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US-China relations
ChinaDiplomacy
Shi Jiangtao
Shi Jiangtao

As I see it | Decoding the deliberate ambiguity of China’s expanding core interests

  • Beijing’s finely tuned ranking of its vital concerns reveal how China assesses its place in the world in relation to the US
  • The Chinese leadership adopted the term in the early 2000s as part of an effort to persuade Washington to regard the rising power on equal terms

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The scope of China’s core interests have expanded in recent years to include Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, but some hot button issues remain ambiguous, including the maritime disputes in the South and East China Seas. Photo: Xinhua
Shi Jiangtao
For years, safeguarding China’s expanding national interests – especially its core concerns – has been something of a catchphrase for Chinese leaders and diplomats. But Beijing’s decade-old definition of what constitutes its core interests and how they should be ranked hierarchically are studiously vague and seldom updated.

The concept was first introduced to China’s foreign policy in the early 2000s, as Beijing sought to persuade Washington to accommodate its ascendancy while avoiding the historical trap of confrontation between a ruling power and a rising one. Similar to the US, China’s national interests are roughly categorised into three levels: core, important and secondary.

In July 2009, China’s then top diplomat Dai Bingguo tried for the first time to clarify the broad definition of a “core” interest, or bottom line, to his US counterpart Hillary Clinton.

A further attempt was made in September 2011, with a Chinese government white paper which summed up China’s core interests as: “state sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity and national reunification, China’s political system established by the constitution and overall social stability, and the basic safeguards for ensuring sustainable economic and social development.”

As many China watchers have pointed out, the white paper underlined Beijing’s global ambitions and growing confidence, in particular when dealing with Washington as an equal. “If only Washington would recognise this logic and yield its remote, peripheral, noncore interests in Asia in favour of China’s truly essential, ‘legitimate’ interests, then the two sides can enjoy peace,” said veteran sinologist Andrew Nathan in 2013.

It was just three weeks ago that China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi made another rare attempt to fine-tune the ranking of core interests, which seems vital to understanding how a rising Beijing assesses its place in the world vis-à-vis Washington.

It was during a meeting with visiting second-ranking US diplomat Wendy Sherman that Wang laid out the three “bottom lines” of China’s core interests. Unlike 10 years ago – when sovereignty and territorial claims were ranked at the top – Beijing appears now to put greater emphasis on defending its party-state authoritarian system and unique development model.

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