put it in his meeting with Putin in March 2023, “Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together.”

A notable difference can be discerned in the CCP’s messaging for domestic audiences compared to what occurs on the international stage. For example, in his statements at the UN General Assembly in 2020 and at the World Economic Forum in 2021, Xi Jinping called for the world to “join hands to uphold the values of peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom shared by all of us and build a new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind”. By contrast, in an article in the Party’s leading theoretical journal Qiushi in 2019, Xi Jinping vowed that China “must never follow the path of Western ‘constitutionalism’, ‘separation of powers’, or ‘judicial independence’”. Instead, Xi said, China should follow its own path and “be adept at using law when participating in international affairs. In the struggle against foreign powers, we must take legal weapons, occupy the high ground of the rule of law…. We must actively participate in the formulation of international rules and act as participant, promoter, and leader during the changing process of global governance.”

Whether domestically or internationally, the CCP relies in equal parts on powers of persuasion and coercion to get its message across. China craves soft power but frequently resorts to compulsory means. In its efforts to enhance its power over meaning at the UN, China alternates promises of “mutually beneficial cooperation” with thinly veiled threats about “consequences” to compel other member states to accept and support its positions.^[2]      

Following the Party’s lead

The term “Global China” has become a shorthand in international policy and academic circles to describe the manifestation of China overseas. But experts rightfully note that the blanket reference to “China” is often oversimplified and the diversity of actors poorly understood. Global China has many faces and comprises state and non-state actors with different motives and interests that are sometimes aligned and sometimes conflict: central government representatives and local officials; state-owned enterprises, private entrepreneurs and individual citizens who seek their fortunes abroad; scholars, researchers and engineers working with their foreign counterparts on a variety of issues. Any attempt to effectively engage with Chinese stakeholders must understand the complexity of those people and the diversity of entities. 

Whereas the space for international exchange and cooperation within China has shrunk significantly after the passing of the Foreign NGO Law in 2017, Chinese institutions and non-governmental organisations are encouraged to “go out” into the world. Some of the most prominent Chinese organisations on the global stage are closely affiliated with the Chinese state and better characterised as GONGOs (government-organised non-governmental organisations). They are officially tasked with strengthening China’s “discourse power” and defending its “right to speak”. But more independent social actors and NGOs also venture abroad to help address global issues, gain international experience and escape the tight restrictions at home. They too may frame their work in accordance with CCP language and priorities for strategic reasons.

Official discourse shapes beliefs and behaviour in multifaceted ways. It functions as a corset in which all diverse actors have to move and arrange themselves: some organisations, especially those affiliated closely with the government, may use the terminology to fulfil their foreign propaganda mission or out of reflexive political compliance. Others may seek benefits through strategic alignment, e.g. by adapting the BRI label to gain economic opportunities or investment. Framing activities abroad as a contribution to an official initiative or goal can also help ensure that such efforts are seen as unthreatening. Individuals may also follow the officially endorsed notions out of personal conviction. The promise of development and the need to struggle for progress has emerged as a powerful social narrative and shared aspiration of Chinese citizens.

While there are many different actors, motivations and degrees of alignment with official language, the outcome is still some level of “magnetic” alignment around the Party’s central goals and narratives. A similar logic and mechanism can be seen at play as foreign governments, companies and at times scholars align themselves for strategic reasons, affinity in values, out of fear of consequences – or simply from lack of understanding what they are endorsing. This is helped by the fact that Beijing has a vast foreign propaganda and influencing apparatus at its disposal, in which a variety of actors at Party, state, central or local level try to ensure that the Party line is maintained in international relations. From joint statements, to Memoranda of Understanding and op-eds in international media – foreign citizens and representatives may equally contribute to promoting China’s political language and interests.

Foreign diplomats and officials often underestimate the importance of China’s United Front and propaganda system, viewing its rhetoric as mere sloganeering and verbal posturing. But China’s increasing discourse power was on full display at the UN, where Beijing employed a range of familiar tools and tactics to control the narrative on Xinjiang and stall an independent UN investigation. This included mobilising Chinese diaspora organisations purporting to represent the Muslim Uyghur population to counter international criticism and organising a “friendly visit” by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, during which she adopted Beijing’s terminology and referred to the camps in Xinjiang as “vocational education training centres”. The High Commissioner was quoted in state media praising China for its achievements in economic development and human rights and photographed receiving a copy of Xi’s Thought on Human Rights Protection.^[3]

In the last couple of years, China has also launched a pressure campaign to get foreign dignitaries, publishers and mapmakers to adopt the name “Xizang” in place of “Tibet”, to assert China’s sovereignty and ownership of the region. Such examples highlight the challenge, but also the need to maintain clear positions when engaging with China.

Language matters: The need for decoding and responding to China

China’s rise as a global power and vision for global governance means increasing competition over the values, rules, standards and principles underpinning the international order. Policymakers worldwide must come to terms with the fact that China, like other great powers, uses its growing economic and political clout to shape this order. A rules-based world order relies on a global consensus on what the underpinning norms entail. When the understanding of terms like the rule of law, human rights, democracy, and sovereignty diverges to the extent where they become incompatible, international norms are undermined.

Language matters, as evidenced by the strategic emphasis the CCP puts on it. While it is crucial in diplomacy to leave room for strategic ambiguity where it enables constructive disagreement or the formation of a new consensus, it is increasingly important to discern where it becomes erosive to core values and harmful to one’s goals. Instead, policymakers should understand and be ready to counter China’s rhetoric by making a compelling argument for why international norms in their universal sense matter and what benefits they hold for citizens.

The Decoding China Dictionary was developed by a group of China specialists with the aim of providing policymakers and practitioners with a simple and practical tool to help them decipher the official Chinese narrative, or “New China Newspeak”. To enable informed engagement with Chinese counterparts, governments, entrepreneurs, and civil society representatives worldwide need to understand the official meaning of frequently invoked concepts and key terms in international relations. It is our hope that this dictionary will serve as a point of reference for reflection, communication and strategy development.

While available in a readily accessible format (with colourful illustrations), the dictionary is based on decades of “swallowing sawdust by the bucketful,” as the great Belgian Sinologist Simon Leys put it, describing the feeling when reading CCP documents. Our work builds on and was inspired and informed by sinologists and decoding experts such as Geremie Barmé, Michael Schoenhals, and Perry Link. We have included key works of reference and useful resources in a list at the end of the Dictionary. Finally, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the experts, scholars and practitioners who have provided insightful, generous and encouraging feedback on this project.

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[1] Z. Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012, p. 96.

[2] M. Oud, “Powers of Persuasion?”

[3] M. Oud, “Powers of Persuasion?”