The new leaders of the Chinese Communist Party may have moved into office, but so far their new policies have not. Yet if these men at the top—led by party General Secretary Xi Jinping—are to resolve a daunting array of problems at home and abroad, they must move quickly to prevent bad situations from growing worse, thus aggravating troubles their predecessors have passed along unsolved.
And no issues may be more pressing than those of foreign policy, where current Chinese actions often are incoherent, contradictory and all too possibly dangerous to themselves and the region. The reasons are many, but they include the lack of an overall strategy for achieving broad but ill-defined goals and a governing system that is poorly suited to making coordinated decisions.
looking beyond borders 