Andrew Grant
The discourse of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and trio of global initiatives implies that the country’s geopolitical interests are firmly global. Nonetheless, in recent years Chinese scholars and intellectuals have increased their attention on the periphery of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). For many PRC scholars, this is presented as a course-corrective to earlier efforts to improve China’s position and status in “far away” places around the globe—efforts that in Western countries have produced weak results or backfired. The turn to its periphery can also be understood as an effort by China to reimagine its borderlands as geopolitical spaces that will serve as natural stepping stones between the consolidation of domestic frontier territories and long-term goals of extending China’s great-power influence around the world. From this viewpoint, control of China’s periphery is seen as a testing ground for the country’s global power.
In October 2013 and April 2025, Xi Jinping convened special meetings on China’s periphery. In his 2025 speech at the Central Peripheral Work Conference, he emphasized the importance of creating a “peripheral community of a shared future” (周边命运共同体). While development and a large assortment of “mutual” projects are presented as key to the establishment of this community, there is also a strong emphasis on finding a basis in cultural commonalities expressed via terms such as “affinity” (亲) and “tolerance” (容). Such shared traits are seen as attributes of populations on either side of the border that must be cultivated to strengthen peripheral states’ ties to China. These attributes will then become the foundations of a peripheral community that will serve China’s geopolitical interests and is responsive to “China’s new era foreign discursive system,” which, in line with Xi’s calls for building Chinese-centered narrative and conceptual frameworks, ensures that positive stories about China and its benevolent deeds are told, heard, and further disseminated.1 Such a peripheral propaganda program can help counter Western influence, thereby helping establish China’s stepping stones to greater world influence. At the heart of this approach is the concept of “peripheral communication” (周边传播)—an emerging field of study and action pioneered by the Peking University scholar Lu Di that seeks to control the discourse about China in the countries proximate to its borders.
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