Issue Brief

Addressing a Resurgent China: A New Mindset for Strategic Competition

Can either China or the U.S. “win” strategic competition?

By Ali Wyne Author • Emma Ashford Editor • Nevada Joan Lee Editor

Grand Strategy

September 15, 2025

This essay is part of the New Visions for Grand Strategy Project. You can find the entire collection of essays on the project page and listen to Ali Wyne discuss his essay with Stimson Senior Fellow Emma Ashford on The Grand Strategy Sessions podcast

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

Full New Visions Report (PDF)

Editor’s Note: The New Visions for Grand Strategy Project brought scholars from across the political and ideological spectrum to discuss what the future has in store for the United States in the world. The editors of this series sought to foster a lively debate about America’s global role and strategic futures. Each author in this collection speaks for himself or herself alone, and their views do not reflect the official positions of the Henry L. Stimson Center, or of their own employers. Ali Wyne is a senior advisor for US-China relations at the International Crisis Group.

By Emma Ashford, Senior Fellow, Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program

A rapidly growing corpus of writing considers how the United States might “outcompete” China or perhaps even “win” the contest between the two countries. According to many observers, this competition will go a long way toward shaping the 21st century’s international order. This essay does not aim to contribute to that genre. Instead, it suggests that Washington must recalibrate its mindset if, as seems likely, it will have to cohabitate with a comprehensively powerful Beijing indefinitely. China’s principal competitive challenge to the United States is not military, economic, or diplomatic, but psychological.

It is difficult enough for policymakers to process that Washington faces its most potent challenger so soon after its triumph in the Cold War — and yet more vexing to accept that that challenger promulgates a model of domestic governance and an approach to international relations that are antithetical to those that the United States champions.¹ Among the most consequential questions for U.S. grand strategy, then, is how the United States will address a resurgent China: Will it proceed with composure, appreciating the likelihood that the two countries will have to coexist over the long term, or succumb to defensiveness, concluding that it can and must achieve a victory that will position it to inaugurate the next “American century”? If, between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of the global financial crisis, the United States erred on the side of underestimating China’s competitive potential, it must now avoid overcorrecting in the direction of aggrandizement.

Mistaken Expectations

In 1999, the then-director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Gerald Segal, wrote an influential essay that balked at the notion of a consequential China: “Only when we finally understand how little China matters will we be able to craft a sensible policy toward it.”² Although his intervention was provocative — then-Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) rejoined that the United States would have to “adjust to, and deal with, China’s imminent emergence as a major regional and global power” — it seemed tenable, especially in view of America’s global preeminence.³

American observers were not mistaken, of course, to characterize post-Cold War China as a poor and isolated backwater. Where many of them erred was in hoping, and in some cases assuming, that China could not adapt — its political system would prove to be a developmental straightjacket — or that it would adapt in a direction that the United States would welcome — China would incrementally liberalize as its economy grew more interconnected with the rest of the global economy.

Some distinguished analysts did venture that China could achieve significant growth without democratizing, though it is unclear how much success they had in making considerations of its potential pathways more nuanced. Nearly two decades ago, for example, a team of scholars at the Center for Strategic and International Studies presciently argued that “Washington will need to be prepared psychologically for the impact China’s rise may have on the United States’ relative power and influence in East Asia and beyond.” But they also cautioned against “the pessimism and alarmism that too often cloud the public’s perspective,” stressing that a dispassionate, holistic appraisal of China’s trajectory could “help Americans transcend love-it-or-fear-it simplicities that…[undercut] a clear-eyed response to the China challenge.”⁴ The latter sentiment presently prevails, with many policymakers and observers assuming that US-China relations will be unalterably competitive, if not adversarial.

After undertaking a cursory net assessment four years ago, the Brookings Institution’s Ryan Hass and I argued that “Beijing is neither on the precipice of disintegration nor on a path to hegemony; it is an enduring yet constrained competitor.”⁵ Despite the intervening turbulence — encompassing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the outbreak of successive conflicts in the Middle East beginning with the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, and Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency — a juxtaposition of China’s competitive liabilities and assets suggests that that conclusion still holds.

At home, China confronts slowing growth, population aging, and the structural problem of transitioning from an infrastructure- and export-driven economic model to one that relies on consumption and cutting-edge innovation.⁶ Political economist Yuen Yuen Ang observes that it will be difficult to implement that shift because “the old and the new economies are deeply intertwined; if the old economy falters too quickly, it will inevitably hinder the rise of the new.”⁷ Meanwhile, continued purges within the top echelons of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) suggest that — despite Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s reported demand that it be ready to execute an invasion of Taiwan by 2027 — the PLA is struggling to root out corruption and enhance combat readiness. Abroad, even as the Trump administration’s foreign policy is straining U.S. alliances and partnerships, China confronts mounting pushback from the United States and major powers across Asia and Europe.

At the same time, despite — or perhaps in part because of — U.S. sanctions, tariffs, and especially export controls, China is now at the forefront of technological progress, imbued with a national determination to accelerate its effort to achieve self-sufficiency.⁸ The PLA has the largest naval fleet of any military in the world, is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, and, in the case of an armed conflict between the United States and China, would be able to inflict devastating damage on U.S. military personnel and bases in the Western Pacific. China is also deepening its influence across the developing world through the Belt and Road Initiative and gaining traction for an emerging conception of order that is anchored in its development, security, and civilization initiatives.⁹

Even if one were to stipulate the most expansive interpretation of China’s strategic objectives — that Beijing aims to supplant Washington as the world’s leading power and establish a Sinocentric order — it is unclear whether China could achieve such goals.¹⁰ But speculation that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will soon collapse — or, less dramatically, that China’s comprehensive national power (CNP)¹¹ will soon plateau — appears erroneous as well.¹² In brief, neither consternation nor complacence is warranted on America’s part.

Unfortunately, though, U.S. commentary on China increasingly exhibits analytical whiplash, which inhibits prudent policy: Some observers express anxiety because they conclude that it is staring down decline, while others do so because they assess that it is marching toward dominance.

Those who emphasize China’s competitive liabilities are principally concerned with a short-term possibility: that within the next ten years, if not by the end of this decade, Beijing will decide to make a move on Taipei — either because Chinese leaders discern a closing window of opportunity or because they seek to distract from mounting public discontent over China’s economic challenges — precipitating a great-power war that would exact an unfathomable human, economic, and military toll. If the United States can deter Chinese aggression, the thinking goes, it will be well positioned to prevail over China, whose systemic decline will be far more apparent and entrenched after this period of maximum danger passes.

Those who emphasize China’s competitive assets worry not only about the possibility of a great-power war, but also about the prospect that a more confident and capable China could reconfigure today’s order in ways that would further weaken U.S. influence in Asia, legitimize autocratic governance, and drive wedges between the United States and its longstanding allies and partners. If the United States can reinvigorate its defense industrial base, regain its lead in developing critical and emerging technologies, and galvanize its diplomatic network for this century’s twilight struggle, the thinking goes, it will be able to prevail over China in the long run.

For proponents of both hypotheses, though, the motivating sentiment is distress, and the non-negotiable imperative is to win — whether the contest is one whose intensity will climax soon and then dissipate, or one that will be, with occasional reprieves, significantly testing for the United States over several decades, if not longer. In brief, the hope is that a policy of containment, or one approximating it, will eventually end the competitive challenge from China. One reason that policymakers often characterize US-China relations as “a new Cold War” is that the prospect of a decisive resolution in Washington’s favor is more comforting to contemplate than a tense cohabitation that does not culminate, but simply persists.¹³

A specific fear about China has dogged U.S. commentary since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949: that the United States has consistently gotten China “wrong.” In this view, Mao Zedong’s communist forces prevailed in 1949 because the United States did not do enough to support Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces. China has emerged as America’s fiercest strategic competitor because the United States did not do enough to thwart — and indeed enabled — its postwar resuscitation. And China is becoming a center of global innovation because the United States is not doing enough to detach it from the advanced industrial democracies that furnish Beijing with world-class technological inputs and know-how.

Oddly absent from these conclusions is an appreciation of China’s history and agency. Although U.S. observers often describe China as a rising power, it is better understood as a resurgent or returning one, especially in the economic arena.¹⁴ That its internal and external challenges are mounting in number and severity is indisputable; that it has endured centuries of dynastic collapses, internal strife, and external predation, though, provides a sense of its resilience.

A Basis For Recalibration

Against that backdrop, the United States should consider three propositions, discussed below, in order to recalibrate its approach to China. Doing so could reduce the likelihood of an armed confrontation and enhance the prospect of a competitive coevolution between the world’s two foremost powers.

#1: It is strategically risky to treat competition as an end unto itself

Washington would be unwise to compete as ubiquitously as it did in the Cold War, when it often contested Moscow even where vital U.S. national interests were not implicated. China is a far more capable competitor than the Soviet Union ever was, and America’s relative strength is far less pronounced than it was at the turn of the century. These realities need not be cause for alarm. Indeed, the chief obstacle to developing a more sustainable U.S. foreign policy is not clear-eyed acceptance but nostalgic hope: Washington cannot restore the margin of preeminence that it briefly enjoyed after the Cold War.

As such, policymakers need to articulate a better understanding of what the United States is competing for — and over — vis-à-vis China, lest competition become a self-evident imperative that does not require a strategic justification. Any given Chinese action, after all, can undercut, benefit, or have no impact on U.S. national interests. Chinese actions within the first category, moreover, are not uniformly harmful; they run the gamut from mild irritant to serious danger. The charge for U.S. strategy is not to assume that each problematic Chinese action warrants the same degree of concern, but to differentiate between them — and make duly informed policy choices.

Although the US-China relationship may seem inexorably antagonistic at present, policymakers should bear in mind the oscillations that it has undergone since the founding of the PRC — a history that cautions against treating current tensions as immutable. Xi’s successor could recalibrate China’s paths at home and abroad, even if such shifts may be decades away.¹⁵ Deterministic thinking shrinks the capacity, if not the willingness, to consider how creative diplomacy could expand cooperative space.

#2: Efforts to slow China’s technological progress and organize a counterbalancing coalition will likely prove less effective over time

The claim that China can only innovate by stealing other countries’ intellectual property ceased to be defensible long ago; as economists David Autor and Gordon Hanson observe, “China Shock 2.0 will last for as long as China has the resources, patience, and discipline to compete fiercely. And if you doubt China’s capability or determination, the evidence is not on your side.”¹⁶

As for the linchpin of America’s present effort — preventing China from developing high-end semiconductors — it will probably, in the best-case scenario, do little more than slow Beijing down, while depleting U.S. economic leverage over time.¹⁷ Indeed, many observers believe that Washington will end up accelerating Beijing’s quest.¹⁸ It is true, of course, that China had been pursuing greater technological self-reliance long before the United States implemented any de-risking¹⁹ measures; witness, for example, the National Medium- and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology (introduced in 2006), a 15-year strategy for enhancing China’s leadership in global innovation, and Made in China 2025 (introduced in 2015), a blueprint for making China more self-sufficient in ten industries that are driving the transformation of the global economy. The duration of such initiatives suggests that China would probably have continued that effort even if the United States had not embarked on a de-risking campaign.

But Washington’s pressure has changed the rationales for Beijing’s effort. China had long pursued greater technological self-reliance gradually, principally for economic reasons, while believing that it was prudent to maintain a baseline of interdependence with the United States. Today, however, it is doing so urgently, increasingly for security reasons, for fear that the United States will leverage the two countries’ remaining interdependence to contain China. Given the CCP’s hope that technological progress can at least partially offset the impact of structural challenges on the country’s growth, any external impediment to the former could weaken a pillar of the Party’s legitimacy: its ability to deliver sustained improvements to the welfare of China’s middle class.²⁰ There has been extensive reporting about China’s efforts to smuggle proscribed chips. Of greater note, though, is that the government is pouring money into research on chip design and production and aiming to develop an indigenous semiconductor supply chain that incorporates both established players such as Huawei and emerging ones such as ChangXin Memory Technologies.²¹

The common rejoinder — that the United States can, in fact, prevent China from producing leading-edge chips if only it enforces “smarter” restrictions — seems plausible but is ultimately unsatisfactory: “Industrial secrets are impossible to keep for long,” columnist Howard Chua-Eoan observes, “as the Chinese themselves know from millennia of what we would now call intellectual property lost by way of trade, theft, and war.”²² In addition, China’s response to the Trump administration’s “Liberation-Day” tariffs has clarified the asymmetry of the two countries’ interdependence: It will most likely be easier for China to innovate around U.S. restrictions on chipmaking technology in the near term than it will be for the United States to diversify away from China as a source of rare earths.²³

Turning from technology to diplomacy, U.S. allies and partners will most likely have an even lower baseline of trust in the United States on January 20, 2029 than they did on January 20, 2025: Trump’s imposition of steep tariffs, threats of territorial annexation, and attacks on multilateral institutions, among other manifestations of a more aggressive “America-First” foreign policy, are compelling them to partner with one another more systematically to circumvent its influence.²⁴ Even if an internationalist were to become U.S. president in 2029, America’s friends would be unlikely to pursue an ambitious cooperative agenda with Washington, lest a Trumpian successor capriciously and thoroughly reverse it four years later. In turn, the next president will likely have a considerably diminished capacity to organize America’s diplomatic network against China. Such mobilization efforts will probably have even less effect across the developing world, where many countries have dark memories of the first Cold War and no desire to be entrapped in a second or forced to pick a side. As the incumbent power, the United States will always view China as no other country does — as a threat to its preeminence — thereby capping its ability to forge a countervailing coalition.

Counterbalancing against China is occurring, of course, and will continue to happen. In Asia, Beijing has engendered distrust with its intensifying pressure on Taiwan, its expansive claims across the South China Sea, and its territorial dispute with India. In Europe, it has done so by deepening its relationship with Russia, dismissing concerns that its exports could exacerbate deindustrialization across the continent, and translating its economic influence into coercive power.

There is good reason to believe that, even as it learns and adapts, China will continue to sow resistance to its foreign policy, with its coronavirus pandemic-era “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy²⁵ serving as the paradigmatic example.²⁶ As the second-most powerful country in the world, it would probably elicit a certain degree of discomfort abroad by sheer dint of its scale, even if its leader were content for China to focus principally on domestic challenges and disavow any aim of revising the international order. Xi, of course, wants China to be a (not necessarily the) global leader, and he has not hesitated to be confrontational toward U.S. allies and partners, even when, as now, Washington’s diplomatic missteps furnish Beijing with opportunities to pursue conciliation.

As political scientist Susan Shirk argues, the United States should allow China’s overreach to play out rather than overreacting.²⁷ More broadly, it should transition from a foreign policy that projects reactive defensiveness and aims for victory to one that exhibits quiet confidence and strives for coexistence. Concretely, rather than enjoining allies and partners to be instruments of strategic competition between the United States and China, the latter policy would enlist them in an effort to fashion a more resilient order that facilitates greater cooperation on transnational challenges. In addition, such a policy would focus less on trying to dissuade third — especially developing — countries from cultivating ties with China and more on convincing them to deepen ties with the United States because Washington can help them address their most pressing socioeconomic concerns.

#3: The China challenge can only go so far in orienting America’s foreign policy and mitigating its internal dysfunction

Some U.S. observers rue the dissolution of the Soviet Union because they believe that U.S. foreign policy cannot be disciplined — and U.S. cohesion cannot be sustained — without an external challenger. Thus far, though, a resurgent China has delivered little on either score.²⁸

Even as the desire to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward Asia has motivated both Republican and Democratic administrations over the past 25 years, chaos across the Middle East has continued to distract Washington, and with the Russia-Ukraine War demonstrating no sign of abating as it approaches its four-year mark, instability across Europe will also limit policymakers’ bandwidth to maneuver.

Despite widespread agreement, moreover, that China is America’s most formidable competitor, there is not, contrary to a pervasive narrative, a “consensus” on how best to approach Beijing. Consider, for example, the difference between former President Joe Biden’s view of alliances and partnerships — that they are strategic assets — and Trump’s — that they are economic burdens that constrain America’s geopolitical freedom. Even more telling is the discrepancy between Trump’s own views and those of some of his top advisors, past and present; while he has long believed that Beijing enjoys an unfair trading relationship with Washington, he does not see strategic competition as especially ideological, let alone Manichean. Trump is virtually alone in Washington, moreover, in expressing fondness for Xi and in believing that a tête-à-tête between the two leaders could stabilize US-China ties, and he is among the very few leaders across the ideological spectrum who think that there is considerable room for bilateral cooperation.²⁹

As for the impact of China’s resurgence on America’s internal health, anxiety can have some propulsive utility; one could argue that it helped secure congressional passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. But such achievements are vulnerable to domestic politics; the Trump administration is already unwinding many of them with its “One Big Beautiful Bill,” with especially self-defeating ramifications for America’s capacity to undertake a clean energy transition.

In the main, America’s response to China has proven corrosive to the United States’ domestic life.³⁰ Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans are increasingly stigmatized, undercutting America’s soft power as well as its technological prowess. Elected officials and prospective lawmakers accuse their opponents of being “weak” or “soft” on China, creating a political environment in which advocacy for diplomatic engagement is often condemned as a demonstration of strategic naivete.³¹ And policymakers and observers frequently argue that those who spotlight America’s domestic challenges are legitimizing CCP propaganda. Finally, the hope that China might help Americans overcome their political divisions seems increasingly quixotic, whether one considers the growing number of threats against elected officials, the deepening animus that Americans of different ideologies exhibit toward one another, or the intensifying debate among Democrats over how to best offer an alternative to Trump’s vision of America.³²

Unanswered Questions

It should be apparent that U.S. policymakers are far from settling on the United States’ approach to China. If Washington is to coexist with Beijing, they will need to answer the following questions — questions that, in some cases, are only beginning to surface in policy debates:

The pandemic and Russian aggression against Ukraine have trained policymakers’ focus on the security risks of “weaponized interdependence” between the United States and China.³³ How can Washington mitigate those risks while slowing the emergence of those that might arise as it loses economic leverage over Beijing?³⁴
Some observers worry that China may soon initiate a blockade of Taiwan. What policies would be likeliest to bolster “dual deterrence” in the service of avoiding an armed conflict between Washington and Beijing over the island?³⁵
The United States often enumerates those exercises of power on China’s part that it considers illegitimate. Which exercises does it consider permissible?
How can the United States and China achieve an equilibrium in Asia — a balance of military power that allows both countries to feel sufficiently assured that their respective core interests are secure?

There are no ready answers to such questions. There is, accordingly, an imperative and an opportunity for established and emerging voices alike to inject creative thinking into the discourse on China policy.

In the interim, the three aforementioned propositions suggest a modest starting point for that conversation: Washington and Beijing seem fated to coexist as major powers indefinitely. As dramatic as the discourse on the US-China relationship can be, portraying a titanic, indeed existential, struggle, the key insight is comparatively underwhelming: Each has significant competitive strengths that the other cannot readily replicate. Although historical resilience does not guarantee future stability, each country has a compelling record of defying declinist prognostications. Each is sufficiently strong to resist the imposition of the other’s dictates, yet insufficiently strong to impose its own. And the efforts of each to achieve greater self-reliance underscore not only the interdependence of their economies, but also the extent to which transnational challenges such as climate change, pandemic disease, and macroeconomic instability entangle their societies.

The question, of course, is how the United States and China can conceptualize, achieve, and sustain a balance between them whereby competitive dynamics neither yield armed confrontation nor preclude cooperative undertakings.

Avoiding war — the foundational prerequisite for long-term coexistence — will require a nimble balance of diplomacy and deterrence.³⁶ When Trump and Xi meet, probably later this year, they could try to rebuild trust by striking a limited, mainly economic, deal. Specifically, Trump might consider asking Xi to increase China’s imports of U.S. energy and agricultural products and urging China to crack down more vigorously on the export of fentanyl precursors. In return, he could reiterate his openness to increased Chinese investment in the United States, provided that Chinese companies share some of their technological know-how with U.S. companies. A successful conversation could pave the way for the two leaders to discuss how the United States and China can bolster existing military-to-military channels and establish a balance of power in Asia that both countries find acceptable.

But it would be unwise to entrust the future of US-China relations to the leader-level channel; shock absorbers are needed in case a rupture emerges between Trump and Xi, as occurred during the pandemic in the former’s first term. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer appear to have developed productive relationships with their Chinese counterparts, and one hopes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, can cultivate a channel comparable to that which former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Wang developed during the Biden administration.

Deterrence will be crucial as well. Even as Trump works to assure Xi that he welcomes a reinvigoration of bilateral talks, he should impress upon Xi that top advisors who have been affirming the integrity of U.S. defense treaties in Asia speak for him, lest Chinese officials believe that those figures are circumventing Trump to convey such reassurances. He should also make clear that the United States would not trade away Taiwan’s security to achieve some “grand bargain” with China.

If the United States and China manage to avert a catastrophe, as they can and must, they will need to undertake the longer-term project of cohabitation. As good a starting point as any for doing so is the counsel of John Fairbank, who is widely regarded as the founder of modern China studies; in a July 1967 address at a seminar of the National Committee on US-China Relations, he argued that although the two countries might not be able to reconcile their respective conceptions of exceptionalism, they could find a way to coexist on the basis of strategic empathy:

Obviously the path of reason is to try to understand them and to understand ourselves and to get onto a new basis, which is in between these somewhere, without giving up what we consider essential, and nevertheless to resolve this conflict on some kind of mutual basis. This is a trick which may be beyond the capacity of humankind to pull off, but the alternative is not good, and the effort must be made.³⁷

To that end, China must resist concluding that the United States is in terminal decline and recognize that Beijing’s coercive conduct compels many U.S. allies and partners to strengthen their security ties with Washington. For its part, the United States should appreciate not only that China’s challenge to Washington’s confidence is likely to endure, but also that that challenge is likely to prove an insufficient guide for policymakers: A power that can only articulate its purposes by invoking a competitor has neither an affirmative vision to inspire others nor the self-confidence to renew itself.

Notes

1
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, columnist Nick Kristof concluded that “no country more than China stands up so brazenly for ideologies and values that most Americans find outdated or evil.” See “China Takes on the Role of Enemy No. 1 to the West,” New York Times (September 22, 1991).
2
Gerald Segal, “Does China Matter?” Foreign Affairs, 78:5 (September/October 1999): 24.
3
Max Baucus, “Asian Bulge,” Foreign Affairs, 79:1 (January/February 2000): 189.
4
C. Fred Bergsten et al., China: The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know Now About the Emerging Superpower (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006), 2, 16, and 17.
5
Ali Wyne and Ryan Hass, “China’s Diplomacy Is Limiting Its Own Ambitions,” Foreign Policy (June 9, 2021).
6
The share of Chinese aged 60 and over is projected to rise from 22% today to over 30% by 2035. See Christopher Bodeen, “China’s population falls for a third straight year, posing challenges for its government and economy,” Associated Press (January 20, 2025).
7
Yuen Yuen Ang, “China’s Economic Paradox,” Project Syndicate (September 4, 2024).
8
On China’s technological progress, see Christopher Mims, “The U.S. Plan to Hobble China Tech Isn’t Working,” Wall Street Journal (May 30, 2025). Mims observes that the United States “has tried almost everything to win the tech race against China — across areas as varied as AI, energy, autonomous vehicles, drones, and EVs [electric vehicles]. So far, none of it has worked.” On China’s national determination, economist Keyu Jin notes that China “is invoking a juguo approach, or an ‘integrated whole-nation scheme,’ concentrating all sorts of national resources in an attempt to achieve breakthroughs in key technologies, or as the Chinese call it, ‘throat choking’ technologies.” See The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism (New York: Viking, 2023), 218.
9
For a treatment of that concept, see Elizabeth Economy, “China’s Alternative Order: And What America Should Learn from It,” Foreign Affairs, 103:3 (May/June 2024): 8-24.
10
Political scientist Taylor Fravel notes that observers “diverge over what might be the end state of the community of common destiny or China’s ultimate goal within this vision of order.” See “China: Balancing the U.S., increasing global influence,” in Leslie Vinjamuri (ed.), Competing visions of international order: Responses to U.S. power in a fracturing world (London: Chatham House, 2025), 15. For cautions against maximalist understandings, see, for example, Michael D. Swaine, “Inflating China’s Threat Risks Disaster for the United States,” National Interest (July 15, 2022); Alex W. Palmer,” Paul Heer on the Danger of Overstating China’s Ambitions,” Wire China (January 22, 2023); and Jessica Chen Weiss, “Even China Isn’t Convinced It Can Replace the U.S.,” New York Times (May 4, 2023).
11
CNP is a Chinese construct that aims to measure a country’s aggregate power. Though it originated in China’s strategic literature in the 1980s, it did not enter official government documents until the 14th Party Congress in 1992. See Hoo Tiang Boon, China’s Global Identity: Considering the Responsibilities of Great Power (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018), 39.
12
See, for example, Evan S. Medeiros, “The Delusion of Peak China: America Can’t Wish Away Its Toughest Challenger,” Foreign Affairs, 103:3 (May/June 2024): 40-49; and Ryan Hass, “Organizing American Policy Around ‘Peak China’ Is a Bad Bet,” China Leadership Monitor, no. 81 (September 2024).
13
For a trenchant exhortation against thinking in terms of “winning” and “losing,” see Leo Blanken, Jason Lepore, and Christopher Boss, “Escaping the Zero-Sum Trap in Strategic Competition with China” (Modern War Institute, May 29, 2024).
14
The late economist Angus Maddison estimated that China accounted for roughly one-third of gross world product in 1820. See Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run: Second Edition, Revised and Updated: 960-2030 AD (Paris: Development Center of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2007), 44.
15
For a rare and searching consideration of alternative paths that China might take over the coming two decades, see Rana Mitter, “The Once and Future China: How Will Change Come to Beijing?” Foreign Affairs, 104:3 (May/June 2025): 52-65. See also Neil Thomas, “Xi Jinping’s Succession Dilemma” (Asia Society Policy Institute, February 14, 2024).
16
David Autor and Gordon Hanson, “We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse.,” New York Times (July 14, 2025).
17
Two former senior officials in the Biden administration explain that “export controls are a limited tool. They can protect specific exquisite technologies for a limited time to help U.S. companies stay ahead of their Chinese competitors. But they cannot constrain development short of the frontier, and they will have inevitable unintended consequences, including encouraging foreign companies to find creative workarounds.” See Radha Iyengar Plumb and Michael C. Horowitz, “What America Gets Wrong About the AI Race: Winning Means Deploying, Not Just Developing, the Best Technology,” Foreign Affairs (April 18, 2025). Trade attorney Neena Shenai, who served as a senior advisor to the assistant secretary for export administration during the George W. Bush administration, notes that “investment restrictions along with other primary tools of economic statecraft like sanctions and export controls are ‘single use.’ Once exercised, they either break or preclude economic ties….used enough without alternatives to refill leverage reserves, the strategies risk sidelining the U.S., leaving few policy levers short of military conflict in the long term.” See “America Needs to Be Smarter About Its Economic Leverage,” RealClearPolicy (September 5, 2023).
18
June Yoon, “The U.S. has spurred the Chinese chip industry,” Financial Times (March 4, 2025).
19
U.S. officials denote de-risking as involving efforts to reduce interdependence between the United States and China in arenas of advanced technology, principally to ensure that Washington is not assisting Beijing’s military modernization. See, for example, Janet L. Yellen, “The Biden Administration’s Economic Approach Toward the Indo-Pacific,” speech at the Asia Society Policy Institute, Washington, DC (November 2, 2023).
20
On May 28, 2018, roughly three months after Trump announced his intention to initiate a tariff campaign against China during his first term, Xi delivered a speech that underscored the stakes of greater technological self-reliance: “Only by grasping key and core technologies within our own hands can we fundamentally guarantee national economic security, national defense security, and other securities.” See Ben Murphy et al. (translation), “Xi Jinping: ‘Strive to Become the World’s Primary Center for Science and High Ground for Innovation,’” DigiChina (March 18, 2021).
21
See, for example, Ansgar Baums, “The ‘Chokepoint’ Fallacy of Tech Export Controls” (Stimson Center, February 6, 2024); Lizzi C. Lee, “DeepSeek and the Strategic Limits of U.S. Sanctions,” Wire China (January 26, 2025); and Sujai Shivakumar, Charles Wessner, and Thomas Howell, “The Limits of Chip Export Controls in Meeting the China Challenge” (Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 14, 2025).
22
Howard Chua-Eoan, “Chips, Silk, and Paper: You Can’t Keep Secrets Forever,” Bloomberg (September 5, 2023).
23
Author’s interview with a former senior economist at the State Department (July 30, 2025).
24
Minouche Shafik, “How to live in a G minus one world,” Financial Times (July 25, 2025).
25
This term refers to the confrontational approach that Chinese diplomats sometimes employ to defend China’s domestic and foreign policies and impugn foreign counterparts who criticize those policies. See Duan Xiaolin and Liu Yitong, “The Rise and Fall of China’s Wolf Warrior Diplomacy,” Diplomat (September 22, 2023).
26
Especially in the early stages of the pandemic, high-ranking Chinese government spokespersons and embassy officials touted China’s domestic response to the emergence of the coronavirus and its exports of personal protective equipment. They also threatened economic and diplomatic consequences for countries that called for an independent inquiry into the origins of the virus and accused China of not doing enough to warn the rest of the world about its lethality and methods of transmission.
27
Susan L. Shirk, Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
28
Columnist Janan Ganesh observed recently that his earlier hope had been misguided: “The answer to domestic strife — I used to be sure of this — lies abroad. So far, it has to be said, this theory of mine is aging like milk. The U.S. finds itself externally challenged and internally split at the same time. The bonding effect of having a shared national rival is nowhere to be seen. ‘Give it time’ is the obvious response, but China has been eating into America’s share of global output for decades.” See “The China challenge isn’t bringing Americans together,” Financial Times (October 2, 2024).
29
Another source of dissensus is Trump’s own inconsistency, which makes it a fool’s errand to predict what the next three years have in store for America’s China policy. During his first term, for example, Trump signed an executive order that targeted TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform, but a federal judge extended it a lifeline. Today, despite an April 2024 law — and a unanimous January 2025 Supreme Court decision that upheld it — that would have banned TikTok from operating in the United States unless ByteDance, its owner, were to divest from it within nine months (with a possible three-month extension if a sale were in progress), it is Trump who continues to save the app, citing the role that it played in mobilizing the youth vote during his reelection campaign. Perhaps even more dramatically, in July, he reauthorized Nvidia to sell H20 chips to China, reversing a decision that he had made in April.
30
See Nancy Okail and Matthew Duss, “America Is Cursed by a Foreign Policy of Nostalgia: Washington Needs Something Better than ‘America First’ and ‘America Is Back,’” Foreign Affairs (December 3, 2024); and Van Jackson and Michael Brenes, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025).
31
Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY) cautions against legitimizing a “competition about who can be the biggest fearmonger about the threats China poses.” See “Anti-China Rhetoric Distracts Washington — and Boosts Beijing,” Foreign Policy (June 26, 2023).
32
Although public sentiment toward China is negative, it is less pronounced than it was last year; 33% of Americans have a very unfavorable opinion, down from 43% last year, and 33% say that it is an enemy, down from 42%. See Christine Huang, Laura Silver, and Laura Clancy, “Negative Views of China Have Softened Slightly Among Americans” (Pew Research Center, April 17, 2025).
33
For the foundational exposition of that concept, see Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security, 44:1 (Summer 2019): 42-79.
34
I weigh the prospect of “weaponized detachment” in “The Dangers of Detachment: Why Economic Independence Could Make the World More Dangerous,” Foreign Affairs (July 31, 2023). A recent analysis notes that as the international financial order fragments, “officials from Washington to Beijing might regret the opportunities and connections being lost. They need not worry they are hastening Armageddon. Yet they are certainly making war more feasible, while simultaneously normalizing the sense of conflict between nations.” See “How the financial system would respond to a superpower war,” Economist (May 3, 2024). Political scientist Allison Carnegie raises a sobering prospect: “If the United States reduces its economic reliance on Taiwanese semiconductors…Beijing might decide that Washington won’t respond if China blockades or invades the island.” See “When Trade Wars Become Shooting Wars: How Tariffs Destabilize an Already Dangerous World,” Foreign Affairs (May 14, 2025).
35
The goal of this policy is to keep both China and Taiwan unsure of how the United States would react if war were to erupt, thus leading each to assume the worst from its respective perch. As such, should Beijing be contemplating an invasion of Taipei, Washington would want Beijing to assume that Washington would intervene as forcefully as possible — a judgment that would presumably dissuade it from attacking. Conversely, should Taipei be thinking about declaring formal independence, Washington would want Taipei to assume that Washington’s response would be lackluster — and thus refrain from taking such a step.
36
Asia in Flux: The U.S., China, and the Search for a New Equilibrium (Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2025).
37
“Fairbank Employs ‘Historical Perspective’ to Understand Patterns in China Today,” Harvard Crimson (July 18, 1967).

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