About Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs

Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs

The Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs, abbreviated CPIFA and known in Chinese as Zhongguo Renmin Waijiao Xuehui, is a people's organisation for people-to-people diplomacy and foreign-policy study, headquartered at 71 Nanchizi Street in the Dongcheng District of Beijing. It was founded on 15 December 1949 — the first social organisation of the People's Republic of China devoted to international affairs — on the initiative of Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai, who served as its honorary president for the rest of his life. Its bilingual official website is cpifa.org. The Institute receives foreign statesmen, diplomats and scholars, maintains dialogue mechanisms with counterpart institutes abroad, conducts research on international issues, and since 1985 has published the quarterly Foreign Affairs Journal, among China's first foreign-language policy periodicals.

The CPIFA was created to work one step ahead of official diplomacy. In 1949 only a small number of countries recognised the new People's Republic, and the Institute's task was to build friendship with foreign peoples, explain the new China and prepare the ground for formal relations where governments were not yet ready to establish them. Over seventy-five years it has received thousands of foreign delegations and tens of thousands of visitors, and its courtyard compound in central Beijing — whose oldest building dates to 1919 — has become one of the fixed points of China's unofficial diplomatic map.

Founding on 15 December 1949

The Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs was established on 15 December 1949 in Beijing, less than three months after the founding ceremony of the People's Republic of China on 1 October. It was set up on the proposal of Zhou Enlai, who was simultaneously premier of the Government Administration Council and foreign minister, and Zhou served as the Institute's honorary president until his death in 1976. Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Chen Yi also served as an honorary president, from 1964 until his death. The Institute's own history describes it as New China's first institute dedicated to people-to-people diplomacy, and its establishment is treated in its anniversary literature as the beginning of people-to-people diplomacy in the People's Republic.

The Institute's early membership embodied its purpose. Prominent leaders associated with it included Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi, Deng Xiaoping, Ye Jianying, Wang Ming, Li Lisan, Cai Chang, Hu Yuzhi, Gao Gang, Luo Longji, Liao Chengzhi and Qiao Guanhua — diplomats, united-front figures and public personalities who could meet foreigners as representatives of the Chinese people rather than as officials of a government many states did not yet recognise. Its first president, in the listing maintained by the Institute, was Zhang Xiruo, who served from 1949 to 1973, a tenure spanning the Institute's founding decades. The CPIFA was one of a small family of people's diplomacy bodies created in the same season; the Chinese People's Committee for World Peace had been formed on 2 October 1949 under Guo Moruo, and the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries followed in 1954.

People-to-people diplomacy as a concept

The Institute's anniversary scholarship sets out the theory it embodies. People-to-people diplomacy, its historians argue, reflects the Communist Party's mass line and united-front thought applied to foreign relations: before and alongside official diplomacy, the peoples of different countries can build understanding and friendship that stabilise state-to-state relations. The practice predated the state itself. In Yan'an during the revolutionary years, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai personally organised and took part in contacts with sympathetic foreigners — Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong and Rewi Alley among them — who explained the Communist cause to the world.

Chinese commentators note that this doctrine was articulated in 1949, more than a decade before American writers popularised the term public diplomacy in the 1960s. The CPIFA and its sister organisations were, in the formulation of their own historians, tasked to be one step ahead of official diplomacy and to create a favourable environment for the establishment of diplomatic relations. Only ten countries established diplomatic ties with China in 1949, so the people's channel carried unusual weight: friendship societies, cultural exchanges and visits arranged by bodies such as the CPIFA helped develop and cement relations with other peoples and assisted the later establishment of relations with Western countries.

Suspension and resumption, 1969–1972

Like most Chinese institutions, the Institute was overtaken by the Cultural Revolution. Its work was suspended from 1969 to 1971, and it resumed activities in 1972 — the year of the Shanghai Communiqué and the opening between China and the United States, when people-to-people channels suddenly mattered again at the highest level. The resumption restored the Institute's reception, exchange and research work, and the following decades made it one of the principal Chinese hosts for foreign political figures visiting outside official state visits.

The scale of that reception work is recorded in the Institute's own summaries. Between 1972 and 2002 the CPIFA hosted more than four thousand Americans in China, and across its history it has received more than 4,000 foreign delegations and more than 30,000 visitors in total. Those figures reflect the Institute's standing method: invitation visits, dialogues and symposia through which foreign officials, former officials, parliamentarians, scholars and journalists meet Chinese counterparts in a setting that is authoritative but not formally governmental.

Functions: exchanges, dialogues and research

The CPIFA's stated purpose is to study the world situation, international issues and foreign policies, and to carry out exchanges with statesmen, scholars, noted personages, relevant research institutions and social organisations of various countries, in order to enhance mutual understanding and friendship between the people of China and the world, promote friendly relations and cooperation, and contribute to global peace and development. It establishes contacts with foreign political activists, diplomats and other individuals and organises public lectures and symposia on academic and international policy subjects.

The Institute maintains standing dialogue mechanisms with counterpart institutes in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, India and other countries, and its presidents' writings describe long-standing contact with statesmen including Henry Kissinger, Helmut Schmidt, Jacques Chirac and Kevin Rudd. It co-hosted the Non-Governmental Forum of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in 2015 and 2017, and it is associated with the Understanding China Conference series, through which Chinese officials and scholars present China's development path to international audiences. Internally, its research is organised through a Research Department alongside regional departments for Asia, Africa and Latin America; Europe; and North America and Oceania, supported by its general office and party committee organisation and personnel functions.

Foreign Affairs Journal

Since 1985 the Institute has published Foreign Affairs Journal, a quarterly English-language periodical edited and published by its Research Department. Launched amid the boom of reform and opening up, the Journal became, in the words of its fortieth-anniversary retrospective in 2025, the first authoritative, globally distributed English periodical in New China devoted to elaborating China's foreign policy and researching international relations. Among the first foreign-language policy periodicals of the People's Republic, it carries articles by leading officials, diplomats and scholars from central and local government and research institutions.

The Journal's current volumes state their focus plainly: Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy, major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics, the shifting dynamics of the international landscape, the development of global politics and economy, reform of the global governance system, the Global South and Chinese modernisation. Its 2026 volume opened with Volume 42, Number 1, Issue No. 159. The Journal's anniversary special issues double as a record of the Institute's own doctrine: the seventieth-anniversary issue of 2019 carried contributions from Yang Jiechi, then director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, and from the presidents of the CPIFA and the CPAFFC, setting out seventy years of people-to-people diplomacy theory and practice.

Headquarters at 71 Nanchizi Street

The Institute's home is a courtyard compound at 71 Nanchizi Street, Dongcheng District, a short distance east of the Forbidden City. Its oldest building, Yingbinlou, was built in 1919 and was originally the library of the Chinese Social and Political Science Association; the compound preserves historical archives, literature and the Institute's periodicals on display for visitors. In the Siyuan Pavilion stands a bronze bust of Premier Zhou Enlai, before which visiting groups are received in memory of the founder's contribution to pioneering the people's diplomacy of the Communist Party and the new China.

On 22 November 2024 the Institute held its first Open Day, inviting nearly thirty teachers and students from Peking University, Tsinghua University and Renmin University of China into the normally quiet courtyard. President Wang Chao told the visitors that the Institute is as old as the People's Republic itself, recalled that Zhou Enlai had acted as its honorary president until his passing, and set out its working principle of "making friends for the country" — stabilising state-to-state relations, promoting people-to-people friendship, facilitating practical cooperation and conducting dialogues among civilisations. The Open Day, held weeks before the seventy-fifth anniversary, was presented as a new step in explaining the Institute's work to the Chinese public.

Presidents of the Institute

The Institute's official list of former presidents runs: Zhang Xiruo (1949–1973), Hao Deqing (1977–1983), Han Nianlong (1983–1991), Liu Shuqing (1991–1997), Mei Zhaorong (1997–2003), Lu Qiutian (2003–2006), Yang Wenchang (2006–2016), Wu Hailong (2016–2019) and Wang Chao (2019–2025). The sequence is a roll of senior Chinese diplomats: Han Nianlong and Yang Wenchang were vice foreign ministers, Mei Zhaorong served as ambassador to Germany, Wu Hailong as ambassador to the European Union, and Wang Chao as a vice foreign minister and spokesman of the National People's Congress.

In September 2025 Wu Ken, a senior diplomat and former ambassador to Germany, succeeded as president, and he writes in that capacity in the Journal's current issues, including its fortieth-anniversary retrospective. Earlier candidate records for this profile listed Wang Chao and Wu Ken among the most recent presidents together with Zhang Wentian; the Institute's own "former presidents" page is the authority for the sequence above, in which the founding-era president is recorded as Zhang Xiruo. The Institute's secretary-general in current reference listings is Yu Jinsong, and its party secretary Zhou Haihong.

Anniversaries and public diplomacy

The Institute marks its anniversaries as diplomatic occasions. A ceremony marking its sixtieth anniversary was held at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse on 16 December 2009. For the seventieth anniversary in December 2019, the Institute held a reception in Beijing at which Yang Jiechi delivered a speech affirming China's path of peaceful development and the promotion of friendship between the Chinese people and all other countries, and hosted a seminar on New China's people-to-people diplomacy with the CPAFFC's congratulations delivered in person. The seventy-fifth anniversary followed in December 2024, with the Open Day and anniversary publications presenting seventy-five years of work under the guidance, in the Institute's formulation, of Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy.

Reference and policy literature outside China describes the CPIFA as a united-front organisation answering to the United Front Work Department, and studies of Chinese influence, including the Hoover Institution's volume China's Influence and American Interests, treat it as a principal instrument of China's public diplomacy. The Institute does not dispute the framework so much as restate it in its own terms: it is a people's organisation, led by the Communist Party, whose diplomacy is conducted by and among peoples. Both descriptions converge on the same institutional facts — a Beijing institute, founded by Zhou Enlai in December 1949, hosting foreign elites and publishing China's foreign-policy views for the world.

Significance

The Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs is the oldest continuously operating instrument of China's unofficial diplomacy. Founded within weeks of the People's Republic itself, suspended only during the Cultural Revolution years of 1969 to 1971, it has outlasted the diplomatic isolation it was created to break, the Cold War alignments it helped to thaw and the reform era in which its Journal was launched. Its method — invitation, dialogue, publication and friendship, one step ahead of official relations — became a template for China's wider people's diplomacy system.

Today the Institute continues from 71 Nanchizi Street to receive delegations, convene dialogues with counterpart institutes on several continents, and publish Foreign Affairs Journal each quarter as a channel through which China's foreign policy is explained in English to foreign readers. Guided, in its own account, by Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy while remaining true to its founding mission of making friends for the country, the CPIFA carries into its eighth decade the task Zhou Enlai set it on 15 December 1949: to grow the People's Republic's ties with the rest of the world through the friendship of peoples.