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First Letter: P

a slice of cake

Prosperity

Written by David Bandurski on .

Brief

In global discourse, prosperity has typically encompassed economic and social well-being, which in many contexts — both within nation states and international institutions — has been linked to social and political freedoms. The UN Charter speaks of promoting “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”.

In the modern era, prosperity has featured prominently within Chinese political traditions. Sun Yat-sen, often seen as the founder of modern China, in 1905 listed “people’s livelihood” as one of his three key political goals (along with nationalism and democracy). In subsequent decades, various iterations of prosperity were closely tied to national revival and political legitimacy — from Mao Zedong’s “common prosperity” (共同富裕) as radical egalitarianism promoting violent revolutionary struggle, to Deng Xiaoping’s reinterpretation to enable grassroots capitalism. In Xi Jinping’s China, “common prosperity” has assumed a new populist meaning, with an emphasis on performative acts and propaganda. Unlike global conceptions linking prosperity to individual liberty, China’s notion centres on prosperity as a good delivered by the Party.

Analysis

Before the Communist era, Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People (三民主义) established prosperity as central to Chinese political thought. The third of these principles, minsheng (民生主義), emphasised “people’s livelihood” through land reform, wealth redistribution, and state-managed economic development, dividing welfare into four essential areas: clothing, food, housing, and mobility. Influenced by American economic and social philosopher Henry George and combining traditional Chinese values with modern governance concepts, Sun’s doctrine sought cooperation between classes rather than Marxist struggle, advocating redistributing land ownership rights and state oversight of major industries as methods to achieve national prosperity without creating extreme wealth inequality.

The phrase “common prosperity” (共同富裕) first appeared in the People’s Daily on 25 September 1953. This Maoist conception linked prosperity to collective ownership and mutual aid within agricultural cooperatives. As political struggles subsided in the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping led an ideological reversal. While capitalism had been condemned as “a road of a few getting rich”, Deng’s reform and opening policy rewrote “common prosperity” to embrace what Mao had forbidden — allowing select individuals and regions to accumulate wealth first. “Poverty is not socialism”, Deng wrote.

Deng’s capitalism as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” held GDP growth as a key marker through successive administrations. In 1997, Jiang Zemin introduced the “Two Centennial Goals”: by 2021, the CCP’s 100-year anniversary, to “enter moderate prosperity, and stride boldly toward prosperity and power”; and by 2049, the national centennial, to “build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious”. These became goal posts for “common prosperity”.

By the second half of the Hu Jintao era (2002-2012), it was clear that rapid development had brought sharp social and economic inequities. Considering “the intensification of social stratification and the increase in social problems”, as one official economic journal wrote in 2007, “there must be new ideas”.The rethink took form as Hu Jintao’s “Scientific View of Development”, which stressed balanced growth over pure economic expansion.

In the Xi era, common prosperity has been hobbled by contractions in China’s economic model,  chief among them capitalist-style inequalities (“natural antagonism”) stemming from the fact that three quarters of urban workers are employed by private enterprises. While the promise of shared prosperity remains central to the CCP’s legitimacy, lagging economic growth has necessitated new approaches.

Xi Jinping’s response has been a mix of initiatives and performative gestures. In March 2021, Zhejiang province was designated as a “demonstration zone”, with proposed measures including the creation of “high-quality” jobs to promote common prosperity. Renewed talk of common prosperity at the top followed in August 2021, as Xi wrapped the concept with the geo-politicised “Chinese-style modernisation” — essentially, the assertion that modernisation as pursued by the CCP is fairer and more sustainable than that of the West.

The performative aspect became evident in August-September 2021, when major firms were pressured to donate billions to common prosperity funds. Similarly, China’s December 2020 declaration of victory in the “war against poverty” asserted victory even while Premier Li Keqiang acknowledged that 600 million Chinese still lived on less than 140 dollars per month.

hands joined to form a star

Partnership

Written by Marina Rudyak on .

Brief

The UN defines partnership as an ongoing collaborative relationship based on alignment of interests around a common vision. It is aimed at combining complementary resources and competencies as well as sharing risks, in order to maximise value creation and deliver benefits to all parties involved. The concept differs from alliances, which are formal agreements with binding commitments, such as NATO’s Article 5 collective defence clause.

The Chinese official discourse emphasises that “China does not have allies, but has friends with partnership diplomacy”. It argues that while alliances are grounded in the “old thinking of confrontation and bloc mentality,” China’s partnerships are rooted in mutual benefit, non-alignment, and the principle of “seeking common ground while maintaining differences”. Under Xi Jinping, constructing a global network of partnerships that promotes cooperation over confrontation has been framed as key to safeguarding China’s development and geopolitical space. China has built a layered system of over one hundred bilateral partnerships, ranging from “strategic” to “all-weather” or “comprehensive”, which vary in formality and depth. Though framed as flexible and non-aligned, these partnerships increasingly serve geopolitical functions.

Analysis

In the Mao era, the term partnership carried strongly negative connotations, associated with U.S. foreign policy rhetoric. The People’s Daily frequently referred to “so-called ‘partnerships’” as tools of imperialism, portraying relationships between the U.S. or Western Europe with Asian or African states as exploitative. In contrast, China promoted friendship, non-alignment, and mutually beneficial cooperation. 

It was only after the launch of Reform and Opening in the late 1970s that China began referring to other countries as its partners. At the time, this was almost always used with a qualifier, such as trade partner, economic partner, or partner for China’s modernisation. Brazil became the first country to be named partner without qualifiers in 1985, when Premier Zhao Ziyang, during a visit, proposed that China and Brazil could become “friends and partners”. In 1993 Brazil became the first country with which China established a strategic partnership – now regarded in the official discourse as the start of China’s partnership diplomacy.

Throughout the 1990s, China established a series of partnerships, including the Strategic Partnership of Coordination and Equality for the 21st Century with Russia in 1996, and in 1997 a Long-term Comprehensive Partnership with France, and an agreement to work toward a “constructive strategic partnership” with the United States.

In official discourse, partnership was positioned as a counter-narrative to alliance (结盟). The concept of Great Power Partnership was presented as a “new type of international relations” between China and major powers of the post-Cold War era like the US, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, or Japan.

The official narrative argues that partnering without alignment (结伴不结盟) is based on the idea that alliances are about finding enemies, while partnerships are about making friends. However, when Xi Jinping introduced the concept of a Global Network of Partnerships in November 2014, he framed it in explicitly strategic terms. Xi called for deeper cooperation and partnerships to help increase China’s soft power and safeguard China’s development and geopolitical space. Xi’s statement has since been linked to the Comprehensive National Security Outlook – China’s national security strategy. Partnerships are a tool to counter what China perceives as global US-hegemony.     

According to official sources, China has partnerships with nearly 100 countries, structured across more than 20 types and five categories. These range from strategic (战略) partnerships,  the most commonly used category, held with at least 80 countries, to all-weather (全天候) or permanent partnerships held with countries such as Pakistan, Venezuela, and Belarus.

Though described as flexible and non-binding, upgrades in partnership status to “comprehensive” or “strategic” often coincide with broader agendas and more formalised mechanisms of cooperation. Despite being framed as “non-aligned” and value-neutral, global partnerships are a tool for promoting the “democratisation of the international relations” (国际关系民主化) and building a “Community of Shared Future for Mankind” – a network designed to counter what China perceives as global US-hegemony and advance a more multipolar world order.

People-centred

Written by Editors on .

“People-centred” approaches in global development, humanitarian initiatives, and climate action aim to empower individuals and communities by promoting public participation and amplifying marginalized voices. In China, the phrase “people-centred” or “putting people first”  (以人为本) has been a prominent Party slogan since the early 2000s. Historically, the term “people” has served as a political category in China, constituting the class-based population that the Chinese Communist Party claims to represent. The people and the Party are often conflated, suggesting that their interests are inherently aligned.

On the international stage, China advocates for “people-centred development” and for a “human rights system with a people-centred approach.” This is a critique of the prevailing global human rights framework, which focuses on individual rights and the obligations of states to respect and protect them. China’s interpretation of a people-centred approach tends to blur the lines between individual (人), people/collective (人民), and nationality (民族), thereby sidelining the rights of individuals and ethnic groups. Instead, it places an emphasis on individual contributions towards nation-building, thus prioritizing societal goals over personal liberties.

white dove

Peaceful

Written by Editors on .

China’s leaders frequently state that the PRC’s desire for peace is rooted in traditional Chinese values as well as the country’s own historical experiences of foreign aggression and colonisation. Its promise that China’s rise will be fundamentally different from the expansionism of Western nations is enshrined in the “peaceful development” (和平发展) doctrine adopted in the 1950s.

Beijing maintains that its primary goal is domestic modernisation, which requires a stable, peaceful international environment, and that China’s military power is for defensive purposes only. But China also forcefully defends its territorial claims against neighboring countries on land and sea and retains the right to use military force to assert its sovereignty over Taiwan.

In international conflicts, China promotes itself as a neutral mediator, such as in Ukraine, Gaza and simmering conflicts in the Middle East. It regularly offers to serve as a platform for talks and has published peace plans (albeit rather short and vague), while positioning itself as a force for post-war reconstruction. Despite participating in peace and humanitarian aid missions, the PRC maintains a strong policy of non-intervention.

wrench

Pragmatic

Written by Editors on .

China presents its policy as pragmatic (or practical) and results-oriented, both at home and abroad. Domestically, the Party claims to deliver efficient progress by prioritizing practical solutions over ideological debates, despite ongoing campaigns to ensure that cadres and citizens adhere to CCP doctrine and support Xi Jinping’s policy visions.

In its diplomacy (especially with liberal democracies), China promotes pragmatism as a focus on shared interests such as  trade, scientific exchange, and global challenges, while setting aside contentious issues such as human rights, security concerns or geopolitical competition. The implicit message is that failure to “properly handle” these differences will damage the relationship and cause economic harm.

Towards the Global South, China frames itself as a pragmatic actor offering “win-win” economic cooperation and access to global public goods without political conditions (in contrast to Western conditionality). China promises non-interference in domestic affairs, though it criticises pushback against its interests – such as trade barriers – as ideologically motivated.

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Public Diplomacy

Written by David Bandurski on .

Brief

From its modern origins in the 1960s, the notion of “public diplomacy” broadly involves governments cultivating both public opinion in other countries and intercultural communications. The aim was to distinguish government-led international public relations efforts from the distasteful notion of propaganda. More recently, the idea of a “new public diplomacy” has emerged to encompass the activities of non-state actors, including NGOs.

The trend in China in the reform era, and particularly since the 1990s, has likewise been to distance international public relations from so-called “external propaganda”, a mainstay of the Chinese Communist Party since the founding of the PRC. Since 2013, however, the re-centralisation of CCP power under Xi Jinping and a renewed emphasis on ideological conformity have reinvigorated the focus on “external propaganda” around the conviction that state media and even quasi-private actors must work internationally to “tell China’s story well” (讲好中国故事), thus enhancing the country’s “international discourse power” (国际话语权) as a key aspect of its “comprehensive national power” (综合国力).

Analysis

In January 1991, still faced with sanctions from the EU and the United States as a result of its crackdown on pro-democracy protests on 4 June 1989, China established the State Council Information Office, a government office whose function is to “explain China to foreign countries”. Chinese experts have regarded this institutional change as marking a move away from the influence of so-called “external propaganda” toward a “concept of modern public diplomacy”.

Marking a further attempt to rebrand its information activities, the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department – an office in fact overlapping with the Information Office (the former emphasising internal controls, the latter external messaging) – issued a notice stating that the word “propaganda” (宣传) in the department’s official English translation would be formally changed to “publicity”. The ambiguous dual identity of these two offices at the present day can be seen as symbolising the tension that persists in China between “external propaganda” as a more rigid notion of party-controlled messaging, and the broader notion of “public diplomacy” as the need to engage more flexibly and credibly with foreign publics.

In late 2007, Joseph Nye’s term “soft power” was also introduced into China’s official political discourse. In 2008, as China prepared to host the Beijing Olympic Games, which were regarded as a historic opportunity to showcase China’s development before the world and increase its soft power, the country faced a wave of criticism over its human rights abuses. Accordingly, much of the official CCP discourse focused on rectifying the relative weakness of China’s “discourse power” against the “soft containment” of the “biased” media of the West. Hu Jintao spoke of “cultural soft power” and increasing the influence of Chinese traditional culture as a key component of “comprehensive national power”, essential to maintaining the CCP’s global interests.

Initiated in 2009, China’s “going out” strategy involved the investment of billions of dollars every year in the overseas expansion of Chinese media, an effort focused entirely on Party-state media, leaving out more vibrant Chinese commercial media. By 2012, China’s domestic media environment and non-governmental exchanges were already coming under much tighter Party control, and centralised CCP coordination remained the model when it came to public diplomacy.

Since 2013, the role of the Party in public diplomacy has become more pronounced than at any time in the reform era. In a speech to the National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference on 19 August 2013, Xi Jinping emphasised the old model of “external propaganda” as he outlined his programme for international messaging: “[We] must meticulously and properly conduct external propaganda, innovating external propaganda methods, working hard to create new concepts, new categories and new expressions that integrate the Chinese and the foreign, telling China’s story well, communicating China’s voice well”.

The core content of “telling China’s story well”, now the central concept in the CCP’s orthodoxy on public diplomacy, centres on the Party’s leadership. Within this concept, the chief objective of China’s public diplomacy, or external propaganda, conducted through the state conglomerate China Media Group and other channels, is to “create an international public opinion environment favourable to China’s development” under the Party’s leadership.

peace white dove

Peace

Written by Jerker Hellström on .

Brief

“The love for peace is in the DNA of the Chinese people”, Xi Jinping, General Secretary of China’s Communist Party, has repeatedly asserted. This narrative, proclaiming that its subjects are harmonious, non-violent and benevolent by nature, rhymes well with the Party’s conviction that it is always morally correct. While the UN Charter does not explicitly define the term “peace”, it is generally understood as a state where war, non-state sanctioned hostility and violence are absent. Moreover, the Chinese leadership’s notion of peace involves social stability, “harmony”, development, cooperation, and mutual benefit – but also the absence of interventionism and colonialism.

Not surprisingly, the CCP’s rhetoric often emphasises its own “peaceful” nature. As the Party characterises China as peaceful by definition and the Chinese nationality (or race) as genetically peace-loving, its defence policy is also portrayed as purely defensive in nature. Speaking in Berlin in March 2014, Xi said that the pursuit of peace, amity and harmony was “an integral part of the Chinese character, which runs deep in the blood of the Chinese people”, and that it represented “the peace-loving cultural tradition of the Chinese nation over the past several thousand years”. In Xi’s rhetoric, China’s fondness for peace is explained with reference to factors related to Chinese ethnicity, tradition and history.

Analysis

While Mao Zedong came to the same conclusion, his explanation was purely ideological in nature. According to Mao, all socialist countries, including China, want peace; “he only ones who crave war and do not want peace are certain monopoly capitalist groups in a handful of imperialist countries that depend on aggression for their profits”.

A government White Paper issued in 2011, “China’s Peaceful Development”, explains that China’s love for peace is based on lessons drawn from history: “From their bitter sufferings from war and poverty in modern times, the Chinese people have learned the value of peace and the pressing need of development”. As a result, China “never engages in aggression or expansion, never seeks hegemony, and remains a staunch force for upholding regional and world peace and stability”.

The White Paper stresses the importance of preserving social stability, which is tightly linked to China’s notion of peace and one of the CCP’s core objectives. In fact, “preserving peace” could also refer to the suppression of peaceful protest movements, let alone violent social unrest. The Chinese regime perceives peace and stability as the bases of its legitimacy, and therefore witnessed the “colour revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in the 2000s with great concern. “Preserving peace” in this context is as much about protecting the regime from its people as it is about protecting the ruling party from real or imagined foreign hostile forces. Such concerns also explain China’s investment in technologies of mass surveillance as part of its overall security apparatus.

The 2011 White Paper also explains that the overall goal of China’s pursuit of “peaceful development” is to “achieve modernisation and common prosperity”. Xi Jinping’s “Thought on Diplomacy”, published in early 2020, stresses that China “insists on the path of peaceful development based on mutual respect, cooperation, and mutual benefit”.

Moreover, the “peaceful unification” (“和平统一”) of China is a euphemism for Taiwan’s incorporation into the People’s Republic by peaceful means. The term implies that unification could also occur by non-peaceful means, i.e., through a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. In fact, China has made it clear that it is ready to go to war if the current status quo, in which Taiwan is a de facto (but not de jure) independent state, is changed. Through the adoption of the 2005 Anti-Secession Law, China clarified that it “shall employ non-peaceful means … to protect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” should “secessionist forces … cause the fact of Taiwan’s secession from China” or if “possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted”.

Meanwhile, the CCP continues to claim that “peace is in the Chinese DNA”, that its defence policy is “defensive in nature”, and that it “poses no military threat to any other country”. The logic here is that Taiwan is actually not another country from the CCP’s perspective: rather, it is portrayed as an integral part of the PRC’s territory. Hence the Chinese government’s proclaimed adherence to “the principle of not attacking others unless it is attacked” rests on the definition of what constitutes an “attack”.

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