Xi’s 2026 New Year Address

Xi Jinping’s 2026 New Year address marks a shift from reassurance toward confidence at the close of the 14th Five-Year Plan. It portrays the past five years as a completed and successful phase of Chinese modernisation, reinforcing a sense of achievement while sidestepping uncertainty and challenges as China enters a new planning cycle.

China’s Diplomatic Agenda

Wang Yi’s year-end stocktake and agenda for 2026 shows how Chinese diplomacy is being adjusted at the start of the 15th Five-Year Plan. Rather than pointing to a new strategic direction, it explains how foreign policy is being used to steady China’s external environment, manage growing risks, and support domestic development under continued geopolitical strain.

Venezuela Response

Beijing’s response to recent US military action in Venezuela highlights a recurring feature of China’s external posture. While forcefully condemning the operation as a violation of sovereignty and international law, China confined its response to diplomatic channels, deliberately limiting material involvement. The episode illustrates how Beijing manages risk when US force is applied against a partner where Chinese interests are exposed but not strategically indispensable.

On December 31, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered his annual New Year address, setting out his reading of the past year and signalling expectations for the one ahead. In a political system where communication between top leaders and the public is channelled through Party and state institutions, this ritual stands out as one of the few occasions on which Xi addresses the Chinese public directly. Originally conceived in the late 1980s as an outward-facing gesture of goodwill, the address has since become a domestically oriented instrument for narrating national performance and shaping public interpretation.

While the format is familiar, the 2026 address is distinctive in its timing and tone. It closes the 14th Five-Year Plan at the end of 2025 and opens the transition toward the 15th, directing attention to how China’s recent trajectory should be read. Xi leaves little ambiguity: the past five years are presented as a completed and vindicated chapter of “Chinese modernisation,” defined by “solid advances” and “new heights.”

The central message emphasises settled outcomes. Economic growth, technological capability, defence modernisation, environmental improvement, and social welfare appear not as fragile or provisional gains, but as achievements already secured. Aggregate indicators—economic scale, “composite national strength,” and innovation capacity—underscore a sense of arrival. Difficulties receive brief acknowledgment, folded into a wider narrative of perseverance.

This logic carries through the address’s main themes. Planning and governance provide the backbone: the successful completion of the 14th Five-Year Plan is cited as proof of policy coherence and institutional competence, enabling the 15th Plan to be cast as a period of momentum rather than recalibration. Technology and innovation follow, portrayed as sources of competitive strength, with advances in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, space exploration, and advanced manufacturing signalling China’s global status. History and memory take on strategic weight. Commemorations of the anti-fascist war and the designation of Taiwan Recovery Day are tied explicitly to “national rejuvenation,” linking historical victory to present legitimacy and to a future depicted as assured.

The contrast with the 2025 address is notable. Last year’s message leaned toward reassurance, openly citing uncertainty, external pressure, and the need to stabilise expectations. The 2026 address largely sets that register aside. References to economic strain diminish, and confidence appears as already established. China’s recent trajectory is framed as another entry in a continuing sequence of successes, rather than as a phase of adjustment or uncertainty.

Taken together, the 2026 New Year address signals a shift in emphasis—from reassurance and expectation management toward the projection of confidence and the assertion of outcomes.

At a year-end symposium with foreign-policy experts, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi used his December 30 address to outline Beijing’s diplomatic agenda as China prepares to enter the 15th Five-Year Plan period. The speech reviews China’s foreign relations in 2025 and sets out diplomatic priorities for 2026. Wang places this agenda against an external environment defined by geopolitical instability, trade fragmentation, and intensifying major-power rivalry—developments he presents as exerting increasing pressure on China’s development trajectory.

While much of the address reiterates familiar themes, its most consequential elements point forward. Wang frames 2026 as a year in which diplomacy must “accomplish more” by supporting domestic development goals, managing external risk, and tightening the alignment between international engagement and Beijing’s strategic priorities.

The agenda is structured around a set of listed priorities. Rather than advancing a new diplomatic strategy, Wang outlines how diplomatic work is to be refocused at the start of the new planning cycle, with a clear emphasis on serving national development objectives.

China’s Stated Diplomatic Priorities for 2026

First, diplomacy is tasked with providing stronger strategic support for national development and rejuvenation. Wang directly links foreign policy to the success of the 15th Five-Year Plan, stating that shifts in the international environment will generate more immediate and consequential domestic effects in the years ahead. He attributes this exposure to deeper global integration alongside trade fragmentation and intensifying strategic competition, positioning diplomacy primarily as a stabilising input into domestic planning.

Second, China will continue to pursue a “new type of major-country relations.” Engagement with the United States centres on stability and conditional cooperation, while relations with Russia are described as durable and strategically coordinated. Ties with Europe are framed pragmatically, with an emphasis on stability, cooperation, and multilateralism. Across these relationships, the priority is to prevent deterioration rather than to reshape major-power dynamics.

Third, Wang elevates China’s regional environment as a core diplomatic concern. Beyond bilateral ties, he emphasises shaping a stable strategic periphery through trade integration, security dialogue, and dispute management, repeatedly invoking the neighbourhood as a shared “home” that must remain peaceful, secure, and prosperous.

Fourth, Wang presents China as an advocate for the Global South’s “joint march toward modernisation,” rejecting the notion that modernisation must follow Western models. BRICS expansion and deeper engagement with Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America are described as ways to strengthen coordination among developing countries and amplify their collective voice.

Fifth, China commits to sustaining global openness. Wang highlights high-standard opening up, defence of the WTO-centred trading regime, and continued Belt and Road cooperation as responses to decoupling pressures, citing China’s hosting of APEC in 2026 as part of its effort to support regional economic cooperation.

Sixth, global governance reform remains a stated priority. Wang situates China’s approach within Xi Jinping’s global initiatives, portraying Beijing as both a defender of the UN-centred system and a proponent of gradual reform.

Finally, Wang assigns diplomacy a more explicit role in safeguarding national interests. Counter-sanctions, resistance to extraterritorial legal pressure, and strengthened overseas risk-warning and consular protection mechanisms are treated as routine elements of diplomatic work.

What the Agenda Reveals

Taken together, Wang’s articulation of China’s 2026 diplomatic priorities does not point to a new strategic direction. Instead, it sets out how diplomacy is expected to operate at the outset of the 15th Five-Year Plan.

Three features stand out. First, diplomacy is explicitly subordinated to domestic development priorities. Foreign policy is framed as an extension of China’s development strategy under more demanding international conditions. Wang stresses that diplomacy must “facilitate a good start” to the 15th Five-Year Plan by shaping a favourable external environment—preserving market access, stabilising economic linkages, and limiting the spillover of geopolitical volatility into the domestic arena. Risk management emerges not as a contingency, but as a standing task.

Second, the prominence accorded to China’s immediate neighbourhood establishes a clear hierarchy of diplomatic focus. Regional stability is treated as foundational to China’s security and development, with the neighbourhood described as a shared home. This reflects an assessment that Asia is both the most consequential and the most manageable arena for Chinese diplomacy, where instability would pose the most immediate risks and where diplomatic effort can most directly shape outcomes.

Third, preparedness for confrontation is treated as normal. References to counter-sanctions, resistance to “tariff bullying,” and institutional resilience against external pressure are presented not as exceptional responses, but as baseline conditions of contemporary diplomacy. Engagement and cooperation remain central, but they now operate alongside an expectation of sustained friction. Legal, institutional, and political resilience is placed on par with outreach.

For external audiences, much of the language will sound familiar. For internal constituencies, however, the message is more directive. As the new planning cycle begins, Chinese diplomacy is being refocused to ensure that China’s external environment remains workable under conditions of sustained uncertainty.

The recent US military operation in Venezuela—including air strikes and the cross-border seizure of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife for transfer to the United States—has drawn a sharp rebuke from Beijing. Chinese officials accused Washington of violating international law and basic norms of international relations, warning of wider regional destabilisation.

Beyond the immediate condemnation, Beijing’s response is revealing in how it handles such situations more broadly. Venezuela illustrates how China reacts when US force is applied against a partner in which it has tangible but limited economic interests. In such cases, Beijing relies on diplomatic and normative opposition while deliberately limiting material involvement, prioritising risk containment over confrontation.

This pattern is visible in the gap between Beijing’s language and its actions. Official statements reiterated familiar themes of non-interference, sovereign equality, and opposition to hegemonic behaviour. At the same time, China avoided steps that would deepen its material exposure. There were no indications of security involvement, punitive measures, or attempts to alter conditions on the ground. Beijing’s response has therefore been emphatic in rhetoric, but tightly circumscribed in material terms.

This approach carries a clear signalling purpose, particularly for international audiences wary of US interventionism. By stressing sovereignty and international law, Beijing advances a narrative in which the United States appears coercive and destabilising, while China presents itself as restrained and order-oriented. In this sense, Venezuela serves as a vehicle through which Beijing restates its opposition to unilateral force and externally imposed political outcomes.

Authoritative Party-state media editorials have reinforced this framing by shifting attention from Venezuela itself to the implications of precedent. A recent People’s Daily editorial treated the US operation as a threshold moment for the international order, arguing that the open use of unilateral force to seize a foreign leader—justified through domestic legal claims rather than multilateral authorisation—risks hollowing out core protections of sovereignty. The concern is the normalisation of a practice that elevates power over rules and weakens the constraints intended to shield weaker states.

The editorial further questioned the legitimacy of the operation by highlighting material motives. References to US statements about “managing” Venezuela and opening the way for American oil companies cast the intervention as economic extraction dressed up as law enforcement.

Normative positioning alone, however, does not account for the limits of Beijing’s response. China has concrete interests at stake in Venezuela, most notably through energy ties, outstanding loans, and infrastructure projects. These arrangements, including oil-for-loans mechanisms, have long been politically fraught and financially risky. Renewed instability directly threatens Chinese assets, repayment prospects, and the viability of remaining projects.

At the same time, China’s exposure remains constrained. Venezuela is not strategically indispensable to Beijing. Even before the latest US action, China had already been affected by Venezuela’s prolonged economic and political crisis, reflected in repeated renegotiations of repayment schedules, underperforming oil-for-loans arrangements, and stalled infrastructure projects. For Beijing, the priority today is less the preservation of a particular leader or government than the management of downside risk: maintaining access where possible, limiting further losses, and resisting the normalisation of externally imposed regime change as a tool of great-power competition.

These considerations help explain Beijing’s caution. Direct confrontation with the United States in the Western Hemisphere would entail high costs and limited strategic return. China lacks the capacity to alter outcomes on the ground and has little incentive to test US red lines in a region Washington continues to treat as a core sphere of influence. Beijing has therefore channelled its response through diplomatic protest and institutional forums, including deliberation at the UN Security Council, rather than material countermeasures.