The CCP Politburo holds “collective study sessions” on a semi-regular basis, in which an outside academic or government expert leads a discussion on a selected topic. Such sessions can signal which issues the senior leadership considers to be important. The 20th collective study session of the 20th Central Committee Politburo was held on April 25, 2025, and was presided over by Xi Jinping. Xi delivered a speech emphasizing the need for the party to promote innovation in the field of artificial intelligence, while also enhancing self-reliance and striving to set global standards.

The CCP Politburo holds “collective study sessions” on a semi-regular basis, in which an outside academic or government expert leads a discussion on a selected topic. Such sessions can signal which issues the senior leadership considers to be important. The 19th collective study session of the 20th Central Committee Politburo was held on February 28, 2025 and was presided over by Xi Jinping. Xi delivered a speech emphasizing the need to shift China’s public safety governance model from “reactive response” to “proactive prevention,” which entails expanding community-based security forces, and resolving various conflicts at the local level.

Days after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement, Guan Tao, the global chief economist at BOCI China, assesses the impacts of the intensifying U.S.-China trade war. He compares this round of tariffs with the earlier tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term, concluding that their impacts on China this year may be similar to those of 2019. However, Guan views the external environment as increasingly suppressive and unpredictable, arguing that it will force China to “focus on doing its own things well” and spur domestic reforms spanning its development pattern, trade model, and macroeconomic policy priorities. Guan expects U.S.-China economic and trade relations to worsen but is confident these domestic adjustments will enable China to weather the “tariff storm.”

Three Chinese state-affiliated researchers Jiang Zhao, Dong Chao, and Fu Jiang assess the impact of Trump 2.0 on the global economy and U.S.-China trade relations. They foresee Trump’s policies as harmful to multilateral economic cooperation, but they believe the impact on China will be limited. They also propose a slate of countermeasures for Beijing, which include further diversifying export markets and trade cooperation with emerging economies, optimizing China’s ability to attract foreign investment, accelerating RMB internationalization, and “telling China’s economic development story well” to influence global public opinion.

Commentator Zhong Xin’s analysis of PLA reform situates national defense within the overall framework of economic and social development. The piece argues that China needs to continue building an integrated national strategy system, especially focusing on defense-industrial production and S&T upgrading.

Zhang Fuhai, a member of the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection, provides an overview of the Party-state’s recent anti-corruption work and outlines strategies to continue countering graft. Emphasizing that the Party has won an “overwhelming victory” against corruption under Xi Jinping’s leadership, Zhang suggests that the next steps will be implementing systemic dis-incentives, maintaining high pressures against misconduct, strengthening investigations, and cultivating a culture of integrity.

Yang Guoliang, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing, frames U.S. pursuit of strategic competition with China as a reemergence of Western imperialism. He suggests the relative shift in economic power away from the West in past decades, toward the rest of the world, has led Washington to characterize globalization as “out-of-control” and introduce its own set of restrictions on international commercial engagement. While reiterating the need for continued reform and opening up, he underscores the need for China to set its own limits on commercial openness — particularly in the realm of inbound foreign investment from the West — in order to safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a top economist at the Bank of China Securities unpacks the potential trade impacts of a second Trump administration on China. He argues that Trump 2.0 may not be universally unfavorable from Beijing’s perspective, given he is entering his second term more focused on domestic issues and China currently maintains a lower trade deficit with the United States than other countries. Though he suggests Trump 2.0 could be less volatile than Trump 1.0, Guan cautions that Beijing still needs to prepare for U.S.-China trade relations to worsen and views domestic reforms and economic performance improvements as key to strengthening China’s position.

Three Chinese economists from JD.com lay out potential impacts of tariffs that U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to impose on China, arguing that U.S. domestic concerns will most likely reduce the duration and magnitude of such measures, thereby minimizing their impacts on the Chinese economy. They argue that regardless of the scale of Trump’s trade actions, Beijing should seek to bolster its national strength through proactive international trade integration with other countries.

Chinese researchers Sun Xuguang and Zhu Caihua explore the new paradigms of China’s trade as it responds to its industrial upgrading and domestic circumstances. They argue that as China seeks to become a manufacturing superpower, it has come to compete directly with developed countries in advanced manufacturing fields, engendering trade frictions with them. In the case of the United States and Europe, China’s changing trade patterns that now prioritize integrating domestic technology have in the authors’ view threatened to break up the Western high-tech monopoly and inevitably faced pushback.