What did the year in foreign policy look like in Chinese official circles? Divining the thoughts and motives of China’s leadership is a famously abstruse exercise even for Chinese citizens, who are often left to parse bland quotes or keep their ears peeled for rumor. But one reliable, albeit indirect, indication of the Zeitgeist of Chinese officialdom comes by way of a 2013 foreign affairs retrospective published on the website of the People’s Daily, the ruling Communist Party’s paper of record. On December 21, in a slight nod to quasi-democratic crowd-sourcing, the site opened online voting for the “top ten world news” for 2013, asking readers to select the ten best from a meager list of thirteen People’s Daily stories published over the past year (the results are here).
Together, the stories form a clear narrative about the Chinese Communist Party’s view of the world—self-congratulations for continuing economic reforms coming out of Beijing, a good measure of Schadenfreude about troubles in the United States’ backyard, and continued efforts to befriend Africa.
The compilers cannot be accused of provincialism. Of the dozen-plus choices offered, five focus on Asia, four on the Middle East, two on the United States, and two on Africa. Only two stories are explicitly China-centered, although they reflect a predictably rose-tinted view of the party. The first, voted the top story of 2013, describes how the Third Plenum meeting, a high-level political conclave held in November, “confirmed a comprehensive blueprint to deepen reforms.” The other reminds readers that the “Chinese Dream,” a still-vague phrase coined by President Xi Jinping to sketch the country’s new direction, involves “everybody winning” by “integrating China’s renaissance with the world’s progress.”
By contrast, the People’s Daily selections focusing on the United States present China’s greatest geopolitical rival as a paranoid nation in decline. The second-most significant story of 2013, according to voting results, covered former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s bombshell revelation about widespread NSA wiretaps, which Chinese media frequently call “PRISM-gate” in reference to one NSA project’s code name. PRISM-gate garnered a nomination because it had a “serious effect” on the “public trust in the U.S. government.” The U.S. federal government shutdown, lasting from October 1 to October 16—which People’s Daily opined was an expression of “worsening political polarization,” not to mention the “intensification of structural conflicts in U.S. society”—also featured.
Japan, China’s other rival—and wartime enemy—got a single nomination: “Japanese Government Continues to Move ‘Right.’” The People’s Daily complains that under new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, elected in July 2013, the Japanese government has engaged in “frequent backsliding on the historical question of the Diaoyu Islands,” a disputed pile of rocks that Japan administers and calls the Senkaku. This “rightward move” has prompted “international society to increase its vigilance.” The paper doesn’t explain what that means, but it may refer to China’s surprise announcement in late November of an “air defense identification zone” that included those very same islands.
It’s common to see Chinese press play fast and loose in the service of brow-beating Japan, but factual elisions particularly bedevil another selection: “Philippines Hit by Typhoon; China Rushes to Assist.” That article notes that after the devastating November 11 Typhoon Haiyan ended over 5,500 Filipino lives and left millions homeless, China not only “sent international relief teams” from its own Red Cross to assist, but mobilized the PLA Navy’s “Peace Ark” ship. Both statements are true, but misleading. China initially donated a paltry $100,000 to Haiyan relief, upping the total and dispatching Red Cross personnel a week later—after international observers and even some Chinese state media complained about the inaction. Even that revised sum is less than the aid package offered by Swedish furniture giant Ikea.
In contrast to its prevailing pessimism and bombast, the People’s Daily list did evince some refreshing bullishness on Africa, a continent to which China has pledged $20 billion worth of infrastructure and agriculture loans. On one hand, the paper nominated the September 21 terrorist attack on Nairobi’s Westgate mall as a top story, calling it a signal that “behind the ‘rise of Africa’ there is social inequality, corruption, high unemployment,” and other ills that catalyze terrorism, a problem the continent “needs to solve.” But that rise is still real: The paper listed as another top story the fact that in May African Development Bank President Donald Kaberuka announced that average per capita GDP for the continent had exceeded $1,000. This “symbolic event” showcased the “development potential” of Africa, rooted, the paper says, in “the discovery of rich oil reserves, natural gas, and other resources.” China’s economic ties with Africa, the article concludes, has become “an important factor” driving the continent’s growth.
And what of the world in 2014? Here, the People’s Daily is a bit stingy with forecasts. That’s also true of Chinese state media generally, which mostly sticks to predicting domestic matters like the direction of economic development, employment figures, and real estate prices. If the Communist Party has a bet on where its frayed relations with the United States will go, or how China’s territorial dispute with Japan will play out in the East China Sea, it’s not inclined to share.