Matt Ferchen

This piece was originally published by Foreign Affairs. It is based on a longer, annotated version entitled How New and Crafty is China's "New Economic Statecraft"? According to conventional wisdom, Chinese president Xi Jinping has launched a more ambitious and geopolitically game-changing era of Chinese foreign economic policy. And Beijing is certainly promoting new economic initiatives, from the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to the rollout of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative. But China's international economic grand strategy under Xi is not new. It is an extension of Beijing's long-standing Peaceful Development framework from the mid-1990s, which asserts that China's own development and stability is contingent on shared prosperity with its international economic partners, especially those in the developing world. In fact, the Peaceful Development strategy has not been uniformly successful, and Xi's expansion of it is likely to create unexpected challenges for China and the world.

Energy is back in the headlines in a way not seen since the 1970s. Europe's reliance on natural gas from Russia is under increased scrutiny because of the ongoing turmoil in Ukraine. China recently signed a multiyear, multibillion-dollar gas deal with Russia that underlines the strengthened economic and political cooperation between the two neighbors. Meanwhile, the United States is at the epicenter of a shale oil and gas revolution that is transforming domestic as well as global energy markets and politics. Yet while perhaps less noticed, the energy-based relationships that the United States and China each have with Venezuela—and the interactions among those three countries—have geopolitical implications that are particularly pressing.

According to conventional wisdom, Chinese president Xi Jinping has launched a more ambitious and geopolitically game-changing era of Chinese foreign economic policy. And Beijing is certainly promoting new economic initiatives, from the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to the rollout of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative. But China's international economic grand strategy under Xi is not new. It is an extension of Beijing's long-standing Peaceful Development framework from the mid-1990s, which asserts that China's own development and stability is contingent on shared prosperity with its international economic partners, especially those in the developing world. In fact, the Peaceful Development strategy has not been uniformly successful, and Xi's expansion of it is likely to create unexpected challenges for China and the world.