However, almost exactly ten days after his return home, Xi made his first public appearance, which strongly suggests he was in quarantine during the interim. Ironically, Xi’s failure to appear in public for eleven days following his return from Samarkand sparked a frenzy of unfounded social media speculation that he had been removed in a coup. ![]() Despite myriad domestic challenges, Xi had no compunction about departing China a month before the 20 th Party Congress begins in Beijing ( China Brief, September 20). The timing of Xi’s first overseas trip since early 2020 suggests confidence in his domestic political position. He echoed Xi’s observation that the world faces immense challenges but also characterized the current moment as “full of hope.” Wang acclaimed the GDI as “a rallying call to refocus attention of the international community on development and build a global community of development,” and for “reducing the peace deficit and providing China’s input to meeting global security challenges” ( FMPRC, September 25). Several days later, Foreign Minister Wang Yi addressed the UN General Assembly. In order to navigate these challenging times, he called on all parties to partake in the GSI to enhance security cooperation and the GDI to “deepen practical cooperation” in areas such as trade, investment, infrastructure development and technological innovation ( People’s Daily, September 17). At the summit, Xi stated that humanity has entered a new period of turbulence. In mid-September, Xi traveled outside China for the first time in over two-and-a-half years to visit Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where he attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand ( PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 17). However, President Xi Jinping’s recent announcements of the Global Development Initiative (GDI) at the UN General Assembly in 2021 and the Global Security Initiative (GSI) at the Boao Forum this April leave little doubt that the PRC is making an active push to become a world leader in all facets ( China Brief, May 13 Xinhuanet, September 22, 2021). Only a short time ago, the question of whether the People’s Republic of China (PRC) aspires to global leadership was generally considered farfetched.
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