By Kerry Brown
What Xi Jinping’s extensive travels tell us about his foreign policy strategy.
With Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the U.K. for a four day visit, we have another chance to observe one of the most striking ways he differentiates himself from his predecessors. A simple look at the list of countries he has visited as they are set out on the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs website shows in just 31 months since assuming the role of president, he has clocked up trips to 33 nations.
Even more remarkable is the diversity of these destinations. There are, of course, the standard places one would expect – four visits to Russia, two to the United States, three to Indonesia. Most of these visits were to attend international fora like the Bandung Conference, the Shanghai Co-operation Organization summit, or the Sochi Winter Olympics. But then there are an array of bilateral visits made for purely diplomatic reasons – a trip to South Africa in 2013, just after the first foreign visit he made as country leader (to Moscow); almost all the Central Asian states in the autumn of 2013; a large swathe of central Europe the following spring, with Latin America later that year, and then South Asia in September, and Australia and New Zealand at the end of the year. In 2014 alone, Xi managed to clock up visits to no less than 20 countries.
Can we discern any patterns from this diplomatic hyper-activity? Firstly, in view of his frequent flying habits, the two most obvious omissions on this list – Japan and North Korea – become even more conspicuous. And while the strains with Japan since 2010 are well understood, and make the failure to pay a visit there comprehensible, the omission of North Korea is truly an anomaly. It speaks volumes that Xi has been able to visit places like Fiji (population 881,000), Maldives (345,000), and Trinidad and Tobago (1.3 million), which barely figure on most leaders’ radar, while he so far hasn’t found the time to sit on a plane for an hour in order to pay a visit to one of his country’s supposedly closest diplomatic allies. Even the perfect pretext offered by the recent 70th anniversary of the Korean Workers Party in North Korea failed to entice him to go. The lack of a single destination in the Middle East so far, despite the region being China’s largest source of imported petrol, is also striking.
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