Who Will Be the Face of China’s Diplomacy?

2023 was the year China finally reopened to the world, after three years of COVID-19 restrictions. But not everything has snapped back to normal – including the diplomatic engagements of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Before the pandemic, Xi had visited an average of 13.8 countries a year, with a high of 18 countries visited in 2014 and a low of eight in 2017 (while Xi was presumably preoccupied with domestic politics ahead of the National Party Congress that fall). Then the pandemic hit, and he didn’t travel abroad at all from January 2020 to September 2022.

In 2023, we might have expected Xi’s travel to return to the pre-pandemic norm. But that wasn’t the case. Putting aside the pandemic years, Xi set a new record for fewest trips abroad in 2023, with just four foreign visits (to Russia, South Africa, the United States, and Vietnam).

Most notably, Xi skipped the G-20 summit hosted by India. It’s tempting to put that down to geopolitics, but it’s not the only notable curtailing of the Chinese leader’s diplomatic travel. As I wrote back in July, he also chose not to do a broader regional tour alongside his attendance at the BRICS summit in South Africa, something he had done every year prior.

In fact, Xi didn’t travel to more than one country at any point this year. Before the pandemic, he would often string together multiple country visits on a larger regional tour. 

The impression is very much that Xi is keeping his travel engagements to a bare minimum: attending the major summits (APEC and BRICS) and adding a high-level touch to important relationships.

To drive home the abnormality, throughout all of 2023 Xi visited fewer countries than he did in just the last four months of 2022. From September 2022 to the end of that year, Xi crammed in five trips abroad. That seemed to signal that Chinese diplomacy would come roaring back with a vengeance post-pandemic; the reality dispelled that notion.