China

In 1820, China produced approximately one-third of the world’s GDP. By 1950, after a century of foreign invasion, civil war, and ideological upheaval, that share had fallen to roughly 5%. Today it has climbed back above 18%—and by purchasing power parity, China’s economy is already the world’s largest. This trajectory shapes everything Beijing does and everything the world must reckon with: China is not rising so much as returning, and the psychological and strategic implications of return are fundamentally different from those of emergence. A nation that believes it is reclaiming a position stolen by historical injustice operates with a sense of entitlement and urgency that no amount of Western reassurance can easily defuse.

Understanding China requires abandoning several comfortable simplifications. China is not a nation-state in the European sense—it is a civilization-state, a political entity organized around cultural continuity rather than ethnic homogeneity or democratic consent. It is not simply an authoritarian regime pursuing power—it is a system that sees its own survival as inseparable from the restoration of Chinese centrality in Asia. And it is not merely competing with the united-states—it is attempting to restructure the regional and global order to reflect a hierarchy that Beijing considers natural and that two centuries of Western dominance temporarily disrupted.

Geographic Foundations¶

The Fertile Core¶

China’s heartland is defined by its great rivers, which created the agricultural surplus that sustained one of history’s most enduring civilizations:

The Yellow River (Huang He), flowing 5,464 kilometers through the North China Plain, cradled Chinese civilization from the Shang dynasty onward. Its catastrophic floods—the river has changed course dramatically at least twenty-six times in recorded history, killing millions—gave rise to the hydraulic engineering tradition that demanded centralized authority. The need to manage the Yellow River is one origin of China’s deep-rooted preference for strong central government: states that could mobilize massive labor forces for flood control survived; those that could not were destroyed.

The Yangtze River, China’s longest at 6,300 kilometers, divides the wheat-growing north from the rice-growing south and carries more freight than the Mississippi and Rhine combined. The Yangtze Delta—encompassing Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Suzhou—generates approximately $3 trillion in annual GDP, rivaling the output of France. Control of the Yangtze has decided Chinese civil wars for millennia; today it remains the economic spine of the country.

The Pearl River Delta in the south—Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Hong Kong, Macau—is the manufacturing heart of the global economy. This region alone exports more than most countries produce. Shenzhen, a fishing village of 30,000 in 1980, now has a population exceeding 17 million and a GDP larger than Sweden’s. The Pearl River Delta’s transformation is perhaps the most dramatic urbanization in human history.

These three river systems and their coastal plains contain the overwhelming majority of China’s 1.4 billion people, its industrial capacity, and its wealth. Approximately 94% of the population lives on the eastern 43% of the territory. This concentration creates both extraordinary productive power and a critical vulnerability: China’s economic core is within range of naval and air power projected from the Pacific.

The Periphery as Buffer¶

Surrounding the Han Chinese core are vast territories that comprise over 60% of China’s landmass but only about 6% of its population. These regions are not incidental to Chinese strategy—they are essential to it:

Tibet (the Xizang Autonomous Region) sits atop the Tibetan Plateau, averaging 4,500 meters in elevation, earning its designation as “the roof of the world.” Tibet’s strategic significance far exceeds its sparse population of 3.6 million. The plateau is the source of Asia’s greatest rivers—the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Indus, and Salween—meaning China controls the headwaters of rivers on which approximately 2 billion people depend for drinking water, irrigation, and hydropower. Tibet also provides a 2,400-kilometer buffer against india, pushing China’s defensive perimeter hundreds of kilometers south of its population centers. China’s refusal to entertain Tibetan autonomy is not merely authoritarian stubbornness—it is a calculation that losing Tibet would expose the Chinese heartland from the southwest and surrender control over Asia’s water supply.

Xinjiang (“New Frontier”) connects China to Central Asia and, through the Karakoram Highway, to pakistan. Its Uyghur population of approximately 12 million—Turkic, Muslim, and culturally distinct from the Han majority—has resisted Chinese assimilation, producing periodic unrest that Beijing has met with extraordinary repression, including mass internment estimated to have affected over one million people. Xinjiang’s strategic importance lies in its position as the overland gateway to the Heartland: the Belt and Road Initiative’s overland routes pass through Xinjiang, and the region contains significant oil, natural gas, and mineral resources. A destabilized or independent Xinjiang would sever China’s land connections to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

Manchuria (China’s northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) was the industrial base developed by Japanese occupation (1931-1945) and Soviet-influenced industrialization, now a rust belt of declining heavy industry and shrinking population. It borders both russia and north-korea, making it a strategic corridor that any conflict on the Korean Peninsula would immediately affect. Manchuria’s decline—population has dropped by roughly 11 million since 2010—represents one of China’s most stubborn domestic challenges.

Inner Mongolia stretches across 1.2 million square kilometers of grassland, desert, and mining towns along the Russian and Mongolian borders—a northern shield that has historically separated the Chinese agricultural world from the nomadic steppe.

Beijing treats these peripheral regions as non-negotiable parts of Chinese territory not because of sentiment but because each serves a specific strategic function: buffer, resource base, or transit corridor. The intensity of Chinese resistance to separatism in Tibet and Xinjiang makes sense only when understood in these geographic terms.

The Malacca Dilemma¶

China’s most consequential geographic vulnerability has a name: the Malacca Dilemma, a term coined by President Hu Jintao in 2003. Approximately 80% of China’s oil imports—and a vast share of its natural gas and raw material imports—transit the Strait of Malacca, a waterway 800 kilometers long but only 2.8 kilometers wide at its narrowest point, flanked by Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. The US Navy’s Fifth and Seventh Fleets could close this strait in hours.

This single geographic fact drives an extraordinary range of Chinese strategic behavior:

The Belt and Road Initiative’s overland corridors—through Central Asia, through Pakistan (the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, $62 billion), through Myanmar (the Kyaukphyu port and pipeline)—are, at their core, attempts to build energy and trade routes that bypass the Malacca chokepoint. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor connects Xinjiang to the deep-water port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, providing potential access to Persian Gulf energy that avoids the Strait of Malacca entirely. The Myanmar pipeline, operational since 2017, carries crude oil from the Bay of Bengal to Kunming, providing an alternative to the maritime route through the Strait.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy’s expansion—from a coastal defense force to the world’s largest navy by vessel count (over 370 ships)—is fundamentally about securing the maritime approaches through which China’s economic lifeblood flows. The construction of artificial islands in the south-china-sea—seven features in the Spratly Islands fortified with airstrips, radar systems, and anti-ship missile batteries—extends Chinese military reach over the waters through which that trade passes.

Even China’s aggressive pursuit of renewable energy and electric vehicle technology has a strategic dimension: a China powered by domestic solar, wind, and nuclear energy is a China less vulnerable to maritime energy blockade. The energy-transition is, for Beijing, partly a national security project.

The Malacca Dilemma is to Chinese strategy what the flat North European Plain is to Russian strategy: the geographic fact that explains the most seemingly disparate policies.

The First Island Chain¶

China’s access to the open Pacific is blocked by what strategists call the first-island-chain—an arc of territory running from the Kuril Islands through Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Philippines, and down to Borneo. Every link in this chain is either a US ally, a US partner, or a territory the United States has committed to defend.

Taiwan sits at the center of this chain, and its strategic significance extends far beyond symbolism. Taiwan bisects the chain at its midpoint; a China that controls Taiwan gains direct access to the deep waters of the western Pacific, breaking through the barrier that currently confines the PLA Navy to enclosed or semi-enclosed seas. Conversely, a Taiwan aligned with the United States (as it currently is, de facto) serves as an unsinkable aircraft carrier positioned 130 kilometers off the Chinese coast—close enough to observe, constrain, and in wartime interdict Chinese naval operations.

This is why Taiwan is not merely a question of national sentiment for Beijing, though it is that too. It is the geographic key to Chinese maritime strategy. Without Taiwan, China remains a continental power with limited Pacific access. With Taiwan, it becomes a Pacific power capable of projecting force into the open ocean.

Historical Layers¶

The Tributary System and Chinese Centrality¶

For roughly two thousand years—from the Han dynasty (206 BCE) through the Qing (1644-1912)—China organized its foreign relations around the tributary system, in which neighboring states acknowledged Chinese cultural superiority and political preeminence in exchange for trade access, diplomatic recognition, and security guarantees. Korea, Vietnam, the Ryukyu Kingdom, Burma, and dozens of Central and Southeast Asian polities participated in this system, sending tribute missions to the Chinese emperor and receiving in return the legitimacy that Chinese recognition conferred.

This was not an empire in the European colonial sense—China generally did not seek to administer these territories directly. It was a hierarchical order in which China sat at the center and other states occupied positions of graduated subordination. The Chinese name for China—中国, Zhōngguó, literally “the Central Kingdom” or “the Middle Kingdom”—encodes this worldview.

The relevance for contemporary geopolitics is direct. When Chinese leaders speak of “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” they are referencing not merely economic development but the restoration of a regional order in which China’s centrality is acknowledged. This does not necessarily mean the reimposition of the tributary system in its historical form, but it implies a hierarchical regional order in which smaller states defer to Chinese preferences on matters Beijing considers important—an expectation that sits uneasily with the Westphalian principle of sovereign equality on which the current international system is nominally based.

The Century of Humiliation¶

From the First Opium War (1839-1842) to the Communist victory (1949), China experienced what it calls the “century of humiliation” (百年耻辱, bǎinián chǐrǔ)—a period of foreign invasion, unequal treaties, territorial dismemberment, and internal collapse that reversed two millennia of regional preeminence.

The scale of the catastrophe was staggering. Britain forced opium on China and extracted Hong Kong in 1842. France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States carved out spheres of influence, extraterritorial concessions, and treaty ports where Chinese law did not apply. Japan seized Taiwan in 1895, annexed Korea in 1910, invaded Manchuria in 1931, and occupied much of eastern China from 1937 to 1945—a war that killed approximately 14-20 million Chinese. The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), partly triggered by the disruptions of Western imperialism, killed an estimated 20-30 million people, making it the deadliest civil war in human history.

This history is not mere background. It is actively instrumentalized by the Chinese Communist Party to justify one-party rule (the party “saved” China from humiliation), to explain military modernization (never again will China be too weak to resist foreign aggression), and to frame contemporary disputes (Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Hong Kong are “lost territories” to be reclaimed). Every Chinese schoolchild studies the century of humiliation. The National Museum in Beijing begins its exhibits with the Opium Wars. When Chinese officials respond to Western criticism of domestic policy with accusations of “interference in internal affairs,” they are invoking a sensitivity rooted in 110 years of having their internal affairs violently determined by outsiders.

Revolution, Reform, and the Party-State¶

Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949 reunified mainland China under a single authority for the first time since the Qing dynasty’s disintegration. The People’s Republic fought the United States to a standstill in Korea (1950-1953), developed nuclear weapons (first test 1964), and restored Chinese sovereignty over most of its claimed territory. It also produced catastrophic suffering: the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) caused a famine that killed an estimated 15-45 million people; the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) destroyed much of China’s intellectual and cultural heritage and killed an estimated 1-2 million.

Deng Xiaoping’s reforms after 1978 redirected the party-state toward economic development with a pragmatism captured in his famous remark: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” The formula—market mechanisms directed by state planning, foreign investment channeled through special economic zones, export-oriented manufacturing combined with infrastructure investment—produced growth averaging nearly 10% annually for three decades. Between 1978 and 2020, approximately 800 million Chinese were lifted out of extreme poverty, the most dramatic improvement in material living standards in human history.

Under Xi Jinping (in power since 2012), the pendulum has swung back toward centralized control. Xi has consolidated personal authority to a degree not seen since Mao, abolished presidential term limits, reasserted party control over the private sector, intensified ideological campaigns, and pursued a more assertive foreign policy. The question of whether Xi’s centralization strengthens or weakens China is one of the most consequential debates in contemporary geopolitics.

Strategic Culture¶

The Logic of Defensive Expansionism¶

Western analysts have long debated whether Chinese strategy is fundamentally defensive or offensive. The question may be poorly framed. Chinese strategic culture operates on a logic that might be called defensive expansionism: the conviction that China’s security requires control or influence over a wide periphery, and that failure to establish this control invites the kind of predation that the century of humiliation demonstrated.

From Beijing’s perspective, the island-building in the south-china-sea is not aggression but the fortification of China’s maritime frontier. The militarization of the taiwan-strait is not expansionism but preparation to recover sovereign territory. The Belt and Road Initiative is not neo-imperialism but the construction of economic connections that reduce China’s vulnerability to blockade. Each action, viewed from Beijing, is defensive. Viewed from Manila, Hanoi, Tokyo, or Washington, it looks like the systematic expansion of Chinese power at the expense of neighbors and the international order.

This ambiguity is not accidental—it is structural. A great power that genuinely feels insecure will take actions to enhance its security that genuinely threaten others, who will respond in ways that confirm the original insecurity. The security dilemma is not a theoretical abstraction in the Western Pacific; it is the daily reality of military and diplomatic interaction.

Patience and the Long Horizon¶

Deng Xiaoping’s instruction to “hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead” (韬光养晦, tāoguāng yǎnghuì) guided Chinese foreign policy from the 1980s through approximately 2010. The strategy was to avoid premature confrontation with the United States while building the comprehensive national power—economic, military, technological, diplomatic—that would eventually allow China to operate from a position of strength.

Under Xi Jinping, the “hiding” phase appears to have ended, replaced by what Chinese officials call “striving for achievement” (奋发有为, fènfā yǒuwéi). Yet patience remains embedded in Chinese strategic culture. Beijing’s approach to Taiwan—maintaining pressure, building capabilities, waiting for favorable circumstances rather than forcing the issue—reflects a willingness to think in decades that most democratic governments cannot match. The gradual salami-slicing of contested waters in the South China Sea—each individual step too small to justify a military response, but cumulatively transformative—demonstrates the same patience applied tactically.

This does not mean that patience is infinite. Demographic pressures (discussed below), economic deceleration, and political considerations could compress the timeline. But any assessment of Chinese strategic behavior that assumes Western-style impatience will systematically misjudge Beijing’s actions.

The Military Transformation¶

The People’s Liberation Army has undergone the most rapid military modernization in modern history. In two decades, China has transformed a bloated, outdated force designed for continental defense into a technologically sophisticated military capable of challenging American dominance in the Western Pacific.

The PLA Navy (PLAN) now operates over 370 vessels—numerically the world’s largest fleet, surpassing the US Navy’s approximately 290 deployable battle force ships. The fleet includes three aircraft carriers (the Shandong, the Fujian with electromagnetic catapults comparable to American technology, and the older Liaoning), approximately 60 submarines (including nuclear ballistic missile submarines capable of second-strike deterrence), and a rapidly growing fleet of advanced destroyers and frigates equipped with phased-array radar and long-range anti-ship missiles. China launches more naval tonnage annually than the entire Royal Navy displaces.

The PLA Rocket Force fields the world’s largest and most diverse arsenal of land-based missiles. The DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile—the so-called “carrier killer”—can strike moving vessels at ranges exceeding 1,500 kilometers, threatening the aircraft carriers on which American power projection in the Pacific depends. The DF-26 extends this range to 4,000 kilometers, covering Guam. The DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, carrying multiple independently targetable warheads, ensures nuclear deterrence against any adversary. China’s nuclear arsenal has expanded from an estimated 200 warheads in 2019 to a projected 1,000 by 2030—a buildup that, while still smaller than the American or Russian arsenals, transforms China from a minimum deterrent to a major nuclear power.

Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) represents the operational concept unifying these capabilities. The goal is not to match the US Navy ship-for-ship across the global oceans but to make American military intervention within the first-island-chain so costly—in aircraft carriers sunk, aircraft shot down, bases destroyed—that Washington calculates the price of defending Taiwan or the Philippines as prohibitive. The dense network of land-based missiles, submarines, aircraft, and sensors that China has deployed creates what military planners call a “killing zone” extending hundreds of kilometers into the Western Pacific. Whether this network would actually defeat American forces is debatable; that it would impose enormous costs is not.

Economic Power and Vulnerability¶

The Growth Model Under Stress¶

China’s economic model—export-oriented manufacturing, massive infrastructure investment, state-directed industrial policy, and financial repression (keeping interest rates low to channel cheap credit to investment)—delivered transformative growth but now faces structural headwinds:

Debt: Total debt has risen to approximately 300% of GDP, with local government and property sector debt particularly concerning. The real estate sector, which at its peak accounted for roughly 29% of GDP (including construction and related industries), entered a prolonged crisis beginning in 2021 with the near-collapse of Evergrande. Property prices in many cities have fallen 15-30% from their peaks. Since Chinese household wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in real estate (estimated at 70% of total household assets), this decline has crushed consumer confidence.

Demographics: China’s population peaked in 2022 and is now declining—a trajectory that the UN projects will reduce it from 1.4 billion to approximately 1 billion by 2080. The working-age population is already shrinking by several million per year. The fertility rate has collapsed to approximately 1.0 births per woman—far below the 2.1 replacement rate and lower than Japan’s during its worst demographic years. China will grow old before it grows rich by developed-world standards: per capita GDP remains approximately $12,500, roughly one-fifth of America’s. This demographic trajectory creates a closing window for achieving strategic objectives—particularly regarding Taiwan—before economic and military power begin to erode.

Youth unemployment: Official youth unemployment peaked at 21.3% in June 2023 (before the government temporarily stopped publishing the figure), and independent estimates suggest higher actual rates. Millions of university graduates face a labor market that cannot absorb them, creating political pressures that the party-state takes seriously.

Technology as Strategic Imperative¶

China’s pursuit of technological self-sufficiency—what Xi Jinping calls “self-reliance and self-strengthening in science and technology”—is driven by the recognition that dependence on American technology is a strategic vulnerability that Washington has already demonstrated willingness to exploit.

The US export controls imposed in October 2022 and tightened subsequently—restricting Chinese access to advanced semiconductors, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and AI chips—represent what some analysts have called the most significant act of US economic warfare since the oil embargo against Japan in 1941. The controls target the foundation of modern military and economic power: the advanced chips that enable artificial intelligence, precision weapons, surveillance systems, and advanced manufacturing.

China’s response has been massive investment in domestic alternatives. Semiconductor spending through the “Big Fund” and related programs exceeds $150 billion. Huawei’s development of the Kirin 9000s chip using SMIC’s 7nm process—despite export controls designed to prevent exactly this achievement—demonstrated both Chinese determination and the difficulty of maintaining technological blockades. Yet China remains years behind in the most advanced chip manufacturing: TSMC in Taiwan produces chips at 3nm, while China’s most advanced domestic production is at roughly 7nm, a gap that represents billions of dollars and years of engineering.

The technology competition extends beyond semiconductors into artificial intelligence (where Chinese firms like DeepSeek have surprised Western observers with competitive models built despite chip restrictions), quantum computing, biotechnology, space systems, and clean energy. In solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles—the “new three” exports that have replaced the old “three” of clothing, furniture, and appliances—China has achieved decisive global dominance, producing over 80% of the world’s solar panels and over 60% of electric vehicles.

Belt and Road: Infrastructure as Strategy¶

The Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013 with cumulative investments and loans exceeding $1 trillion across approximately 150 countries, is simultaneously a development program, an economic strategy, and a geopolitical project. It extends Chinese infrastructure—ports, railways, highways, power plants, telecommunications networks—across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America, creating physical connections that tie participating economies to China.

The strategic logic is multifold: diversify trade routes away from the vulnerable maritime chokepoints (especially Malacca); create markets for Chinese industrial overcapacity (particularly in steel, cement, and construction); build relationships of dependency that translate into diplomatic support; and establish the physical infrastructure for a China-centered economic order that provides alternatives to the dollar-denominated, American-dominated global financial system.

BRI has produced both genuine development (railways, ports, power plants that recipient countries needed) and serious problems (debt distress in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Zambia, and elsewhere; environmentally destructive projects; corruption). Its scale has diminished from the initial peak as China has become more selective and as some recipients have pushed back on terms. But the fundamental strategic architecture—an overland network connecting China to Europe and a maritime network connecting China to Africa and the Middle East—remains in place and continues to expand Chinese influence.

Key Relationships¶

The United States: Structural Rivalry¶

The US-China relationship is the most consequential bilateral dynamic of the 21st century—and increasingly resembles the kind of structural rivalry that has historically produced conflict. The great-power-competition between Washington and Beijing spans every domain: military (the Western Pacific), economic (trade, technology, finance), institutional (competing visions of international order), and ideological (democracy versus authoritarian state capitalism).

Economic interdependence—bilateral trade still exceeds $700 billion annually, and supply chains remain deeply intertwined—provides a constraint on escalation that the US-Soviet rivalry lacked. But interdependence also provides tools for coercion: sanctions, export controls, investment restrictions, and de-dollarization efforts transform economic ties from sources of mutual benefit into instruments of competition. The relationship has entered what some analysts call a “competitive interdependence” phase—too intertwined to decouple cleanly, too adversarial to cooperate consistently.

Taiwan remains the issue most likely to produce direct military conflict. The United States maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity” regarding whether it would defend Taiwan militarily, but successive administrations have moved toward more explicit commitment. China has declared that it will never renounce the use of force to achieve reunification. As Chinese military capabilities improve and the cross-strait balance shifts, the risk of miscalculation grows.

Russia: Partnership of Convenience¶

China and russia have drawn closer since 2014 and dramatically closer since 2022, united by shared opposition to American hegemony and the American-led institutional order. The “no limits” partnership declared in February 2022—weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—signaled a level of alignment that stops short of a formal alliance but exceeds any previous Sino-Russian relationship, including the alliance of the 1950s.

The partnership is complementary: Russia provides energy (oil and gas at discounted prices, with bilateral trade exceeding $240 billion annually by 2024), military technology (advanced jet engines, air defense systems), and diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council. China provides manufactured goods, technology, financial alternatives to the dollar system, and the economic weight that prevents Russia’s complete isolation.

Yet the relationship has structural limits. China is the vastly senior partner—an asymmetry that Moscow resents and Beijing quietly exploits. Chinese economic penetration of Central Asia, Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, creates friction. The demographic imbalance along the shared border—millions of Chinese across from a depopulating Russian Far East—generates Russian anxiety. And China has been careful not to provide Russia with military equipment that could trigger Western secondary sanctions, suggesting that the partnership has boundaries Beijing will enforce when its own interests require.

The Asian Periphery: Influence and Resistance¶

China’s relationships with its Asian neighbors reveal the tension between economic attraction and strategic anxiety. China is the largest trading partner of virtually every Asian economy—including US allies Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. Yet most of these same countries have strengthened security ties with the United States precisely because of Chinese military assertiveness.

The relationship with india is particularly consequential. The two most populous countries in history share a disputed 3,440-kilometer border where deadly clashes occurred as recently as 2020 (the Galwan Valley incident, the first fatal border clash in 45 years). India views China as a strategic encircler—Chinese ports and infrastructure in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Bangladesh form what Indian strategists call a “string of pearls” around the Indian Ocean. China views India as a potential rival whose alignment with the United States (through the Quad and other mechanisms) threatens Chinese interests. This rivalry, played out across the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, will increasingly shape Asian geopolitics.

The Demographic Cliff¶

China’s demographic trajectory may be the single most important constraint on its strategic ambitions. The one-child policy (1980-2015) produced a generation of only children now entering middle age, a surplus of males (approximately 30-40 million more men than women due to sex-selective practices), and a fertility collapse that continued even after the policy was relaxed. The fertility rate of approximately 1.0—half of replacement level—means that each generation is roughly half the size of its predecessor.

The consequences are profound. China’s working-age population peaked around 2015 and is shrinking by several million per year. The old-age dependency ratio will roughly triple by 2050—from approximately 20 elderly per 100 working-age adults to over 50. The pension and healthcare systems, already underfunded, face obligations that current economic growth cannot sustain. Japan’s experience with demographic decline—three decades of stagnation, deflation, and diminishing geopolitical weight—haunts Chinese planners, who understand that their country faces a similar trajectory but at a much lower level of per-capita wealth.

This demographic pressure creates urgency. If China’s strategic window—the period in which it has the economic and military power to reshape the regional order—is closing, then objectives that might otherwise wait (Taiwan, South China Sea consolidation, technological independence) may need to be pursued sooner rather than later. Some Western analysts argue that this makes the 2020s and 2030s a period of heightened danger: a China powerful enough to act but aware that the trajectory is turning against it. Others counter that demographic decline makes China more cautious, not less—a weakening power that cannot afford the economic devastation a major war would bring.

Conclusion¶

China presents the international system with a challenge for which no historical precedent offers reliable guidance. No previous rising power has been so economically intertwined with the existing hegemon. No previous strategic competition has occurred under the constraint of nuclear weapons, mutual economic dependence, and shared existential threats like climate change. And no previous civilization-state has attempted to re-enter the international system at the scale China represents.

The central question is not whether China will continue to grow more powerful—demographics and economic headwinds may moderate the pace, but China will remain the world’s second-most-powerful state for the foreseeable future. The question is whether the existing international order can accommodate Chinese power without war, and whether China can achieve what it considers its rightful position without destroying the stability on which its own prosperity depends.

Geography made China a continental power hemmed in by mountains, deserts, and a chain of American-allied islands. History gave it grievances that the Communist Party has woven into the fabric of national identity. Economics provided the resources to translate ambition into capability. And demographics have set a clock that may be running out.

What China does with the power it has accumulated—and how the United States, Japan, India, and the rest of Asia respond—is not merely the central drama of our time. It is the question on which the peace and prosperity of the 21st century will likely turn.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi — Drawing on Chinese-language sources, a former Biden administration official reveals Beijing’s systematic three-phase strategy to blunt, build, and eventually replace American hegemony.

• Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century by Orville Schell and John Delury — Traces the intellectual history of Chinese modernization through the thinkers and leaders who shaped the drive for “wealth and power” (富强, fùqiáng) from the Opium Wars to Xi Jinping.

• China’s World: What Does China Want? by Kerry Brown — Accessible analysis of how China sees the world, explaining the worldview behind policies that often mystify Western observers.

• The Hundred-Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury — A controversial but influential argument that China has pursued a deliberate century-long strategy to replace the United States as global hegemon, drawing on Chinese strategic writings.

• On China by Henry Kissinger — The former secretary of state draws on decades of engagement with Chinese leaders to explain how history and strategic culture shape Beijing’s approach to international relations.

• Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall — The chapter on China is among the best concise treatments of how geography constrains and enables Chinese strategy, particularly regarding the Malacca Dilemma and the First Island Chain.

• China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know by Arthur Kroeber — Clear-eyed analysis of the economic model’s strengths and structural weaknesses, cutting through both triumphalist and alarmist narratives.