2025.12.22
Yi Wushuang, a Research Fellow at the Maritime Studies Center of Grandview Institution(GVI) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University, has recently published an article in East Asia Forum analyzing the evolution of the Beijing Xiangshan Forum and its role within the regional security architecture.
IN BRIEF
China’s efforts to build an alternative security platform around the Beijing Xiangshan Forum have gained momentum as its military modernisation accelerates. Demonstrated advances have made regional governments more attentive to Xiangshan within the wider network of security forums. But unless Beijing can manage the divergent security interests and needs of the forum’s diverse participants, Xiangshan risks becoming diplomatic theatre while China’s military capabilities race ahead.
The Beijing Xiangshan Forum’s transformation from a modest Track II dialogue into a major security platform reflects China’s evolving approach to multilateral engagement, backed by visible military modernisation. The 12th forum in September 2025 drew over 1800 participants from more than 100 countries, establishing it as a complement to Singapore’s Shangri-La Dialogue. Its growth signals the rise of parallel security architectures serving distinct constituencies, reinforced by China’s increasingly sophisticated military capabilities.
China’s 2025 Victory Day parade preceding the forum showcased its comprehensive military modernisation, featuring hypersonic weapons, the HQ-29 ‘satellite hunter’ and the complete nuclear triad. The parade also unveiled the People’s Liberation Army’s restructured forces — including the Aerospace Force and Cyberspace Force. These displays provided tangible backing to China’s security discourse at subsequent forums.
Recent operational developments have reinforced these demonstrations. The carrier Fujian’s successful catapult launches of J-35 stealth fighters and KJ-600 early warning aircraft marked China’s entry into advanced carrier aviation. China Central Television’s disclosure that a J-16 fighter intercepted two foreign stealth aircraft in 2024 indicated a level of operational readiness beyond parade displays. These incidents have shifted regional threat perceptions and bolstered Beijing’s claim that its increasingly advanced forces are necessary for defending its sovereignty.
The forum’s defining characteristic remains its inclusive participant composition, now viewed against the backdrop of China’s enhanced military posture. Representatives from sanctioned states and nations with limited access to mainstream forums engage differently when their host demonstrates both convening power and credible deterrence. The 11th forum included defence ministers from Belarus and Laos and representatives from both Palestinian factions and Israel — a combination rarely seen elsewhere. This inclusivity advances Beijing’s Global Security Initiative while providing implicit guarantees to smaller states seeking alternatives to Western security frameworks.
The forum’s operating philosophy stresses open engagement without demanding prior alignment with Beijing’s positions, yet China’s military modernisation shapes how this engagement is received. Beijing’s development assistance and increasingly advanced defence capabilities have made Global South representatives, who made up over 60 per cent of participants, more receptive. But translating dialogue into concrete outcomes remains challenging when participants bring fundamentally different security priorities.
Understanding Xiangshan’s trajectory requires situating it within the broader ecosystem of multilateral security platforms, including the Shangri-La Dialogue, Munich Security Conference, and regional mechanisms like the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus.
China’s decision to send only a delegation from the People’s Liberation Army National Defence University to the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue, while Chinese Defence Minister Dong Jun delivered an extended keynote at Xiangshan, reflects strategic calculation about which forums best advance its security narrative.
Western participation at Xiangshan has evolved considerably. Some European nations, including France and Germany, have maintained senior-level participation, recognising value in the forum for military-to-military dialogue. The United States, which sent senior defence officials to earlier rounds, now participates through think tank representatives and retired military officers, mirroring the broader deterioration in bilateral military exchanges. This recalibration reflects Western assessments of how to balance engagement with competition while managing concerns about legitimising platforms seen as serving Chinese strategic narratives.
Southeast Asian states are adept at navigating the region’s parallel security architectures. Singapore’s former defence minister Ng Eng Hen has used both the Shangri-La and Xiangshan forums to acknowledge China’s contributions while voicing regional stability concerns. These forums now serve different functions: Shangri-La enables frank exchanges between treaty allies on maintaining regional order, while Xiangshan facilitates dialogue between developing nations and China on alternative security frameworks.
Regional states utilise both platforms to air different sets of security concerns, yet China’s military developments increasingly influence how they balance these engagements, creating pressure to acknowledge shifting capability balances while preserving strategic autonomy.
The forum now highlights areas where China claims comparative advantage, including peacekeeping, the development–security nexus and technological innovation. There are real achievements but also limitations. While Xiangshan provides valuable military-to-military engagement opportunities, it has yet to produce binding confidence-building measures despite enhanced deterrent capabilities.
The diversity defining Xiangshan’s inclusivity complicates consensus-building, particularly when backed by demonstrations of military strength that some participants view as destabilising. Resolving core regional tensions requires alignment of interests, which becomes more difficult when the host’s military advancement creates asymmetric threat perceptions.
China’s military modernisation provides substantive backing to its alternative security architecture, making Xiangshan more than a symbolic counterpart to Western forums. The demonstrated capabilities validate China’s claims to be a regional security provider while creating new uncertainties. Regional states gain diplomatic options as forums proliferate, but they also face strategic dilemmas when military capabilities evolve faster than diplomatic mechanisms can accommodate.
For now, most regional states are hedging — maintaining presence at both Shangri-La and Xiangshan while calibrating the seniority of their delegations and depth of engagement according to shifting threat perceptions and economic dependencies. This dual-track approach reflects less a commitment to either forum’s vision than a pragmatic recognition that security partnerships in the region increasingly require fluency in competing diplomatic vocabularies.
Whether this equilibrium holds will depend largely on whether China’s military strength enhances or undermines its diplomatic credibility. If advanced capabilities enable genuine security guarantees for developing nations, Xiangshan could demonstrate real value and draw more substantive regional commitment. But if military modernisation continues to be viewed primarily as serving power projection rather than collective security, the forum may struggle to transcend its role as diplomatic theatre.
The coexistence of multiple security forums reflects adaptation to a more multipolar reality where military capabilities increasingly shape diplomatic engagement. As China’s defence capabilities advance from demonstrations to operational deployment, forums like Xiangshan become simultaneously more significant as alternative platforms and more challenging as bridges between rival security visions. The forum exemplifies how military strength can enable institutional innovation while also complicating the collective security cooperation that such institutions claim to promote.
Note: East Asia Forum is an international policy research platform hosted by the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. It is jointly supported by the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research (EABER) and the South Asian Bureau of Economic Research (SABER), and publishes peer-reviewed in-depth analytical articles on a daily basis, focusing on public policy issues such as politics, economics, security, and international relations in the Asia-Pacific region.
