Economic Diplomacy in Xi Jinping’s Foreign Policy Concepts: A Comprehensive Analysis

The transformative impact of paramount leaders’ foreign policy concepts on modern China has been widely acknowledged. China’s emergence as a global power can be attributed to strategic foreign policy principles such as ‘hide your strength, bide your time’ and the ‘pursuit of peaceful development’. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China’s foreign policy has undergone significant evolution, encompassing economic diplomacy as a potent tool for advancing national interests. The research paper examined the economic diplomacy components embedded in Xi Jinping’s foreign policy, particularly with respect to the community of common destiny and a new type of major country relations. The paper employed David Baldwin’s Economic Statecraft theory as a theoretical framework for examining the research question and analysing it. The paper argued that existing scholarship extensively analyses China’s economic diplomacy in relation to economic growth and its foreign policy implications, providing a rich analysis of the BRI, NDB, and AIIB. The current research does not systematically examine how Xi Jinping’s key foreign concepts operationalise economic instruments as tools of statecraft. The paper examines the nature of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) economic diplomacy, concluding that its primary approach aligns with what Baldwin terms “positive economic sanctions”.