The Ming Dynasty navigator Zheng He is often closely associated with Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road narrative. But the historical figure has been used as a diplomatic tool for decades, long before Xi launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Zheng He entered the diplomatic storytelling of the People’s Republic of China within a decade of its founding. Under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao he became part of a broader historical argument about China’s rise, a role that remained prominent during the first years of Xi’s presidency.
Much attention has been paid to why Beijing revived Zheng He. But few have noticed how mentions of Zheng He changed: Since 2018, China’s top leaders have increasingly moved away from using him to argue that a stronger China would not become a conquering power.
As early as the late Qing period, Chinese nationalists recast Zheng He as evidence that China had once possessed global reach. During the Republican era he entered Chinese history textbooks and became a domestic symbol of national capacity. Around the time of the Bandung Conference, Beijing began recoding him for diplomacy. Zheng He was increasingly presented as a powerful but anti-colonial emissary of Afro-Asian friendship, particularly in China’s relations with newly independent African states.
Under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, China’s top leaders systematically invoked Zheng He in diplomatic settings to answer a question at the heart of China’s rise: How would a China that was becoming powerful again use its power? In 2003, while explaining China’s “peaceful rise and development” at Harvard University, Wen described Zheng He as a diplomat who had sought friendly relations with other countries across seven voyages, tying this history directly to the Chinese tradition of loving peace.
In 2005, speaking to the Mexican Senate, Hu again used the Silk Road and Zheng He’s voyages as historical evidence of China’s commitment to peaceful development. In Pretoria in 2007, Hu invoked Zheng He before turning to China’s own experience of colonialism to argue that China would not impose its will on Africa.
The logic of Hu’s argument rested on an asymmetry of power. A fleet incapable of conquest proves nothing by refraining from violence. Only if the fleet is understood to possess the capacity to conquer can its peaceful approach serve as evidence of restraint. To Chinese leaders, Zheng He’s story showed how China would exercise superior power without undertaking conquest. Beijing drew on this argument particularly when it sought to reassure foreign audiences about how China would use its growing power, including in its diplomacy with African, Southeast Asian, and Arab states.
This usage persisted for a while after Xi took office. In 2014, Xi placed Zheng He directly within his argument that the Chinese nation carries “no gene for invading others or seeking hegemony.” At the first Belt and Road Forum in 2017, Xi listed Zheng He alongside Zhang Qian, Du Huan, Marco Polo, and Ibn Battuta as friendly envoys along the Silk Road. As the Maritime Silk Road became central to Xi-era diplomacy, Zheng He remained an obvious historical resource.
The later Premier Li Keqiang was especially consistent in bringing up Zheng He during this period. At the 2015 China-ASEAN Leaders’ Meeting and the East Asia Summit, Li invoked the navigator to argue that the South China Sea had been a sea of peace and freedom of navigation for six centuries. Three years later, at the 2018 East Asia Summit, Li was still using Zheng He in much the same way.
After 2018, however, the pattern of top-level use began to change. The decline was most visible in the field of regional maritime order, where references to Zheng He had once figured prominently. At the 2019 East Asia Summit, Li addressed similar regional issues without invoking Zheng He. By the 2023 Belt and Road Forum, even the language of civilizational exchange and connectivity no longer required name-dropping Zheng He.
One contributing factor may have been the 2016 South China Sea arbitration, which made historical arguments about maritime rights more legally awkward. But the timing does not line up perfectly. Two years after the ruling, Li was still making much the same argument. Instead, the break came in 2019, which means the arbitration alone cannot account for it.
China’s maritime strategy and naval capabilities were themselves changing. In 2012, the 18th Party Congress formally called for China to become a “maritime power.” Three years later, the defense white paper China’s Military Strategy directed the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to move from a posture centered on “offshore waters defense” toward a combination of “offshore waters defense” and “open seas protection.”
At celebrations marking the PLAN’s 70th anniversary in Qingdao in 2019, Xi introduced the idea of a “maritime community with a shared future.” He also stressed that China followed a defensive national defense policy and that the navy would safeguard international sea lanes, shoulder international responsibilities, and provide more public goods for maritime security.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s 2025 China Military Power Report describes the PLAN as fielding Asia’s largest force of principal surface combatants, submarines, and amphibious warfare ships. As China built aircraft carriers, sustained far-seas escort missions, established overseas support facilities, and expanded its shipbuilding capacity, Beijing increasingly shifted the basis of its reassurance from historical precedent toward declared policy and contemporary behavior.
The growth of China’s naval capabilities reduced Zheng He’s value as evidence of maritime power. It also changed the analogy itself. In the 2000s, the official narrative constructed by Hu and Wen used Zheng He to show that maritime capability and peaceful intent could coexist. But by the late 2010s, China’s expanding naval power had become an observable reality, increasingly open to judgment through the navy’s actual conduct. The more the Zheng He narrative linked formidable maritime power with voluntary restraint, the more it invited foreign audiences to apply the same standard to China today. The analogy had therefore become more politically demanding.
Zheng He still appears, but mostly in bilateral settings to discuss historical ties with specific countries or communities. In April 2025, Xi’s signed article in the Malaysian press mentioned sites in Malacca associated with Zheng He. On April 21, 2026, during a meeting with Mozambican President Daniel Chapo, Xi noted that Zheng He’s fleet had visited the Mozambican coast more than six centuries earlier. In June of the same year, the Chinese embassy in Tanzania again presented Zheng He’s voyages as a historical symbol of long-standing exchanges between Chinese and Swahili civilizations. Later that month, Jakarta launched a series of cultural exchanges under the banner of “Zheng He’s Voyage: Envoys of Friendship.” In these settings, Zheng He primarily serves as a marker of shared history. In that sense, Beijing is returning Zheng He to the more limited diplomatic role he played in the 1950s and 1960s.
Zheng He’s visibility remains high. Exhibitions in Jakarta and Nairobi marked the 620th anniversary of his voyages; an academy in Angola now bears his name, as do international freight links. But in recent top-level diplomacy, he no longer serves primarily as evidence of China’s national character.
That retreat has also made the difference between Zheng He and another historical icon, Zhang Qian, easier to see. Zhang Qian, the Han Dynasty envoy sent to the Western Regions, has long been regarded as a pioneer of the overland Silk Road. Compared with Zheng He, he represents the active opening of new routes and spaces for exchange. Existing discussions often treat the two as equivalent historical precursors of the Belt and Road. Yet Zhang Qian cannot easily perform Zheng He’s old role of providing reassurance as to China’s peaceful intentions.
The shift has also been uneven across Zheng He’s main diplomatic settings. He appears to have receded more sharply in Africa than in Southeast Asia. In its diplomacy with Africa, Beijing increasingly draws on 20th century anti-colonial solidarity and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to narrate historical ties. In Southeast Asia, by contrast, physical sites associated with Zheng He in Malacca, local memories of his voyages, and the Maritime Silk Road continue to sustain a highly localized political afterlife for the navigator.
Another round of China-ASEAN leaders’ meetings and the East Asia Summit will take place this November, while Shenzhen will host the APEC summit in the same month. Whether Zheng He reappears will be worth watching. If Beijing invokes him again, the more revealing question will be what it asks him to prove this time: restraint six centuries ago, or simply a shared local past.