If you want to understand the world, not thinking about China is not an option. The relationship, competition, or clash between the United States and China is the defining rivalry of our time.
The standard story says the US is in decline and China is rising, and that Beijing wants to replace Washington as the global hegemon. Whether that frame is actually useful is something you only figure out by looking closely at how both countries behave, instead of just accepting simple “rise vs decline” narratives.
That’s why I found Lydia Polgreen’s New York Times column interesting. She leans on a recent open-access paper in International Security, “What Does China Want?” by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, and Zenobia T. Chan. The authors analyse around 12,000 speeches, documents, and articles to infer China’s intentions.
Their conclusion cuts against the dominant narrative. Kang et al. argue that the usual claim that China wants to dominate the world or remake the entire order in its own image is badly overstated, and in some ways “dangerously wrong.” In their reading, China is more inward-looking than people assume. Its aims are unambiguous and limited, even though its power has grown.
Polgreen is careful to say this does not make China a benign actor. Its behaviour in the South China Sea, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and toward Taiwan is deeply troubling. But she argues that these actions still fall short of a full-blown project to reorder the entire global system. A harsh, repressive, but mostly regime-focused China is a different kind of problem from a power that openly wants to run the world.
That distinction matters for how we think about strategy, risk, and the kind of world we’re actually living in.