Following a tradition I maintain in this space, I will use the last few columns of December to project the main trends regarding China for the following year.
This week, I analyze macroeconomic geopolitical issues in order to be able to address the domestic issues on Beijing’s agenda next week. This is of course a dangerous futurology exercise that does not always yield good results, but it helps direct attention to what needs to be monitored more carefully.
2026 tends to be less a year of sudden turning points than the moment when a strategic reading matured over the last decade crystallizes. In Beijing, the conviction was consolidated that the international environment was no longer just competitive but had become structurally hostile. The expectation of a return to the liberal globalization of pre-2018, still present a few years ago among part of the Chinese elite, has been definitively abandoned.
The response to this diagnosis is not isolation, but the deliberate construction of a parallel architecture of international integration. The growing emphasis on technological self-sufficiency should be interpreted less as a conventional economic project and more as a national security imperative. The central priority is to reduce critical vulnerabilities and neutralize instruments of external coercion, even if this means accepting short-term costs and inefficiencies.
In this context, the relationship with the United States will continue to be the main structuring axis of foreign policy. In 2026, bilateral dynamics tend to stabilize in a pattern of prolonged friction, marked by selective and asymmetric decoupling.
Beijing accepts continued trade in less sensitive sectors, but is preparing for a long-term technological conflict, in which tariffs, export controls and regulatory measures will become permanent tools. The objective is no longer to manage “strategic competition”, but to manage a systemic rivalry, in which specific concessions do not change the panorama of mutual distrust.
The relationship with Europe will follow a more ambiguous logic. Brussels insists on the discourse of “risk reduction”, but comes up against the limits imposed by internal political fragmentation and the economic dependence of key sectors on the Chinese market. This tension between rhetoric and reality opens space for pragmatic Chinese diplomacy, which exploits national differences within the European Union and turns strategic incoherence into advantage.
However, it is in the countries of the South that the most transformative dimension of Chinese strategy emerges. Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia no longer occupy a peripheral role and become central in the projection of power. By combining financing, infrastructure and political coordination, China has attempted to present itself as an alternative to an order that many of these countries perceive as exhausted.
In security, the greatest risk lies not in open conflict, but in the proliferation of gray zones. From the South China Sea to the Taiwan Strait, Chinese strategy favors progressive pressure and the use of administrative or economic instruments to impose a fait accompli.
More than a year of spectacular ruptures, 2026 tends to mark the normalization of a world in which China no longer seeks to adapt to the existing order, but to shape it according to its own interests. Ignoring this transition, or underestimating it, will be a strategic error that is difficult to correct.
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