China’s foreign minister projects strength at the Two Sessions while the economy tells a different story
The Confident Face of a Nervous Government
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi delivered his annual press conference during the 2026 National People’s Congress sessions on March 9, 2026, and offered the assembled journalists a performance of confident, assertive diplomacy that bore little relationship to the economic reality unfolding inside China’s borders. Wang spoke of China’s rising international influence, of President Xi Jinping’s strategic foresight, and of Beijing’s readiness to work with like-minded nations to build a shared future. He invoked the language of multipolarity and Global South solidarity. He described the changes unfolding in the world as evidence that China’s moment of national rejuvenation is unstoppable. What he did not address was the fact that the government he represents has just set China’s GDP growth target at between 4.5 and 5 percent, the first time the official target has fallen below five percent in decades, a quiet admission that the economic engine on which the CCP’s legitimacy has depended is losing power.
The Gap Between the Message and the Reality
The European Union Institute for Security Studies Chaillot Paper published on the same day as Wang’s press conference offered a striking counterpoint to his confident framing. The ISS report, titled “China – A Fragile Power?”, documents in detail the structural weaknesses that Wang’s diplomatic rhetoric is designed to conceal: a collapsing property sector, unsustainable local government debt, a rapidly ageing population, slowing domestic consumption, and growing technological dependencies that leave China vulnerable to the very de-risking strategies that Europe and the United States are now pursuing. Wang’s insistence that China’s national rejuvenation is unstoppable is precisely the kind of rhetorical overreach that a government makes when it is trying to project confidence it does not fully feel.
The Leverage Wang Does Not Want to Acknowledge
The ISS report argues explicitly that Europe and the broader democratic world hold more leverage over China than they have been willing to use. China needs access to Western markets, Western technology, Western capital, and Western political legitimacy far more than Western nations need access to China’s. This leverage, deployed with coherence and democratic conditionality, could be used to press Beijing on Hong Kong, on Xinjiang, on Taiwan, and on the systematic repression of political dissent. Wang’s press conference is designed precisely to discourage this kind of thinking, to project such an image of Chinese power and inevitability that democratic governments hesitate to exercise the leverage they hold. The EU Institute for Security Studies provides the evidence-based analysis that should inform democratic governments’ responses to this diplomatic projection.
What Wang Yi’s Framing Conceals
Wang spoke of China guiding its diplomacy by “Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy,” a formulation that elevates a single individual’s political philosophy to the level of a governing doctrine for a nation of 1.4 billion people. This personalization of foreign policy has significant implications. It means that China’s diplomatic positions are not the product of institutional deliberation or democratic accountability. They reflect the preferences of one man, insulated from correction by a political system that has eliminated every mechanism for genuine challenge.
The Democratic Alternative
The democratic world’s foreign policy may sometimes look messier, more contested, and slower to cohere. But it is anchored in accountability, in the possibility that voters can change governments, that institutions can challenge executive power, and that policy can be corrected when it fails. China’s foreign policy, guided by Xi Jinping Thought, has no such corrective mechanism. When it is wrong, there is no institutional process for saying so. When it fails, as the Belt and Road Initiative’s debt diplomacy has failed in dozens of partner countries, the answer is more central direction, not more accountability. The Freedom House global democracy report provides the comparative context for understanding what China’s governance model actually produces compared to democratic alternatives. For Hong Kong, for Taiwan, and for every democracy trying to build a coherent response to Beijing’s diplomatic theater, the starting point must be an honest assessment of what China actually is, not what Wang Yi would like the world to believe it is. His confidence is a diplomatic tool. The weaknesses beneath it are real.
