The Chinese President Xi Jinping has recently stressed that it is necessary to deeply understand and accurately grasp the profound changes in the external environment and the new situations, new problems and new challenges faced by China's reform, development and stability, in order to prevent and resolve major risks in politics, ideology, economy, science and technology, society, external environment and those within the party. Noting the challenges posed by the international situation and a variety of major risks, President Xi Jinping emphasized the re-examination of the strategic environment faced by China's future development from a higher perspective.

In 2002, the report of the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that the first two decades of the 21st century are an important period of strategic opportunities that China must firmly grasp and can make a difference. Since then, the "strategic opportunity period" has become China's basic judgment on the strategic environment. China's determination of the strategic opportunity period is mainly based on the following judgments: global multi-polarization continues to evolve, peace and development would be the theme of the times; the world economy maintains growth, economic globalization develops in depth, and the restructuring and flow of production factors are further accelerated on a global scale; the scientific and technological revolution is in the ascendant, providing a possibility for exerting the advantages of later development and realizing the cross-development of productivity. The comprehensive national strength and market economic system formed by years of reform and opening-up have provided China with a solid material foundation and good institutional guarantee. Such judgment has been used until now.

From the perspective of actual development, China has a better grasp and utilized the period of strategic opportunities that had previously emerged. After joining the WTO in 2001, China's in-depth participation in economic globalization has achieved rapid development; its scale of GDP has risen from the sixth in the world to the second, from a large foreign investment target to a major investor country, and it is trying to adopt the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative to expand market space with the hope of participating in global governance. In addition to China's own efforts, the formation of the strategic opportunity period also depends on the external environment provided by the international community. For the most part of China's reform and opening-up, the United States had adopted a "strategic engagement" strategy for China. The U.S. also hoped to "guide" China into a market economy through the deep globalization brought by the WTO.

However, even before the first two decades of the 21st century have ended, the international environment has undergone huge changes. The changes in the actual international political and economic situations show that the unipolar world is weakening, but the true multipolar era has yet to come. The United States still has the ability to dominate the global rules; the new unfairness brought by economic globalization is stimulating anti-globalization wave in developed countries and has changed the international political structure. The United States launched a global trade war and withdrew from various international cooperation, while the multilateral structure was severely damaged, turning our time to a bilateral era. The WTO has existed in name only, from an effective international trade organization rapidly to become a mere stage of trade discussions. Intensified trade friction has also created investment barriers, and the global industrial chain has been continuously reorganized. The restructuring and re-allocation of global production factors have changed the world economic structure and the environment for future development.

More importantly, the United States has begun to shift its national security strategy to China. The U.S. Department of Defense stated in the 2018 National Defense Strategy Report that "inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security". For the United States, China is its new long-term strategic competitor. Through economic, military, and geopolitical expansion, it will replace the United States to gain global dominance in the future. At present, the U.S.-China confrontational competition has become a fact. In the past two years, although the division of American society has intensified, it has formed a high consensus concerning China, which has not only transcended the differences between the White House and the Congress but also crossed the political differences between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. It has even bridged the contradiction between commercial enterprises and trade unions and the world, and between those who support globalization and the populists. The United States not only adjusts its strategy toward China but also uses its influence to push its Western allies to change their China policy. The boycott of technical cooperation, investment mergers and acquisitions and trade with China has become apparent in 2018 and will be maintained for a long time in the future, which forms the basic external environment for China's future development.

The fundamental reason why the United States and its allies have "contained" China in multiple ways reflects their deep concern that China's gradual rise will bring all-rounded competition to the United States and the West. Economically occupying more market space through globalization, China is becoming a strong competitor of the West in science and technology and challenging the status of the United States in the Western Pacific through the Belt and Road expansion in geopolitics. The strategic adjustment based on this concern has become the third historical stage after the two previous stages of the Cold War and anti-terrorism since the end of World War II, which is the suppression of strategic competitors, and the main target of the third stage is China.

It can be seen that after 40 years of reform and opening-up, China's role in the process of globalization has changed; from the opening-up in terms of passiveness, acceptance in the past, to the going out and governance participation now, the world has new demands and new vigilance against China and has adopted new checks and balances in this regard. Based on the above changes, it can be judged that the window period of China's "strategic opportunity period" has passed, and a new and differentiated strategic window is coming. Anbound's scholar Chan Kung pointed out that from now on, China will no longer be in a strategic opportunity period, but in a "strategic co-opetition period" with Western-led developed countries, a development period of cooperation and competition with the West, in which it would be dominated by competition.

In fact, the strategic competition period is also a kind of strategic opportunity period to inherit and develop in response to the situation, emphasizing competition and cooperation, in which China is still an important peace force in the world. Chan Kung pointed out that if one looks at the strategic opportunity period from the Chinese perspective and the Chinese market, there will still be the strategic opportunity period to a certain extent in the future, as China's social economy is indeed in the process of transformation. This kind of transformation is necessary; there are obviously a lot of development opportunities and there is huge market space. However, if the strategic environment is based on the external environment, China will obviously face the environment of strategic competition in the future.

Chan Kung believes that this kind of competitive and cooperative global environment is also very difficult to realize. It is necessary to prevent new cold and hot wars. To avoid imbalances, there should be a certain degree of transparency; new boundaries and bottom lines should be established, and new international order built through the joint efforts of all countries in the world. All of this means that it can be achieved through the tremendous strategic efforts of China and the countries in the world. The ultimate goal is to allow strategic competition and cooperation to be constrained in a framework of rationality, civilization, co-construction, cooperation, and sharing, rather than the total out of control that could destroy human civilization.

Final analysis conclusion:

The international environment for China's development has undergone tremendous changes. The stage of China's development in the future will shift from a strategic opportunity period in which cooperation has been the main focus to a "strategic competition period" that is both competitive and cooperative, but more towards competitiveness.