China This Week: Strategic Moves and Messaging
October 17 - October 26, 2025
Every Friday, Xinanigans analyzes China’s most consequential moves across geopolitics, military, economy, and propaganda, revealing Beijing’s evolving strategy and its impact on US national security.
Bottom Line: Beijing used this week’s Fourth Plenum to codify its strategic direction through 2050, signaling the bureaucratization of China’s global ambitions. In parallel, the CCP began exporting its ideology under new slogans, reinforced “system superiority” rhetoric on Taiwan, purged one of its top generals, and expanded coordinated media warfare with Russia. These synchronized moves constitute a global influence strategy that fuses governance, ideology, and control.
1. The Fourth Plenum Sets China’s Bureaucratic Mandate for 2050
China’s Fourth Plenum laid out a long-range plan for becoming a “strong socialist modernized country” by mid-century, emphasizing performance metrics, cadre evaluations, and task-based governance reforms.
Why it matters:
This marks a shift toward technocracy as long-range strategy. By embedding political goals into governance structures, Beijing is creating a durable framework to execute its vision well beyond Xi’s tenure, codifying ideology into institutional muscle.
Implications for US National Security:
Anticipatory Bureaucracy: Beijing is planning for a post-American order with bureaucratic precision that extends beyond 2049 while US strategy still struggles to see past 2030.
Governance as Influence: China is marketing its system as more stable and reliable than liberal democracies through governance performance metrics.
Chinese Vulnerabilities and US Counter-Opportunities:
Rigidity Risk: Ideologically driven systems often become brittle in crisis.
Transparency Leverage: Codified goals can be tracked and modeled to preempt China’s long-term plays.
2. “Three News” Slogans Anchor China’s Next Wave of Development Diplomacy
Beijing elevated three slogans - “New Development Stage,” “New Development Concept,” and “New Development Pattern” - as ideological infrastructure for both domestic governance and global engagement, particularly through the 15th Five-Year Plan.
Why it matters:
This is how China packages its internal governance model for external adoption. The slogans serve as cognitive scaffolding for influence in multilateral forums and Global South institutions.
Implications for US National Security:
Development as Doctrine: Economic policy is being fused with political indoctrination and international influence operations.
Normative Warfare: China is exporting its model as an alternative to Western liberalism, especially in multilateral forums.
Policy Diffusion Risk: Language from the 15th FYP is migrating into UN and Global South institutions.
Chinese Vulnerabilities and US Counter-Opportunities:
Narrative-Performance Gap: China’s slogans face a reality check from youth unemployment and economic slowdown.
Countermodel Advantage: The US can promote innovation and local empowerment as more adaptable development paths.
3. Jin Sheping Links “System Superiority” to Taiwan’s Future
A People’s Daily commentary by Jin Sheping declared China’s planning system as proof of “socialist superiority,” explicitly linking it to cross-strait unification and PLA readiness.
Why it matters:
Beijing is using its domestic planning apparatus to shape cross-strait narratives, casting unification as the logical end of a successful system.
Implications for US National Security:
Cognitive Framing: Portraying peaceful unification as “pragmatic” aims to weaken Taiwan’s internal political cohesion.
Escalatory Rhetoric: If Taiwan is framed as irrationally rejecting a “superior system,” Beijing’s justification for “corrective” action strengthens.
Chinese Vulnerabilities and US Counter-Opportunities:
Expose Disparities: Taiwan can highlight real failures of the PRC’s system, including social unrest, economic inequality, and surveillance overreach.
Undermine Legitimacy Linkage: Separate planning capacity from regime legitimacy in the global narrative.
4. He Weidong’s Expulsion: Purging Toward a Loyal PLA
General He Weidong, the former Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and China’s second most senior military official, was expelled from the Communist Party on Oct 20, along with eight other senior officers. This marks one of the most sweeping military purges since Xi came to power.
Why it matters:
This represents the reconstruction of a loyalty-first PLA. Xi is clearing out potential dissenters and replacing them with politically reliable personnel as he builds a war-ready command structure.
Implications for US National Security:
Ideological Military: The PLA’s chain of command is being shaped around loyalty over merit, raising escalation risks in conflict scenarios.
Wartime Cabinet Formation: Personnel choices suggest preparation for future Taiwan contingencies.
Instability Window: Turmoil during reorganization creates operational intelligence opportunities.
Chinese Vulnerabilities and US Counter-Opportunities:
Operational Risk: Political loyalty may degrade PLA effectiveness in a crisis.
Intelligence Opportunity: Fluid command transitions increase the chance to map influence networks and decision flows.
Irregular Warfare Spotlight
China’s gray zone tactics often hide in plain sight. Each week, I will feature one that deserves a closer look.
China and Russia Coordinate a Propaganda Bloc
On October 20, China and Russia convened a high-level meeting to expand media cooperation, planning over 70 joint projects to “make their voices heard in the international public opinion arena.” Behind the language of “cultural exchange” lies a deeper agenda: the construction of a coordinated narrative warfare alliance designed to undermine US-led norms and rewrite the meaning of “fairness and justice” on the global stage.
“We will jointly promote reform of the global governance system,” one official declared, signaling an ambition to rewrite the rules of the narrative battlefield.
Why it matters:
This is the architecture of influence forming in real time. As Beijing and Moscow deepen their media and cultural ties, they’re laying the foundation for a parallel information order, one that cloaks authoritarianism in the language of equity and cooperation.
Implications for US National Security:
Narrative Saturation: In target regions like the Global South, the US will struggle to compete with unified anti-Western messaging.
Legitimacy Undermining: Shared narratives cast the US as hypocritical, destabilizing, or obsolete.
Credibility Amplifier: Russian-Chinese coordination gives their disinformation campaigns added reach and false legitimacy.
Chinese Vulnerabilities and US Counter-Opportunities:
Language Markers: Repeated use of terms like “justice,” “reform,” and “multipolarity” telegraphs narrative manipulation.
Local Media Investment: Supporting independent journalism and public media in third countries offers inoculation against propaganda capture.
Strategic Outlook
Xi’s China is constructing a long-term architecture of control. This week revealed a synchronized push to institutionalize global ambition through codified timelines, ideological engineering, politicized command structures, and coordinated narrative warfare. The Fourth Plenum laid bureaucratic groundwork to project system confidence abroad, even as purges and propaganda conceal internal strain.
Beijing is advancing a parallel order built on performance metrics, central planning, and top-down control, offered as a stable alternative to democratic flux. Through planning documents, military reshuffles, and media alliances with Russia, the CCP is refining a governance-export model engineered for resilience and replication.
For the US, this moment demands strategic foresight, not reaction. Competing with China means more than countering its moves; it means offering an alternative future that is flexible where Beijing is rigid, and inclusive where it is hierarchical. The long game has begun, and it’s no longer a matter of timeline. It’s a matter of vision.
This piece really made me pause. Your insights on Beijing's anticipatory bureaucracy, especially that 2050 roadmap, are so spot on. It makes you wonder if our own long-term planning is less like a solid alghorithm and more of a flexible script. You always unpack these strategic layers perfectly.