Beijing’s Two Foreign Policies: Performance, Strategy, and
the Limits of Gray-Zone Pressure

Dialogue China：Dingxian (Alex) He

October 2026

Beijing’s Two Foreign Policies: Performance, Strategy, and the Limits of Gray-Zone Pressure

Dingxian (Alex) He Dialogue China October 2026

Introduction

On August 24, 2023, the day Japan began releasing treated water from the Fukushima plant, 41 topics regarding this issue appeared on Weibo’s trending list. Some came from the state: “China’s suspension of Japanese seafood imports is entirely necessary.” Others came from kitchens and supermarkets, as the state salt company was forced to respond to reports of panic buying. Two years earlier, Beijing recalled its ambassador from Lithuania, downgraded relations, and blocked Lithuanian goods at customs over a Taiwanese representative office in Vilnius. On every day the archive covers, that campaign produced no more than five trending topics, and most of those were official statements or state-media commentary.¹

Both were coercive measures against democratic countries, over an issue Beijing described as a matter of principle. They were run in different ways, for different audiences. That difference is the subject of this paper.

China conducts two kinds of foreign policy. The first is performed. It concerns issues the Chinese public can see, it answers to that public, and it is constrained by what officials have already said in front of it. The second is strategic, while the state keeps public attention to it low. It is made by ministries and planners working on long timelines, and answers to long-range calculations. The two tracks can involve the same countries and even the same instruments. They do not follow the same logic, and reading one as if it were the other produces errors in both directions.

The most influential American frameworks treat Chinese behavior as the expression of a single strategy. The best-known holds that a China whose growth has peaked will become more dangerous as its window of opportunity closes.² Yet a recent review of Chinese elite writing finds that Beijing’s conviction that the United States is in decline has not produced the aggression this view predicts; Chinese officials say China “will not gamble on the United States losing.”³ A single-strategy reading struggles to explain a country that is louder in some places and more patient in others at the same time.

The danger China poses sits in different places on each track, and the performed track is growing. As Chinese households withdraw from long-term commitments, the regime’s claim to deliver a better future weakens, and more of its legitimacy comes from visible standing abroad.

The public rewards toughness and resists its cost, so that demand is met by gray-zone pressure that rises steadily and stops short of war. The strategic track keeps the long horizon that households have given up.

Two Tracks

The two tracks differ on four dimensions. On the performance track, the issue is visible to the Chinese public and touches ordinary life; the leadership and the propaganda system are the main actors; the governing logic is audience cost, meaning that once something has been said in public, something visible must follow; and the horizon is short. On the strategic track, the issue is public but attracts little attention, and the state does little to raise it; the main actors are ministries, regulators and planners; the governing logic is long-range calculation; and the horizon runs to five or ten years. Existing work explains how domestic ratification constrains international bargaining, and how China’s foreign-policy actors have multiplied.⁴ The claim here is narrower and more useful to an analyst: domestic salience tells you which kind of actor is in charge of a given move, and therefore which logic will govern what comes next.

Salience can be measured from open sources. An independent archive has recorded every topic that appears on Weibo’s trending list each day since November 2020.⁵ The list is managed, so it measures the attention the state permits or promotes rather than raw public interest. For this argument, that is a feature rather than a flaw, because the decision to let an issue trend is itself part of the performance.

The tracks separate cleanly on peak intensity. The Fukushima water release produced 41 distinct trending topics on its busiest day. Topics naming Nancy Pelosi peaked at 26 on the day she landed in Taipei, and topics naming Sanae Takaichi at 15 in November 2025. On the strategic side, Lithuania peaked at five topics; rare-earth export controls at three during October and November 2025, the Global Governance Initiative at three, and the Digital Silk Road at one in nearly six years.⁶

Two refinements matter. First, strategic issues do trend. Lithuania appeared on the list on at least 33 days between August 2021 and January 2022, but almost always in the voice of a spokesperson or a state commentator, and never as a story about ordinary people. The topics covered the diplomatic downgrade and Lithuania’s own troubles. None described a Chinese trade measure, although the customs block and the pressure on European firms that used Lithuanian parts carried the economic weight of the campaign, and Beijing’s spokesperson called reports of the block “not true.”⁷ The punishment was addressed to other European governments weighing similar moves, not to the Chinese public. The Fukushima topics, by contrast, included panic buying of salt and the mood in seafood markets. The test is not whether an issue trends but whom it is addressed to. Second, instruments can be borrowed. Rare-earth controls were a strategic decision, yet they were promoted online with slogans such as “China holds rare earths: one move to subdue the enemy.” They still never rose above three topics a day. The decision followed one logic, and the publicity borrowed another.

Performance also appears in diplomacy. At the Anchorage talks in March 2021, Yang Jiechi told his American counterparts that “the Chinese people do not accept this.” Within days, the line was printed on T-shirts sold on Taobao for 30 yuan.⁸ An American official said at the time that the Chinese delegation was “focused on public theatrics and dramatics over substance.”⁹

The framework implies one combination Beijing avoids and one it cannot avoid. It avoids actions that are highly visible and that require households to bear real costs, which is to say war or mobilization. It cannot always avoid issues that are both highly visible and strategically consequential. Takaichi’s statement on November 7, 2025, that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a survival-threatening situation for Japan, was one. It raised the expected cost of unification, a strategic stake, and it was a public affront to Xi Jinping, a performance stake.

Beijing’s response did not end after a few days. It began with performance instruments: a consular official’s threatening post, a travel advisory, a pause on Japanese films, and a renewed halt to seafood imports that had partly resumed only in June. It then moved onto the strategic track, with a ban on dual-use exports to Japanese military end users in January 2026, restrictions on rare earths, and successive additions of Japanese firms to export-control lists. Eight months later, Beijing was still rebuffing high-level meetings and pressing for the remark to be retracted.¹⁰

Cases of this kind are rare, but they are where the two logics reinforce each other and retreat is hardest, and most of them concern Taiwan.

The Switch

An issue does not belong to one track permanently. The state decides which track it travels on, and Jessica Chen Weiss’s work explains how. In Powerful Patriots, she shows that Beijing permits or suppresses nationalist protest according to its diplomatic aims: it lets protest run when it wants to show resolve, and it contains protest early when it wants room to compromise. She prefers the word “management” to “manipulation.”¹¹ With Allan Dafoe, she has also shown that Chinese citizens disapprove when their government threatens force and then does nothing, so that an authoritarian government faces audience costs too. The same experiments found that vague bluster is rewarded rather than punished, and that propaganda presenting restraint as the route to future success raises approval.¹² Once an issue is switched onto the performance track, something visible has to follow. It does not have to be war.

Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022 shows the whole sequence. Expectations were raised in advance. In a call with Joe Biden on July 28, Xi warned that “those who play with fire will perish by it,”¹³ and Hu Xijin, then the most prominent nationalist commentator, suggested that the PLA could shoot down her aircraft. When she landed safely, the reaction online was disappointment. The commentator Ren Yi wrote that when “the actions don’t match,” the public feels “confused and disappointed,” which “could also exhaust government credibility,” and the post was later removed.¹⁴ Beijing answered within two days with four days of drills that encircled Taiwan for the first time and included eleven ballistic missiles. The Eastern Theater Command released cinematic video, and a People’s Daily post urging the forces to “seize the momentum to surround” drew more than 115,000 likes. Sentiment online moved from anxiety to pride.¹⁵ Trending topics on the drills and the visit peaked at 38 on August 4. Beijing met an audience cost with a spectacle, and no household paid anything for it.

Seven large exercises around Taiwan since then show that this was a pattern rather than an episode.

Table 1. Large PLA exercises around Taiwan since 2022, with peak Weibo trending topics

Sources: Scale and dates from the ASPI Pressure Points exercise tracker and USNI News. Trending counts are the author’s, from the Weibo trending archive (justjavac/weibo-trending-hot-search); search terms differ slightly by episode.¹⁶

Two regularities stand out. The exercises have grown larger and shorter: the number of aircraft more than doubled while the duration fell from four days to one or two. Intensity ratchets upward, but each performance has a clear beginning and end. More important, publicity is chosen, not driven by scale. The December 2024 operation, reported as China’s largest maritime deployment since 1996, was never announced and produced a single trending topic. Joint Sword in April 2023 was larger in aircraft than the 2022 drills and produced two; Beijing kept it quiet, analysts suggested, to avoid strengthening the governing party in Taiwan before its January 2024 election.¹⁷ Military activity therefore divides along the same line as everything else. Some of it is rehearsal and belongs to the strategic track. Some of it is performance. The question an analyst should ask of any Chinese move is which track it is on now, and who put it there.

Why the Performance Track Is Growing

Chinese households are withdrawing from long-term commitments that they would have to underwrite themselves. The national stock of individual mortgage debt fell 1.8 percent in 2025, to 37.01 trillion yuan, even though mortgage rates and minimum down payments had been cut to record lows; at the six large state banks, the balance fell for a third consecutive year. In the 2026 civil service cycle, 3.718 million applicants passed the eligibility review for 38,100 central government posts, a ratio of 98 to one, against 86 and 77 in the two preceding years.

Registrations for the graduate entrance examination fell to 3.43 million from a peak of 4.74 million, below the number cleared to sit the civil service examination.¹⁸

The central bank’s own survey shows the same disposition directly. The quarterly survey of 20,000 depositors in 50 cities, run since 1999, found in the third quarter of 2025 that 62.3 percent preferred to save more, against 19.2 percent who preferred to spend and 18.5 percent who preferred to invest. That is above the 58.3 percent recorded in mid-2022, which was itself a record at the time. Only 9.1 percent expected house prices to rise in the coming quarter, while

23.5 percent expected them to fall.¹⁹

These households have not stopped planning for the long term. A civil service post is a lifetime contract backed by the state, and a bank deposit is guaranteed. What they have stopped doing is taking on long-term risks that they carry alone, such as a thirty-year mortgage on an asset expected to fall in value, or a degree whose return the labor market no longer promises.

Performance legitimacy rests on the claim that the future will be better, and the evidence for that claim is people acting on it. When households stop acting on it, growth figures still arrive and order is undisturbed, but the regime has lost the most direct proof that its promise still holds. Part of what it can no longer supply at home has to come from somewhere else.

The same disposition governs how the public views conflict. Surveys assembled by Weiss show that a majority of urban Chinese support greater reliance on the military, but support falls by about 20 percentage points when respondents are asked about sending troops to ensure a fight. Weiss notes that tough talk can satisfy public opinion without force, and that Beijing has not historically engaged in diversionary war.²⁰ In a nationwide online survey conducted in 2020 and 2021, about 55 percent supported a war to take Taiwan, roughly a third opposed it, and only one percent wanted it immediately.²¹

Tsinghua University’s 2025 security survey found that nearly 90 percent supported trade countermeasures against the United States, even as favorable views of the United States rose from 1.85 to 2.38 on a five-point scale.²² These samples are urban, and most of them predate the household retreat, so they describe a stable structure rather than a trend: the public rewards toughness and is wary of its cost.

Gray-zone pressure fits this structure exactly. It produces standing without asking any household for anything. PLA aircraft entering Taiwan’s air defense identification zone rose from 972 in 2021 to 3,615 in 2024.²³ Chinese government vessels were present in the contiguous zone around the Senkaku Islands on 357 days in 2025, including an unbroken run of 335 days.²⁴ On Weibo, Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal appeared on 61 days since 2020 but never on more than eight topics a day, mostly in the voice of the coast guard and the Southern Theater Command. Gray-zone activity does not create peaks; it supplies standing at a steady rate. Over the same period, Beijing’s diplomatic tone softened, with the most combative spokesperson reassigned in early 2023 and visa-free entry widened, because investors and tourists respond to tone. The track that depends on money grew quieter while the track that supplies standing grew louder.²⁵ The rise began before the household retreat did, and the retreat did not start it. What the retreat changes is the cost of stopping: when fewer households act on the promise of a better future, standing abroad is worth more at home, and a visible step back costs more.

The state has also shown that it retreats when household costs become intolerable. Zero-COVID, the policy most closely associated with Xi personally, was abandoned within weeks of the protests of November 2022.²⁶ A war over Taiwan would impose costs on households far larger than any lockdown. Gray-zone pressure is therefore the point at which every part of the public can be satisfied: those who see it as a necessary part of great-power

competition, those who take pride in it, and those whose only conclusion from a weak economy is not to take risks. Its intensity can keep rising, but its purpose, which is to supply a sense of stability and progress, keeps it below the threshold at which that stability would be destroyed.

The Strategic Track Keeps Its Long Horizon

While the performance track grows louder, the strategic track continues to make long bets in quiet. Export controls on critical minerals show its method. Beijing introduced licensing for gallium and germanium in 2023, named the United States as the target of a ban on dual-use exports in December 2024, and extended controls to rare earths in 2025. The Busan meeting in October 2025 suspended the most restrictive measures for a year, yet China’s exports of unwrought gallium fell 94 percent in 2025 and had not recovered by mid-2026.²⁷ The Lithuania campaign, the Digital Silk Road, and the Global Governance Initiative launched in September 2025 belong to the same track. None produced more than five trending topics on any day.

Chinese investment in Africa and Latin America shows the same division between a decision and its publicity. The China–Africa summit in Beijing in September 2024 and Xi’s visit to Peru and Brazil that November each produced twelve trending topics on their busiest day, almost all of them state-produced features about friendship, history, food and culture. The money was absent. The 360 billion yuan in financing that Xi pledged at the summit never trended, and the opening of the port at Chancay, 60 percent owned by China’s COSCO, produced two topics on its busiest day.²⁸ There is a domestic reason to keep the money quiet. When Xi pledged $60 billion to Africa in 2018, commenters online objected that it was “money that we earned,” and censors suspended comments on Weibo news reports about the pledge.²⁹ The ceremony supplies standing at home; the cost is kept off the performance track, because the public that rewards toughness also resists paying for it.

Czin and Matthias find that Chinese officials believe time is on their side, which is precisely the conviction a planner needs to work on a ten-year timeline. They also note signs that the strategic track is turning from defense to initiative, citing the rare-earth controls of October 2025 and the Fourth Plenum’s emphasis on seizing the “strategic initiative.”³⁰ The Takaichi crisis shows how the two tracks can feed each other: a dispute that began as performance gave the strategic track a mandate to apply export controls against Japanese military end users and companies that will outlast the dispute itself.

This is the horizon Beijing cannot move. It cannot lengthen the horizon of its own households, so it divides its conduct abroad. For the public, it supplies short-horizon performance. Where public attention is kept low, the state keeps the long horizon that households have given up. The gap between those two horizons is what produces the two tracks.

Reading 2027

The distinction matters most when Washington reads a strategic signal as a statement of intent. The clearest case is the year 2027. The date comes from the Party’s Fifth Plenum in October 2020, which called for achieving the PLA’s centenary goal by 2027, a modernization benchmark in a sequence that continues to 2035 and 2049.³¹

It is a strategic-track object by every measure used here. Its audience is internal: the army and the Party bureaucracy, for whom it works as a management target in the manner of a five-year plan. Its public salience is negligible. Since November 2020, the centenary goal has appeared on Weibo’s trending list as a single topic, during the Party Congress in October 2022. When 2027 trended in China in March 2026, it was as “China responds to US report on so-called 2027 plan to attack Taiwan”: a Washington story.³² The instruction that the PLA be ready to invade by 2027 is known from American intelligence rather than from any Chinese public statement, and the CIA director who disclosed it added that it “does not mean that he’s decided to conduct an invasion in 2027 or any other year.”³³

In Washington, the benchmark became a date. Admiral Philip Davidson told the Senate in 2021 that the threat would become manifest “in the next six years.” The chief of naval operations later said the window might be 2022 or 2023, and a four-star Air Force general told his officers in 2023 that “my gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”³⁴ The fixation had consequences. It pulled China policy toward the short term and helped direct billions of dollars to forces in the Pacific, until the Pentagon settled on the line that conflict was “neither imminent nor inevitable.” One senior defense official put it plainly: “It’s not like Xi Jinping has a calendar up in his office with a date in 2027 marked ‘invade Taiwan.'”³⁵

The two-track framework supplies the correction. A capability benchmark tells you what China intends to be able to do. A decision to use that capability would impose costs on Chinese households, and a regime that depends on household acquiescence would have to prepare them for it in public. That preparation would appear on the performance track, as official discourse shifted from stability and rising strength to sacrifice. No such shift has appeared. Capability targets describe what China can do; the performance track shows what it is preparing its public to bear.

Implications for Washington

The first implication concerns the performance track. Gray-zone pressure around Taiwan, the Senkakus, and the Philippines should be expected to persist and to intensify, because it is the cheapest available source of standing and the public rewards it. That does not by itself bring war closer. The real risk lies in the ratchet: each display must be at least as strong as the last, and a collision at sea or in the air could leave both governments facing audience costs at the same moment. American policy should therefore keep exits open. Public humiliation is the fastest way to move an issue onto the performance track, as the Takaichi episode showed, and once there it is both harder for Beijing to retreat from and more likely to spread to strategic instruments.

The second concerns what to watch. The performance track has indicators that are public, cheap, and currently read as economic news: the central bank’s depositor survey, the outstanding stock of mortgage debt, the ratio of civil service applicants to posts, and the intensity of trending topics on a given dispute. The most important indicator is qualitative. If official discourse turns from stability and rising strength toward asking the public to prepare for sacrifice, that would be a stronger warning than any count of aircraft. Analysts should also remember that the public’s view of the contest is curated. The Ministry of State Security opened a public WeChat account in August 2023 and uses it to publicize foreign espionage against China;³⁶ Chinese citizens rarely see their own government’s intelligence activity, so part of the feedback the state responds to is feedback it has written.

The third concerns the strategic track, where most of the long-term competition takes place and where little of it is loud. It should be read the way planners write it: through policy documents, export-control lists, standards bodies and financing decisions, most of them published in Chinese and below the national level. None of this requires new collection.

The fourth concerns economic pressure. Measures that constrain Chinese capability and measures that deepen the household retreat are often justified in the same terms. If the argument here holds, the second kind may enlarge the performance track and the gray-zone activity it produces. That is not a reason to forgo pressure, but it is a cost that should be weighed rather than ignored.

Conclusion

China’s conduct abroad looks contradictory only if it is read as one strategy. Read as two, it becomes predictable. On the performance track, Beijing answers a public that wants toughness and will not pay for it, at a time when households are withdrawing from the commitments that once proved the regime’s promise. The result is gray-zone pressure that rises steadily and stops below war. On the strategic track, ministries and planners keep making long bets that the public can see but is rarely invited to watch.

The argument can be proved wrong, and it should be tested. Three developments would count against it. The first would be Beijing taking an action that clearly imposes cost on Chinese households, such as a blockade, a mobilization, or the deliberate acceptance of severe sanctions, while household confidence remains low. The second would be a strategic-track issue reaching high public salience without the state promoting it. The third would be gray-zone intensity falling while household confidence continues to fall.

Household balance sheets and trending lists are not usually treated as strategic material. They are, however, the cheapest open-source record of which track Beijing is moving on, and of how much it is preparing its own people to bear.

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Robertson, Noah. “How DC Became Obsessed with a Potential 2027 Chinese Invasion of Taiwan.” Defense News, May 7, 2024. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2024/05/07/how-dc-became-obsessed-with-a-po tential-2027-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan/.

“US Accuses China of Grandstanding, Violating Protocol after Fiery Exchanges.” Deccan Herald, March 19, 2021.

https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/international/us-accuses-china-of-grandstanding-viol ating-protocol-after-fiery-exchanges-963669.html.

Wang, Kelly, and Hou Wuting. “China-Africa Summit: Xi Pledges $50 Billion in Financial Aid.”

Caixin Global, September 5, 2024.

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2024-09-05/china-africa-summit-xi-pledges-50-billion-in-f inancial-aid-102233825.html.

Wang, Orange. “Chinese Public Warms to US While Strongly Backing Beijing’s Trade Stance.” South China Morning Post, January 2, 2026. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3338550/chinese-public-warms-us-while-strongly-backing-beijings-trade-stance-survey.

Weiss, Jessica Chen. “How Hawkish Is the Chinese Public? Another Look at ‘Rising Nationalism’ and Chinese Foreign Policy.” Journal of Contemporary China 28, no. 119 (2019): 679–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2019.1580427.

———. Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Weiss, Jessica Chen, and Allan Dafoe. “Authoritarian Audiences, Rhetoric, and Propaganda in International Crises: Evidence from China.” International Studies Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2019): 963–73. https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz059.

Willemyns, Alex. “When Might China Invade Taiwan? Depends Who You Ask.” Radio Free Asia, January 30, 2023.

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/taiwan-invasion-timeline-01302023145650.html.

Xiang Jiaying 向家莹. “2025年新增贷款16.27万亿元 普惠、科创仍是投放’热门'” [New loans in 2025 totaled 16.27 trillion yuan]. Jingji cankao bao [Economic Information Daily], January 28, 2026. Reposted by Xinhua. https://www.news.cn/fortune/20260128/d999d5a084b14b2083a14eb16b607002/c.html.

Zheng, Sarah. “China Defends Extra US$60 Billion Pledge to Africa from Critics at Home.”

South China Morning Post, September 4, 2018.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2162745/china-defends-extra-us60-billion-pledge-africa-critics-home.

“中国共产党第十九届中央委员会第五次全体会议公报” [Communiqué of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China]. Xinhua, October 29, 2020. http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-10/29/c_1126674147.htm.

Zhou Jin. “China Announces Visa-Free Travel for Five European Countries and Malaysia.” China Daily, November 24, 2023. https://enapp.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202311/24/AP65605530a310824e906c5fba.html.

¹ justjavac, “weibo-trending-hot-search,” GitHub repository, daily files for August 24, 2023, and for August 2021 to January 2022, accessed October 7, 2026, https://github.com/justjavac/weibo-trending-hot-search.

² Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022).

³ Jonathan A. Czin and Allie Matthias, “Occidental Fall: Assessing Chinese Views of U.S. Decline,” China Leadership Monitor, no. 87 (February 28, 2026),

https://www.prcleader.org/post/occidental-fall-assessing-chinese-views-of-u-s-decline.

⁴ Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 427–60; Linda Jakobson and Dean Knox, New Foreign Policy Actors in China, SIPRI Policy Paper 26 (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2010).

⁵ Author’s counts of distinct trending topics per day, by keyword, from the archive cited in note 1. The archive is sparse from November 2020 to June 2021 and for parts of July, September, and October 2021; the peak days reported here fall outside those gaps, although Lithuania’s figures for September and October 2021 may be understated. Data and script are available from the author.

⁶ Author’s counts; see note 5.

⁷ Author’s counts; see note 5. “China Blocking EU Imports with Lithuanian Components over Taiwan Row, Says Brussels,” AFP, December 24, 2021, via Euronews,

https://www.euronews.com/2021/12/24/china-blocking-eu-imports-with-lithuanian-components-over-taiwan-row-sa ys-brussels.

⁸ “Beijing Official’s Strong-Arm Remarks at US-China Talks Become Hot Merchandise on Taobao,” Apple Daily, March 20, 2021, https://collection.news/appledaily/articles/S4CSXZWBDBA3RC5XAMMAJGPC2U.

⁹ “US Accuses China of Grandstanding, Violating Protocol after Fiery Exchanges,” Deccan Herald, March 19, 2021, https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/international/us-accuses-china-of-grandstanding-violating-protocol-after-fiery-e xchanges-963669.html.

¹⁰ “Japan Warns Citizens in China over Safety amid Taiwan Row,” AFP, November 18, 2025, via The Defense Post, https://thedefensepost.com/2025/11/18/japan-warns-citizens-china/; Feng Yiming, “China Halts Japanese Seafood Imports amid Diplomatic Row,” Caixin Global, November 20, 2025,

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2025-11-20/china-halts-japanese-seafood-imports-amid-diplomatic-row-102384739.h tml; John Liu, “Japanese PM’s Taiwan Comments Prompt China to Ban Certain Exports to Japan,” CNN, January 6, 2026, via KTVZ,

https://ktvz.com/money/cnn-business-consumer/2026/01/06/china-bans-certain-rare-earths-and-other-exports-to-japan-for-military-purposes-over-takaichis-comments/; “China Restricts Exports to 40 Japanese Entities with Ties to Military,” Associated Press, February 25, 2026, via NPR,

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/25/g-s1-111441/china-restricts-exports-to-40-japanese-entities-with-ties-to-military; “China Places 20 Japanese Entities on Export Control List for Dual-Use Items,” China Global South Project, June 29, 2026, https://chinaglobalsouth.com/2026/06/29/china-adds-20-japan-entities-dual-use-export-ban/; “China, Japan Top Envoys Spontaneously Talk for First Time since Takaichi Row,” Bloomberg News, July 23, 2026, via ThePrint,

https://theprint.in/world/china-japan-top-envoys-spontaneously-talk-for-first-time-since-takaichi-row/2994440/.

¹¹ Jessica Chen Weiss, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); see also Peter Larson, “Three Questions with… Jessica Weiss,” China Focus, University of California San Diego, July 19, 2015, https://chinafocus.ucsd.edu/2015/07/19/3-questions-with-jessica-weiss/.

¹² Jessica Chen Weiss and Allan Dafoe, “Authoritarian Audiences, Rhetoric, and Propaganda in International Crises: Evidence from China,” International Studies Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2019): 963–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz059. ¹³ “Don’t ‘Play with Fire’ over Taiwan, China’s Xi Warns in Call with Biden,” Reuters, July 29, 2022, via Malay Mail,

https://www.malaymail.com/news/world/2022/07/29/dont-play-with-fire-over-taiwan-chinas-xi-warns-in-call-with-b iden/19915, quoting the Chinese foreign ministry’s readout of the call.

¹⁴ Alexander Boyd, “Hu Xijin Becomes Target of Nationalist Ire, Again,” China Digital Times, August 5, 2022, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/08/hu-xijin-becomes-target-of-nationalist-ire-again/.

¹⁵ Manya Koetse, “The Social Media Spectacle of China’s Taiwan Military Exercises,” The Interpreter, Lowy Institute, August 19, 2022,

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/social-media-spectacle-china-s-taiwan-military-exercises.

¹⁶ Australian Strategic Policy Institute, “China’s Large-Scale Exercises since 2022,” Pressure Points, accessed October 7, 2026,

https://www.pressurepoints.aspi.org.au/taiwan-and-the-taiwan-strait/chinas-military-coercion/chinas-large-scale-exer cises-since-2022; Dzirhan Mahadzir, “China Launches Blockade Drills around Taiwan in Protest of U.S. Arms Sales,” USNI News, December 29, 2025,

https://news.usni.org/2025/12/29/china-launches-blockade-drills-around-taiwan-in-protest-of-u-s-arms-sales. Trending counts: author’s counts; see note 5.

¹⁷ Jordyn Haime, “Beijing’s Dialed-Down Response to the Tsai-McCarthy Meeting,” The China Project, April 13, 2023, https://thechinaproject.com/?p=273345.

¹⁸ Xiang Jiaying 向家莹, “2025年新增贷款16.27万亿元 普惠、科创仍是投放’热门'” [New loans in 2025 totaled

16.27 trillion yuan], Jingji cankao bao [Economic Information Daily], January 28, 2026, via Xinhua, https://www.news.cn/fortune/20260128/d999d5a084b14b2083a14eb16b607002/c.html; Chen Yueshi 陈月石, “‘提前还房贷’现象犹在，国有六大行去年个人住房贷款余额集体下降” [Early mortgage repayment persists as housing loan balances fall at all six large state banks], Pengpai xinwen [The Paper], April 4, 2026, https://m.thepaper.cn/detail/32903212; Li Jingtong 李京统, “2026年国考今日开考：招录年龄放宽 报名创新高” [The 2026 national civil service examination opens with record applications], China News Service, November 30, 2025, via Xinhua, https://www.news.cn/politics/20251130/7da14327e1c24cafbf0af0a287a2f085/c.html, citing the National Civil Service Administration; “报考回归理性 发展路径多元——专家分析2026年考研报名人数” [Experts analyze 2026 graduate examination registrations], Xinhua, November 24, 2025, https://www.news.cn/20251124/e54d3157f15744f5beb5b76644035f5d/c.html; Feng Qi 冯琪, “2023年全国研考首日落幕，多省份公布考试报名及借考数据” [First day of the 2023 graduate examination ends], Xin jing bao [Beijing News], December 25, 2022, https://www.bjnews.com.cn/detail/1671932811168023.html. Graduate examination figures are from the Ministry of Education.

¹⁹ People’s Bank of China, Urban Depositor Survey Report, Q3 2025, October 2025, https://www.pbc.gov.cn/en/3688247/3688981/3709408/5885948/2025103115592162965.pdf; “PBOC: Chinese Plans to Save Hit a Record High in Q2,” CNBC, June 30, 2022,

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/pboc-chinese-plans-to-save-hit-a-record-high-in-q2-job-concerns-rise.html.

²⁰ Jessica Chen Weiss, “How Hawkish Is the Chinese Public? Another Look at ‘Rising Nationalism’ and Chinese Foreign Policy,” Journal of Contemporary China 28, no. 119 (2019): 679–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2019.1580427.

²¹ Adam Y. Liu and Xiaojun Li, “Assessing Public Support for (Non)Peaceful Unification with Taiwan: Evidence from a Nationwide Survey in China,” Journal of Contemporary China 33, no. 145 (2024): 1–13. The sample is described in Institute for National Defense and Security Research, INDSR Newsletter, no. 25 (July 2023), https://indsr.org.tw/uploads/enindsr/files/202307/9a52fcd9-34da-49b3-a5e0-feaaef9d0f5d.pdf.

²² Orange Wang, “Chinese Public Warms to US While Strongly Backing Beijing’s Trade Stance,” South China Morning Post, January 2, 2026,

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3338550/chinese-public-warms-us-while-strongly-backing-bei jings-trade-stance-survey.

²³ Akhil Kadidal, “China Sets New Records in Air-Sea Operations around Taiwan,” Janes, March 10, 2025, https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-and-national-security-analysis/china-sets-new-records-in-air-sea-opera tions-around-taiwan. Data from Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.

²⁴ Brian McElhiney and Keishi Koja, “China Coast Guard’s ‘Increasingly Severe’ Presence near Japanese Islands Breaks Another Record,” Stars and Stripes, January 5, 2026,

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2026-01-05/senkaku-islands-china-coast-guard-20302589.html. Data from the Japan Coast Guard, which counts the days on which vessels are confirmed in the contiguous zone; the article reports the 2025 figure as 357 “times.”

²⁵ “China ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomatic Spokesperson Zhao Moves to New Role,” Reuters, January 9, 2023, via Malay Mail,

https://www.malaymail.com/news/world/2023/01/09/china-wolf-warrior-diplomatic-spokesperson-zhao-moves-to-n ew-role/49278; Zhou Jin, “China Announces Visa-Free Travel for Five European Countries and Malaysia,” China Daily, November 24, 2023,

https://enapp.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202311/24/AP65605530a310824e906c5fba.html.

²⁶ “China Further Loosens COVID-19 Measures in Major Policy Shift,” CGTN, December 7, 2022, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-12-07/China-further-optimizes-COVID-19-prevention-control-measures-1fzdNeFf eb6/index.html. The measures were issued by the National Health Commission.

²⁷ Aidan Powers-Riggs, Brian Hart, and Matthew P. Funaiole, “The U.S.-China Trade Truce Has Not Solved the Gallium Problem,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 11, 2026, https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-china-trade-truce-has-not-solved-gallium-problem.

²⁸ Author’s counts; see note 5. Kelly Wang and Hou Wuting, “China-Africa Summit: Xi Pledges $50 Billion in Financial Aid,” Caixin Global, September 5, 2024,

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2024-09-05/china-africa-summit-xi-pledges-50-billion-in-financial-aid-102233825.ht ml; “China and Peru’s Leaders Celebrate Opening of New Chinese-Built Megaport,” Maritime Executive, November 15, 2024,

https://maritime-executive.com/article/china-and-peru-s-leaders-celebrate-opening-of-new-chinese-built-megaport.  ²⁹ Sarah Zheng, “China Defends Extra US$60 Billion Pledge to Africa from Critics at Home,” South China Morning Post, September 4, 2018,

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2162745/china-defends-extra-us60-billion-pledge-africa-critics-home.

³⁰ Czin and Matthias, “Occidental Fall.”

³¹ “中国共产党第十九届中央委员会第五次全体会议公报” [Communiqué of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China], Xinhua, October 29, 2020, http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-10/29/c_1126674147.htm. The relevant clause reads “确保二〇二七年实 现建军百年奋斗目标” [ensure that the centenary goal of the army is achieved in 2027]. On how the benchmark was read in Washington, see Noah Robertson, “How DC Became Obsessed with a Potential 2027 Chinese Invasion of Taiwan,” Defense News, May 7, 2024,

https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2024/05/07/how-dc-became-obsessed-with-a-potential-2027-chinese-invasi on-of-taiwan/.

³² Author’s counts; see note 5.

³³ Olivia Gazis, “CIA Director William Burns: ‘I Wouldn’t Underestimate’ Xi’s Ambitions for Taiwan,” CBS News, February 3, 2023,

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cia-director-william-burns-i-wouldnt-underestimate-xis-ambitions-for-taiwan. 

³⁴ Alex Willemyns, “When Might China Invade Taiwan? Depends Who You Ask,” Radio Free Asia, January 30, 2023, https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/taiwan-invasion-timeline-01302023145650.html; Chris Gordon,

“Pentagon Distances Itself from Minihan Memo Suggesting Possible War with China in 2025,” Air & Space Forces Magazine, January 29, 2023,

³⁶ Chris Lau, “China Spy Agency’s Social Media Debut Calls for All Members of Society to Combat Espionage,” CNN, August 2, 2023, via ABC 17 News,

https://abc17news.com/news/national-world/cnn-world/2023/08/02/china-spy-agencys-social-media-debut-calls-for-all-members-of-society-to-combat-espionage/.