US President Donald Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, 23 September, during Xi’s first state visit to the United States in more than a decade. The visit came at a time of major international upheaval, particularly in the Middle East and amid the continuing repercussions of the Russia-Ukraine war. Xi’s visit was indeed his first US state visit in more than a decade.
State visits traditionally involve elaborate reception and hosting protocols that require extensive preparation. They are reserved for a relatively small number of world leaders to whom Washington wishes to accord symbolic diplomatic importance in pursuit of longer-term political and economic objectives.
Few would dispute the extraordinary expansion of China’s economic and military power over the past two decades. That rise has generated a fundamental question about the future of relations between China and the United States, and whether confrontation between the two powers is ultimately inevitable.
The China the United States should truly fear is not the China benefiting from the current international order and growing through its participation in it. It is a future China facing deep economic and political crises and concluding that the existing system constrains it more than it benefits it.
China is an ascending international power, while the United States faces growing challenges in maintaining its dominant position within the international system.
Some analysts therefore argue that confrontation between the two powers may be inevitable, drawing on theories of international relations and historical accounts of major wars in which intense competition between an established hegemonic power and a rising challenger eventually produced conflict.
But the more important question is this: does China’s growing power itself constitute a direct threat to the United States that makes conflict inevitable?
In my view, analysts trying to answer this consequential question often focus on the wrong part of the equation. They assume that China’s growing strength will necessarily make Beijing more aggressive, more willing to overturn the rules of the international system and more inclined to impose its dominance through military force.
That interpretation is partly rooted in historical parallels with the conditions preceding the First and Second World Wars, when the rise of new powers, particularly Germany and Japan, alarmed established powers such as Britain and France because of the prospect of a fundamental shift in the global balance of power.
The transformations surrounding the Second World War ultimately reshaped the international order from a multipolar system into the bipolar structure dominated by the United States and the former Soviet Union.
But I believe the China Washington should fear is not the China currently benefiting from the international order, whose economy grew enormously through participation in that system.
The more dangerous China would be one facing deep economic and political problems in the future, one that comes to believe that the existing international system is restricting rather than advancing its interests.
At that point, Beijing may see little alternative but to seek changes to the rules of the international order while using external confrontation to divert attention from domestic pressures. Under those circumstances, military confrontation with other major powers could become far more difficult to avoid.
How China Is Different
China’s integration into the international system tells a different story from the rise of emerging powers before the two world wars, the historical analogy frequently used to argue that Sino-American conflict is unavoidable.
The foreign policy of former US President Richard Nixon during the 1970s opened the way for rapprochement with Beijing and contributed to gradually distancing China from its previously close relationship with the Soviet Union. The diplomatic opening to China became a defining feature of Nixon-era US foreign policy.
That strategic shift helped integrate China more deeply into the global economic and financial system without forcing Beijing to abandon its communist political structure or the Chinese Communist Party’s control over the institutions of the state.
Beijing does not see itself as engaged in a short-term race with the United States. It sees a long historical contest in which strategic patience and China’s long experience in confronting international challenges work to its advantage.
Perhaps one of the central explanations for China’s economic rise has been its extraordinary ability to combine a market-oriented economic system with a communist political order.
China benefited enormously from the existing international system, particularly international trade and investment. This helped produce a vast economic and social transformation and lift around 800 million Chinese citizens out of extreme poverty, a figure also cited by international development institutions.
As long as China continues to see the existing international order and its economic and commercial institutions as serving its national interests, it will not necessarily seek a comprehensive military confrontation with the United States, even while Taiwan remains a central and highly sensitive issue for the Chinese leadership.
The China America Should Fear
China’s accommodation with the present global order could change dramatically if it were to face severe economic and political crises alongside demographic, commercial and technological pressures capable of producing a major domestic crisis.
Chinese foreign policy could then become considerably more assertive.
Under such conditions, a Chinese government might employ foreign policy to divert attention from internal difficulties or mobilise public support around nationalist causes.
China could then abandon the strategic patience for which it has become known and begin challenging the international system more aggressively because it no longer believes some of its rules serve its strategic interests.
This is what makes China genuinely different from several rising powers in modern history before the Second World War.
China is an ascending global power that has benefited, and continues to benefit, substantially from the rules of the existing international system. It therefore has little interest in launching a military confrontation with the United States simply to destroy that system or replace it entirely.
At the same time, Beijing will continue working to reshape some of the system’s rules and institutions to reflect its growing economic and political weight.
The global trading system offers one of the clearest examples.
While the United States has moved away from some of the principles of global free trade it championed for decades and, under Trump, adopted more protectionist policies towards China and other trading partners, Beijing has sought to present itself as committed to preserving the international trading system and institutions created after the Second World War.
There is a striking political irony: while China spent recent decades methodically building its economic and military strength, the United States became immersed in long and costly wars that consumed enormous financial and human resources.
China’s long-term approach is also consistent with the strategic thought commonly associated with the ancient Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu, particularly the principle that the highest form of warfare is to subdue an opponent without fighting.
Beijing does not appear to view its competition with the United States as a short-term race. It approaches it as a prolonged historical contest, drawing on strategic patience and a long tradition of managing external challenges.
China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 became a crucial stage in this process. The WTO formally approved China’s accession at its Fourth Ministerial Conference in Doha, and China became the organisation’s 143rd member on 11 December 2001.
Over the following two decades, Beijing turned its integration into the international economic system into a mechanism for building economic and military strength, using the rules of global trade and its legal mechanisms for resolving disputes.
China moved from being regarded primarily as the world’s factory to becoming a major economic and technological power capable of competing with the world’s most advanced states and challenging US predominance across a growing range of economic and commercial indicators.
There is a striking irony here.
While China was systematically expanding its economic and military capabilities, the United States spent years fighting costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and remaining deeply involved in repeated crises and conflicts across the Middle East.
Beijing, by contrast, was conducting a different kind of war, one in which it did not need to fire a shot. Instead, it expanded its international presence through economics, technology and industrial capacity.
The Real Turning Point
China’s rise by itself is not necessarily a threat to the structure of the international system.
The decisive change would come if severe domestic economic and political crises altered China’s calculation about whether that system still served its interests.
If Beijing concluded that the international order had become an obstacle rather than an instrument of Chinese power, its foreign policy could become considerably more revisionist.
At that point, China may become much more willing to challenge the international system directly, and military confrontation with other major powers could become increasingly difficult to avoid.
That is the turning point that matters.
The danger does not necessarily emerge when China becomes stronger. It may emerge when a powerful China begins to feel economically, politically or strategically constrained.
Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States therefore comes at a moment when the world faces uncertainty over future economic crises, the continuing consequences of the war in Ukraine, confrontation involving the United States and Iran, and Trump’s trade policies towards Washington’s traditional economic partners.
For now, China remains a major stakeholder in global stability precisely because it continues to benefit from the institutions and organisations of the international system.
The real transformation would begin if Beijing one day concludes that it no longer does.
