previous 30 years of “hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead”. It also heralded the beginning of a new period of confident, independent international policy activism by Beijing. In part this change reflected Xi Jinping’s greater centralisation of political power in the Chinese system. In part it reflected the Chinese system’s deep conclusion that American global power was in relative decline and that the United States would not confront China militarily if China sought to expand its regional military presence. In part it reflected a Chinese institutional conclusion that China had finally become an indispensable global economic power to most countries in the world, thereby enabling China to begin to project its economic influence bilaterally, regionally and also multilaterally. It also was an expression of Xi Jinping’s personal leadership temperament, which is impatient with the incremental bureaucratism endemic to the Chinese system, and with which the international community had become relaxed, comfortable and thoroughly accustomed. For those who follow these events closely and have written on the importance of this significant departure from China’s traditional strategic framework dating from the 2014 conference, a number of developments since then have been illustrative of this overall change in the style, content and direction of China’s international policy approach. China worked overtime in 2014-16 to expand its military position in the South China Sea with a rapid program of island reclamation. China took the idea of the New Silk Road and turned it into a multi- trillion dollar trade, investment, infrastructure and wider geo-political and geo-economic initiative, engaging 73 different countries across much of Eurasia, Africa and beyond. China signed up most of the developed world in the first large-scale non-Bretton Woods multilateral development bank called the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), capitalised it and launched it so th