The 18th Party Congress and Foreign Policy: the Dog That Did Not Bark?

The 18th Party Congress and Foreign Policy: The Dog that Did Not Bark?

Michael D. Swaine

1. Main Idea

Even though a party congress is mainly about domestic political power and domestic policies, it can be an important indicator of the country’s future foreign policy directions and power structures in the foreign policy arena. The future policy indicators usually can be found in the congress work report while the power structure indicators in the official membership roster. Thus, the future trends of policy and policy-related personal can be predicted through examine the evidence in those documents.

2. Abstract

The author believes that future policy indicators lies in the congress work report while power structure indicators are contained in the official membership roster of the new CCP Central Committee, Politburo, and Politburo Standing Committee. The essay is trying to get some hints of future trends of Chinese foreign policy by examining two main documents presented at the 18th party congress: The 18th Party Congress Work Report and Foreign Policy Personnel roster. So it’s naturally divided into three parts: analysis of each document and the concluding remarks.

In The 18th Party Congress Work Report part, the author introduces three concrete tasks of the party congress work report and leads to the foreign policy elements of the work report since any specific policy contents are usually not mentioned in the report.

To find out the developing trends of China’s foreign policy overtime and understand what new and different is happening during the 18th Party Congress, the essay examines four main features of the 18th Party Congress Work Report and compares them with those from former years. Defined as “common features” in the essay, those features of work reports from the 18th Party Congress and the others actually bear some inexplicit differences which are worth mentioning.

Like all other work reports, the 18th Party Congress Work Report reaffirms what kind...