The decision of Xi Jinping to not attend this weekend’s G20 meeting has sparked rampant speculation. Since coming to power in 2013, Xi has attended every G20 meeting – either in person or virtually – but on Monday China’s foreign ministry revealed the premier, Li Qiang, would be leading the delegation instead.
China is a crucial global player and its leader’s absence has raised eyebrows.
“Given that Xi is the one making all the decisions it’s become all the more important for world leaders to have regular, direct exchange with him, to improve the chances that the views of other governments are getting through to him,” said Amanda Hsiao, senior China analyst with the International Crisis Group.
Few leaders have centralised power around themselves to the extent that Xi has. While other leaders have skipped G20s in the past, representatives sent in their place had delegated power and responsibility. Ja Ian Chong, a political scientist at the National University of Singapore, said it wasn’t clear what Li was empowered to do.
“What decisions can he make in terms of the communiqué, or any deliverables that might be possible on the sidelines?” Chong said. “What can he promise that other entities can hold Beijing to?”
Xi’s non-attendance of the G20 hasn’t been explained by the Chinese government and is unlikely to be. It comes just weeks after Xi missed giving a speech at the Brics summit in South Africa, prompting questions about his health.
It also comes amid multiple spats and tensions between Beijing and other governments, including the US, Japan, G20’s host country, India, and regional neighbours that have territorial disputes with China.
By avoiding the G20, some analysts suggested, Xi could be trying to sidestep uncomfortable conversations.
Beijing is under increasing pressure over its close relationship with Russia and refusal to condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Some analysts have suggested Xi may be avoiding G20 in part in solidarity with Putin, who is subject to an international criminal court warrant for war crimes and is also not attending.
Many of the countries attending the summit are angry at China’s recent update of a national map, which unilaterally claims several disputed regions as its own, while Beijing’s propaganda apparatus is running full tilt at Japan’s Fukushima water release.
Just a year ago, Xi was urging governments to strengthen cooperation in multilateral organisations, including specifically the G20. But as he grows frustrated with partnerships like Aukus and the Quad, which – along with the G20 – are pushing back on China’s military expansion and Beijing’s relationship with Russia, he has sought to elevate groups like Brics which he sees as more focused on the global south and less dominated by the west.
Hsiao said: “Beijing may see limited use in the G20 for pushing Chinese narratives or that they don’t need to invest as much … because they have other multilateral platforms through which China can exert greater influence and control the agenda and outcome – for instance, in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Brics.”
Hsiao said his non-appearance could be tactical. “By making itself less available to the G20, Beijing is creating more demand for Xi’s attendance in the future, therefore giving itself more room to exert influence.”
There are some suspicions that his absence is a deliberate snub of the summit’s host, India, with which China has increasingly frosty relations. Ongoing border disputes in the Himalayan region have erupted into violence, and India’s military is staging drills on its side of the border as the summit proceeds.
China’s foreign affairs spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters this week that relations between the two countries were “generally stable” and that Chinese leaders have “always supported India’s hosting of this year’s summit”. India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, told the ANI news agency that Xi’s absence wouldn’t affect the bloc’s ability to produce a communiqué.
But John Fitzgerald, a China expert and emeritus professor at Swinburne University, suggested the snub narrative sent a potential message to other countries. “Whatever the actual reason [for Xi’s absence], if the world thinks it’s all because India is not paying due deference to China then that suits Xi Jinping’s purpose admirably.”
The US president, Joe Biden, had been hoping to meet with Xi at the G20. The next potential meeting is on the sidelines of Apec in November. Sinocism writer and analyst Bill Bishop said Beijing might be thinking the conditions for a Biden-Xi meeting weren’t quite right yet.
“That is, the US has still not reversed its errors and returned to the correct path for US-China relations,” he wrote on Friday. “[B]y holding back from New Delhi, perhaps the US will become more eager to return to the ‘correct path’.”
Other analysts have pointed to the raft of domestic issues and crises in China, including widespread flooding and anger at how authorities dealt with it, and a worsening economic situation.
“He has a lot of domestic issues to deal with, and like Mao perhaps he now prefers to send his premier to most overseas meetings while he stays home to deal with domestic issues and grant audiences to visiting foreign dignitaries,” Bishop said.
A recent article in Asia Nikkei claiming Xi faced a dressing down from China’s political elders drew incredulity from China watchers, but pointed to at least some evidence of rumblings among the Chinese Communist party elite – all the more reason to stay home.
“Xi’s centralisation of power means the entire political system becomes more reliant on his direct leadership on an ever wider range of policy issues, and the machinery becomes less effective in his absence,” said Wen-ti Sung, a China expert at the Australian National University. “As the opportunity cost of Xi’s absence increases, Xi’s frequency of international travel inevitably decreases.”
Alessio Patalano, professor of war and strategy in east Asia at King’s College London, said the one thing that was clear was that Xi was “less preoccupied by the impact that his absence to an international forum might have on his country’s international perception”.
“Indeed, one suspects that keeping everyone else guessing as to why Xi is absent from a multilateral forum is part of the new Chinese playbook,” he said. “Xi has seemingly decided there’s an advantage in making it harder for others to read what his next move will be.”
