How China Wins

The United States and China see eye to eye on very little these days, but there is one surprising point on which their top officials agree: the world is becoming multipolar. In one of his first interviews in office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that the unipolar dominance the United States had enjoyed in recent decades was “an anomaly” and “a product of the end of the Cold War.” The United States, in his view, was no longer the unrivaled global hegemon but one of a handful of “great powers in different parts of the planet.” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agrees. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Wang declared, “A multipolar world is not only a historical inevitability; it is also becoming a reality.”

To be sure, Beijing’s and Washington’s understandings of multipolarity are different. Trump administration officials picture a world in which the United States has been freed from many of its overseas obligations and can act unilaterally, focusing mainly on the Western Hemisphere and “America first” policies while tolerating spheres of influence elsewhere. “The Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia,” and the United States will do “what’s in the best interest of the United States,” as Rubio put it in January. For their part, Chinese leaders see multipolarity not merely as an opportunity to dominate Asia but also as heralding the emergence of a transactional global system in which the reach of U.S. power is curtailed, key U.S. partners are less aligned with Washington, autocracy faces less pushback, and China—along with its strategic partner Russia—has far greater freedom of action and global influence.

Both of these visions are reshaping the world. U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are ushering in an era of what can be called “mercenary multipolarity”—a transformed international order centered on self-interested great powers that generally disdain using their influence to benefit or cooperate with others and are primarily concerned with maximizing their own security, prosperity, and power.

How did a multipolar world emerge in the first place? Two new and very different books help answer that question. In Upstart: How China Became a Great Power, the Stanford University political scientist Oriana Skylar Mastro, who also serves in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, provides a systematic and creative examination of how far China has come in pursuing its goals “to close the gap in relative diplomatic, economic, and military power.” By contrast, the Chinese analyst and former People’s Liberation Army (PLA) senior colonel Zhou Bo insists that China’s rise should not be cause for concern. In Should the World Fear China?, a loosely curated collection of his essays, Zhou emerges as a resolute polemicist for China’s cause whose perspective reflects mainstream currents in Chinese strategic thinking.

In recent years, many analysts have hotly debated the scope and scale of the challenge that Beijing poses to the international order. This debate now finds itself in a peculiar moment, as Trump has made the United States appear as the more explicitly revisionist power, openly upending the international order it once championed. By withdrawing from UN bodies; placing tariffs on the entire world, including on U.S. allies; threatening to seize Canada and Greenland; and undermining collective principles of law and pluralism, the second Trump administration has given China unprecedented space to present itself as both a defender and a reformer of the existing order. That is allowing China to gain greater influence in existing institutions, exploit fear and uncertainty to pull long-standing U.S. partners closer to Beijing, and build its own alternative institutions and relationships even as it continues to flout international rules and norms. Trump and Xi are turning U.S.-Chinese competition into a story of two self-interested, domineering superpowers looking to squeeze countries around the world—and each other—for whatever they can get. This dramatic shift plays into China’s hands and undermines core U.S. strengths in the long-term competition over the future international order.

WATCH AND LEARN

The growth of China’s global influence, which has shaped the emerging multipolarity, was the result of a careful strategy pursued over decades and tied closely to Beijing’s analysis of U.S. power, as Mastro demonstrates in Upstart. She provides a fresh framework for understanding China’s rise by drawing from an unlikely source: the extensive scholarship on industry disruption in the business sector. Mastro applies the concept of industry “upstarts,” which push out established firms, to power shifts in international relations and, specifically, to the case of China. She shows that Beijing has risen to great-power status over the past 40 years mainly by exploiting gaps in U.S. power and the international order while selectively innovating new approaches and occasionally emulating U.S. actions. She writes that the United States, like an industry-leading firm, has been the “primary reference for Chinese decision-makers” and that China’s strategies of exploitation, entrepreneurship, and emulation are constantly evolving.

Upstart’s most important contribution is to explain how China was able to grow powerful without triggering, until relatively recently, a major response from the United States. One of Mastro’s core insights is that China, during its rise, often chose not to emulate the United States when it assessed that emulation would have been either too costly or likely to trigger a backlash from Washington. (In these pages in 2019, Mastro described China’s rise as that of a “stealth superpower.”) Although China’s growing power was plain to see, its intentions and ambitions were not. Great powers such as the United States often measure their rivals’ growing power by comparing it with their own, looking for signs of similar strategies that helped them rise. But Mastro shows how Beijing limited the kind of emulation that would have made clear to U.S. policymakers that China had ambitions to challenge the United States’ position on the global stage. Chinese leaders knew, Mastro argues, that if Washington felt threatened, the United States could thwart their country’s ambitions.

Trump and Xi are ushering in an era of “mercenary multipolarity.”

To head off such an outcome, they deployed a strategy to obfuscate threats to U.S. interests and thereby delay a response from Washington, even as they engaged in a dramatic military buildup. Examples of this strategy that Mastro cites include Beijing’s focus on building commercial ports instead of more overseas military bases and training foreign local law enforcement instead of foreign militaries. Such policies allowed Chinese officials to characterize their country’s actions as benign and to insist that they were committed to a “peaceful rise.” As Beijing developed a powerful military, advanced technology, and a dominant role in international trade, Mastro observes, China was able to transform in just a few decades “from diplomatic isolation to having as much diplomatic and political power on the world stage as the United States.”

The emergence of a multipolar world has depended on the interaction between the United States and China that Mastro illuminates in Upstart. For the United States to maintain an edge in this competition, she argues that Washington should pursue “its own version of an upstart strategy,” which would entail closing the gaps that China exploits, outmaneuvering China when the United States and its allies have competitive advantages, using entrepreneurial approaches of its own, and even emulating some Chinese successes. One such U.S. advantage, Mastro writes, is immigration: “In innovation, for example, a more open immigration policy that encourages skilled labor to settle in the country is an option Beijing does not have.” The overall goal of such a strategy would be “to move competition into areas where the United States has an advantage and reduce the impact of Chinese strategies where China enjoys advantages.”

Mastro’s proposal for a U.S. “upstart strategy” is not the approach the Trump administration is taking. Instead, under Trump, the United States is creating new gaps for China to exploit by withdrawing from international institutions and undermining U.S. competitive advantages, such as its global network of alliances and partnerships and its robust domestic research and innovation base. In April, Xi traveled to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia to sign agreements on trade, technology, and other fields in a region that had, in recent years, developed deeper partnerships with the United States but was hit hard by Trump’s tariffs earlier that month. Beijing is also working to draw Europe closer as the continent faces intense pressure from Washington; for example, China has lifted sanctions on members of the European Parliament and dangled other concessions ahead of an EU-Chinese summit scheduled for July 2025. Chinese leaders are trying to take advantage of an opportunity that Washington’s actions have handed them.

LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

As Beijing recalibrates its international strategy in response to the second Trump term, some Chinese foreign policy thinkers are speaking openly about opportunities for China to advance its vision of a multipolar world favorable to its interests. “By the end of Trump’s second term, America’s global standing and credibility image will have gone down,” Zhou, the former PLA colonel and author of Should the World Fear China?, bluntly told CNN in March 2025. He continued, “And as American strength declines, China, of course, will look more important.”

In his new book, Zhou offers paeans to China as a responsible and stabilizing player in a chaotic world, and his essays can best be understood as a theme and variations on the official party line, sometimes stepping beyond it but never wandering far. He argues that China does not “really want to reshape the international order,” as the United States claims, because “there is no liberal international order.” Such a phrase is simplistic and carries “an apparent air of western triumphalism,” Zhou writes, because it overlooks seven decades of postwar history that included Cold War rivalry, postcolonial independence, and the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as the institutions that have emerged since the Cold War, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the G-20, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Zhou argues that the changes wrought by China “shouldn’t be taken as an erosion of the international order” but as steps that “could change the world for the better.” Given the often coercive nature of Chinese behavior, seen, for example, in Beijing’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea, many readers will reject such an argument made by a former PLA officer. Zhou’s efforts to cast China in a benign light are often implausible, such as his claim that it was “not exactly use of force” when “the Chinese coast guard used water cannons against Filipino ships in 2024.”

Zhou cheers an emerging multipolar world. Alternative power centers—such as the BRICS, the group whose original members were Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa and has grown to include Indonesia, Iran, and others; and the SCO, which focuses on security and economic issues across Eurasia—are “thriving with expansion.” He triumphantly notes that the BRICS’ economies are larger in size than the G-7’s, although one might question whether the BRICS, even if it has scale, will ever be able to muster the unity of purpose that the G-7 has demonstrated in recent years. (Zhou himself offers a derisive assessment of India as a competitor to China, despite the two countries’ membership in the BRICS.)

Russia, China’s closest partner in the BRICS and the SCO, is of particular interest to Zhou. Perhaps the most noteworthy piece in his collection of essays is an op-ed he originally wrote for the Financial Times in October 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin was engaging in dangerous nuclear saber rattling. At the time, Zhou argued, “Given Beijing’s huge influence on Moscow, it is uniquely positioned to do more to prevent a nuclear conflict”—an argument also made by prominent voices in the United States and Europe but that stood out coming from a Chinese commentator. A few weeks later, after a meeting in Beijing between Xi and then German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Chinese government stated that the two leaders “jointly oppose the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons”—the most pointed public statement that Beijing had made since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of that year. But Beijing and Moscow remain firmly aligned on major strategic questions, Xi’s comments on nuclear weapons notwithstanding.

Zhou sees a subtle difference in Russia’s and China’s worldviews, even if both countries talk about a multipolar world order. “China is the largest beneficiary of globalization, which relies on the existing international order,” he points out, whereas “Russia resents that order and considers itself a victim of it.” Whatever one thinks of this attempted distinction, it is particularly ironic that assertions from Trump administration officials—such as Rubio’s statement in his confirmation hearing that the postwar global order is “a weapon being used against us”—reflect a similar sense of victimization that Zhou here ascribes to Russia.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Zhou’s book is one that lurks in the background: that the Chinese Communist Party allowed a former military officer to publish an essay in an overseas paper, such as Zhou’s in the Financial Times, at such a sensitive moment. At a time when the CCP’s control over the information environment is tighter than ever—including, for instance, threatening economists who spread “inappropriate” views—the fact of Zhou’s prolific international publishing is itself revealing. Beijing is eager to cultivate voices that, as Xi put it in 2013, “tell China’s story well” and strengthen its “international discourse power,” or its influence over global public opinion, which Xi believes is an important element of national power. But China has struggled to strengthen its discourse power in recent years. This, too, is an area in which Beijing sees opportunity in the second Trump term.

VISIONS OF ORDER

Mastro’s and Zhou’s books could hardly be more different, but both authors’ perspectives shed light on the still protean multipolar world that is being shaped by the competition between Washington and Beijing. In the United States, prior optimistic assumptions that China would join existing institutions as a “responsible stakeholder” were long ago replaced by a more coldly realistic understanding that as China became more powerful, it sought to fundamentally change aspects of the international order to favor its authoritarian system of government, state-dominated political economy, and geopolitical objectives. And the Trump administration has framed its unilateralism as a necessary response to China’s actions. As Rubio put it in his confirmation hearing, “We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into the global order and they took advantage of all of its benefits, and they ignored all of its obligations and responsibilities.” Because China rose to power by taking advantage of the rules and institutions that have undergirded the postwar global order, that order must be destroyed, the logic goes, and the United States must look out for its own interests as ruthlessly as China has. Deferring to Russia and disregarding Europe fit into this perspective because Trump sees Russia, not Europe, as another great power.

Chinese officials, of course, have a different version of events. As Mastro notes, they see U.S. leadership of the international order and U.S. alliances and partnerships as crucial advantages that the United States enjoys over China—and they are jubilant at the Trump administration’s rejection of what they see as sources of U.S. strength. They speak less openly than the Trump administration about their own pursuit of narrow self-interest and their intent to revise the international order, often shrouding their transactional diplomacy in the language of multilateralism. At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Wang reflected that although some critics had, over the years, accused China of wanting to change the international order, they were falling silent “because now there is a country that is withdrawing from international treaties and organizations.” China, by contrast, was, in Wang’s words, “growing within the existing order,” and it would therefore “move the order in a more just and reasonable direction.”

Mastro and Zhou shed light on a still protean multipolar world.

Zhou would no doubt agree with Wang’s claims here, which some in the audience described as more plausible because U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the conference—perceived by many as a harsh attack on U.S. allies in Europe—immediately preceded Wang’s. But what is most troubling for U.S. interests is that despite Chinese support for Russia in its war against Ukraine, the threat that Chinese manufacturing overcapacity poses to European industry, and the many other European interests that would in theory cut against strengthening ties with China, American pressure and Chinese incentives may very well lead European leaders to explore closer partnerships with Beijing.

The erratic nature of the Trump administration makes it impossible to predict exactly how its views on China and the international order will evolve in the coming years. But it is already apparent that the world has entered an era of mercenary multipolarity that will be much more chaotic and dangerous than what has come before. A multipolar world could take more or less cooperative forms and feature more or less great-power acceptance of continued interdependence. But it now seems highly unlikely that cooperation will be a major feature of the emerging international order over the next several years. Instead, the world appears fated to witness the decline or even the collapse of international institutions, which may then be replaced by less influential multinational institutions and intensified fragmentation, competition, and transactionalism.

If more countries come to believe that they are simply facing a choice among big, selfish superpowers, they will make token concessions and then likely implement long-term foreign policy strategies that align with neither Washington nor Beijing. Many countries may even persuade themselves that they can get a better or more durable deal with China than with a unilateralist United States. They may be less willing to take risks to join the United States in upholding peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait or limiting advanced technology exports that can be used by the PLA. And they will be less interested in looking to Washington to lead the future international order—unless they can be persuaded once again that the United States is looking out for them and not only for itself.