Trip in countdown to Communist Party congress shows Xi Jinping’s confidence, experts say
- Chinese president expected to travel overseas next week for the first time in more than two years
- Face-to-face exchanges by top leadership will help China avoid appearing isolated from the rest of the world, observers say
The timing of President Xi Jinping’s first trip abroad in more than two years – just ahead of next month’s 20th Communist Party congress – is a display of confidence in his status and power, experts say.
Xi wants ‘new era’ for China economy, leaving Deng’s ‘get rich’ policy behind
The two international trips will be the first by any member of the seven-person Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top political body, since Xi visited Myanmar in January 2020.
During that congress, which begins on October 16, Xi is widely expected to secure a third term as the party’s leader, as a new line-up of top officials are ushered in.
Xi’s trip to Kazakhstan will project an image of confidence to both domestic and international audiences, according to Xie Maosong, a senior fellow of the Taihe Institute and a senior researcher at the National Institute of Strategic Studies at Tsinghua University.
“To the home audience, Xi’s trip to Kazakhstan signals that he is confident about China’s stability ahead of the pivotal party congress, especially when the country’s economy is facing tough challenges from the new wave of Covid outbreaks and there is growing worry among the people,” Xie said.
“Political stability, which is the most important in China, has been achieved.”
“It does not mean that zero-Covid policy will be changed because it is necessary to avoid a sudden nationwide outbreak that brought China’s public health systems to its knees and thrown China into chaos,” Xie said.
01:52
Shanghai Ikea shoppers scramble for the exits during flash Covid shutdown
While Xi’s first international trip since the pandemic began may not signal an immediate change in the government’s zero-Covid policy, it reflects that Xi is “confident that he is in control of the domestic situation”, according to Pu Xiaoyu, associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.
He added that it also suggested that Beijing had realised the urgency for in-person diplomacy amid international challenges.
“More top Chinese leaders will start to travel abroad from now on as they have come to realise that top level, face-to-face exchanges are irreplaceable if China [is to avoid being] isolated from the rest of the world, especially when all the Western and other Asian countries’ leaders are already travelling and shaking hands with each other,” Pu said.
“Conducting top-level diplomacy via video-links for two years simply cannot be a long-term solution.”
Return to focus on ideology leaves China’s economic growth lagging behind
Xi is expected to meet Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev before travelling to Uzbekistan to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit. He is also expected to meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin for the first time since the pair announced a “no limits” partnership on the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Tsinghua’s Xie said choosing central Asia as his first official destination in two years, showed Xi regarded the SCO as a “crucial platform to counter the geopolitical pressure from the United States and its allies and securing China’s future energy supply”.
He said it was important for China to make the SCO summit a success because it represented a different model of international organisations, in which members have diverse religion, ideology and states of development, which are “drastically different from the Western alliances, which are based on one model of democracy”.
02:04
China’s President Xi visits far western Xinjiang region for first time in 8 years
China, Russia, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are full members of the SCO. Several other countries are in either the process of acceding to the forum, or are currently dialogue partners.
Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said Xi was poised to bring back a successful SCO summit as a trophy to further cement his standing ahead of the party congress.
