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Since the turn of the 21st century, China has leveraged the international environment in its favour to achieve a spectacularly rapid rise, a success that Chinese strategic policymakers attribute in part to 'seizing the strategic window of opportunity'. How has China perceived the international environment and shaped the narrative of its macro-strategy? What impact has it had on China and the world? The article explores the evolution of the strategic narrative of the 'window of opportunity' in three stages since the 21st century and explores its impact in terms of quantity and keyword mapping by analysing the narrative texts of China's 'discourse coalition' (government, official media and intellectual elites). The study found that China's macro-strategic narrative is primarily driven by the official political and semi-official intellectual elites and places a premium on domestic political persuasion rather than external displays of strategic intent. It combines classical and modern philosophical thinking and methodology with the two core objectives of 'maintaining peace' and an 'economic priority'. Over 20 years, the trend of narrative production of the 'strategic opportunity period' has shown a concentrated emergence and fluctuating decline, and its narrative elements have been enriched, interlinked and aligned with the narrative of the CPC's core policies. The narrative of the 'strategic opportunity period' has been a powerful force in building domestic legitimacy, guaranteeing partial fulfilment of strategic objectives and offering lessons for other countries to learn from. Inevitably, the narrative faces a number of dilemmas and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American geopolitical analysts perceive the steady rise of China as a strategic competitor and challenger to the United States' sole superpower stature in the twenty-first century. The vibrance of the United States (US) economy is on the wane as the Belt and Road Initiative of China is heralded as a vision of shared prosperity. Therefore, Trump administration adopted a hostile-cum-containment foreign policy posture towards China. The main fear of the administration was that China could transform the prevalent global geopolitical order to its advantage. Therefore, the administration constructed and publicised the anti-China narrative internally and externally which seems detrimental to Pakistan's geoeconomic pursuits through CPEC. Besides, Washington's reservation over the CPEC undermines Pakistan-US strategic cooperation. The study systematically analyses how the US ruling elite, academia and media constructs, shapes, and rebuilds anti-China and CPEC narratives to pursue their geopolitical objectives during the Trump administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]