The message was reinforced by Foreign Minister Wang Yi in July. “As we stand today at a new point in history, we face more geopolitical complications, we have bigger responsibilities and harder missions,” he told cadres, according to official transcripts.

“We have to form an iron army of diplomats who have the invincible political will, unwavering determination, high ability, and tough spirit to turn new pages for diplomacy with Chinese characteristics in the new era.”

But in a reversal of its pre-2020 trajectory of rising spending on diplomacy, Beijing cut its actual outlay on foreign affairs last year by 16.47 per cent, to 51.41 billion yuan (US$8.07 billion).

In 2019, China’s funding for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs increased by 5.49 per cent. This compares with a 12.26 per cent boost to diplomacy spending – to 58.34 billion yuan – in 2018.

The figures were gleaned from this year’s annual financial report to the national legislature. It did not break down the outlays, but the cuts were in line with calls from the Communist Party leadership and State Council to “tighten our belts”, the report said.

Congress delivered on Biden’s request for US$58.5 billion – a 10 per cent increase – in the current financial year for the country’s two foreign policy pillars, the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Xi wants isolated China to ‘make friends and win over the majority’

In his May budget submission, Biden was explicit that “diplomacy would once again be a centrepiece of American foreign policy, and America would once again be a leader on the world stage”.

‘Challenging’ belt and road strategy needs risk analysis, anti-corruption steps

According to China-based think tank Green BRI, which analyses the global infrastructure initiative, belt and road investments last year were at their lowest since the programme was unveiled in 2013.

Scuppered deals and the coronavirus pandemic contributed to the fall, but Beijing has also adopted a more cautious approach to development of these overseas projects.

The nurturing of the next generation of Chinese diplomats has also taken a tepid turn, with just 142 graduates recruited to the foreign ministry this year – the lowest number since 2012.

While there is an increase in openings to 170 next year, annual hires over the past decade have remained in a limited range from 142 to 217, peaking in 2019.

The new recruits will be added to the foreign ministry’s estimated 10,000 staff, according to the latest count from an academic paper published this year by Wang Chunying, a professor from China Foreign Affairs University, an institution directly affiliated to the ministry.

There is no public information on ministry personnel, but Chinese researchers say there is a constant deployment of staff from other government organs and academic institutions.

These positions are in addition to the 13,790-strong workforce in the State Department’s foreign service.

02:25

Xi Jinping and Joe Biden call for mutual respect and peaceful China-US coexistence

Xi Jinping and Joe Biden call for mutual respect and peaceful China-US coexistence

While a country’s diplomatic abilities and influence do not rest on the number of its overseas postings and diplomats, Chinese foreign policy experts have warned of a mismatch between staffing levels and the country’s global ambitions.

Wang Yizhou, a Peking University professor specialising in research into China’s diplomacy capability building, warned in 2017 that Beijing would need to boost the number of diplomats to match its many foreign policy goals.

In a paper co-authored with Li Xinda, also from Peking University, and published in September 2017, Wang said the shortfall was partly a result of the party’s grip on political ideology alignment among China’s diplomats.

“In order to keep up the fighting spirit in the foreign service, the country will not expand its diplomatic recruitment in a short period of time,” he said.

“This is to avoid the loss of morale and redundancy. It is more likely the ministry will adopt an approach to steadily increase the number of diplomats to ensure the quality of the team.”

Cultural Revolution to Wolf Warrior: Chinese envoys on edge of new era

Wang said he expected the diplomatic team to go through an expansion because of the need to avoid conflict with other countries under “many geopolitical uncertainties” and the “increasing expectation from other countries on China”.

“The demand for [Chinese] diplomats has reached an unprecedented peak,” he said.

However, Wang and Li also pointed out problems that needed to be solved by “political leaders” to strengthen the foreign service team.

“For example, the disproportional distribution of workload in the institution, and the disorganised and muddled roles among departments have created barriers to expand the team of diplomats,” they wrote.

In addition to concerns over staffing levels, the quality of the country’s diplomats has also worried Chinese experts.

“Despite the fact that we may still not be able to compare to US in terms of their entire global network and outreach of diplomacy at the moment, our judgment is that US diplomacy is on decline, and China is still rising,” said Pang Zhongying, an international relations expert with the Ocean University of China.

“What really is unfinished business in Chinese diplomacy is the need to push for professionalism – the need for career diplomats,” he said.

“If we want to compare ourselves with the US Department of State, we need to have professional and career diplomats like their top diplomats in the civil service. This has also created a problem in attracting talent.”

China makes billion-dose coronavirus vaccine pledge to Africa

Pang said that ultimately, it was important for Beijing to know whether the resources put into diplomatic-related areas were yielding proportional results. But it was hard to know how competitive China was with the US in diplomacy: “There is no data available for us to make that comparison.”

Another concern is the rise of Wolf Warrior diplomacy – named after two successful Rambo-style films in China – and known for an aggressive, in-your-face approach to international relations.

Conflict brewing between pandas and wolves in China’s foreign policy community

Sun Yun, director of the China programme at the Washington-based Stimson Centre, said the narrative China was trying to push and the structure of the Chinese government had created inherent difficulties for Beijing’s diplomacy.

“I think the ‘tell China stories well’ is only one side of the coin, the other side is the Wolf Warrior diplomacy,” she said.

“I think Chinese diplomats suffer from a different international discourse [to the US] that promotes democracy as a universal value, as well as the language capability as English is the official language of many countries but Chinese is only for China,” she said.

“The State Department arguably has more authority in foreign policymaking than the foreign ministry. The secretary of state is the fourth in line in the presidential succession while no one expects the Chinese foreign minister to be in the line of succession at all.”