China’s Global Security Initiative: Narratives, Origins and Implications

Summary

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary, Xi Jinping, announced the Global Security Initiative (GSI) on 21 April 2022 at the annual Boao Forum. The timing was noteworthy. It came only weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and China joined Russia in blaming the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the cause for Russia's aggression.

In the arc of Boao Forums throughout the Xi era, development has been the dominant theme. Xi's 2015 Boao speech was entitled “Towards a Community of Common Destiny and A New Future for Asia”. It was still a time of high hopes and few doubts within China about its rise, but then each subsequent year saw mounting problems that needed answers. In 2016, Donald Trump, who vowed to rectify trade and market access imbalances with China, won the US presidential election. In 2017, the Trump administration launched the US Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) initiative. The year 2018 saw the start of the Sino-US trade war and the consolidation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) between the United States, Australia, Japan and India. Xi was confident that he could win a trade war, and he invoked Mao's call for “self-reliance” to brush off worries about Beijing's continuing technological dependence on the United States. China's then foreign minister Wang Yi dismissed the Quad as something that would “dissipate like sea foam”. But by 2020, he would accuse the Quad of being a new “Asian NATO”.

In 2019, Xi skipped the Boao Forum. He began the year warning Taiwan that unification “must be and will be achieved”. Then the Sino-US trade war deepened; a million Hong Kong citizens marched to protest a criminal extradition law that would violate Hong Kong's Basic Law and China's one country–two systems commitment in the Sino-British Joint Declaration; and the Second Belt and Road Forum saw Chinese officials pledge to reform the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which was ridden with concerns over debt sustainability, corruption, environmental impacts and local benefits. As growth slowed, Xi called for a “new Long March” to overcome “major challenges at home and abroad”.