What Does China Want?

Stop Discarding Half the Evidence: China’s Peace Rhetoric, Its Red Lines, and How to Read Both.

A new round of debate—sparked by the August 2025 International Security blockbuster essay What Does China Want?—has revived a familiar reflex in Western commentary: treat Chinese statements about “peaceful development,” non-hegemony, and unwillingness to “replace” the United States as mere propaganda designed to anesthetize Washington and “buy time.” One former Pentagon official put it bluntly on Substack:

When will reputable journals stop publishing articles that purport to discern Chinese “intentions” based on their own propaganda?

That stance is common—and logically brittle. Even if we bracket sincerity, the fact remains that Beijing repeats these peaceable claims to its own public, teaches them in schools, routinizes them in nightly news and Party training, and embeds them in official documents. To quote one key observation in What Does China Want?

In other words, whether the statements are sincere or cunning camouflage, repeating these statements to pupils in primary schools shows that they are what China wants its own people to believe.

Once Beijing has chosen to make them the beliefs it wants its citizens to internalize and the Chinese government invests in saturating its domestic audience with a narrative, that narrative becomes a constraint as well as a message: it shapes expectations and raises the political cost of visibly contradicting it later. Messages hammered into 1.4 billion citizens—including the Party’s 100 million members—are not analytically weightless.

Yet many analysts do something odd. When Chinese leaders describe a peace-first, non-hegemonic identity, those lines are dismissed as deceit. When the same leaders sound not so “friendly,” those lines are treated as the only “real” intentions. Why should the hawkish half be coded as truth and the dovish half as a lie? What principle justifies ignoring one half of the record? Dismissing the entire category of domestically embedded signals because suspicious China watchers deem it as ideologically inconvenient is not analysis; it is selection bias.

Both Things Can Be True—At the Same Time

A more coherent reading applies one symmetrical test. Treat both sets of statements as data, and both things are simultaneously true. First, China’s official discourse emphasizes peaceful development, non-hegemony, and no intention to replace the United States or overturn the world order; this message is carried across Xinhua readouts, China Central TeleVision evening news, provincial outlets, Party training, and schoolbooks. Second, on a narrow set of “core interests,” Beijing’s posture is unyielding and willing to employ coercive measures—and, in one uniquely sensitive case (Taiwan), to reserve the option of force.

The analytical task is not to deny one truth in favor of the other. It is to map the boundary between them: to clarify which domains Beijing places inside the coercion-tolerant perimeter, how narrow that perimeter actually is, and how it has changed across time—from 1949, through reform and opening, and over the past decade or two as economic and especially military capabilities have grown. The central question is whether rising capabilities have expanded the perimeter or thickened enforcement within a longstanding, limited set of issues. That boundary—its scope, its stability, and the conditions under which it might move—is the right object of analysis.

By framing the problem this way, we avoid the logically brittle habit of treating peaceful rhetoric as disposable and only the hard-edged rhetoric as “real.” Instead, we read both together: a peace-first self-image that is domestically constitutive, alongside a tightly bounded set of red lines where coercion (and, in the Taiwan case, force) is contemplated.

Accepting that both claims are true at once does not sanitize risk; it specifies it. It restores intellectual symmetry: instead of discarding half the evidence, we weigh how deeply each narrative is planted at home, how consistently it aligns with resources and posture, and what penalties accompany deviation. The result is not a rosy view of China. It is a more disciplined one—anchored in the full evidentiary record of what a state tells its own people, repeatedly, in venues designed to shape beliefs over time.

And that is a key contribution of What Does China Want? , which says

We challenge this conventional wisdom.

What Does China Want?

by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, Zenobia T. Chan

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that China is a rising hegemon eager to replace the United States, dominate international institutions, and re-create the liberal international order in its own image. Drawing on data from 12,000 articles and hundreds of speeches by Xi Jinping, to discern China's intentions we analyze three terms or phrases from Chinese rhetoric: “struggle” (斗争), “rise of the East, decline of the West” (东升西降), and “no intention to replace the United States” ((无意取代美国). Our findings indicate that China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability and is more inwardly focused than externally oriented. China's aims are unambiguous, enduring, and limited: It cares about its borders, sovereignty, and foreign economic relations. China's main concerns are almost all regional and related to parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Our argument has three main implications. First, China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Thus, a hostile U.S. military posture in the Pacific is unwise and may unnecessarily create tensions. Second, the two countries could cooperate on several overlooked issue areas. Third, the conventional view of China plays down the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address.

There is much about China that is disturbing for the West. China's gross domestic product grew from $1.2 trillion in 2000 to $17 trillion in 2023.¹ Having modernized the People's Liberation Army over the past generation, China is also rapidly increasing its stockpile of nuclear warheads. China spends almost $300 billion annually on defense.² Current leader Xi Jinping has consolidated power and appears set to rule the authoritarian Communist country indefinitely. Chinese firms often engage in questionable activities, such as restricting data, inadequately enforcing intellectual property rights, and engaging in cyber theft.³ The Chinese government violates human rights and restricts numerous personal freedoms for its citizens. In violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), every country in the region, including China, is reclaiming land and militarizing islets in the disputed East and South China Seas. In short, China poses many potential problems to the United States and indeed to the world.

In U.S. academic and policymaking circles, the conventional wisdom is that China wants to dominate the world and expand its territory. For example, Elbridge Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense during Donald Trump's first term and undersecretary of defense for Trump's second term, writes: “If China could subjugate Taiwan, it could then lift its gaze to targets farther afield … a natural next target for Beijing would be the Philippines … Vietnam, although not a U.S. ally, might also make a good target.”⁴ Rush Doshi, deputy senior director for China and Taiwan during the Joe Biden administration and a key architect of the Biden administration's China policy, writes that China has been playing a long game to “displace the United States as world leader.”⁵ Aaron Friedberg, deputy assistant for national security affairs and director of policy planning for Vice President Dick Cheney during the George W. Bush administration, warns of “China's expanding territorial claims” and its aggressive attempt to “replace the United States as the world's leading economic and technological nation and to displace it as the preponderant power in East Asia.”⁶ Stephen Walt writes that the problem is “regional hegemony in Asia: China would like to have it…and use that position to make significant revisions to the international status quo.”⁷ Hal Brands and Michael Beckley assert that “although Beijing would surely like to knock Vietnam down, an even juicier target would be the Philippines, which meets all the criteria of being a perfect enemy…the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is undertaking an epic project to rewrite the rules of global order in Asia and far beyond … it wants to be the superpower.”⁸ The then–U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in 2022 that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”⁹ Trump's former U.S. trade representative, Robert Lithgizer, claims that “China to me is an existential threat to the United States…. China views itself as number one in the world and wants to be that way.”¹¹⁰

These assessments of China's intentions lead mainstream U.S. scholars and policy analysts from both the Left and the Right to policy prescriptions that will take generations to unfold, and that are almost completely focused on war-fighting, deterrence, and decoupling from China. Those who believe in this China threat call for increasing U.S. military expenditures and showing “resolve” toward China. The conventional wisdom also advocates a regional expansion of alliances with any country, democratic or authoritarian, that could join the United States to contain China.¹¹ As Colby writes, “This is a book about war.”¹² Brands and Beckley argue that the United States should reinforce its efforts to deter China from invading Taiwan: “What is needed is a strategy to deter or perhaps win a conflict in the 2020s … the Pentagon can dramatically raise the costs of a Chinese invasion by turning the international waters of the Taiwan Strait into a death trap for attacking forces.”¹³ Doshi argues that the United States should arm countries such as “Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India” with capabilities to contain China.¹⁴

This leads to a key question: What does China want? To answer this question, this article examines contemporary China's goals and fears in words and deeds. In contrast to the conventional view, the evidence provided in this article leads to one overarching conclusion and three specific observations. Overall, China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability, and it remains more inwardly focused than externally oriented. More specifically: China's aims are unambiguous; China's aims are enduring; and China's aims are limited.

First, China's aims are unambiguous: China cares about its borders, its sovereignty, and its foreign economic relations. China cares about its unresolved borders in the East and South China Seas and with India, respectively. Almost all of its concerns are regional. Second, China deeply cares about its sovereign rights over various parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Third, China has an increasingly clear economic strategy for its relations with both East Asia and the rest of the world that aims to expand trade and economic relations, not reduce them.

It is also clear what China does not want: There is little mention in Chinese discourse of expansive goals or ambitions for global leadership and hegemony. Furthermore, China is not exporting ideology. Significantly, the CCP's emphasis on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is not a generalized model for the world.¹⁵ In contrast, the United States claims to represent global values and norms. What China also does not want is to invade and conquer other countries; there is no evidence that China poses an existential threat to the countries on its borders or in its region that it does not already claim sovereignty over.

We explore how China views its own position and role in the region and globally. Recognizing that public statements vary in their level of authoritativeness, we examined three main sources: People's Daily, which represents not only the state but also the Central Committee of the CCP; Xi Jinping's and other senior officials' speeches; and Qiushi, a magazine publicizing the CCP's latest policy directions. We used computer-assisted text analysis to systematically assess China's stated goals over time. This method allowed us to more accurately track China's concerns and identify how they have changed. We also show that China's top leaders consistently reiterate that China does not seek regional hegemony or aim to compete with the United States for global supremacy. Instead, China views international relations as multilateral and cooperative.

Second, China's aims are inherited and enduring, not new. There is a “trans-dynastic” Chinese identity: Almost every major issue that the People's Republic of China (PRC) cares about today dates back to at least the nineteenth century during the Qing dynasty. These are not new goals that emerged after the Communist victory in 1949, and none of China's core interests were created by Xi. These are enduring Chinese concerns, even though the political authority governing China has changed dramatically and multiple times over the past two hundred years or more.

Third, what China wants is limited, even though its power has rapidly expanded over the past generation. China's claims and goals are either being resolved or remain static. This reality is in contrast to many of the expectations of U.S. policymakers and to the conventional wisdom of the international relations scholarly literature, which maintains that states' interests will grow as power grows. Rather, the evidence shows that the Chinese leadership is concerned about internal challenges more than external threats or expansion.

We find that China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Consequently, there is no need for a hostile military posture in the Pacific, and indeed the United States may be unnecessarily creating tensions. Just as important, we suggest that there is room for the two countries to cooperate on a number of issues areas that are currently overlooked. Finally, the conventional view of China de-emphasizes the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address. The conventional wisdom about U.S. grand strategy is problematic, and the vision of China that exists in Washington is dangerously wrong.

What Does China Want? International Security

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What Does China Want? is open access in International Security, the #1 journal in International Relations based on 2024 impact factor. It is published by the MIT Press, and sponsored and edited by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University.

1. World Development Indicators, DataBank, World Bank, 2025, https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators.

2. In comparison, the United States spent $810 billion on defense in 2023. Chief Financial Officer, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Defense Budget Overview 2023: United States Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Request (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2023), https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2023/FY2023_Budget_Request.pdf.

3. Katie Silver, “China's Trade Practices Come Under Fire,” BBC News, October 21, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58991339.

4. Elbridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), pp. 116–117.

5. Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 51.

6. Aaron L. Friedberg, Getting China Wrong (Medford, MA: Polity, 2022), p. 142; Aaron L. Friedberg, “An Answer to Aggression: How to Push Back Against Beijing,” Foreign Affairs, August 11, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-08-11/ccp-answer-aggression.

7. Stephen Walt, “Hedging on Hegemony: The Realist Debate over How to Respond to China,” International Security, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Spring 2025), pp. 37–70, quotes at pp. 37, 39, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00508.

8. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022), pp. 1, 129. Emphasis in original.

9. Antony J. Blinken, “Secretary Blinken Speech: The Administration's Approach to the People's Republic of China,” speech presented at George Washington University, May 26, 2022, U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Australia, https://au.usembassy.gov/secretary-blinken-speech-the-administrations-approach-to-the-peoples-republic-of-china/.

10. Scott Pelley, “Trump's Former Trade Chief Says China Is a Threat, Tariffs Are Necessary,” CBS News, February 2, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-former-trade-chief-robert-lighthizer-says-china-is-a-threat-tariffs-are-necessary-60-minutes-transcript/. See also: Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis, “The New Cold War: America, China, and the Echoes of History,” Foreign Affairs, October 19, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-10-19/new-cold-war; Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “Misplaced Restraint: The Quincy Coalition Versus Liberal Internationalism,” Survival, Vol. 63, No. 4 (2021), p. 10, https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2021.1956187; John J. Mearsheimer, “The Inevitable Rivalry: America, China, and the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics,” Foreign Affairs, October 19, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-10-19/inevitable-rivalry-cold-war.

11. In Elbridge Colby's words, “It may be advantageous or even necessary for an anti-hegemonic coalition [against China] to associate with nonrepublican governments. This is especially important in Asia, where many states are not democracies or are only inconsistently or imperfectly democratic.” Colby, The Strategy of Denial, p. 71.

12. Ibid., p. xii.

13. Brands and Beckley, Danger Zone, pp. 177–178.

14. Doshi, The Long Game, p. 318.