When Donald Trump visited Beijing in May of this year, Xi Jinping promoted a new definition of Chinese foreign policy, a “constructive strategic and stable relationship” (jianshe xing zhanlue wending guanxi) or a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” that both the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the White House defined as “a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability on the basis of respect, fairness, and reciprocity.” Xi’s follow-up visit to Washington last September reiterated this definition. It is a classic example of “tifa”, the special “keywords” or coded formulations of official policy used by the Party-State in China, whose translation requires carefully contextualized analysis.
As with any understanding of official Chinese terminology, the historical and cultural contexts and connotations must be considered, especially in light of the “civilizationism” driving the Trump regime’s one-sided Christian Nationalist foreign policy. On both occasions, Xi specifically dismissed the “Thucydides Trap” (phoneticized as Xiuxidide xianjing in Chinese), a fundamental paradigm in U.S. foreign policy thinking that forecasts the emergence of any new superpower as inevitable grounds for war.
At the State banquet in May, Xi asked, “Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations?” He insisted on China’s peer status: “Where disagreements and frictions exist, equal-footed consultation is the only right choice”. Xi played to the U.S. President’s vanity by referring to Trump’s trademark and stating that “Achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand,” but also stressing that “both China and the U.S. stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation” and “should be partners, not rivals.”
The new formulation of Chinese foreign policy follows in the wake of a series of policy definitions that deny the Trap. In 2003, the government advisor Zheng Bijian described official foreign policy as “China’s peaceful rise” (Zhongguo heping jueqi), but in East and Southeast Asia the term “rise” (jueqi) awoke painful memories of Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” and in 2004 the term was amended to “China’s peaceful development” (Zhongguo heping fazhan) in order to preclude any connotation of the Thucydides Trap.
These terms developed in the context of Hu Jintao’s domestic policy of developing a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui) that would balance the creation of wealth with its equitable redistribution, later extended to a foreign policy of working toward a “harmonious world” (hexie Shijie), in which the emergence of developing nations—today’s “Global South”—would not generate conflict with developed nations.
The concept of “harmony” (he) has deep roots in Chinese culture. One of the cornerstones of Chinese foreign policy is the Confucian dictum “the enlightened person practices harmony, not uniformity” (junzi he er bu tong), with the corollary “the small-minded person pursues uniformity, not harmony” (xiaoren he tong er bu he). In the political context, “harmony” also means plurality or diversity, while “uniformity” means sameness or one-track thinking. Chinese culture is characterized by an ancestral aversion to “disorder, chaos” (luan) that prioritizes “stability” (wending) above all else, opposing “harmonized diversity” (he) or “imposed uniformity, sameness” (tong), as alternatives to “disorder” (luan), but preferring plurality to sameness. Stability is the most important geopolitical public good because it guarantees smooth trade and socioeconomic development for all nations. Applied to foreign policy today, the dictum defends multipolarity from hegemony. In the context of multipolarity, plurality includes the diversity of political systems and civilizations. This could be interpreted negatively as an excuse not to change or positively as a defense of cultural identity.
Xi has taken this thinking further by calling for a “community of common destiny for mankind” (renlei mingyun gongtongti), and proposing a “Global Governance Initiative” (quanqiu zhili changyi) as an alternative to the existing Liberal International Order that prioritizes the interests of the developed nations. The cultural key to understanding “harmony” and the “common” in this line of thought is the Confucian concept of “reciprocity” (shu). In social relations, shu prioritizes altruism over egotism, the common good over private gain, putting oneself in the shoes of the other, not wishing for others what one would not wish for oneself. In international affairs, it would represent equanimity, reciprocity, equal treatment, and win-win diplomacy rather than zero-sum rivalry. Xi made this clear in his remarks at the banquet in May, “whether or not we could have mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation is the key to whether the relationship can advance steadily.”
Thus Xi defines a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” as “positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, a sound stability with moderate competition, a constant stability with manageable differences, and an enduring stability with promises of peace,” while Foreign Minister Wang Yi defines the bases of “respect, fairness, and reciprocity” as “respect means respecting the other side’s core interests and major concerns; fairness refers to pursuing mutually beneficial cooperation; reciprocity requires each side’s concerns to be addressed on an equal basis”.
There are obvious similarities to the longstanding concept of “peaceful coexistence” (heping gongchu wu xiang yuanze) first proposed by Zhou Enlai in 1954—mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. Thus, a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” is no newcomer; it has a lengthy genealogy in Chinese foreign policy thinking.
Although the long-term effects remain to be seen, this approach has already produced some concrete results. The U.S. and China agreed in May to create mechanisms to put it into practice—a Board of Trade to manage bilateral trade across non-sensitive goods and a Board of Investment to provide a government-to-government forum for discussing investment-related issues. While this is largely aspirational at present, China did commit to purchasing 200 American-made Boeing aircraft and at least $17 billion per year in U.S. agricultural products through 2028, as well as restoring market access for U.S. beef and resuming poultry imports. The September agreements include the new front of emerging technologies, China adopting the term “super intelligence” promoted by Trump rather than “artificial intelligence” to describe them, and both countries establishing the U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue to exchange views on risks and benefits related to SI.
Parallel to this, China has subsequently used the constructive relationship of strategic stability to avoid an all-out economic war with the European Union, reaching agreement with the EU on how to manage China’s overcapacity production of electric vehicles (better and cheaper than their European competitors), and consensual management of the supply chains of rare earths and permanent magnets necessary for EU high-tech production.
The duration of this lull in open hostility of the U.S. and the EU toward China is an open question. U.S. rhetoric has been clearly adversarial, labeling China as a threat. The EU rhetoric is more nuanced, seeing China as simultaneously a partner in some endeavors, an economic competitor and a systemic rival. The U.S. Minister of War, Pete Hegseth, who accompanied Trump to Beijing in May, adapted his rhetoric to the new tone by agreeing to “build a constructive relationship of strategic stability, based on fairness and reciprocity, reaffirming that while our nations will vigorously protect our respective interests, we can secure practical, mutually beneficial agreements where our interests align”.
This deference to China is difficult to reconcile with America’s unchained retreat into 19th-century mercantilism and imperialism, characterized once again by the emergence of robber barons, manipulation of the media, even the barbarity of reviving public executions (joining the select company of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Taliban, ISIS, North Korea and Somalia), as well as the unfettered use of raw power to blatantly interfere in the affairs of other nations and institutions—such as sanctions on the ICC, kidnapping heads of state or calling for their removal, or unilateral armed interventions—in an unbridled attempt to resuscitate the Great Game of great power geopolitics.
Despite his claims to MAGA, every move Trump makes weakens America even further, perhaps irreparably. By contrast, China has been acquiring soft power by default. Provoked into groundbreaking scientific and technological innovation by the very attempts to stymie its progress, it offers access to green energy technology and open-source AI, allowing the developing world to skip over dependence on petroleum and exposure to restrictive U.S. and EU export policies. Meanwhile, a coercive and transactional U.S. tries to maintain worldwide dependence on petroleum supplies it wants to dominate and prevent others from developing alternatives, while falling behind in green technology.
American deference to China’s rhetoric does not hold across the board, however, because the geopolitical narrative is still in dispute. As Amitav Acharya wrote in The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West: “While the West still controls the narrative of world order that exalts its ideas and leadership, the Rest has become stronger economically and diplomatically, thereby raising questions about the future of world order”.
In a major policy speech he gave in Athens in October, in view of the Parthenon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “Western nations must embrace an earlier ethos of exploration and conquest as part of their civilization, to remain ‘at the head of the world’.” As the New York Times put it, “Rubio Urges Europe to Awaken From ‘Slumber’ and Uphold Western Dominance”, describing Rubio’s speech as a call to “rejuvenate their civilization so they can maintain their dominance in a world of wars, economic uncertainty and technological change”.
Nothing could be further from the conciliatory tone of President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo in 2009 that won him the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump so deeply covets. Rubio’s exposition of the key tenets of the civilizationist ideology driving U.S. foreign policy contrasts so alarmingly with China’s narrative of a “community of common destiny for mankind” that it makes China’s “constructive relationship of strategic stability” narrative eminently more attractive.
The continually erratic and capriciously abrupt and disruptive swerves of Trump’s ad hoc and short-sighted attempt to mould the world to his own delusional vision and interests are accelerating the emerging “world minus one narrative”. Mark Carney’s call for a coalition of the willing among middle powers, Ursula von der Leyen’s proposal of “associate” status for Canada, the EU’s pursuit of “strategic autonomy,” European doubts about the future of NATO, the moves toward “dedollarization” among the BRICS+, a meaningful, sustained decline in the use of the dollar in global trade and financial transactions, the emergence of the Global South, the declining demand for petroleum products as green alternatives are implemented, are all symptoms of this evolution toward an order of regional orders as an alternative to the unitary neoliberal world order.
Having acquired superpower status, China’s “constructive relationship of strategic stability” narrative, win-win diplomacy and defense of multipolarity become increasingly more attractive alternative models in the realm of international affairs. Even Francis Fukuyama, who credits China with the invention of the State as a bulwark in favor of the common good against patrimonialism in his classic textbook The Origins of Political Order, where he foresaw the fragility of the model of liberal democracy that he defended—and predicted the errors that could subvert it—, reserves judgment on the validity of the current Chinese political system as an alternative. Fukuyama observes: “A liberal democracy is based on having a competent state that is limited both by rule of law and by elections. And China has the competent state—very competent—but it isn’t limited by either rule of law or elections.” He adds: “I’ve thought all along that this is the only alternative political and social system that has a chance of being competitive with liberal democracy”. It was “because the American model has deteriorated” that he began saying these things, but he does wonder if the Chinese state is a sustainable model—“I think that there are reasons to still regard that as an open question”.
The middle- and long-term maintenance and consequences of China’s constructive relationship of strategic stability policy will also depend upon the continued competence of China’s leaders as an alternative to the continued incompetence of America’s leaders—and the EU’s.
Cover photo: US President Donald Trump reacts after a B1 bomber flew past during the national anthems while he greeted Chinese President Xi Jinping upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on September 23, 2026. Xi is visiting the United States from September 23 to 25. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP)
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