The chapter first identifies the puzzle of how China’s illiberal polity could convince many quarters of the world to support the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Chinese-led transformative, global infrastructural program. The next section investigates how China’s all-in commitment quickly launched the program but doing so at the expense of its sustainability. The following section discusses why credibility matters for the BRI and China’s broad foreign policy agenda. The last section considers how mounting sustainability challenges are transforming the dynamics of the BRI, forcing China to scale back its investment and ambitions. The conclusion highlights how China’s priority has changed from projecting Beijing’s commitment to securing the BRI’s long-term viability and what the policy shift means for the initiative’s future evolution.

The Joint Declaration may have been concluded in 1984 but it was not until 1991 that agreement, or at least a first agreement, was reached between China and the UK on the composition of an altogether new entity, the Court of Final Appeal or ‘CFA’ for post–handover Hong Kong. It was to replace appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council from colonial Hong Kong. In that respect the new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will begin where other former British colonies had evolved; the eventual abolition of appeals to the Privy Council when sufficient confidence in the local judiciary had been, or was felt to have been, achieved, or perhaps when national honour in some former colonies had demanded it. Barbados and Guyana have now joined Canada, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore, effectively Australia, and also India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka just to name a few prominent examples of jurisdictions which have abolished appeals to the Judicial Committee.

The chapter introduces strategic opportunity as the analytical approach guiding the book. China’s strategic opportunity is defined by the national goals and ambitions as set by the Chinese leadership, the opportunities and risks presented in the international environment, and the policy instruments and resources at the nation’s disposal. The chapter first shows how the concept is anchored in the reformist Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s assessment that peace and development were the predominant trends in the world. It then explains why the concept provides an appropriate and innovative approach to the study of Chinese foreign policy. Finally, the chapter investigates how Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping has launched a major-power diplomacy seeking to effectively deploy its newfound resources to reshape its international environment. It also lays out the salient causal beliefs and policy patterns behind the assertive Chinese foreign policy and concludes with a summary of the contents of the book.

The chapter examines the onset of great-power competition between the rising power, China and the dominant power, the United States. It first discusses how Xi Jinping consolidated central control of foreign policy, the economy, and the military. The next section sketches out the main ideas and initiatives in Xi’s major-power diplomacy. The following section discusses how the long standing US engagement policy came to an abrupt end, ushering in a new phase of US-China peer competition. A further section teases out the key beliefs held by the Chinese leadership and policy elites on the emerging great-power struggle. The conclusion highlights how China mobilized and adjusted its diplomacy amid the Sino-US rivalry to secure its long-term strategic opportunity.

US, Finland and Ireland, in response to China’s National Security Law, suspended their extradition treaties with Hong Kong. France stated that it would not be ratifying an extradition treaty with Hong Kong. These suspensions ostensibly were intended to safeguard the rights of nationals (and others) in the suspending States. In some cases such as the UK the same act could constitute retorsion, meaning that it could have been intended as a patently lawful (albeit less than friendly) reaction to the National Security Law. Thus, a foreign State – albeit apparently not the UK which, as a party to the Sino–British Joint Declaration, had declared a breach of the Sino–British treaty – could still treat the National Security Law as Beijing’s lawful prerogative, or in any case may have no clear legal right to press, yet still react with a perfectly lawful act of its own to show its displeasure.

Part II begins with the UK’s failure to secure a role for the Hong Kong judiciary in relation to the 1984 Joint Declaration. Part I had discussed the idea during the negotiations of subjecting amendments to the Basic Law to the judgment of an ‘international commission’, where Geoffrey Howe had considered it to be a non-starter. Instead, there was an attempt to have the Basic Law’s terms dictated in detail by the terms of the Joint Declaration resulting in a short statement of China’s ‘basic policies’ in paragraph 3 in the main body of the Joint Declaration, a more detailed ‘elaboration’ of these in Annex I and a clause in paragraph 3 (paragraph 3(12)) stating that both these basic policies and their elaboration will ‘be stipulated’ in ‘a Basic Law’ and will remain unchanged for fifty years.