China 2020: A foreign policy characterized by growing resilience, fading responsibility and increasing uncertainty

Abstract

[...]following the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 China’s strategic ambitions sprawled de facto across the Pacific and Indian oceans. [...]we can affirm that its foreign policy «has politically entered the Indo-Pacific without acknowledging it officially».1 The rise of China has coincided with a period during which the reshaping of the international order also reflects North-South inequities, whereby questioning the longer-term position of the Anglo-American and European models of governance. [...]the author is fully aware that such sources cannot but reflect the Weltanschauung and political objectives of the party-state, shedding a positive light on them. China’s foreign policy in the context of COVID-19 With direct reference to the global pandemic, China’s foreign relations in 2020 have been characterized by an attempt to solve a central political conundrum: how to safeguard China’s power in world affairs in ways that will avoid criticism of its authoritarian political system, but which will be in line with its image as a responsible country in the eyes of the West, while also continuing to be a model to the developing world. The outbreak of COVID-19 confirmed to the world a reality that leaves little room for imagination: the second largest economy in the world, perhaps soon to be the first, is still a society in which little or no space for personal privacy and freedom of speech is guaranteed.