When his time is done, China will remember President Xi Jinping as its most transformative leader. Since taking office in March 2013, Jinping has not only turbocharged forerunner Deng Xiaoping’s outward-looking economics, but has also mapped a foreign policy course moored to win-win partnerships. His China proves that major power privilege and conditional handouts in the US mould are now obsolete. In doing so, Jinping is creating a legacy to match Xiaoping’s own. China’s post-revolution outlook fixated on the Sun-Tzuvian ideal of “hiding one’s capabilities and biding one’s time,” a necessary strategy in the sharply bipolar, Cold War world. Politically hardwired perhaps after decades of use, this policy continued despite China’s emergence as an economic superpower at the turn of the 21st century. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spotlit the divergent sense of destiny between both nations in his 2011 tome, On China. “American exceptionalism is missionary,” Kissinger wrote. “It holds that the US has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world.” The latter, meanwhile, as a millennia old civilization, cares little if its social values “are relevant outside China” and prefers to be a role model rather than a bully. Jinping is subtly shaking up this status quo. He wants China to have a “distinctive diplomatic approach befitting its role as a major country”. In short, a more assertive foreign policy that contours around what political scientists call the country’s “peaceful rise 2.0”. To this end, Jinping preaches that since money makes the world go round, why not let us help you, help ourselves? His One Belt, One Road and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) initiatives are key levers to push this policy update. The Chinese president’s whirlwind tour of the Middle East in January is testament to changing times. Jinping not only became the first major world leader to visit Iran after international sanctions ended, he also signed 17 accords on January 23 that will lift bilateral trade to $ 600 billion in the next decade. His statement at the pursuant press conference underscored China’s new geopolitical mantra, where Jinping declared all countries free to “independently pursue the political systems and development paths suited to their national conditions”. The timing of this trip was highly significant since Jinping stopped over in Saudi Arabia and Egypt on his way to Tehran. As the Saudi-Iran pressure cooker heats up over ricocheting accusations of terror sponsorship, Jinping’s presence as a ‘uniter’ and counselor for peace trusted by both parties was a major diplomatic coup. In Riyadh, Saudi oil giant Aramco inked a new strategic cooperation deal with China’s state-owned Sinopec, and Beijing promises to invest upwards of $ 15 billion in Egyptian public works and to build the country’s new administrative capital. As the world’s leading crude consumer, China undoubtedly has a keen interest in securing the Middle Eastern oil supply, but equally important is Jinping’s desire for increased strategic space. His One Belt, One Road plan is the perfect icebreaker in this respect, because it champions a common good that most cash-strapped countries can get behind. To boot, China is pumping money into regions facing a significant shortfall in investment irrespective of location. Latin America, for example, has a Chinese-backed, Trans-Andean railway in the works. Jinping’s Yuan diplomacy, of course, dovetails with China’s urgency to escape the middle-income trap. The Chinese economy slowed down in 2015 after a quarter-century of rampant growth as its cheap manufacturing-driven exports bubble began to deflate. While Beijing implements crucial market reforms to rewire its economic engine for consumption-based growth, stock market volatility has dented investor confidence and lower demand for oil created a global glut that tanked prices. Although the International Monetary Fund (IMF) calls China’s transition pains “manageable” the overarching worry is its monstrous debt and how snowballing market pessimism over the pace of reforms could trigger another global recession given that China is the world’s largest trading nation. Therefore, by selling Chinese expertise for development projects to needful nations, including the means to finance them through AIIB, Jinping aims to reorient China’s appeal away from cheap labour and towards value created by tertiary industries. Ironically, US foreign policy in the latter Obama years has warmed oft-indifferent ties between Russia and China, and has created a robust counterweight to American hegemony for the first time since the Iron Curtain collapsed. With Washington willing to pick fights in Ukraine and the East China Sea, Presidents Jinping and Vladimir Putin now sense great leverage in presenting a united front. Jinping himself paused a seven-decade-long standoff last November to shake hands with Taiwan’s leader, Ma Ying-jeou, in Singapore. China also revealed plans for its first ever international military outpost in Djibouti on January 21 to help curb piracy around the Horn of Africa. By rewriting the international relations playbook to favour mutual interests over coercion, the Chinese president is enabling a new world order not weighed down by the past. History should remember him well for it. The writer is a freelance columnist and audio engineer based in Islamabad