China’s 2025: Forging a new global role

This article analyses China’s foreign policy in 2025 as a phase of global role consolidation, manifested most visibly in the introduction of the Global Governance Initiative but extending well beyond it. Drawing on interactionist Role Theory, the study examines how China articulated, performed, and negotiated its global role through diplomatic interactions in a context of intensified international fragmentation and instability. Based on content and narrative analysis of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ official statements and policy documents released in 2025, the article argues that neighbourhood and South-South diplomacy emerged as the primary arenas in which China’s global role was most significantly relocated, tested, and contested. In doing so, the article suggests that China’s foreign policy behaviour throughout the year, rather than signalling a mere turn toward assertiveness, reflects its evolving self-conceptualisation as a global power, entailing a reconfiguration of its role identity as such and its associated dilemmas. Ultimately, it contends that China’s global positioning is increasingly reorienting the normative and spatial coordinates of contemporary diplomacy toward the East.