The Only Book to Read to Understand China’s Quest for World Domination
A new world order is emerging and one country in particular is vying to control it.
If you guessed China you would be correct.
Historically, the world has undergone myriad changes. At one point the Netherlands was the global world power. It’s hard to imagine today but the teeny tiny northern Europe country once ruled the seas and the global economy.
Massive technological, social, political, and economic challenges are on the horizon. This means the global world order is once again up for grabs. The United States is the current incumbent but China is positioning itself to have a say in how the rest of the 21st century plays out.
A Chinese-led world order isn’t inherently a bad thing. But if you’re a freedom-loving Westerner, it isn’t necessarily a good thing either.
China is a hybrid communist-capitalist state. It invests in companies on the front lines of innovation but those companies are state-owned and fall under the purview of the Chinese Communist Party.
It leads the world in surveillance and censorship. Having an autocratic state take the reigns of global governance would not only weaken the U.S.-built system of democratic values as it currently exists but replace it with undemocratic norms in the process.
China’s grand strategy for world domination is laid out in The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi. This essay is a summary of that work, highlighting the key points that make a Chinese world order likely if not inevitable.
What is grand strategy?
According to Doshi, grand strategy is defined as:
A state’s theory of how it can achieve its strategic objectives that are intentional, coordinated, and implemented across multiple means of statecraft–military, economic, and political. (Doshi, Rush. The Long Game. 6.)
In China, the Chinese Communist Party — or CCP — is the primary instrument for coordinating grand strategic objectives. Instead of being bogged down by politics, the CCP exists above the state.
Compared to the United States, this makes it easier for China to implement policies, particularly foreign policy. China doesn’t have to deal with the bureaucratic burden of administering a large government. If someone disagrees with the party’s platform, they’re simply removed. It’s not democratic by any means but it is simple and efficient.
One thing Doshi notes in the book that is particularly salient with regard to US-China relations is that:
Grand strategies rest on perceptions of power and threat. (Doshi, Rush. The Long Game. 19.)
China’s execution of its grand strategy to replace the United States as the head of the global order has taken place over several decades. It started with an effort to blunt American power before building a competing alternative to American governance in Asia.
These shifts were based on how Beijing perceived Washington. When it deduced America was no longer a threat it became more assertive in how it approached regional and global leadership.
China as a viable competitor to U.S. hegemony is worth paying attention to because China has a high level of coordination that the United States does not. Doshi argues that this is needed to achieve grand strategic goals and it makes sense. It’s much easier to allocate resources and implement policies that are centralized than it is to coordinate divergent and often competing objectives in a democratic system.
Looking at China’s recent strategic shifts it is evident China is deploying a grand strategy to displace America as the de facto leader of the world order.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, China just wanted to be left alone.
Doshi argues a “traumatic trifecta” moved China from an inwardly focused country to one that was concerned about the threat posed by the United States. The trifecta included three key events: Tiananmen Square, the Gulf War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When the Soviet Union was no longer a key player in the global order China began developing a new grand strategy. The goal of this new strategy was to blunt American military, political, and economic leverage in order to prevent it from containing China as it did with the Soviet Union.
The purpose of this grand strategy was to survive the United States, not necessarily to defeat it.
Evidence of this is seen in how China invested in its military. It had the ability to invest in blue-water capabilities — like building aircraft carriers — but chose not to. Instead, it invested in defensive activities like sea denial. It didn’t want to compete with the United States militarily, it just wanted to make it harder for the U.S. ships to navigate around Chinese territory.
China also joined international organizations to make it harder for the United States to exert political or economic leverage. Doshi notes that:
China joined and stalled regional organizations to blunt American order-building and create security for itself. (Doshi, Rush. The Long Game. 103.)
As it did militarily, China’s goal was to make it hard to have a say in regional affairs. By joining regional organizations, China could keep an eye on Washington.
China’s overall strategy was to engage with its neighbors through peripheral diplomacy. Doshi writes:
The purpose of China’s peripheral diplomacy…was not to build China-led order in the region but to dissuade its neighbors from joining with the United States to encircle China. (Doshi, Rush. The Long Game. 109.)
It’s evident that up until 2008 China was not actively trying to challenge the United States. It simply wanted to carve out a space for itself in Asia and to be left alone.
But thanks to the 2008 Financial Crisis, Beijing realized it had an opportunity to start building more capacity in Asia.
China’s strategy changed after 2008. Following the 2008 Financial Crisis, China began to see the United States as a weakening global power. This prompted Beijing to shift from a blunting strategy to a more assertive strategy to build capacity for itself in regional affairs.
As mentioned above, grand strategy is predicated on perceptions. We’ve been so embroiled by the political and economic fallout here in the United States that many leaders failed to see how China responded to our own hubris. Doshi notes that leaders in Beijing saw the financial crisis not just as something that weakened the United States, but highlighted the flaws in America’s version of capitalism too.
This marked a shift in China’s grand strategy. Instead of trying to keep the United States out of its periphery, it began to actively develop a leading role for itself in Asia. China wanted Asian countries to start looking to Beijing for support — not Washington.
Under a building strategy, China took a greater effort to participate in international institutions and shape the rules that governed the world order. One of the core ways it has been doing this is by creating economic institutionalization via its Belt and Road Initiative. This effort makes other countries more dependent on China, giving Beijing greater flexibility to exert more influence across the region.
Militarily, China shifted its force posture from denying power to projecting power. It invested in aircraft carriers and began building overseas bases. These are investments China decided to make only after it deduced the United States no longer posed a threat it once did.
What’s important to note about China’s shift to project more power is that it did so through dual-use projects. The Belt and Road Initiative is as much an economic endeavor as it is a military one. Commercial ports aren’t merely designed for economic activities, they are built with the intention of harboring a blue-water fleet in the near future.
This strategy doesn’t just blunt American power, it neutralizes it. Chinese infrastructure projects won’t be compatible with American projects and that is a legitimate problem for sustaining American hegemony. Huawei’s development of 5G capabilities across the Eurasian continent is a great example of this.
In the new world order countries will have to choose between continuing to participate in the American-led system or jumping ship to whatever version of the world China creates. In doing so the alliance system the United States has spent decades building will become fragmented. The realization that this is an inevitable outcome of Chinese infrastructure projects is evidence it is developing a broader grand strategy that will eventually go beyond Asia.
Now China sees it has a shot at world domination.
China’s strategy shifted again in 2017. Brexit, Trump’s election, and the West’s response to the COVID pandemic signaled that America isn’t just weak — it’s in decline. By Beijing’s standards America is no longer a dominant superpower and the Western order it built is fraying at the seams.
China has seen recent events as a window of opportunity to achieve a much grander goal: national rejuvenation by 2049. This date has tremendous significance for China. It represents the centennial of Mao Zedong’s founding of the People’s Republic of China.
According to Doshi, texts from party leaders suggest that rejuvenation is a euphemism that refers to displacing the United States as the world leader. Its grand strategy has now shifted from constraining the United States to seizing the initiative to replace it.
This begs the obvious question: what would a Chinese world order look like?
World orders are basically the imposition of one’s values and norms on other, weaker countries. The current world order is governed by values aligned with democracy, human rights, and free markets. China would replace those values with its own. According to Doshi, China sees fundamental flaws in America’s values:
Diversity as a weakness…information flows as dangerous…and “neoliberal” economic policies exacerbat[ing] economic inequality and ethnic strife. (Doshi, Rush. The Long Game. 268.)
It would replace democratic values with its own values of centralized control, party loyalty, surveillance, and censorship. If it is true that America has failed, Beijing believes these values would create a more equitable alternative.
China anticipates American resistance, as it should. Superpowers aren’t keen to relinquish their power without a fight.
To prepare for this China has already started building the foundation for hegemonic rule. It’s doing this by seizing the initiative of the “fourth industrial revolution.” It’s investing in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and establishing an alternative financial system, including a digital currency. If it successfully executes this strategy it could allow China to leapfrog past the United States altogether.
Final takeaway.
Civilizations rise and fall. China is one of the oldest civilizations in human history. It’s hubris to think America is entitled to hegemony in perpetuity.
This is something we in the West fail to acknowledge. China isn’t just looking toward world domination. It is consolidating the resources of the state to achieve an existential ambition.
For this reason, China should be feared. It’s not just what it is setting out to accomplish but why.
Beijing sees an unprecedented opportunity and they aren’t throwing away their shot. The West seems to be decaying from within. Here in the United States, we have unprecedented levels of debt, income inequality, and a growing housing problem. From China’s vantage point, this is a sign of failure.
Doshi wraps up the book by offering a solution to how the United States can respond to the challenge of a rising China. He advocates for taking a page right out of Beijing’s playbook: blunt Chinese power and build the foundations for continued U.S. power projection.
The logic underpinning this recommendation is the belief that America is an open system. Doshi argues that open systems attract capital and talent while closed, autocratic systems like China’s repel it.
That logic is noble but flawed.
In the book, Doshi cites that China could catch up to the United States in economic size by 2028. By 2030, China aspires to have dominance in AI. Its system of state-owned enterprises more efficiently allocates capital, giving it a significant advantage over the United States.
We take democracy for granted. We assume it’s a better system because it gave us a few decades of prosperity. It is becoming increasingly evident that our prosperity has come at a cost.
Our capitalist financial system may generate tremendous wealth but it is rotting our democracy from within. Our politicians are in the pockets of Wall Street while our citizens are captive audiences of Silicon Valley.
2049 might seem like a long way off but it will be here before you know it. Whether you like the idea of an autocratic global order or not, the fact that China has specific goals that are measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely makes it likely they’ll achieve their objectives. Their ability to plan and execute in and of itself should be cause for concern.
What do we have here in the West? Unless you’re into foreign policy no one is talking about the rising threat posed by China. Socially, there isn’t even a central set of values unifying us together anymore.
The absence of this dialogue in our civil discourse could be the greatest threat of all.
The book is The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. If you want to understand how we got to where we’re at in US-China relations — and more importantly where we’re heading — give this book a read.
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