When China’s most powerful leader in decades looks at the world and says it is “crumbling into disarray,” it is worth pausing to consider both what he is describing and what he is doing about it.
Speaking at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday, President Xi Jinping met with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and used language that was notable not just for its directness but for its moral weight. “The international order is crumbling into disarray,” Xi said, deploying a Chinese phrase that conveys not merely chaos but also moral decay — a civilizational deterioration, not just a political one. He called on China and Spain to “oppose the world’s retrogression to the law of the jungle” and to “jointly safeguard genuine multilateralism.”
These are not casual remarks. They are a carefully crafted statement of geopolitical positioning from a leader who has watched the war in the Middle East, the fracturing of Western alliances, and the rise of U.S. unilateralism under President Trump — and who has decided this moment is China’s to claim.
The Context Behind the Words
Xi’s remarks came at an extraordinary diplomatic juncture. The US-Israel war on Iran, now in its seventh week, has upended the international order in ways that have reverberated from oil markets to diplomatic alignments. The Strait of Hormuz — through which China sources enormous quantities of its energy — remains contested. The Islamabad peace talks collapsed over the weekend without a deal. And the global community is watching nervously to see whether the fragile ceasefire holds.
China has enormous stakes in the outcome. It is one of the world’s largest importers of Gulf oil, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz since late February has hit Chinese energy imports and industrial activity directly. Chinese export data for March showed a sharp toll from the conflict. Beijing has called for an immediate ceasefire and even joined with Pakistan in a joint statement urging both sides to stand down.
But there is another dimension to China’s engagement with this crisis that goes beyond self-interest in energy flows. Xi has seized the moment to position China — deliberately, visibly, and repeatedly — as the responsible alternative to what he frames as American disorder. Where Washington has launched wars and threatened allies, Beijing is receiving a procession of foreign leaders at the Great Hall of the People, offering dialogue, stability, and trade agreements.
Spain’s Pivot — and the Broader European Pattern
Sánchez’s visit to Beijing is his fourth in four years, an unusually high frequency for a European head of government and a signal of the direction in which Spain — and, arguably, broader segments of Europe — is moving. His government denied U.S. military access to jointly operated bases during the Iran conflict and closed Spanish airspace to aircraft involved in the strikes. Trump responded in March by threatening to “cut off all trade with Spain.” Sánchez responded by flying to Beijing and signing cooperation agreements.
The symbolism could hardly be more pointed. As Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Spain that getting closer to China would be “cutting your own throat,” Sánchez was signing a High Quality Investment Agreement with Beijing designed to bring Chinese investment into Spain with technology transfers, local supplier contracts, and job creation guarantees. He also secured Beijing’s agreement to measures to narrow Spain’s trade deficit of nearly $50 billion with China — deals that were clearly calibrated as much for domestic political messaging as for economic impact.
Spain is not alone. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Beijing in January. Canada’s Mark Carney made the trip. South Korea’s Lee Jae-myung visited China for the first time since 2019. Leaders from Finland and Ireland have also made the journey. The procession reflects a calculation being made in capital after capital: that the world’s geopolitical centre of gravity is shifting, that the United States under Trump has become an unreliable partner, and that Beijing — for all its complications — is a partner that cannot be ignored.
Sánchez articulated this directly in a press conference after his meeting with Xi. “Trade wars are not good, nobody wins,” he said. “The world needs both China and the United States to talk.” The implicit message: Europe will not simply choose Washington. It will hedge. And in the meantime, it will deal with Beijing.
Xi’s Strategic Calculation
For Xi, this diplomatic moment is an opportunity to be exploited carefully. He knows the instinct well. In 2017, during Trump’s first term, Xi traveled to Davos and delivered a celebrated speech in defence of free trade and globalisation against a protectionist American tide. China was briefly cast as the responsible global actor. Then came the “wolf warrior” diplomatic era, the crackdown in Hong Kong, COVID-19, and a sharp deterioration in China’s global standing that squandered much of that goodwill.
Now the cycle is turning again, and Xi is clearly aware of both the opportunity and the risk of overreach. His language to Sánchez — “genuine multilateralism,” opposing “the law of the jungle,” “safeguarding justice and power” — is the vocabulary of a country that wants to be seen as the defender of the rules-based order at precisely the moment the United States appears to be dismantling it.
The challenge is that the words require substance to stick. Xi knows this too. Hence the signed agreements with Spain. Hence China’s calls for ceasefire in the Middle East. Hence the joint statement with Pakistan urging the US and Iran back to the table. These are acts of diplomatic theatre, but they are also genuine attempts to demonstrate that Beijing can be a constructive actor in a crisis rather than a bystander or an opportunist.
There are limits, of course. The EU’s institutional relationship with China remains fraught over industrial overcapacity, technology theft, and Beijing’s alignment with Russia. The Trump administration has explicitly warned European nations that moving closer to China carries its own costs. Trump’s warning to Spain — while dramatic — is not empty. The United States remains the largest foreign investor in Spain, and the transatlantic relationship has deep structural roots that no amount of symbolic Beijing diplomacy can replace overnight.
A World Without a Conductor
What Xi’s remarks ultimately reflect is a world in which no single power is capable of or willing to maintain the rules-based international order — and in which multiple powers are competing to shape what replaces it.
The United States, under Trump, is not interested in multilateral institutions. China wants to be seen as their defender, but its track record as a rules-follower is, at best, selective. Europe is searching for agency but is not yet unified enough to exercise it. And smaller powers — Spain, Canada, South Korea — are placing their bets on building resilience through diversification, hoping to avoid being crushed between the two great powers.
Xi’s phrase “crumbling into disarray” is, in this context, both a diagnosis and a pitch. The diagnosis may be accurate. The pitch — that China is the solution — is one that the world will scrutinise very carefully, and rightly so.
As Sánchez himself put it, standing alongside Xi: “Progress no longer has a single center.” He may be right. The question is what it looks like when the centre holds everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Written by Shalin Soni, CMA specializing in financial analysis, global markets, and corporate strategy, with hands-on experience in financial planning and analytical decision-making.
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Source: Based on Bloomberg and publicly available information.