The attack in Kyrgyzstan seemed an ominous outgrowth of China’s shifting stance toward international engagement. OBOR marked a pivot for China, from decades of “tao guang yang hui,” or lying low and concealing one’s capacities, to an outward-looking assertion of its revitalized strength. In recent years, a more confident China has established the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, sent peacekeeping troops to South Sudan, secured railway deals in Central Asia, Africa, and South America, and defied international opinions on the South China Sea. But the pivot has had costs.

As Chinese influence grows, Beijing is presenting itself as an alternative to the imperialist West and interventionist United States: a great power exporting highways instead of values, and fostering stability and peace through economic development, infrastructure, and trade. In adherence to China’s long-standing policy of non-interference, which centers on unconditional respect for state sovereignty, Beijing will also theoretically do all this without commenting on other states’ domestic conditions.

Yet August’s attack in Kyrgyzstan was just one among a spate of violent incidents, including terror attacks, that China has suffered in its pursuit of economic peace. In addition to the hundreds hurt or killed in recent years in Xinjiang, China has also struggled to protect its citizens in Libya, Sudan, South Sudan, and, now, Kyrgyzstan. Apparently, business does not guarantee peace—which means China may well have to alter its traditional approach and step into the messy realm of other countries’ domestic affairs.

China’s non-interference policy dates back to 1953, when then-premier Zhou Enlai put forth China’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. These principles had grown out of China’s historical narrative as a developing country shaking off a “hundred years of humiliation” under imperialism and colonialism. Unlike Washington, with its overt mission of spreading democracy and neoliberal market reforms, Beijing has built its foreign-policy vision on equal suspicion of Western-facilitated reforms and regime changes, and a genuine lack of interest in imposing its own model on anyone else. Despite the central government’s rhetorical embrace of Marxism, Leninism, and Communist precepts, China’s economic growth resulted from a system that constantly adapts ideologies to “Chinese characteristics,” creating a flexible hybrid of capitalism and state socialism that does not conform to any rigid principles. The China Model is to “cross the river by feeling the stones,” as Deng Xiaoping famously said when spearheading reforms in the 1980s.