Now that the United States is riven by internal politics, alienating allies, and once again consumed by a war in the Persian Gulf, this seems like an opportune moment for China to wrest the mantle of global leadership. Yet Beijing has avoided capitalizing on these conflicts with a strong public position. Instead of confronting the United States by defending Iran, a longtime strategic partner in the region, China has provided only indirect support and has largely stayed on the sidelines.
China’s restraint should not be seen as a sign of weakness. Instead, the country is biding its time, positioning itself as the ready choice to fill a leadership vacuum when the United States flames out. China’s leaders are working to shape a world in which their dominance emerges not as a climactic victory over Western interests but as a fact on the ground.
In private conversations and public writings, China’s leaders and their advisers often describe America as “declining but dangerous”—a late-stage power prone to bursts of aggression in the hopes of arresting its slide. As early as the 1990s, the height of the United States’ unipolar power, Chinese thinkers were already theorizing about America’s decline. Wang Huning, then a little-known academic, was moved by his travels through the U.S. to write the book America Against America, in which he described a nation beset by social fragmentation, inequality, and political dysfunction. Shocked by the country’s problems of homelessness, drug addiction, racial violence, social divisions, and low education standards, Wang concluded that America contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Wang is now a member of the seven-person Politburo Standing Committee, the pinnacle of power in the Chinese Communist Party. He is also a close adviser to Chinese President Xi Jinping and a key architect of the country’s strategic plans. The themes that Wang identified decades ago—America’s social decay, economic inequality, and political paralysis—are essential to China’s official narrative about the United States.
This is why China believes that the surest path to international power is not through a direct confrontation but through patience. Why should Beijing risk entering a hot war or challenging American leadership in the Middle East or elsewhere when the United States is plainly wearing itself down, militarily, fiscally, and politically? China’s mission, then, is not to seize the moment but to lay the groundwork for its preferred future.
That means fortifying the Communist Party by reducing the country’s vulnerability to outside pressure. Self-reliance is the clear through line of the party’s latest five-year plan. China is working to ensure that it depends less on the world—and that the world depends more on China. Thanks to heavy state investment and subsidies, Chinese firms are duly climbing the industrial value chain in various sectors, including electric vehicles, clean energy, and telecommunications infrastructure. The state is also bolstering domestic alternatives to foreign technologies, such as semiconductors, software, and airplanes. The ambition is not merely to gain market share but to thwart foreign efforts to hobble China’s rise by curbing access to crucial resources and materials.
China is quietly preparing for a time when its economic weight and technological prowess make it the center of gravity in global affairs. China’s leaders are working to engineer a world that runs largely on Chinese artificial intelligence, is powered by Chinese clean-energy technologies, and in which Chinese computer applications improve medical, educational, vocational, and governance outcomes across the globe.
This economic strategy is all part of a grand geopolitical vision. Instead of overthrowing the post–World War II international order outright, Beijing is trying to nudge it to better reflect Chinese preferences. Chinese leaders have long argued that the existing international order narrowly reflects Western priorities—that the rest of the world is far more interested in economic growth than so-called universal values and individual liberties. As both a major power and a country that still identifies with the developing world, China plainly sees itself as well placed to lead a new global order.
Similarly, Beijing chafes at America’s network of security alliances, seeing them as coming at China’s expense. China’s leaders have instead been arguing that security alliances are Cold War relics that do more to divide and inflame tensions than to solve security challenges. Instead of navigating a world in which Washington sits at the center of a web of alliances in Asia and elsewhere, Beijing is keen for countries to prioritize material interests over ideological affinities. This, Chinese leaders believe, would allow China to displace the U.S. at the center of a new map of practical partnerships.
China has heeded this strategy with impressive discipline. Yet the plans rest on assumptions that could easily prove incorrect. China is betting that America’s decline will continue. But the United States has rebounded from dire periods of division and self-doubt before (such as after the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War) and could very well do so again.
Beijing’s export-driven economic agenda may also run up against its limits. As Chinese firms displace competitors across a growing range of industries, foreign governments are responding by raising barriers to shield their domestic producers—in the U.S., the European Union, India, Indonesia, and Mexico, among other places. Instead of acting as a magnet to pull other countries closer, China’s export juggernaut could end up destroying industries across the developed world and fueling resentments and anger toward China in the process.
Beijing’s assumption that neighbors will grow more deferential as they become more economically dependent on China also merits scrutiny. Despite Beijing’s bristling military capacity and growing economic weight, Tokyo and Taipei remain resistant to China’s vision for controlling Taiwan, the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, and surrounding waters. If other Asian countries similarly defy Beijing’s demands for deference, China’s patience strategy starts to look a little less sound.
Meanwhile, much of China’s domestic economy is floundering. Beijing’s aggressive investments in manufacturing and technology have enabled dominance in these industries but have also created a deflationary spiral in which the supply of goods well outpaces demand. Growth is slowing. Domestic debt is mounting. The transition to a more advanced, technology-intensive economy is producing social strains, including a record-high youth-unemployment rate. The country’s longevity gains and declining fertility rate also promise a demographic crisis in which fewer working-age adults will be supporting ever more pensioners. These trends complicate China’s plans for economic growth and national security.
Yet China’s leaders remain confident that America’s challenges are more severe than their own. They are making a long-term bet that the United States is hastening a decline that will necessitate a more central and powerful role for China in a new world order. Whether this gamble pays off rests in no small part on what the United States does next.