Multiple Multipoles: Distinguishing Definitions Between Beijing and the West

Executive Summary:

• Beijing believes that the multipolar world it has spent decades calling for is within reach, judging by recent high-level speeches in Europe, Russia, and elsewhere.
• Beijing’s conception of multipolarity diverges in important ways from that of the West.
• Moscow has been central to Beijing’s approach to advancing multipolarity, and President Xi Jinping has tended to discuss key foreign policy strategies during visits to Moscow.
• While the United States attempts to peel Russia away from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the PRC is attempting the same with Europe, where it is pitching itself as a stabilizing force in a turbulent world.
• According to Foreign Minister Wang Yi, “support for China’s complete reunification” is fundamental to an “equal and orderly multipolar world.”

If Beijing senses the rumblings of tectonic shifts in the global order, it is because it has been preparing for them for decades. At the turn of the millennium, former U.S. government official Michael Pillsbury argued that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1986 “has had an almost unchanging assessment of an ‘inevitable’ multipolar future,” and surveyed contemporary Chinese scholars who made parallels to the Warring States period (Pillsbury, 2000). At the United Nations in February, People’s Republic of China (PRC) Foreign Minister Wang Yi (王毅) made the remarkable comment that “the past 80 years is a period of accelerated advancement in world multipolarity”—in other words, the entire postwar has been trending in this direction (FMPRC, February 19). Today, it seems, Beijing is more confident than ever in its analysis that it has correctly called the “changes unseen in a century” (百年变局) and that it is uniquely positioned to shape an emerging international order.

A growing number of voices in the West appear to be coming around to Beijing’s thinking. The new U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recently concurred that the United States now faces a multipolar world (U.S. Department of State, January 30). Meanwhile, the theme of this year’s Munich Security Conference was “multipolarization,” with its accompanying report stating that “we already live in a world shaped by ‘multipolarization’” (Munich Security Conference, February 14). The PRC has followed these developments closely. Articles on the PRC internet purr that the Munich report “considers China to be an outstanding and strong supporter of the multipolar international order” (认为中国是多极化国际秩序的杰出、有力支持者), and that the conference showed that Europeans “often put China in the position of a superpower on a par with the United States” (常把中国放在与美国比肩的超级大国位置上) while businesses and academics “generally recognize that China’s rise is unstoppable” (普遍承认中国崛起势不可挡) (Aisixiang, February 24, February 27). [1]

When considering Beijing’s references to multipolarity, questions of what precisely Party officials mean when they use the term and what the implications will be for the rest of the world are more important than debates on the current structure of the international system. Frequently, they are at odds with Western conceptions, instead expressing a desire for a world that more closely reflects Beijing’s own dark view of the world.

Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference Catalyzed Shift

The current clamor concerning “an equal and orderly multipolar world” (平等有序的多极化和普惠包容的全球化)” is not new. The concept of multipolarity was first mentioned in a Party Congress report in 1992 (China Brief, April 12, 2024). Jiang Zemin and former French president Jacques Chirac committed themselves to developing multipolarity in 1997 in a joint statement (Sciences Po, July 2001). A few years later, the founding document of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) stated among its goals the promotion of a new international order in an era of developing multipolarity (UN Treaties, September 19, 2003). And in 2005, a government white paper discussed multipolarity as “an unstoppable historical trend” (不可阻挡的历史潮流) (Xinhua, December 22, 2005).

The shift to a new direction first appeared at the highest levels of the Party in the December 2023 Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference. The conference made “two major propositions” (两大主张), the first of which was the need to “advocate” (倡导) for the direction the world should take, rather than merely describing trends in the international system (China Brief, April 12, 2024). That this conference—only the fifth since the end of the Mao era—set the agenda is evident from recent articles on the state of the world. For instance, an article by academics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences refers explicitly to the conference in support of an argument that “multipolarity has [now] become a fundamental trend” (多极化已成为基本趋势). This is echoed by many, others such as Chen Dongxiao (陈东晓), president of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, who last month said that not only is the world becoming more multipolar but “China … is also shaping the future international order” (中国 … 也是塑造未来国际秩序) (People’s Daily, January 27).

Russia’s Relevance Suggests Ulterior Strategy

Russia is crucial to the development of Beijing’s views regarding multipolarity in the era of Xi Jinping. As the SCO declaration makes clear, the two countries have spent decades willing such a world into existence. In his first year as CCP general secretary in 2013, Xi Jinping chose a visit to Moscow to unveil his theory of a “new type of international relations” (新型国际关系)—a related concept to the promotion of multipolarity (Xinhua, March 24, 2013; China Brief, June 7, 2013). Exactly a decade later, on a separate trip to Moscow, Xi Jinping told Russian President Vladimir Putin, “Now there are changes that have not happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes” (Reuters, March 22; Xinhua, March 23, 2023). The following year, at the SCO summit in Astana, Putin triumphantly stated that the multipolar world “has become a reality” (Kremlin, July 4, 2024).

Driving the world toward multipolarity is clearly on Beijing’s agenda. If Putin is the principal partner in this endeavor, Xi does not intend him to be the only one. While Wang Yi did meet Russian foreign minister Lavrov at the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting, telling him that they were both “advancing multipolarity in the world,” Wang’s speech to the others in attendance was titled “Be the Driving Force for the Progress of History” (MFA, February 24, [1], [2]).

There are important diverging views between the United States and the PRC on who constitutes key actors in a future multipolar world. In the former, Secretary Rubio suggests that Russia could serve as a third pole. This line of thinking likely informs Beijing’s concerns about U.S. attempts to pry Russia away from its deep entanglement with the PRC—a “reverse Kissinger,” to use the phrase attributed to Robert Zoellick (National Interest, January 10, 2017; MFA, February 28). However, surveying PRC references to multipolarity in recent years reveals that it has long focused on Europe as a potential pole.

For the PRC, it is Europe that should be peeled away from the United States in order to build an “equal and orderly multipolar world.” This is in part because Europe has some elements—such as a global currency—that are required of a global power center but that the PRC currently lacks (China Brief, May 24, 2024). Beijing has sprung into action in recent weeks to begin engineering such a gambit. Beyond the Munich Security Conference, PRC officials have been sending the message that “your best friend has abandoned you,” according to reporting from the South China Morning Post (SCMP, February 28). Meanwhile, Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily has run commentaries arguing that “China has always believed Europe is an important pole in a multipolar world” (中方始终认为欧洲是多极世界中的重要一极), urging the two powers to “join hands to promote equal and orderly multipolarity in the world” (携手推动平等有序的世界多极化) (People’s Daily, February 18).

Conclusion

If a multipolar world is the direction of travel for the international system, then there is a dark road ahead. It is not for nothing that the PRC’s historical analogy of choice is the Warring States—a period of enormous upheaval. However, such fearmongering also plays into Beijing’s hands. In a world of uncertainty, people yearn for stability. As it turns out, this is exactly what Beijing offers. A report surveying global strategy and security risks put out in January by the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank under the Ministry of State Security, argues that the PRC should be “a stabilizing force amid accelerating centennial changes” (百年变局加速演进中的稳定性力量) (CICIR, January 1).

This is the PRC’s pitch to Europe and the rest of the world, too. As Wang Yi assured listeners in Munich, “China will surely be a factor of certainty in this multipolar system, and strive to be a steadfast constructive force in a changing world.”036 But as he continued his speech, he overplayed his hand. Among four points he made about the features of a multipolar world came a warning. It is important to respect international rule of law, he said, but “respect for all countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity should mean support for China’s complete reunification” (FMPRC, February 15). If that is the condition for entering the brave new world Beijing envisions, European and other Western countries likely will remain poles apart.

Notes

[1] It should go without saying that this is a clear distortion of what the report says. In its executive summary, the authors write that “many in the West see Beijing’s advocacy for multipolarity as a rhetorical cover for pursuing great-power competition with the [United States].”