As India prepares to host the G20 summit on September 9, there’s one person not readying his plane for the gathering of world leaders. China’s president Xi Jinping, who has attended every meeting of this summit since 2013, is not going.
Xi is busy dealing with significant economic problems at home, while also rejigging his foreign policy approach away from the aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy, a strategy he has pursued since 2017. He is now trying to position China as more of a global peacemaker and is testing out new ways of creating alliances with the west and in Asia.
The apparent abandonment of his previous wolf warrior policy, which typically had included shouting at foreign leaders and storming out of meetings, can be seen as a move away from the bellicose tone that characterised China-US relations and China’s wider relationship with the west in the mid to late 2010s.
