diplomacy by the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the

diplomacy by the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core, and a fundamental guideline for China’s external work in the new era...We should integrate our thoughts and actions into General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important address and Xi Jinping thought on diplomacy, and make new advances in China's external work." To an international foreign policy audience, this may all seem a little arcane. That’s because in the internal ideological deliberations of a one party state, it is arcane. But we would be blind not to see that there is something new at play here. It is unclear whether this means Chinese foreign policy is likely to be more Marxist in its conceptualisation, or even its execution? Whether it likely to be more Nationalist? Whether it will seek to more actively promote the Chinese development model of “authoritarian capitalism” as a model for the world, in competition with the “liberal democratic capitalism” of the West? Whether it is a much more unformed worldview which will ultimately take shape around Xi Jinping’s as-yet- deliberately-vague concept of “a global community of common destiny,” which is now the subject of intense work within China’s think tank community, and with the international academic community. Or whether it is something more mechanistic than that altogether, involving a desire to fire up China’s current diplomatic establishment into a more invigorated, imaginative, creative, even forceful effort to shape the future global rules-based order more in China‘s image, rather than China being the permanent “price -taker” for rules already determined elsewhere by others. Particularly where elements of the existing order are seen to represent a continuing and unwelcome challenge to the legitimacy of China’s domestic political order, for example in areas such as the rule of law, human rights and democracy. A NEW IDEOLOGICAL CONFIDENCE THAT HISTORY FAVOURS CHINA There is a second element to the June 2018 Conference which grows out of the first. It is Xi’s deeply Marxist, dialectical-materialist view of history based on permanently evolving “contradictions” between what dialecticians call thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In Xi’s view, this in turn gives rise to defined “laws” of historical development which are both prescriptive and predictive. This may sound like old-fashioned Marxism. That’s because it is. The intellectual software of generations of Chinese leaders has been shaped by this conceptual framework for interpreting and responding to what they define as scientific, objective reality. And Xi Jinping belongs to that tradition. Remember he has already convened special study sessions of the politburo on understanding both dialectical and historical materialism in the past. According to the conference report: “Xi suggested to not only observe the current international situation, but also review the past, summarise historical laws, and look towards the future to better understand the trend of history.” Furthermore, according to the same report in Xinhua, to obtain “an accurate understanding of the overall situation, Xi underlined not only the observation of detailed phenomena, but also a deep appreciation of the essence of the overall 5 of 10 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026860