When China launched new export controls on uncommon earth metals final October, some observers interpreted the transfer as the newest instance of China’s bid for world dominance—a deliberate present of drive meant to compel the West to acknowledge Chinese language energy. Others have lengthy seen China’s management of the provision of uncommon earths as a extra defensive and even determined transfer by a rustic grappling with slowing financial progress, commerce threats, and rising unemployment, notably amongst younger individuals, and looking for leverage towards the USA and its allies. This disagreement displays a bigger, ongoing debate concerning the true nature of China’s ambitions, one with vital implications for U.S. coverage.
Many politicians and pundits in the USA argue that China seeks nothing lower than world hegemony—in different phrases, to displace and usurp the USA because the central energy within the worldwide system. As a senior member of then-Sen. Marco Rubio’s workers instructed me in 2022, “Beijing actually, really, does envision a world the place they’re the hegemon and so they create the principles of the street.”
When China launched new export controls on uncommon earth metals final October, some observers interpreted the transfer as the newest instance of China’s bid for world dominance—a deliberate present of drive meant to compel the West to acknowledge Chinese language energy. Others have lengthy seen China’s management of the provision of uncommon earths as a extra defensive and even determined transfer by a rustic grappling with slowing financial progress, commerce threats, and rising unemployment, notably amongst younger individuals, and looking for leverage towards the USA and its allies. This disagreement displays a bigger, ongoing debate concerning the true nature of China’s ambitions, one with vital implications for U.S. coverage.
Many politicians and pundits in the USA argue that China seeks nothing lower than world hegemony—in different phrases, to displace and usurp the USA because the central energy within the worldwide system. As a senior member of then-Sen. Marco Rubio’s workers instructed me in 2022, “Beijing actually, really, does envision a world the place they’re the hegemon and so they create the principles of the street.”
Others contend that China’s ambitions are extra restricted, that it seeks regional hegemony by overturning what it sees as an unnatural state of affairs the place a far-away United States dominates East Asia. Nonetheless, some assert that China is, as a current paper put it, “a established order energy involved with regime stability and is extra inwardly targeted than externally oriented.” Chinese language leaders themselves declare that they search solely to interchange a U.S.-led unipolar order with a extra “equal and orderly” multipolar system.
Every of those interpretations suggests a unique U.S. response, starting from confrontation, to lodging, to cooperation. The issue is that whereas every interpretation captures elements of China’s habits, none absolutely clarify it. A extra convincing clarification is that China doesn’t search world hegemony however fairly what I name world preeminence: a place as a type of “first amongst equals,” whereby its pursuits take priority, with out requiring it to imagine the complete duties of hegemonic management that the USA has borne since World Warfare II.
The notion that China desires to interchange the USA as world hegemon and write the principles of the street for the worldwide system fails for 2 causes. First, China has benefited—and continues to learn—from a lot of these guidelines. Second, China has proven little curiosity in assuming the duties of a hegemon. Though Chinese language officers often complain concerning the U.S. greenback’s function as the worldwide reserve foreign money and the facility it provides the USA over the worldwide monetary system, their proposals give attention to creating a world foreign money, not changing the greenback with the renminbi. Likewise, whereas Beijing chafes on the world presence of the U.S. Navy and is constructing a blue-water fleet doubtlessly able to difficult it, China doesn’t need to tackle the duty of policing world transport lanes.
China additionally criticizes the U.S.-led alliance system, but it surely exhibits no want to offer its personal safety ensures on that scale or to make use of its personal forces to resolve world conflicts. As an alternative, Beijing argues that such hegemonic preparations needn’t exist and needs to be changed by multipolarity, a imaginative and prescient articulated most clearly in Chinese language President Xi Jinping’s 2022 World Safety Initiative. Briefly, whereas China desires to dethrone the USA as world hegemon, it doesn’t wish to take up the function itself.
On the similar time, China’s world actions are far too expansive to be reconciled with a technique of regional hegemony. Its 4 world initiatives on safety, improvement, civilization, and governance have translated into concrete insurance policies, together with expanded police coaching and safety cooperation overseas, a brand new $10 billion fund to assist improvement tasks within the world south, and an increasing slate of convenings and people-to-people exchanges. From its long-standing Discussion board on China-Africa Cooperation to its newer diplomatic engagement within the Persian Gulf and its rising naval actions in Latin America, China has projected each arduous and comfortable energy throughout each area of the world. China could not wish to play world hegemon, however neither is it content material to restrict its ambitions to East Asia alone.
Nor does a give attention to home stability preclude wider ambitions. Regime safety is undoubtedly central to Xi’s calculus, notably given his worry of a Soviet-type collapse. However home stability and increasing worldwide energy aren’t mutually unique; many states, together with the Soviet Union underneath Leonid Brezhnev, have pursued each concurrently. Furthermore, Xi has proven a willingness to danger China’s home stability in pursuit of foreign-policy goals. China’s assist for Russia’s ongoing warfare in Ukraine has jeopardized its relationship with considered one of its largest buying and selling companions, the European Union, at a time when China desperately must protect export markets to bolster home financial progress. Its assertive territorial claims, notably within the South China Sea, have additionally strained financial relationships with neighboring states. The management’s concern for home stability, due to this fact, coexists with an expansive worldwide—and sure, world—agenda.
If China just isn’t in search of world or regional hegemony, nor merely home stability and the preservation of the established order, then what’s its goal? That brings us again to world preeminence. China doesn’t aspire to jot down all the principles of the worldwide system, but it surely does need the facility to revise or veto guidelines that battle with its pursuits. It doesn’t wish to be accountable for offering world safety, but it surely does wish to forestall others from utilizing safety provision in methods it views as infringing on its prerogatives—as in U.S. freedom of navigation operations within the South China Sea. It doesn’t wish to exchange the greenback with the renminbi, but it surely does wish to blunt the USA’ capacity to make use of the greenback and the worldwide monetary system as instruments of coercion or to maintain infinite deficits. What China finally seeks is standing and authority with out duty: the reassurance that its voice should all the time be heard, and heard first, with out obligating it to bear prices that don’t align with narrowly outlined nationwide pursuits.
Beijing seeks this affect globally, not simply in East Asia, and it pursues this by creating leverage with as many international locations as doable. China is now a top-three buying and selling accomplice for 157 international locations and areas, and it’s the largest buying and selling accomplice to greater than 120 of them. Opposite to claims of systematic “debt-trap diplomacy,” these relationships aren’t all the time designed to extract quick political or navy concessions. However China just isn’t shy about utilizing the leverage these preparations create when its pursuits are at stake. It has lengthy completed this to persuade international locations to diplomatically acknowledge China over Taiwan, however it’s more and more utilizing its financial leverage, and the political relationships constructed on it, to stress international locations to place China’s pursuits first. China has used its financial relationships with Hungary and Slovakia to combat the adoption of EU insurance policies directed towards it, mobilized its African companions to win votes on the United Nations and different worldwide organizations, and, extra just lately, tried to rally assist in Latin America towards U.S. commerce coverage. The logic is much less a coherent blueprint for enlargement than an accumulation of leverage, in order that when pursuits collide, third international locations will discover it costlier to oppose Beijing than to oppose anybody else, notably Washington.
Understanding China’s drive for world preeminence has necessary implications for U.S. coverage. It means that methods centered on confrontation and containment are unnecessarily dangerous and that pressuring international locations to decide on between the USA and China is prone to backfire—notably if that stress erodes U.S. diplomatic, financial, or cultural ties. To counter China’s drive for world preeminence, the USA should develop its personal leverage, in order that when one thing necessary is at stake, international locations have extra to lose by upsetting Washington than upsetting Beijing.
For U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, this presents each good and unhealthy information.
The excellent news is that the USA needn’t have interaction within the proxy wars and abroad navy involvement that marked the late Chilly Warfare and devolved into the so-called ceaselessly wars within the Center East. As an alternative, U.S. leverage can give attention to financial and social domains, creating alternatives for U.S. companies and staff. Though the consumption-driven U.S. financial system makes shifting commerce balances harder than in export-oriented China, the USA’ strengths—particularly in high-tech innovation—and the pull of its client market nonetheless give Washington appreciable leverage.
The unhealthy information is that this strategy requires extra engagement with the world’s individuals, not much less—which might run straight counter to the Trump administration’s insurance policies. It requires making the USA as soon as once more enticing to international college students, migrants, and traders. America has built-in benefits over China on this regard: a extra open tradition, the English language, elite academic establishments, and a protracted historical past of integrating newcomers who then forge hyperlinks between the USA and their dwelling international locations. Throwing away the strengths that the USA has constructed up over many years would open the door vast for China.
