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previous 30 years of “hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead”. It also heralded
the beginning of a new period of confident, independent international policy activism
by Beijing. In part this change reflected Xi Jinping’s greater centralisation of political power in
the Chinese system. In part it reflected the Chinese system’s deep conclusion that American
global power was in relative decline and that the United States would not confront China
militarily if China sought to expand its regional military presence. In part it reflected a Chinese
institutional conclusion that China had finally become an indispensable global economic power
to most countries in the world, thereby enabling China to begin to project its economic
influence bilaterally, regionally and also multilaterally. It also was an expression of Xi Jinping’s
personal leadership temperament, which is impatient with the incremental bureaucratism
endemic to the Chinese system, and with which the international community had become
relaxed, comfortable and thoroughly accustomed.

For those who follow these events closely and have written on the importance of this
significant departure from China’s traditional strategic framework dating from the 2014
conference, a number of developments since then have been illustrative of this overall change
in the style, content and direction of China’s international policy approach. China worked
overtime in 2014-16 to expand its military position in the South China Sea with a rapid program
of island reclamation. China took the idea of the New Silk Road and turned it into a multi-
trillion dollar trade, investment, infrastructure and wider geo-political and geo-economic
initiative, engaging 73 different countries across much of Eurasia, Africa and beyond. China
signed up most of the developed world in the first large-scale non-Bretton Woods multilateral
development bank called the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), capitalised it and
launched it so that it now has a balance sheet already approaching the size of the Asian
Development Bank.

China has also become for the first time a multilateral diplomatic activist, launching diplomatic
initiatives of its own beyond its own immediate sphere of strategic interest here in the East
Asian hemisphere, as well as actively participating in other initiatives such as the JCPOA on
Iran, rather than declining to reach beyond its own narrowly defined core national interests
as we have often seen in the past. China has also developed naval bases in Sri Lanka, Pakistan
and now Djibouti (the latter with some 5,000 troops based there), as well as participating in
naval exercises with the Russians in the Sea of Japan, the Mediterranean and even the Baltic.

And now in the most recent National People’s Conference in March 2018, we have the decision
to establish China’s first ever International Development Cooperation Agency to manage
China’s burgeoning aid programs across the developing world. Of course, these leave to one
side the activities of Chinese state financial institutions, other Chinese SOE’s as well as Chinese
mixed investment funds operating on every continent and in every region of the world.

It would be wrong, analytically, to say that all these suddenly began after the 2014 Central
Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs. Some began in the two years before then
after Xi first became General Secretary in late 2012. And some have their antecedents in the
late Hu Jintao period. But my point is that they all either began, were intensified or else were
formally publicly legitimised by the conclusions of the last Central Conference. In short, the

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