Xi Jinping

Xi Jinping (born 1953) is general secretary of the Communist Party of China, president of the People's Republic of China and chairman of the Central Military Commission, titles confirmed in official records current through 30 July 2026. Under his leadership, economic security became an explicit domain of party-state strategy through dual circulation, Military-Civil Fusion, supply-chain resilience and counter-sanctions law. These policies pursue both defence against foreign pressure and leverage within interdependent markets.

Role

Xi's doctrine treats economic interdependence as terrain to be shaped rather than a condition to be accepted. In an April 2020 speech, published in Qiushi on 31 October 2020, he called for China to reduce critical external dependencies while increasing foreign reliance on Chinese industrial and supply chains. The published text presents this as a means of improving supply-chain security and creating countermeasures against deliberate cut-offs. That formulation is central to the Dual circulation strategy. Its industrial arm is Made in China 2025 industrial policy (2015-2025), targeting indigenisation of strategic technologies; its military-economic arm is Military-Civil Fusion (Civil-Military Fusion), making civilian technology and infrastructure available for strategic purposes; its external-geography arm is the Belt and Road Initiative as an economic statecraft campaign (2013-present), where the debt-trap characterisation of its lending is contested in the literature.

Capabilities and employment

Under Xi, China has both used and absorbed coercion. Employment includes the THAAD retaliation against South Korea, the 2020-21 trade campaign against Australia, and customs restrictions against Lithuania treated at China's trade pressure on Lithuania over the Taiwanese Representative Office (2021-2025). These campaigns did not produce clear public reversals, although third-party deterrence is difficult to measure. Institutionally, the National People's Congress enacted the Export Control Law and the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law (China, 2021), while the State Council and Ministry of Commerce issued separate rules and controls. Those institutional acts should not be attributed to Xi personally without evidence of a direct decision. They nevertheless form part of the party-state strategy developed under his leadership.

Significance

Xi is the field's leading case of pre-conflict positioning: a state methodically mapping its dependencies, hardening them, and building reciprocal dependencies as deterrent capital, in the spine's terms a standing counter-kill chain constructed before any campaign begins. The unresolved questions are the largest in the discipline: whether chokepoint construction deters or provokes, whether China's coercion failures reflect poor design or the inherent limits of the instrument, and whether the parallel financial and technological infrastructure built under Xi ultimately fragments the Western-centred network on which coalition economic warfare depends.

Attribution

The entry distinguishes leadership from implementation. Xi's speeches and formal offices establish his strategic role. The National People's Congress enacts laws, the State Council coordinates executive policy, ministries issue rules and licences, provincial authorities implement parts of industrial policy, and firms make commercial decisions under varying degrees of state direction. A policy developed during Xi's tenure is not automatically a personal act. The distinction matters most for contested coercion claims and for conduct by nominally private firms.

See also

China (People's Republic) · Dual circulation strategy · Military-Civil Fusion (Civil-Military Fusion) · Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law (China, 2021) · Made in China 2025 industrial policy (2015-2025) · Belt and Road Initiative as an economic statecraft campaign (2013-present) · Gallium and germanium production, refining and export controls · China's trade pressure on Lithuania over the Taiwanese Representative Office (2021-2025) · Critical minerals weaponisation · Counter-kill chain · Economic warfare · Economic statecraft

Sources

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, "Xi Jinping Holds Talks with General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party and Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith" (5 June 2026).
• Xi Jinping, "Major Issues Concerning China's Strategies for Mid-to-Long-Term Economic and Social Development", speech of 10 April 2020, published in *Qiushi* on 31 October 2020, CSIS Interpret translation.
• Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law of the People's Republic of China, National People's Congress Standing Committee (10 June 2021).