I think my answer will involve examining three aspects of the issue.
Since Xi Jinping came to power, he has clearly put an end to what China had considered to be the “low profile” policy on the international scene since Deng Xiaoping. Xi Jinping thought that the time had come for China to claim a leadership role alongside the America superpower. He has even called for a new type of relationship among the great powers.
Obviously, the end of China's peaceful rise and the claim to a more active role led certain major powers to see a much greater Chinese threat. I am not saying that China was invading other countries around it in Asia. However, in response, Xi Jinping has tried to employ strategies that resembled public diplomacy, if you will, except that what China did, it did in secret.
The other thing, to finish, is that the world has very clearly fallen into a new cold war, even though some analysts refuse to use that term. Today, we very clearly have two models. On one side, we have the liberal democracy model, which brings together the United States, the American allies in western Europe and Canada, and on the other side, we have what is an authoritarian or neo-totalitarian model, according to some critics, proposed by China and Russia, for example.
Given all this, we must now expect that there will be a degree of aggression in the approach used by powers like China or Russia when it comes to the strategy we are discussing this evening.