China Is Ready for a World of Disorder

In March, at the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood at the door of the Kremlin to bid his friend farewell. Xi told his Russian counterpart, “Right now, there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Putin, smiling, responded, “I agree.”

The tone was informal, but this was hardly an impromptu exchange: “Changes unseen in a century” has become one of Xi’s favorite slogans since he coined it in December 2017. Although it might seem generic, it neatly encapsulates the contemporary Chinese way of thinking about the emerging global order—or, rather, disorder. As China’s power has grown, Western policymakers and analysts have tried to determine what kind of world China wants and what kind of global order Beijing aims to build with its power. But it is becoming clear that rather than trying to comprehensively revise the existing order or replace it with something else, Chinese strategists have set about making the best of the world as it is—or as it soon will be.

While most Western leaders and policymakers try to preserve the existing rules-based international order, perhaps updating key features and incorporating additional actors, Chinese strategists increasingly define their goal as survival in a world without order. The Chinese leadership, from Xi on down, believes that the global architecture that was erected in the aftermath of World War II is becoming irrelevant and that attempts to preserve it are futile. Instead of seeking to save the system, Beijing is preparing for its failure.

Although China and the United States agree that the post–Cold War order is over, they are betting on very different successors. In Washington, the return of great-power competition is thought to require revamping the alliances and institutions at the heart of the post–World War II order that helped the United States win the Cold War against the Soviet Union. This updated global order is meant to incorporate much of the world, leaving China and several of its most important partners—including Iran, North Korea, and Russia—isolated on the outside.

But Beijing is confident that Washington’s efforts will prove futile. In the eyes of Chinese strategists, other countries’ search for sovereignty and identity is incompatible with the formation of Cold War–style blocs and will instead result in a more fragmented, multipolar world in which China can take its place as a great power.

Ultimately, Beijing’s understanding may well be more accurate than Washington’s and more closely attuned to the aspirations of the world’s most populous countries. The U.S. strategy won’t work if it amounts to little more than a futile quest to update a vanishing order, driven by a nostalgic desire for the symmetry and stability of a bygone era. China, by contrast, is readying itself for a world defined by disorder, asymmetry, and fragmentation—a world that, in many ways, has already arrived.

SURVIVOR: BEIJING

The very different responses of China and the United States to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the divergence in Beijing’s and Washington’s thinking. In Washington, the dominant view is that Russia’s actions are a challenge to the rules-based order, which must be strengthened in response. In Beijing, the dominant opinion is that the conflict shows the world is entering a period of disorder, which countries will need to take steps to withstand.

The Chinese perspective is shared by many countries, especially in the global South, where Western claims to be upholding a rules-based order lack credibility. It is not simply that many governments had no say in creating these rules and therefore see them as illegitimate. The problem is deeper: these countries also believe that the West has applied its norms selectively and revised them frequently to suit its own interests or, as the United States did when it invaded Iraq in 2003, simply ignored them. For many outside the West, the talk of a rules-based order has long been a fig leaf for Western power. It is only natural, these critics maintain, that now that Western power is declining, this order should be revised to empower other countries.

Hence Xi’s claim that “changes unseen in a century” are coming to pass. This observation is one of the guiding principles of “Xi Jinping Thought,” which has become China’s official ideology. Xi sees these changes as part of an irreversible trend toward multipolarity as the East rises and the West declines, accelerated by technology and demographic shifts. Xi’s core insight is that the world is increasingly defined by disorder rather than order, a situation that in his view harks back to the nineteenth century, another era characterized by global instability and existential threats to China. In the decades after China’s defeat by Western powers in the First Opium War in 1839, Chinese thinkers, including the diplomat Li Hongzhang—sometimes referred to as “China’s Bismarck”—wrote of “great changes unseen in over 3,000 years.” These thinkers observed with concern the technological and geopolitical superiority of their foreign adversaries, which inaugurated what China now considers to be a century of humiliation. Today, Xi sees the roles as reversed. It is the West that now finds itself on the wrong side of fateful changes and China that has the chance to emerge as a strong and stable power.

Other ideas with roots in the nineteenth century have also experienced a renaissance in contemporary China, among them social Darwinism, which applied Charles Darwin’s concept of “the survival of the fittest” to human societies and international relations. In 2021, for instance, the Research Center for a Holistic View of National Security, a government-backed body linked to the Chinese security ministry, published National Security in the Rise and Fall of Great Powers, edited by the economist Yuncheng Zhang. The book, part of a series explaining the new national security law, claims that the state is like a biological organism that must evolve or die—and that China’s challenge is to survive. And this line of thinking has taken hold. One Chinese academic told me that geopolitics today is a “struggle for survival” between fragile and inward-looking superpowers—a far cry from the expansive and transformative visions of the Cold War superpowers. Xi has adopted this framework, and Chinese government statements are full of references to “struggle,” an idea that is found in communist rhetoric but also in social Darwinist writings.

This notion of survival in a dangerous world necessitates the development of what Xi describes as “a holistic approach to national security.” In contrast to the traditional concept of “military security,” which was limited to countering threats from land, air, sea, and space, the holistic approach to security aims to counter all challenges, whether technical, cultural, or biological. In an age of sanctions, economic decoupling, and cyberthreats, Xi believes that everything can be weaponized. As a result, security cannot be guaranteed by alliances or multilateral institutions. Countries must therefore do all that they can to safeguard their own people. To that end, in 2021, the Chinese government backed the creation of a new research center dedicated to this holistic approach, tasking it with considering all aspects of China’s security strategy. Under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasingly conceived of as a shield against chaos.

CLASHING VISIONS

Chinese leaders see the United States as the principal threat to their survival and have developed a hypothesis to explain their adversary’s actions. Beijing believes that Washington is responding to domestic polarization and its loss of global power by ramping up its competition with China. U.S. leaders, according to this thinking, have decided that it is only a matter of time before China becomes more powerful than the United States, which is why Washington is trying to pit Beijing against the entire democratic world. Chinese intellectuals, therefore, speak of a U.S. shift from engagement and partial containment to “total competition,” spanning politics, economics, security, ideology, and global influence.

Chinese strategists have watched the United States try to use the war in Ukraine to cement the divide between democracies and autocracies. Washington has rallied its partners in the G-7 and NATO, invited East Asian allies to join the NATO meeting in Madrid, and forged new security partnerships, including AUKUS, a trilateral pact among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), which aligns Australia, India, and Japan with the United States. Beijing is particularly concerned that Washington’s engagement in Ukraine will lead it to be more assertive on Taiwan. One scholar said he feared that Washington is gradually trading its “one China” policy—under which the United States agrees to regard the People’s Republic of China as the only legal government of Taiwan and the mainland—for a new approach that one Chinese interlocutor called “one China and one Taiwan.” This new kind of institutionalization of ties between the United States and its partners, implicitly or explicitly aimed at containing Beijing, is seen in China as a new U.S. attempt at alliance building that brings Atlantic and European partners into the Indo-Pacific. It is, Chinese analysts believe, yet another instance of the United States’ mistaken belief that the world is once more dividing itself into blocs.

With only North Korea as a formal ally, China cannot win a battle of alliances. Instead, it has sought to make a virtue of its relative isolation and tap into a growing global trend toward nonalignment among middle powers and emerging economies. Although Western governments take pride in the fact that 141 countries have supported UN resolutions condemning the war in Ukraine, Chinese foreign policy thinkers, including the international relations professor and media commentator Chu Shulong, argue that the number of countries enforcing sanctions against Russia is a better indication of the power of the West. By that metric, he calculates that the Western bloc contains only 33 countries, with 167 countries refusing to join in the attempt to isolate Russia. Many of these states have bad memories of the Cold War, a period when their sovereignty was squeezed by competing superpowers. As one prominent Chinese foreign policy strategist explained to me, “The United States isn’t declining, but it is only good at talking to Western countries. The big difference between now and the Cold War is that [then] the West was very effective at mobilizing developing countries against [the Soviet Union] in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and Africa.”

To capitalize on waning U.S. influence in these regions, China has sought to demonstrate its support for countries in the global South. In contrast to Washington, which Beijing sees as bullying countries into picking sides, China’s outreach to the developing world has prioritized investments in infrastructure. It has done so through international initiatives, some of which are already partially developed. These include the Belt and Road Initiative and the Global Development Initiative, which invest billions of dollars of state and private-sector money in other countries’ infrastructure and development. Others are new, including the Global Security Initiative, which Xi launched in 2022 to challenge U.S. dominance. Beijing is also working to expand the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security, defense, and economic group that brings together major players in Eurasia, including India, Pakistan, and Russia and is in the process of admitting Iran.

STUCK IN THE PAST?

China is confident that the United States is mistaken in its assumption that a new cold war has broken out. Accordingly, it is seeking to move beyond Cold War–style divides. As Wang Honggang, a senior official at a think tank affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security, put it, the world is moving away from “a center-periphery structure for the global economy and security and towards a period of polycentric competition and co-operation.” Wang and like-minded scholars do not deny that China is also trying to become a center of its own, but they argue that because the world is emerging from a period of Western hegemony, the establishment of a new Chinese center will actually lead to a greater pluralism of ideas rather than a Chinese world order. Many Chinese thinkers link this belief with the promise of a future of “multiple modernity.” This attempt to create an alternative theory of modernity, in contrast to the post–Cold War formulation of liberal democracy and free markets as the epitome of modern development, is at the core of Xi’s Global Civilization Initiative. This high-profile project is intended to signal that unlike the United States and European countries, which lecture others on subjects such as climate change and LGBTQ rights, China respects the sovereignty and civilization of other powers.

For many decades, China’s engagement with the world was largely economic. Today, China’s diplomacy goes well beyond matters of trade and development. One of the most dramatic and instructive examples of this shift is China’s growing role in the Middle East and North Africa. This region was formerly dominated by the United States, but as Washington has stepped back, Beijing has moved in. In March, China pulled off a major diplomatic coup by brokering a truce between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Whereas Chinese involvement in the region was once limited to its status as a consumer of hydrocarbons and an economic partner, Beijing is now a peacemaker busily engaged in building diplomatic and even military relationships with key players. Some Chinese scholars regard the Middle East today as “a laboratory for a post-American world.” In other words, they believe that the region is what the entire world will look like in the next few decades: a place where, as the United States declines, other global powers, such as China, India, and Russia, compete for influence, and middle powers, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, flex their muscles.

Many in the West doubt China’s ability to achieve this goal, mostly because Beijing has struggled to win over potential collaborators. In East Asia, South Korea is moving closer to the United States; in Southeast Asia, the Philippines is developing closer relations with Washington to protect itself from Beijing; and there has been an anti-Chinese backlash in many African countries, where complaints about Beijing’s colonial behavior are rife. Although some countries, including Saudi Arabia, want to strengthen their ties with China, they are motivated at least in part by a desire for the United States to reengage with them. But these examples should not mask the broader trend: Beijing is becoming more active and steadily more ambitious.

SPARE WHEELS AND BODY LOCKS

Economic competition between China and the United States is also increasing. Many Chinese thinkers predicted that the election of U.S. President Joe Biden in 2020 would lead to improved relations with Beijing, but they have been disappointed: the Biden administration has been much more aggressive toward China than they expected. One senior Chinese economist likened Biden’s pressure campaign against the Chinese technology sector, which includes sanctions on Chinese technology companies and chip-making firms, to U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions against Iran. Many Chinese commentators have argued that Biden’s desire to freeze Beijing’s technological development to preserve the United States’ edge is no different than Trump’s efforts to stop Tehran’s development of nuclear weapons. A consensus has formed in Beijing that Washington’s goal is not to make China play by the rules; it is to stop China from growing.

This is incorrect: both Washington and the European Union have made it clear that they do not intend to shut China out of the global economy. Nor do they want to fully decouple their economies from China’s. Instead, they seek to ensure that their businesses do not share sensitive technologies with Beijing and to reduce their reliance on Chinese imports in critical sectors, including telecommunications, infrastructure, and raw materials. Thus, Western governments increasingly talk of “reshoring” and “friend shoring” production in such sectors or at least diversifying supply chains by encouraging companies to base production in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Xi’s response has been what he calls “dual circulation.” Instead of thinking about China as having a single economy linked to the world through trade and investment, Beijing has pioneered the idea of a bifurcated economy. One-half of the economy—driven by domestic demand, capital, and ideas—is about “internal circulation,” making China more self-reliant in terms of consumption, technology, and regulations. The other half—“external circulation”—is about China’s selective contacts with the rest of the world. Simultaneously, even as it decreases its dependence on others, Beijing wants to boost the dependence of other players on China so that it can use these links to increase its power and exert pressure. These ideas have the potential to reshape the global economy.

The influential Chinese economist Yu Yongding has explained the notion of dual circulation with two new concepts: “the spare wheel” and “the body lock.” Following the “spare wheel” concept, China should have ready alternatives if it loses access to natural resources, components, and critical technologies. This idea has come in response to the increasing use of Western sanctions, which Beijing has watched with concern. The Chinese government is now working to shield itself from any attempts to cut it off in case of a conflict by making enormous investments in critical technologies, including artificial intelligence and semiconductors. But Beijing is also attempting to exploit the new reality to reduce the global economy’s reliance on Western economic demand and the U.S.-led financial system. At home, the CCP is promoting a shift from export-led growth to growth driven by domestic demand; elsewhere, it is promoting the yuan as an alternative to the dollar. Accordingly, the Russians are increasing their yuan reserve holdings, and Moscow no longer uses the dollar when trading with China. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has recently agreed to use national currencies, rather than just the dollar, for trade among its member states. Although these developments are limited, Chinese leaders are hopeful that the weaponization of the U.S. financial system and the massive sanctions against Russia will lead to further disorder and increase other countries’ willingness to hedge against the dollar’s dominance.

The “body lock” is a wrestling metaphor. It means that Beijing should make Western companies reliant on China, thereby making decoupling more difficult. That is why it is working to bind as many countries as possible to Chinese systems, norms, and standards. In the past, the West struggled to make China accept its rules. Now, China is determined to make others bow to its norms, and it has invested heavily in boosting its voice in various international standard-setting bodies. Beijing is also using its Global Development and Belt and Road Initiatives to export its model of subsidized state capitalism and Chinese standards to as many countries as possible. Whereas China’s objective was once integration into the global market, the collapse of the post–Cold War international order and the return of nineteenth-century-style disorder have altered the CCP’s approach.

Xi has therefore invested heavily in self-reliance. But as many Chinese intellectuals point out, the changes in Chinese attitudes toward globalization have been driven as much by domestic economic challenges as by tensions with the United States. In the past, China’s large, young, and cheap labor force was the principal driver of the country’s growth. Now, its population is aging rapidly, and it needs a new economic model, one built on boosting consumption. As the economist George Magnus points out, however, doing so requires raising wages and pursuing structural reforms that would upset China’s delicate societal power balance. Rekindling population growth, for instance, would require substantial upgrades to the country’s underdeveloped social security system, which in turn would need to be paid for with unpopular tax increases. Promoting innovation would require a reduction of the role of the state in the economy, which runs counter to Xi’s instincts. Such changes are hard to imagine in the current circumstances.

A WORLD DIVIDED?

Between 1945 and 1989, decolonization and the division between the Western powers and the Soviet bloc defined the world. Empires dissolved into dozens of states, often as the result of small wars. But although decolonization transformed the map, the more powerful force was the ideological competition of the Cold War. After winning their independence, most countries quickly aligned themselves with either the democratic bloc or the communist bloc. Even those countries that did not want to choose sides nevertheless defined their identity in reference to the Cold War, forming a “nonaligned movement.”

Both trends are in evidence today, and the United States believes that this history is repeating itself as policymakers try to revive the strategy that succeeded against the Soviet Union. It is, therefore, dividing the world and mobilizing its allies. Beijing disagrees, and it is pursuing policies suited to its bet that the world is entering an era in which self-determination and multialignment will trump ideological conflict.

Beijing’s judgment is more likely to be accurate because the current era differs from the Cold War era in three fundamental ways. First, today’s ideologies are much weaker. After 1945, both the United States and the Soviet Union offered optimistic and compelling visions of the future that appealed to elites and workers worldwide. Contemporary China has no such message, and the traditional U.S. vision of liberal democracy has been greatly diminished by the Iraq war, the global financial crisis of 2008, and the presidency of Donald Trump, all of which made the United States seem less successful, less generous, and less reliable. Moreover, rather than offering starkly different and opposing ideologies, China and the United States increasingly resemble each other on matters from industrial policy and trade to technology and foreign policy. Without ideological messages capable of creating international coalitions, Cold War–style blocs cannot form.

Second, Beijing and Washington do not enjoy the same global dominance that the Soviet Union and the United States did after 1945. In 1950, the United States and its major allies (NATO countries, Australia, and Japan) and the communist world (the Soviet Union, China, and the Eastern bloc) together accounted for 88 percent of global GDP. But today, these groups of countries combined account for only 57 percent of global GDP. Whereas nonaligned countries’ defense expenditures were negligible as late as the 1960s (about one percent of the global total), they are now at 15 percent and growing fast.

Third, today’s world is extremely interdependent. At the beginning of the Cold War, there were very few economic links between the West and the countries behind the Iron Curtain. The situation today could not be more different. Whereas trade between the United States and the Soviet Union remained at around one percent of both countries’ total trade in the 1970s and 1980s, trade with China today makes up almost 16 percent of both the United States’ and the EU’s total trade balance. This interdependence prohibits the formation of the stable alignment of blocs that characterized the Cold War. What is more likely is a permanent state of tension and shifting allegiances.

China’s leaders have made an audacious strategic bet by preparing for a fragmented world. The CCP believes the world is moving toward a post-Western order not because the West has disintegrated but because the consolidation of the West has alienated many other countries. In this moment of change, it may be that China’s stated willingness to allow other countries to flex their muscles may make Beijing a more attractive partner than Washington, with its demands for ever-closer alignment. If the world truly is entering a phase of disorder, China could be best placed to prosper.