China This Week: Strategic Moves and Messaging
December 5 - December 11, 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 enters mid-December with a synchronized tightening of internal governance, targeted diplomatic outreach to Europe, and escalated political warfare against Japan, all while doctrinal updates signal a push for more coordinated global influence operations in 2026. This week reveals a system preparing its economic, diplomatic, and narrative battlespace for the next phase of strategic competition, even as structural vulnerabilities deepen.
1. Beijing Sets Its 2026 Economic Line and Tightens Governance Machinery
China’s Politburo meeting on December 8 set the overall economic direction for 2026: more “proactive” fiscal policy, “moderately loose” monetary policy, expanded domestic demand, a unified national market, and intensified risk mitigation across real estate, local debt, and finance. In the same meeting, the Politburo reviewed new Regulations on the Party’s leadership over law-based governance, and the Party promulgated revised Regulations on the Party’s Working Organs, strengthening compliance mechanisms and codifying Xi-centric command structures.
Why it matters:
Beijing is entering 2026 by tightening both the economic levers of state power and the political infrastructure that controls them. The CCP is explicitly prioritizing political reliability over policy flexibility, ensuring that fiscal, financial, and legal systems operate as extensions of centralized authority. This alignment gives Xi the machinery to impose direction across the economy during industrial contraction, but eliminates internal feedback loops and increases systemic brittleness, especially as political imperatives override economic signals. This creates a critical tension: “moderately loose” monetary policy paired with maximum political control means Beijing is betting it can suppress economic contradictions through administrative force rather than market mechanisms.
Implications for US National Security:
Stronger state control over economic mobilization: Centralization improves Beijing’s ability to redirect capital toward priority sectors, including defense-industrial buildup.
Higher policy opacity: Law-based governance under Party leadership further blurs the distinction between legal process and political coercion, complicating risk assessment for US firms and allies.
Reduced adaptive capacity and increased volatility: Over-centralization increases the risk of dramatic policy swings and less predictable responses, especially under crisis conditions, as technocratic signals give way to political imperatives.
Greater resilience to targeted pressure, but amplified vulnerability to systemic shocks: Beijing can concentrate resources quickly, but structural vulnerabilities (weak consumption, local debt, industrial contraction) become harder to mask and more explosive when they surface.
2. Xi–Macron Summit: Beijing Courts Europe While Managing Trade Friction and Middle East Diplomacy
Xi hosted French President Emmanuel Macron in Beijing and Sichuan, presenting China–France relations as a model of “independent major-power diplomacy.” Xi promoted cooperation in aviation, nuclear power, green energy, and AI, and pledged $100 million in assistance to Palestine, framing China as a constructive actor in global peace efforts. Macron, meanwhile, pressed Xi on market access and warned that Europe cannot tolerate sustained trade imbalances, a pointed signal that the EU is prepared to harden economic measures if needed.
Why it matters:
This European courtship directly complements Beijing’s domestic consolidation strategy. As Xi tightens control internally, he needs breathing room externally to manage economic pressures and alliance encirclement. By positioning France as an “independent” actor, Beijing is probing for daylight between Washington and Brussels while using Middle East diplomacy to enhance its moral standing. But Macron’s tougher economic tone indicates that Chinese overcapacity and market distortion are becoming strategic liabilities in Europe, even as Beijing desperately needs partnerships to offset US pressure.
Implications for US National Security:
Alliance wedge-testing during consolidation phase: China is working to prevent the US, EU, and Indo-Pacific allies from forming a unified economic and technological perimeter while Beijing concentrates internal power.
Narrative maneuvering through Palestine diplomacy: Beijing is burnishing its “responsible major power” credentials while applying selective sovereignty logic that contradicts its Taiwan position.
Europe’s rising discomfort with Chinese market distortions and coercive economic leverage: Macron’s tariff signaling suggests the EU may be more receptive to US alignment on industrial and tech security.
Strategic diversification under pressure: Beijing sees Europe as a hedge against US decoupling, but the gap between rhetorical warmth and structural tension is widening as China’s economic model becomes less sustainable
3. Beijing Escalates Its Narrative Offensive Against Japan
People’s Daily published a prominent commentary asserting that “Japan’s actions increase the risk of regional conflict,” criticizing Tokyo’s defense build-up, alliance coordination, and statements linking Japanese intervention to a Taiwan contingency. This narrative escalation follows last week’s massing of PLA, Coast Guard, and maritime militia vessels across East Asian waters, indicating both physical and informational shaping operations.
Why it matters:
This narrative offensive reveals Beijing’s timeline compression strategy. The CCP is laying political groundwork to blame any future crisis in the Taiwan Strait or East China Sea on Japan’s deterrence posture, mirroring Beijing’s broader strategy of pre-assigning culpability as a narrative shield for escalation. The timing suggests Beijing may be accelerating its readiness window, testing whether it can politically isolate key alliance partners before any kinetic phase begins. By framing Japan as the destabilizing actor, Beijing reduces the diplomatic cost of more aggressive PLA moves in 2026 and probes how firmly the US–Japan alliance will hold under sustained pressure.
Implications for US National Security:
Pre-escalation justification with compressed timelines: China is constructing a narrative that legitimizes enhanced military pressure on Japan, especially near Taiwan and the Senkakus, while gauging allied resolve under compressed decision timelines.
Alliance stress-testing under accelerated conditions: Beijing is probing for gaps in US–Japan signaling, hoping to deter or delay coordinated responses within a narrower decision window.
Reduced crisis stability: Narrative escalation paired with maritime deployments raises the risk of miscalculation and rapid escalation as Beijing compresses strategic timelines.
Taiwan contingency preparation: Undermining Japan’s credibility is a core component of Beijing’s efforts to constrain US operational flexibility in any Taiwan scenario.
Irregular Warfare Spotlight
China’s gray zone tactics often hide in plain sight. Each week, I will feature one that deserves a closer look.
Wang Yi Codifies Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy: Doctrine as Deployment Preparation
Wang Yi delivered a major doctrinal address outlining the latest evolution of Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy, describing it as an “open Marxist theory” with a structured architecture (”four beams and eight pillars”) that integrates Xi’s global initiatives—development, security, civilization, and governance—into a unified strategic framework. The speech asserts that China has become a “responsible major power” with growing strategic autonomy and moral appeal, and that its diplomatic model offers the world an alternative to Western-led order.
Why this is an irregular warfare case study:
This doctrine serves as operational guidance for immediate deployment, a playbook for coordinated global influence campaigns. Wang Yi’s framework maps directly onto China’s governance warfare strategy: exporting administrative models, shaping the normative environment, leveraging narrative power, and building influence inside institutions that define global rules. More critically, this provides standardized talking points and strategic frameworks for Chinese diplomats worldwide to execute coordinated influence campaigns. It operationalizes the idea that controlling meaning, legitimacy, and governance frameworks is as vital as controlling military or economic resources. This is the intellectual blueprint for China’s governance-driven irregular warfare campaign, with doctrine serving as deployment preparation.
Implications for US National Security:
Governance as battlespace: China is institutionalizing a diplomatic doctrine that seeks to reshape global norms in its favor while providing operational guidance for influence operations.
Narrative infrastructure as capability: Wang Yi’s framework positions discourse power as a strategic resource to erode US legitimacy, with immediate deployment applications.
Platform for governance export: Developing states serve as testing grounds for China’s alternative political and administrative models, guided by this doctrinal framework.
Coordinated global operations: This doctrine will guide how China conducts political, diplomatic, and media operations in 2026 and beyond, enabling synchronized campaigns across multiple theaters.
Chinese Vulnerabilities & US Counter-Opportunities
Beijing’s actions this week highlight a system tightening every lever of internal and external state power while revealing its own pressure points. The Politburo’s economic line shows China entering 2026 with a contradictory strategy: loosening monetary conditions while deepening political control, a combination that signals fragility in China’s policy toolkit. The Xi–Macron summit exposes Europe as both a lifeline and a liability: Beijing needs European economic space but cannot easily meet Europe’s demands for reciprocity. And China’s narrative offensive against Japan underscores Beijing’s urgency to control escalation narratives in advance of any Taiwan contingency.
Meanwhile, the doctrinal consolidation of Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy shows a regime preparing the cognitive and institutional battlespace for synchronized influence operations in 2026.
For the US, this creates actionable openings in the next 30–60 days:
Deepen US–Japan–ROK coordination on rapid-escalation scenarios and political warfare countermeasures.
Expand EU–US alignment on de-risking, market transparency, and tech security while Europe is signaling readiness for tougher measures.
Increase intelligence collection on China’s administrative tightening to identify fractures and inconsistencies in cross-agency execution.
Expose selective sovereignty narratives (Palestine vs. Taiwan) to weaken Beijing’s moral positioning.
Map the operationalization of Wang Yi’s doctrine across embassies, media fronts, and multilateral institutions.
Beijing is preparing its battlespace for 2026 politically, economically, narratively, and institutionally. The US should treat these developments as early indicators of how China intends to shape the next phase of strategic competition.