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From The End Game (Rush Doshi, 2021) pp 264, 267-71

This chapter and the one that succeeds it discuss China’s global expansion. They follow the structure of previous chapters that outlined Chinese grand strategies of blunting and building. This chapter focuses on how China’s perception of accelerating American decline following Brexit, Trump, and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 led to strategic adjustment. This chapter then explores the end goals of this new global phase of Chinese grand strategy, which appear to be to catch up and surpass the United States in a competition for global leadership. The next chapter explores the political, economic, and military ways and means China has wielded to achieve these objectives. It demonstrates that China is now consciously targeting the underpinnings of what it considers to be US hegemony, hoping to blunt American global order while building the foundations for China’s own order. Together, this chapter and the next one paint a picture of what Chinese order might look like globally.

That Chinese order involves seizing the opportunities of the “great changes unseen in a century” and displacing the United States as the world’s leading state. To do so, Beijing would seek to weaken the forms of control supporting American global order while strengthening those forms of control supporting a Chinese alternative. Politically, Beijing would project leadership over global governance and international institutions, advance autocratic norms at the expense of liberal ones, and split American alliances in Europe and Asia. Economically, it would weaken the financial advantages that underwrite US hegemony and seize the commanding heights of the “fourth industrial revolution” from artificial intelligence to quantum computing while the United States deindustrializes. Militarily, the PLA would field a world-class force with bases around the world that could defend China’s interests in most regions and even in new domains. Taken together, China would erect a “zone of super-ordinate influence” in its home region and “partial hegemony” across the developing countries tied to its Belt and Road Initiative — and perhaps parts of the developed world too, a vision some Chinese popular writers describe using Mao’s revolutionary guidance to “surround the cities from the countryside”.

The fact that aspects of China’s global ambitions and strategy are visible in high-level speeches is strong evidence that China’s ambitions are not limited to Taiwan or to dominating the Indo-Pacific. The “struggle for mastery,’ once confined to Asia, is now over the global order and its future.

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A month after that major address, Xi attended the 2017 Ambassadorial Conference.’* These gatherings, which involve the entire foreign policy apparatus and all of China’s overseas ambassadors, have historically been used to adjust China’s strategy, and this speech did the same. In it, Xi finally debuted the very concept that Yang Jiechi had subtly introduced after Trump’s election. “Looking at the world today,” he declared, “we are facing great changes unseen in a century.” This marked a major shift in China’s view of the United States and China’s own grand strategy, and the speech exuded a sense of confidence. “The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has shown unprecedented bright prospects,” Xi noted, and as long as China stayed the course, “it will increasingly approach the center of the world stage.””’ In some areas, Xi’s speech subtly intensified language from the Party Congress address. “The international structure has become increasingly balanced, and this general international trend has become irreversible’ — phrases stronger than he or his predecessors had used and a sign that strategy was changing.”What did this mean? At his 2018 Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference, only the sixth ever held in China’s history, Xi explained: “At present, China is in the best development period since modern times, and the world is in a state of great changes not seen in one hundred years, and these two [trends] are simultaneously interwoven and mutually interacting.” To Xi, China’s global rise and the apparent decline of the West were trends that reinforced each other.

Xi’s language on American decline amid the “great changes unseen in a century was often oblique, but top Chinese scholars and semi-official commentaries were far more candid. They indicated that the key “great change” was unquestionably the decline of the United States and the West relative to China. Critically, these sources followed Xi’s lead and explicitly linked the “great change” with the same variable that shaped decades of China’s own grand strategy: the international balance of forces. As the famous Chinese international relations scholar Zhu Feng wrote, “the ‘great change’ in ‘great changes unseen in a century’ is an acceleration in the redistribution of power among nations within the international structure.”’ A commentary posted online at the Study Times argued that ‘the essence of the great changes is that the power balance among major inter national actors has undergone major changes” that “triggered a major reshuffling of the international structure and a major adjustment to international order.”

Zhang Yuyan, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, wrote, “the most critical variable of the great changes unseen in a century lies in the international balance of power among the major countries.’” Writing more expansively, Duqing Hao from the Central Party School argued that all “the great changes in world history” have included “major changes in the international balance of power among the major international actors.”

But what was the cause of this change in power? These scholars argue it was not only China’s rise but also the West’s fall, which was made clear by a new trifecta of shocking and discontinuous events that began with Brexit and Trump’s election and was capped off by the West’s disastrous response to COVID-19. In an essay on the “great changes,” Wu Xinbo argues that the United States was “spiritually exhausted, physically weak, and could no longer carry the world” Zhu Feng from Nanjing University argued that, as “Western countries experience serious domestic contradictions” due to populism, “the East rises and the West falls.”* Central Party School figures like Luo Jianbo tasked in part with standardizing and disseminating Party concepts wrote that the “great changes unseen in a century” were a “grand strategic judgment” and noted that they marked the end of the “Atlantic era” in global politics.” Gao Zugui, a dean at the Central Party School and deputy director of its Institute for International Strategy, proclaimed, “The willingness, determination, and ability of the United States to control the regional and international situation alone have declined significantly.”°

Behind these bold pronouncements stood thousands of papers on Western decline from China’s top academics. The papers showcase China’s own biases, including a tendency to focus on the “base structure” of the economy which flows from Marxist theory, to see diversity as weakness given China’s relative homogeneity, and to see information flows as dangerous given China’s own illiberalism. Most papers tell a similar if simplistic causal story: the West’s forty-year experiment with “neoliberal” economic policies exacerbated economic inequality and ethnic strife, which in turn produced populist waves that paralyzed the state — all amplified by a freewheeling Western information environment. These are not the views of a handful of obscure experts, but so common as to be consensus. Xi Jinping may never tell this story in public, but it is undoubtedly one he and his fellow Party elites believe about the United States — and it is why they are now emboldened.

A brief tour of China’s discourse on American decline can be instructive. The story often begins with economic inequality. After the 1970s, writes Deputy Dean at Beijing Foreign Studies University Xie Tao, “neoliberalism was in the dominant position” and governments put “economic freedom first, advocated tax cuts, and paid less attention to social inequality.” Jin Canrong, a well-known professor and dean at Renmin University, argued this “neoliberalism” wave began with the “Thatcher Revolution in 1979 and the Reagan Revolution in 1980” and {ed to “a division between the rich and poor.” The economic structure changed too. Nie Wenjuan, deputy director of the Institute of International Relations at China Foreign Affairs University, argued that, “With its democratic society, the US is unable to prevent financial capitalism from swelling, or to take dramatic action against vested interests,’ which causes stagnation and inequality. Wu Baiyi, an America Institute director at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, emphasized these forces “hollowed out” the US economy, with success in the technology and financial services industries coming at the expense of exports and traditional industry.**

From China’s perspective, when the 2008 Global Financial Crisis hit, the bill for these trends came due, and populism and ethnic strife increased over the next several years, paralyzing Western states. As one paper from the MFA connected think tank China Institute for International Studies (CIIS) argued, ‘the populism that is now emerging in Europe and America reflects the intensification of the contradiction between the middle and lower classes vs. the upper classes” that the Global Financial Crisis produced.** Ideological extremism also intensified. As Jin Canrong argued, “in the field of ideas, the trend of extremist ideas has continued to expand,’ with “populism and racism becoming more open and influential.”°° Zhu Feng similarly argued that “white nationalism in the United States and Europe is becoming increasingly active.’ Technology amplified all these trends. An authoritative commentary on Xi’s 2017 National Security Work Forum cited Western reports to argue that “the most basic pillars of the Western world order are weakening. In the ‘post-truth’ era, ‘liberal Democracies’ are vulnerable to misinformation.”*® The “information explosion” as causing “social tearing,’ noted one Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS) scholar, all amplified by algorithms, targeted advertising, and disinformation that “accelerate the spread of global populism/nationalism” and cause ‘serious polarization.” Jin Canrong argued that the culmination of these trends was illiberalism and dysfunction: “the polarization of the rich and the poor leads to widespread dissatisfaction in the lower and middle classes. The dissatisfaction in the lower and middle classes will surely brew populist politics on the left and right. Populist politics will inevitably be used by strong men. This is an inevitable result.” Chinese scholars point to the Tea Party movement in 2009, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and particularly Brexit and Trump in 2016 as evidence of populism’s hold.

When the West struggled to handle COVID-19 in 2020, these diagnoses were seen to have been vindicated. Xi Jinping declared that year that “this new Coronavirus epidemic” was “a big test for the governance system and governance Capabilities” worldwide.” Virtually all Chinese writers on the subject believed China had passed the test and the West had largely failed it. One article published on the Ministry of Finance and Commerce website argued, “the epidemic shows that the United States and Western countries are increasingly unable to carry out institutional reforms and adjustments, and are caught in a political stalemate from which they cannot be extricated.’* Similarly, the editor of a major CASS journal on American studies argued, “The shortcomings of the US federal government’s bureaucratization and ‘small government’ tendency over the past half century have been very evident in this major public health crisis response,’ and that dysfunction would reproduce “political radicalization.” A professor at the Central Party School noted, with apparent pleasure, that COVID-19 would bolster Western nationalism and further damage the liberal order. “Before the COVID-19 outbreak, nationalism had become a trend [supporting China’s] rejuvenation. The Trump administration and Brexit delivered star performances,’ he argued, and COVID-19 would “further strengthen” these in ways that benefited China.** According to Wu Baiyi, the economic calamity, social unrest, and poor COVID-19 response meant that “the country that has bragged about being ‘a light on a hill’ has sunk into sustained social unrest. … Chaos and division are suffocating the people.’ Accordingly, a former vice president of the Central Party School argued, the pandemic would “certainly promote the further development of great changes unseen in a century.’*” Yuan Peng argued that America’s poor response to COVID-19 “is a blow to America’s soft and hard power, and America’s international influence has suffered a serious decline.”

Many see this Western institutional decline as largely intractable and believe that the West is unlikely to resolve it promptly. A focus on “so-called ‘postmaterialist values, ” noted Xie Tao, had produced a politics that is “more about self-expression and a demand for respect rather than traditional economic redistribution,’ complicating efforts to address the structural roots of inequality, Similarly, a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University argued the “absorption of these two forces [left-wing and right-wing populism] by the US political system may not be solved by a single election vote.” Some believe dysfunction will prove long-term. “The cognitive roots of populism will exist for along time, speculated a paper published by the MFA-connected CIIS.” Xie Tao believed this populist phase “may continue for some time — ten or twenty years.” partisan dysfunction was likely to accompany populism. As Jin Canrong put in an article posted to the Ministry of Defense website, “the contradictions between the two parties in the United States are also very deep.” Indeed, Nie Wenj a professor at China Foreign Affairs University, argued that “the pandemic has added urgency [for reform], but American politicians appear not to have found the answers.” Even with a change in administration, she argued, the United States was likely to engage in only “tinkering” around its structural problems.” Wu Baiyi argued that the United States faced a great “American disease” that he likened to the “Dutch disease” and “Latin American disease” used to describe other dysfunctional states. Observers could no longer “cherish fantasies about the US capacity for self-rectification”: the economic pie was shrinking, “general manufacturing” had “withered,” good jobs were rarer, exports were falling, and the economy was tilted toward technology and financial services—all of which increased inequality while “narrowing channels for upward mobility. Political institutions were failing too: “No matter whether the public support for a certain bill is 30 percent or 100 percent, it has no influence on whether it passes or fails” because of polarization, so no progress is made on the sources of US dysfunction. He argued this created “a vicious circle” where “wide gaps in American society keep widening, the room for institutional compromise keeps shrinking and national decision-making drifts further and further away from the ‘people first’ principle.”

One of the “megatrends” that emerged from this state of affairs, noted Jin Canrong, was the end of the United States as the sole superpower. Instead, he argued that “the world structure is changing from one superpower, many great powers to two superpowers, many great powers.”*° This was a major declaration, since China had for decades perceived a world in which the United States was the sole superpower as a key factor shaping its grand strategy. Not only had that now changed, but it seemed just as plausible to elites that given their confidence in American decline, the world could eventually return to “one superpower, many great powers” — this time with China as the sole superpower. There are many who see the ends of its global grand strategy in such terms.