CCP’s confidence in the PRC’s progress, Xi’s objectives for 2035 moved up certain mid-century targets set by the CCP going back to 1987.
At his speech marking the 100th anniversary of the CCP on July 1, 2021, Xi declared that the PRC had “realized the first centenary goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects,” by eliminating extreme poverty. Beyond 2021, the PRC will use the “moderately prosperous society” as the basis for Xi’s “two-stage” plan to achieve national rejuvenation by the PRC’s centenary in 2049. In the first stage from 2021 to 2035, the CCP aims for the PRC to “basically” meet its initial thresholds for becoming a “great modern socialist country.” In this stage, the PRC will likely continue to prioritize economic development as “the central task” but, rather than rapid economic growth, it will seek to address its uneven economic development and inequalities that Beijing recognized as the new “principal contradiction” in PRC society in the “New Era.” By 2035, the PRC seeks to increase self-reliance through enhancing its economic and technological strength, including “basically” completing its military modernization by becoming a “global leader in innovation” and enhancing self-sufficiency in key areas like food supply. The PRC intends to significantly strengthen its cultural “soft power” and improve its domestic rule of law and governance systems.
In the second stage from 2035 to 2049, the PRC aims to attain national rejuvenation and Chinese modernization, realizing an international status that Xi describes as a “global leader in terms of comprehensive national strength and international influence.” A renewed PRC will have attained—among the CCP’s many goals—its objectives to field a world-class military and assume a leading position in an international order revised in line with the PRC’s overall foreign policy goal to establish what it refers to as a “community of common destiny” or, the PRC’s preferred official English translation, “community with a shared future for mankind.”
The PRC’s Core Interests. The PRC considers “core interests” as issues so central to its national rejuvenation that the official position on them is not subject to negotiation or compromise. The PRC began using the term in 2003, initially in reference to sovereignty issues regarding Taiwan and later Tibet and Xinjiang. In 2009, the senior PRC official for foreign affairs publicly defined the elements of core interests: 1) preserving the PRC’s political system, 2) defending the PRC’s sovereignty and territorial claims, and 3) promoting the PRC’s economic development.
The list of core interests has grown over the last decade with President Xi increasingly using the terms of a national security law passed in 2015 to extend the formal status of “core interest” to territorial disputes in the South China Sea (SCS), the Senkaku Islands, and the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Other sources have begun listing PRC interests in new domains— space, cyber, and electro-magnetic—which, in turn, must be contested. The increasing number of issues being defined as “core interests” carries the risk of more potential sources of conflict in PRC-U.S. relations or between the PRC and neighboring states.
Origins of PRC National Rejuvenation. Understanding the origins of the PRC’s national rejuvenation concept is crucial to understanding how the PRC will likely shape and pursue this strategic objective. PRC leaders have consistently framed their efforts as seeking to “restore” China to a preeminent place in the world after enduring what the Party characterizes as China’s “century of humiliation” beginning in the 19th century as the Qing Dynasty began to disintegrate and lasting until the founding of the PRC in 1949. The threads of national renewal can be traced to China’s reformers and nationalist revolutionary leaders in the late Qing Dynasty and emerged
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Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
