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The Chinese Dream

The greatest geopolitical catastrophes occur at the intersection of ambition and desperation. Xi Jinping’s China will soon be driven by plenty of both.

We’ll explain the cause of that desperation—a slowing economy and a creeping sense of encirclement and decline. But first, we need to lay out the grandness of those ambitions—what Xi’s China is trying to achieve. It is difficult to grasp just how hard China’s fall will be without understanding the heights to which Beijing aims to climb. And those heights are imposing, because the Chinese Communist Party is undertaking an epic project to rewrite the rules of global order in Asia and far beyond. China doesn’t want to be a superpower—one pole of many in the international system. It wants to be the superpower—the geopolitical sun around which the system revolves.

Xi announced as much in October 2017, albeit in the opaque language that revisionist powers often use to obscure their intentions. The occasion was the Nineteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, a quinquennial conclave that China’s rulers use to tout their achievements and preview their plans. Xi had already made this congress memorable by enshrining “Xi Jinping Thought” in China’s constitution, sidelining potential successors, and cementing his status as the country’s most dominant leader since Mao Zedong. And as Xi consolidated power at home, he hinted—in a marathon speech lasting more than three hours—that Beijing was ready to shake up the balance of power abroad.

Under CCP leadership, Xi declared, China “has stood up, grown rich, and is becoming strong.” A country that the West had once hoped would follow its democratic example was now “blazing a new trail for other developing countries” to follow. Beijing was already moving closer to “center stage” in world affairs. By the 100-year anniversary of the People’s Republic in 2049, China would “become a global leader” in “composite national strength and international influence”; it would build a more “stable” world order in which China’s “national rejuvenation” could be fully achieved.¹

Xi’s words might have seemed anodyne to the untrained observer. But his audience of Communist Party apparatchiks would have understood what they were hearing—a statement that China was now a great power capable of mounting a global challenge to the United States. Xi himself had put it bluntly in a less publicized speech years earlier. The road ahead would be hard, he explained, and traveling it would require “great strategic determination.” Yet the destination was not in doubt: China would build “a socialism that is superior to capitalism” and ensure a “future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.”²

That ambition is now hard to miss in what CCP officials are saying. It is even more obvious in what the CCP is doing, from its world-beating naval shipbuilding program to its effort to remake the strategic geography of Eurasia. China’s grand strategy involves pursuing objectives close to home, such as cementing the CCP’s hold on power and reclaiming bits of China that were ripped away when the country was weak. It also includes more expansive goals, such as carving out a regional sphere of influence and contesting American power on a global scale. The CCP’s agenda blends a sense of China’s historical destiny with an emphasis on modern, twenty-first century tools of power. It is rooted in the timeless geopolitical ambitions that motivate so many great powers and the insatiable insecurities that plague China’s authoritarian regime.

Although China’s drive to reorder the world predates Xi Jinping, it has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Today, CCP officials outwardly evince every confidence that a rising China is eclipsing a declining America. Inwardly, however, Beijing’s leaders are already worrying that the Chinese dream may remain just that.

WHAT CHINA WANTS

Discerning what China wants can be tricky, because countries that want to overturn the status quo have every reason to conceal their goals. The CCP, moreover, is a secretive authoritarian party that feels no compunction about deceiving outsiders or even its own people. As a result, China’s grand strategy—the country’s overarching conception of what it is trying to achieve—is typically found more in a rough consensus among elites than in detailed, step-by-step plans for the future.³ Yet if one looks closely enough, there is ample evidence that the CCP is pursuing a determined, multilayered grand strategy with four key objectives.

That the CCP is in position to seek any of these objectives is a tribute to the greatest change in global politics during the past half-century—China’s emergence as a major power. At its creation in 1949, the People’s Republic was a technologically backward, poverty-ridden country—“a vast poorhouse,” wrote American strategist George Kennan, “for which responsibility is to be avoided.” ⁴ When Mao Zedong died in 1976, the country remained appallingly underdeveloped. Over time, however, the combination of good fortune and enlightened economic reforms moved China from socialist stagnation to bustling authoritarian capitalism. The resulting growth was mind-blowing: Real gross domestic product grew 37-fold between 1978 and 2018.⁵ Today, China has the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity), manufacturing output, trade surplus, and financial reserves. In 2018, it was the top trading partner for 128 nations.⁶ All of which means that China’s leaders can entertain some very big dreams.

First, the CCP has the eternal ambition of every autocratic regime—to maintain its iron grip on power. China is not what Americans would consider a normal state that hashes out its national interests through open argument and elections. China has political debates, but they occur exclusively within a one-party state in which the supremacy of the CCP is written into the constitution. Since 1949, the Chinese regime has always seen itself as being locked in struggle with domestic and foreign enemies. Its leaders are haunted by the Soviet collapse, which brought down another great socialist state. They know that the collapse of the CCP-led system would be a disaster, and probably fatal, for them personally. The resulting zero-sum ethos, one Sinologist writes, is captured in the stark formula, “You-Die, I-Live.”⁷

In Chinese politics, paranoia is a virtue rather than a vice. As Wen Jiabao, then China’s head of government, once said, “To think about why danger looms will ensure one’s security. To think about why chaos occurs will ensure one’s peace. To think about why a country falls will ensure one’s survival.”⁸ The CCP has historically gone to enormous lengths—plunging the country into madness during the Cultural Revolution, killing hundreds or perhaps thousands of its own citizens amid the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989—to protect its power. And the goal of perpetuating the CCP’s authority is at the core of every key decision. Xi’s fundamental purpose, one official explained in 2017, was “ensuring the leading role of the Communist Party in all aspects of life.”⁹

Second, the CCP wants to make China whole again by regaining territories lost in earlier eras of internal upheaval and foreign aggression. This goal, too, dates back decades: The CCP seized and annexed Tibet just after it took power in China. Today, Xi’s map of China includes a Hong Kong that is completely reincorporated into the CCP-led state (a process that is virtually complete) and a Taiwan that has been brought back into the PRC’s grasp. That self-governing island’s anomalous status cannot “be passed on from generation to generation,” Xi has said: Beijing cannot wait forever for its renegade province to return.¹⁰

Elsewhere along its periphery, the CCP has outstanding border disputes with countries from India to Japan. Beijing also claims some 90 percent of the South China Sea—one of the world’s most commercially vital waterways—as its sovereign possession. Chinese officials say that there is no room for compromise on these issues. “We cannot lose even one inch of the territory left behind by our ancestors,” Xi told U.S. secretary of defense James Mattis in 2018, generously adding, “What is other people’s we do not want at all.”¹¹

Because China’s claims in the East and South China Seas reach hundreds of miles from its borders, it can be hard to differentiate these “sovereignty issues” from a larger campaign to achieve mastery in East Asia. The CCP’s third objective is to create “Asia for Asians,” a regional sphere of influence in which China is supreme because outside actors, especially America, are pushed to the margins.

Beijing probably doesn’t envision the sort of outright physical dominance that the Soviet Union exercised in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. It may not go rampaging militarily across Asia. The CCP envisions, rather, using a mix of attraction and coercion to ensure that the economies of maritime Asia are oriented toward Beijing rather than Washington, that smaller powers are properly deferential to the CCP, and that America no longer has the alliances, regional military presence, or influence necessary to create problems for China in its own front yard. As Zbigniew Brzezinski once wrote, “a Chinese sphere of influence can be defined as one in which the first question in the various capitals is, ‘What is Beijing’s view on this?’ ”¹²

The closest Xi Jinping has come to publicly declaring this ambition was when he said, in 2014, that “it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia”—a euphemism for a situation in which America has been kicked out of a region that then has no way of resisting China’s power.¹³ Other officials have been more explicit. In 2010, PRC foreign minister Yang Jiechi told ten Southeast Asian countries that they must defer to Beijing’s wishes because “China is a big country and you are small countries, and that is a fact.”¹⁴

Beijing wants more than regional hegemony, however, and the fourth objective of its strategy focuses on achieving global power and, eventually, global primacy. State media and party officials have explained that an increasingly powerful China cannot comfortably reside in a system led by the United States. That system is a “suit that no longer fits,” wrote Fu Ying, a leading foreign policy official, in 2016.¹⁵ Xi has talked of creating a global “community of common destiny” that would involve “all under Heaven being one family” and presumably obeying the fatherly guidance of the CCP.¹⁶ Xinhua, the PRC’s state-run news agency, makes no bones about who will shape global affairs once China’s national rejuvenation is achieved: “By 2050, two centuries after the Opium Wars, which plunged the ‘Middle Kingdom’ into a period of hurt and shame, China is set to regain its might and re-ascend to the top of the world.”¹⁷ The struggle to “become the world’s No. 1 . . . is a ‘people’s war,’ ” the nationalist newspaper Global Times, declares. “It will be as vast and mighty as a big river. It will be an unstoppable tide.”¹⁸

The regime has not, understandably, offered up any detailed plan for world order with Chinese characteristics. Until a few years ago, CCP officials scrupulously avoided suggesting that China might challenge, let alone surpass, the United States. But Xi’s speeches, government white papers, and other sources leave little doubt that Beijing is striving for a world-class military that can project power globally and for Chinese dominance of the high-tech industries that generate economic and military power.¹⁹ In a Sino-centric world, America’s global network of alliances would be weakened and neutralized; Beijing would exercise global leadership through its own strategic relationships and international institutions that it can bend to its will. Not least, authoritarian forms of government would be protected and even privileged in the age of Chinese ascendancy, as the period of democratic dominance ends.²⁰

Beijing may not intend to fully “rule the world,” the scholar Nadège Rolland writes. “Asserting its dominant position over a world where the influence of Western liberal democracies has been reduced to a minimum, and where a large portion of the globe resembles a Chinese sphere of influence, will suffice.”²¹ Another Sinologist, Liza Tobin, offers a stark appraisal of Xi’s “community of common destiny”: “A global network of partnerships centered on China would replace the U.S. system of treaty alliances, the international community would regard Beijing’s authoritarian governance model as a superior alternative to Western electoral democracy, and the world would credit the Communist Party of China for developing a new path to peace, prosperity, and modernity that other countries can follow.”²²

As these assessments indicate, the four layers of Chinese grand strategy all go together. The CCP argues that only under its leadership can China achieve its long-awaited “national rejuvenation.” The quest for regional and global power, in turn, should reinforce the CCP’s authority at home. This quest can provide legitimacy by stoking Chinese nationalism at a time when the regime’s original ideology—socialism—has been abandoned. It can deliver prestige, domestic as well as global, for China’s rulers. And it can give China the ability, which it is using aggressively, to silence its international critics and create global rules that protect an autocratic state.²³

Chinese grand strategy thus encompasses far more than the narrowly conceived defense of the country and its ruling regime. Those goals are tightly linked to the pursuit of an epochal change in the regional and global rules of the road—the sort that occurs when one hegemon falls and another arises. “Empires have no interest in operating within an international system,” writes Henry Kissinger. “They aspire to be the international system.”²⁴ That’s the ultimate ambition of Chinese statecraft today.

THE PROOF IS IN THE POLICIES

Not so long ago, many U.S. officials would have found this assessment unduly alarmist. As late as 2016, President Obama argued that America should root for a “successful, rising China” that could constructively share the burdens of leadership in a complex world.²⁵ More recently, American views have darkened, but the idea that Beijing is trying to create a totally different reality in Asia and the world still invites skepticism in some quarters.²⁶ The proof, alas, is in what China is doing.

There is, for starters, the unrelenting military buildup. China’s inflation-adjusted military spending spending grew 10-fold between 1990 and 2020, a rate of sustained expansion unparalleled in modern history.²⁷ The PLA has used that money to build the weapons, from anti-ship ballistic missiles to quiet attack submarines, needed to keep American ships and planes out of the western Pacific—and give Beijing a free hand against Taiwan or another nearby foe. Beijing now accounts for more than half of Asia’s military spending; it wields the world’s largest ballistic missile force, navy by number of ships, and integrated air defense system.²⁸ Chinese forces are preparing for “short, sharp wars” against America and its regional allies; they are racing to complete reforms that would allow the CCP to conquer Taiwan. The PLA, meanwhile, has also begun rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and developing more sophisticated means of delivering it; Beijing is on pace to become a full-fledged nuclear peer of the United States by the 2030s. And China is building aircraft carriers, acquiring overseas bases, and developing the ability to project power into the Indian Ocean and, eventually, around the world. One telling statistic: between 2014 and 2018, Beijing launched more ships than are in the entire British, Indian, Spanish, Taiwanese, and German fleets combined.²⁹

The military buildup is just one way in which Beijing’s ambitions are being translated into action. Over more than a decade, Beijing has used multifaceted coercion to strengthen its control of the South China Sea; most notably, by building artificial islands and then piling air bases, missiles, and other military capabilities on top of them. It has grabbed control of disputed features from the Philippines and sent oil rigs, fishing fleets, and a quasi-official maritime militia into the exclusive economic zones of its neighbors. (Chinese ships have also dumped piles of human excrement near contested reefs and features, causing one environmental expert to exclaim, “China, stop shitting in the Spratlys.”³⁰) “We don’t want to quarrel with you,” Xi told the president of the Philippines in 2017. “But if you force the issue, we’ll go to war.”³¹ Looking further afield, the PLA has tested Japan’s air and naval defenses around the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, harassed India militarily in the Himalayas, and made menacing threats toward Taiwan. That island “won’t stand a chance” if China invades, PLA officials have taunted.³²

Even more audacious is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a globe-spanning trade, infrastructure, and investment gambit that Xi calls “project of the century.”³³ BRI has many facets and motives, some of which are relatively mundane. But at its strategic core, BRI is a $1 trillion effort to turn the historic heartland of Eurasia into a geopolitical space oriented toward Beijing.³⁴

China is using infrastructure projects, loans, and trade to secure resources, markets, and influence from Southeast Asia to southern Europe. It is building overland supply routes to keep the U.S. Navy from interfering with critical shipments of oil and food in time of war. It is using development projects to create greater influence along China’s long land borders in Central Asia. And it is gaining access to ports and other facilities that will give China improved access to the Indian Ocean and extend the PLA’s strategic reach. The tools of BRI thus include everything from state-owned enterprises to China’s growing navy. The fundamental ambition appears to be making the world’s largest landmass a platform for the projection of Chinese power. “Access to Eurasia’s resources, markets, and ports could transform China from an East Asian power to a global superpower,” scholar Daniel Markey writes.³⁵

Critical to BRI—and everything else China is doing—is the pursuit of technological supremacy. The CCP has long sought to hasten China’s rise with a world-class program of intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, and commercial espionage. Through its Digital Silk Road project, Beijing is now trying to position companies such as Huawei and ZTE as the world’s chief providers of telecommunications infrastructure and advanced surveillance equipment. In 2018, Huawei alone claimed to be running upwards of 700 high-tech “safe city” projects in more than 100 countries.³⁶ Through some of the same firms, China is seeking to build or buy the fiber-optic cables and data centers that make up the physical wiring of the Internet—a modern version of the power Great Britain once wielded through its network of undersea telegraph cables—and to vacuum up the world’s data for exploitation by Beijing.³⁷ Underlying all this is the “Made in China 2025” program, which involves generational investments in key technologies—artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and others—that will shape the future balance of economic and military power. “Under a situation of increasingly fierce international military competition,” Xi has announced, “only the innovators win.”³⁸

The CCP is positioning China as an institutional superpower, too. America has long punched above its considerable weight by wielding power through a vast network of international bodies, such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. Beijing has learned the lesson, pursuing a calculated, long-term strategy to build influence in the World Health Organization, UN Human Rights Council, and other organizations by using its economic leverage and putting its nationals in positions of authority. Likewise, China has taken a leading role in bodies dealing with arcane but crucial matters such as regulating new technologies and managing the Internet. In other cases, China has built its own institutions, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to make itself central to global governance. Fighting for influence in the world’s institutions, the CCP’s state press agency explains, is how China will “create a favorable environment” for the rise of a “great modern socialist country.”³⁹

Then there is the ideological offensive. Beijing may not be a messianic Marxist regime, fanatically spreading its political model to the ends of the earth. But its policies—selling advanced surveillance systems, training foreign officials in the art of repression, bolstering embattled tyrants in places as far away as Africa and South America—unquestionably make the world a more autocratic place. On the global stage, China twists concepts of human rights to emphasize economic development rather than political freedom; it champions notions of sovereignty meant to protect dictators from nosy democrats.⁴⁰ And Beijing has cast off whatever modesty it once had about selling its own blend of authoritarian capitalism abroad. It is “inevitable that the superiority of our socialist system will be increasingly apparent,” Xi predicted in 2013. “Inevitably, our road will become wider; inevitably, our country’s road of development will have increasingly greater influence on the world.” ⁴¹

Finally, China has given its policies sting by developing a global capacity to coerce. “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we got shotguns,” bragged one Chinese diplomat.⁴² When South Korea agreed to host a U.S. missile defense radar in 2016, China responded with a campaign of sustained economic punishment. When the Nobel Peace Prize went to a Chinese dissident in 2010, Beijing hit Norway with furious criticism and trade penalties. Countries from Australia to Lithuania have suffered similar fates. This coercion in plain sight is merely the public face of a deeper, more sinister offensive—one that uses bribes, hidden political donations, disinformation, and even members of the Chinese diaspora to deform public debates within democratic societies. These techniques, Xi has said, are China’s “magic weapons,” used to sow dissension in rival states and ease Beijing’s path to primacy.⁴³ At the same time, China is increasingly trying to apply its own laws—and kidnap or otherwise forcibly repatriate dissidents—in countries far beyond its borders.⁴⁴

We could go on and on about the things China is doing to rewire the world. But the basic point would remain the same: Chinese strategy is “grand” in every sense of the word. It marries the geopolitical insights of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who argued that great powers must build ocean-going navies and rule the waves, with those of Halford Mackinder, who popularized the idea that the Eurasian “heartland” could become an unassailable geopolitical fortress if controlled by a single actor.⁴⁵ That strategy envisions preeminence within China’s regional surroundings as a springboard to global influence; it wields a vast array of tools to achieve a vast array of military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological ends. China’s strategy is also grand in one final way: It requires severe competition, perhaps confrontation, with the United States.

CHINA’S AMERICA PROBLEM

Americans might be surprised to find that Chinese leaders view the United States as a dangerous, hostile nation determined to hold other countries down. In 2010, then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton scoffed at the idea that America was “bent on containing China,” pointing out that “China has experienced breathtaking growth and development” in the American world order.⁴⁶ Yet even as China has, in many ways, flourished in the Pax Americana, its leaders have long worried that Washington threatens nearly everything the CCP desires.⁴⁷

History casts an imposing shadow. It cannot escape the attention of Chinese policy makers that the United States has a distinguished record of destroying its most serious global challengers—imperial Germany, imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union—as well as a host of lesser rivals. “The mortuary of global politics is piled high with the corpses of socialist countries,” one PLA official remarked in 2014, and America put many of them there.⁴⁸ Nor can Chinese officials forget that the United States is poised to frustrate all of the CCP’s designs.

From Mao to Xi, Chinese leaders have seen the United States as a menace to the CCP’s political primacy. When America and China were avowed enemies during the early Cold War, Washington both sponsored Tibetan rebels who fought against that regime and supported Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek and his claim to be China’s rightful ruler. In recent decades, American leaders have insisted they wish China well. But they have also proclaimed, as President Bill Clinton said, that the country’s authoritarian political model puts it “on the wrong side of history.” ⁴⁹ After the Tiananmen Square massacre, and in response to CCP atrocities against the Uighur population more recently, the United States even led coalitions of countries that slapped economic sanctions on China. The CCP sees through the subterfuge, one Chinese leader explained: “The U.S. has never given up its intent to overthrow the socialist system.”⁵⁰

Even when the United States has no conscious design to undermine dictators, it cannot help but threaten them. America’s very existence serves as a beacon of hope to dissidents. CCP members surely noticed that protestors in Hong Kong prominently displayed American flags when resisting the imposition of authoritarian rule in 2019–2020, just as the protestors in Tiananmen Square erected a giant replica of the Statue of Liberty thirty years earlier. They howl in anger when American news organizations publish detailed exposés of official crimes and corruption in Beijing.⁵¹ Things that Americans view as innocuous—for instance, the operation of nongovernmental organizations focused on human rights and government accountability—look like subversive menaces to a CCP that recognizes no limits on its own power. America simply cannot cease threatening the CCP unless it somehow ceases to be what it is—a liberal democracy concerned with the fate of freedom in the world. It is little wonder, as the influential Chinese scholar Wang Jisi wrote in 2012, that the regime harbors “a constant and strong belief that the U.S. has sinister designs to sabotage the Communist leadership and turn China into its vassal state.”⁵²

The United States stands athwart China’s road to greatness in other ways. The CCP cannot make China whole again without reclaiming Taiwan, but America shields that island—through arms sales, diplomatic support, and the implicit promise of military aid—from Beijing’s pressure. Similarly, America’s navy and its calls for freedom of navigation obstruct China’s drive for dominance in the South China Sea; U.S. military alliances and security partnerships in Asia give smaller countries the temerity to resist Chinese power. Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan, remarks one Chinese military official, are “the three running dogs of the United States in Asia.”⁵³ Washington maintains a globally capable military and bristles when China tries to develop something similar, while using its heft to shape international views of how countries should behave and what sort of political systems are most legitimate. Beijing must “break the Western moral advantage,” notes one Chinese analyst, that comes from determining which governments are “good and bad.”⁵⁴ Almost everywhere CCP elites look, American power is a barrier to Chinese power.

To be clear, China doesn’t reject all aspects of the American-led order: The CCP has brilliantly exploited access to an open global economy and its military forces have participated in UN peacekeeping missions. But Chinese leaders nonetheless appreciate, better than many Americans do, that there is something fundamentally antagonistic about the relationship: The CCP cannot succeed in creating arrangements that reflect its own interests and values without weakening, fragmenting, and ultimately replacing the order that currently exists. As Wang Jisi writes, “Many of China’s political elites . . . suspect that it is the United States, rather than China, that is ‘on the wrong side of history.’ ” They understand that “the rise of China . . . must be regarded in the United States as the major challenge to its superpower status.”⁵⁵

Even at moments when Beijing and Washington have seemed friendly, Chinese leaders have harbored extremely jaded views of U.S. power. Deng Xiaoping, whose economic reforms relied on American markets and technology, argued that Washington was waging a “smokeless World War III” to overthrow the CCP.⁵⁶ In 2014, two distinguished Western statesmen reported a prevailing belief in Beijing that America’s China policy revolves around “Five to’s”: “to isolate China, to contain China, to diminish China, to internally divide China, and to sabotage China’s leadership.”⁵⁷ These perceptions lead to a belief that realizing China’s dreams will ultimately require a test of strength. The CCP faces a “new long march” in its relations with America, said Xi in 2019—a dangerous struggle for supremacy and survival.⁵⁸

Xi is right that the countries are on a collision course. The CCP’s grand strategy imperils America’s long-declared interest in preventing any hostile power from controlling East Asia and the western Pacific. That strategy is activating America’s equally long-standing fear that a rival that gains preeminence on the Eurasian landmass could challenge the United States worldwide. As early as 2002, Andrew Marshall, the legendary director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, argued that America must gear up “for a long-term competition . . . for influence and position within the Eurasian continent and the Pacific Rimland.”⁵⁹ China’s drive for technological supremacy is no less ominous: A world in which techno-autocracy is ascendant may not be one in which democracy is secure.

The basic reason why U.S.-China relations are so tense today is that the CCP is trying to shape the next century in ways that threaten to overturn what America has achieved over the past century. Which raises a deeper question: Why is Beijing so set on fundamentally revising the system, even if doing so leads to a dangerous rivalry with the United States?

SOURCES OF CHINESE CONDUCT

The answer involves geopolitics, history, and ideology. In some ways, China’s bid for primacy is a new chapter in the world’s oldest story. Rising states typically seek greater influence, respect, and power. Humiliations that were once tolerable when a country was weak become intolerable once it grows strong; states discover vital interests in places that were simply beyond their reach before. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a rising Germany demanded its due; after the Civil War, an economically ascendant America tossed its rivals out of the Western Hemisphere and began throwing its weight around globally. As the great realist scholar Nicholas Spykman wrote, “The number of cases in which a strong dynamic state has stopped expanding . . . or has set modest limits to its power aims has been very few indeed.”⁶⁰

From this perspective, the only thing unusual about China is just how dynamic it has been. No country in the modern era has grown so fast for so long. No country in the modern era has seen its ability to change the world expand so dramatically. This being the case, it was always improbable that China would happily settle into America’s world, because doing so would have required accepting arrangements—such as U.S. protection of Taiwan and U.S. military alliances arrayed along China’s maritime periphery—that no great power would tolerate forever. It was inevitable that Beijing would want to subdue its geopolitical periphery, as America did during its own rise to global power; spread its influence into faraway regions; and make the world conform to Chinese desires. “Of course” a surging China would contest American supremacy, the great Singaporean prime minister Lee Kwan Yew remarked. “How could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time the world?”⁶¹

Yet China isn’t simply moved by the cold logic of geopolitics. It is also reaching for glory as a matter of historical destiny. China’s leaders view themselves as heirs to a Chinese state that was a superpower for most of recorded history. A series of Chinese empires claimed “all under heaven” as their mandate; they commanded deference from smaller states along the imperial periphery. “This history,” writes veteran Asia-watcher Michael Schuman, “has fostered in the Chinese a firm belief in what role they and their country should play in the world today, and for that matter, into the distant forever.”⁶²

In Beijing’s view, an American-led world in which China is a second-tier power is not the historical norm but a profoundly galling exception. That order was created after World War II, at the tail end of a “century of humiliation” in which a divided China was plundered by rapacious foreign powers. The CCP’s mandate is to set history aright by returning China to the top of the heap. “Since the Opium War of the 1840s the Chinese people have long cherished a dream of realizing a great national rejuvenation,” said Xi in 2014. Under CCP rule, China “will never again tolerate being bullied by any nation.”⁶³ When Xi invokes the idea of a CCP-led “community of common destiny,” when he speaks of re-creating a world in which Beijing receives its proper deference, he is channeling this deeply rooted belief that Chinese primacy is the natural order of things.

Not least, there is the ideological imperative. A strong, proud China might still pose problems for Washington even if it were a liberal democracy. But the fact that the country is ruled by autocrats committed to the ruthless suppression of liberalism domestically turbocharges Chinese revisionism globally. A deeply authoritarian state can never feel secure in its own rule because it does not enjoy the freely given consent of the governed; it can never feel safe in a world dominated by democracies because liberal international norms challenge illiberal domestic practices. “Autocracies,” writes the China scholar Minxin Pei, “simply are incapable of practicing liberalism abroad while maintaining authoritarianism at home.”⁶⁴

This is no exaggeration. The infamous Document No. 9, a political directive issued at the outset of Xi’s presidency, shows that the CCP perceives a liberal world order as inherently threatening: “Western forces hostile to China and dissidents within the country are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere.”⁶⁵ The perpetual, piercing insecurity of an autocratic regime has powerful implications for Chinese statecraft. Chinese leaders feel a compulsion to make international norms and institutions friendlier to illiberal rule. They seek to push dangerous liberal influences away from Chinese borders. They must wrest international authority from a democratic superpower with a long history of bringing autocracies to ruin. And as an authoritarian China becomes powerful, it inevitably looks to strengthen the forces of illiberalism overseas as a way of enhancing its influence and affirming its own model.⁶⁶

There is nothing extraordinary about this. When America became a world power, it forged a world that was hospitable to democratic values. When the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe, it imposed Communist regimes. In great-power rivalries since antiquity, ideological cleavages have exacerbated geopolitical cleavages: Differences in how governments see their citizens produce profound differences in how those governments see the world.

China is a typical revisionist state, an empire trying to reclaim its cherished place in the world, and an autocracy whose assertiveness flows from its unending insecurity. That’s a powerful—and volatile—combination.

NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT

All this means the sources of Chinese conduct are not tied to any one leader. America has a China problem, not a Xi Jinping problem. The CCP’s revisionist project began before Xi took office; it has deep roots in the nature of international politics and the nature of the Chinese regime. Yet the Chinese challenge has undoubtedly become sharper over time.

As early as the late 1980s and early 1990s, CCP leaders understood that their plans for China would eventually come into conflict with America’s premier status in the world. Yet Deng saw that it was foolish, if not suicidal, to alienate the world’s sole superpower when China desperately needed a calm international environment and access to the global economy. “We won’t close any doors,” Deng commented; “our biggest lesson from the past has been not to isolate ourself from the world.”⁶⁷ This was the genesis of Deng’s aphorism that China must “hide its capabilities and bide its time”—it must avoid confrontation and find subtle ways of blunting American power until it grew strong enough to begin asserting itself more openly. Once China reached “the level of the developed countries,” Deng had explained, “the strength of China and its role in the world will be quite different.”⁶⁸

During the 1990s, China practiced the politics of reassurance with Washington, pledging that it would never seek “expansion or hegemony.” Beijing built deep commercial and financial ties with the United States, as a way of powering its own development and making it more painful for America to isolate China. It pursued a diplomatic charm offensive with its Asian neighbors, in hopes of wooing them away from any coalition America might try to rally.⁶⁹ At the same time, the PLA quietly began preparing for trouble by developing the capabilities necessary to hold the high-tech U.S. military at bay. Beijing even strengthened ties with regional organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to hollow them out from the inside and ensure that they could not be turned to anti-China purposes. The overall goal, Chinese academic Yan Xuetong concedes, was to “prevent the United States from focusing on containing the rise of China as a global superpower.”⁷⁰ China would rise by stealth.

Chinese statecraft gradually became less subtle over time. America’s post-9/11 wars in the Middle East created what Chinese leaders called a “period of strategic opportunity” by embroiling Washington in draining conflicts far from the Pacific. The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 then persuaded many Chinese analysts—as one American official noted—“that the United States was in decline or distracted or both.”⁷¹ In response, Hu Jintao and then Xi Jinping began more openly projecting Chinese influence. The quest for control of the South China Sea and calls for Washington to embrace a “new model of great-power relations” that would imply acceptance of Chinese predominance in Asia all occurred during this period. Beijing even cast off the “hide and bide” strategy in favor of Xi’s motto of “striving for achievement.” “In the past we had to keep a low profile because we were weak while other states were strong,” Yan remarked. “Now . . . we are indicating to neighboring countries that we are strong and you are weak.”⁷²

The change accelerated again after 2016. The election of Donald Trump, the crisis of the European Union after Britain’s decision to bolt the bloc in 2016, and other disruptions created great chaos within the existing order. Chinese officials began to talk openly about the possibility of a historic transition away from American leadership. Beijing took the offensive in international organizations, in promoting BRI and the Digital Silk Road, in trying to drive wedges between America and its allies, and in punishing countries that displeased it. China also issued progressively less disguised declarations of intent to push past the United States. “No force can shake the status of our great motherland,” Xi said in 2019. “No force can stop the advance of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.”⁷³

All this was prelude to COVID-19. A global crisis that initially seemed to knock America on its back, while China regained its footing relatively quickly, gave Beijing the chance to advance on multiple fronts. It did so by increasing military pressure on Taiwan, destroying the last vestiges of Hong Kong’s political autonomy, escalating—sometimes violently—disputes with several neighbors at once, and engaging in hyperaggressive “wolf-warrior” diplomacy against countries that questioned the CCP’s behavior.⁷⁴ And as the disorder in America deepened in late 2020 and early 2021, with a disputed presidential election and an insurrectionist assault on Congress, the abrasiveness of Chinese policy became almost tangible. When U.S. and Chinese officials met in March 2021, Yang Jiechi openly mocked the idea that Washington could speak to Beijing from a “position of strength.”⁷⁵ China’s leaders, the U.S. intelligence community assessed, were convinced that an “epochal geopolitical shift” was under way.⁷⁶

That was certainly the view expressed at the top. “The East is rising and the West is declining,” Xi announced in January: The era of American hegemony was ending, and the age of Chinese power had arrived.⁷⁷

This is the China that America, and the world, are now familiar with—one that appears ascendant, supremely confident, and determined to claim an outsized share of influence almost everywhere. A country that strides forward as a confused, divided America falters. But it is sometimes hard not to wonder whether Xi and his lieutenants are as buoyant as they seem.

Careful analysts of Chinese politics detect subtle anxiety in government reports and statements. Themes of bounding optimism are mixed with “words of caution and deep insecurity.”⁷⁸ Xi acknowledges, even as he touts Beijing’s power, that there are many ways in which “the West is strong and the East is weak.” He warned, even in the wake of COVID-19, of “looming risks and tests.” He declared that China must make itself “invincible” to ensure that “nobody can beat us or choke us to death.” And he advised his cadres to prepare for a brutal struggle ahead.⁷⁹

Xi’s not wrong to worry. On closer inspection, it turns out that there is also another China, one beset by multiplying problems at home and multiplying enemies abroad. Whatever its propagandists may say, this China will struggle mightily to surpass America over the long term. For that very reason, it may actually be more dangerous in the near future.