For many people in Sweden and across the West, China’s political system and leadership remain distant, often mediated through headlines about trade disputes, human rights controversies, or great power rivalry. What is less familiar are the internal logics, historical references, and developmental ambitions that shape the self-understanding of Chinese leaders and their vision for the country’s role in the world.
The fifth volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China offers precisely such an insight for those willing to look beyond the headlines. As a text comprised of political speeches to concerned audiences, the book provides a rare opportunity to read Xi Jinping’s own words as he reflects on the priorities of the state, from Chinese modernization at home to global initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). For a Swedish audience – coming from a small, open economy deeply integrated with international trade, understanding what China means by “opening up,” “shared future,” and “high-quality development” is essential.
This book does not dissolve the tensions between Western and Chinese perspectives, but it helps illuminate the narratives that underpin China’s policy choices and its contribution to global leadership.
The book’s fifth volume, like its predecessors, is not a conventional monograph but a curated compilation of speeches delivered in different contexts. This makes it more a reference text than a narrative work. The tone is consistently formal, with ideological slogans repeated across speeches. These repetitions reveal what the Chinese leadership wishes to emphasize most strongly.
Reflections on the Meaning of “Opening up”
In tracing Xi Jinping’s reflections on “opening up” across The Governance of China series, one finds a steady broadening of scope and ambition. In the early speeches, China’s “opening up” was cast as the continuation of China’s Silk Road heritage and the essential driver of modernization, with the maxim that, “Openness brings progress, while isolation leads to backwardness.” By the third volume, Xi declared that, “China’s door will not be closed – it will only open even wider,” unveiling landmark measures on market access, intellectual property protection, and imports, and explicitly positioning openness as China’s contribution to global governance. In the fourth volume, the idea of openness expanded to encompass digital, health, and green dimensions, tying external cooperation to domestic transformation and new free trade ports. Finally, in this fifth volume, openness emerges as a defining feature of China’s global identity: high-standards, people-centered, aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and presented as China’s moral responsibility in an era of protectionism. What began as a policy tool in reform and modernization, thus culminates as a vision of global stewardship, with openness at the heart of China’s offer to the world.
The Belt and Road Initiative
In the fifth volume of The Governance of China, Xi presents the BRI not as a new proposal but as a mature and proven framework for global cooperation. Reading his speeches across the earlier volumes, one sees a clear progression: from the early invocations of the ancient Silk Road spirit in 2013, through the pragmatic focus on infrastructure projects and financing mechanisms in 2015-2017, to the broader ambition of reforming global governance and promoting “high-quality development” after 2018. By the time the fourth volume was published, the BRI had already expanded into digital, health, and green dimensions, explicitly tied to China’s domestic reforms and responses to global crises.
In this fifth volume, Xi’s tone is both retrospective and authoritative: the BRI is presented as an established global public good, aligned with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and as a pillar of multipolarity in international relations. The narrative has therefore evolved from connectivity projects to a comprehensive vision of shared future for humankind, which offers a development path distinct from Western models.
Readers may confront a paradox of modern China while reading the book: for nearly half a century, China has achieved what no other major nation has – lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, sustaining decades of near double-digit growth, and integrating itself into the heart of global trade. Yet in Europe, it is still viewed with suspicion, or even portrayed as being on the brink of collapse. Western media cycles are replete with predictions of China’s “end of growth” or looming crises in debt, demographics, or geopolitics. While such challenges are real, they risk obscuring the more important question: how do Chinese leaders themselves interpret their country’s trajectory, and what intellectual frameworks guide their choices?
Xi’s speeches provide an entry point into this logic. They reveal a worldview that ties China’s legitimacy not only to economic performance but also to the promise of “opening up” as a continuing process – expanding markets, deepening exchanges, and pursuing what Xi consistently calls “win-win cooperation.” For Europeans, this perspective matters because it helps us move beyond distortion. Understanding how China sees itself is indispensable in a world where our economies, technologies, and security are increasingly entangled.
Historical and Economic Contexts
It is also worth recalling the historical scale of what has occurred in China since 1978. In less than 50 years, the country has moved from one of the poorest societies on earth to the world’s second-largest economy. That record demands intellectual humility from those of us accustomed to assuming that Western institutions hold a monopoly on development models. To dismiss this achievement as an aberration, or to view it only through the prism of geopolitical rivalry, is to impoverish our own capacity to learn from the realities of global change. Reading Xi’s account of China’s development goals does not require uncritical acceptance, but it does require a willingness to recognize that Chinese leaders see their reforms not as temporary experiments, but as the unfolding of modern history’s most ambitious economic transformation.
At a time when protectionism and economic nationalism are on the rise in Europe and elsewhere, the lessons embedded in this volume are particularly pertinent. China’s leadership insists that openness remains the foundation of prosperity and that the BRI is designed to extend the gains of connectivity beyond China’s borders. For a European audience, the value of engaging with this book is not that it offers a blueprint to be copied, but that it challenges us to test our own assumptions. Do we still believe in open markets and cooperation? Or are we retreating into defensive postures that risk repeating the very mistakes China claims to be avoiding?
Recommendation
The fifth volume of The Governance of China is therefore more than a collection of political speeches. It is a reminder that the narratives shaping the future global economy are not only being written in Brussels, Washington, or Stockholm, but also in Beijing. For Europeans facing a turbulent present and uncertain future, expanding our intellectual horizons to grasp China’s internal logic is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
This book is essential reading not because it persuades, but because it informs. It will be most valuable to policymakers, business leaders, journalists, and students of international relations seeking to understand how China conceptualizes its role in the world. General readers may find the formal style heavy going, but the insights it provides into China’s worldview make the effort worthwhile.
THOMAS KARLSSON is a researcher at the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden.
