A little over a year ago, Xi Jinping embarked on his first foreign trip as China’s president, making stops in Russia and Africa. Over the past 13 months, his administration has focused unprecedented attention on strengthening economic and political ties in Africa, according to a new policy briefing by Brookings Institution scholar Yun Sun.
While China’s People’s Liberation Army has long maintained what Sun calls a “tacit operating principle of ‘no troops on foreign soil,'” last spring Beijing sent 170 combat troops from the PLA Special Force to accompany the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali. In the past, only Chinese engineers and medical personnel had ever been dispatched to foreign soils under a UN mandate.