Why America Is Wrong About China

In contemporary international discourse, the “global China” concept, as it’s generally used, risks imagining China in the first instance as a hegemony-seeking project. Some explain this as a reasonable position to assert within a realist international relations perspective. It’s certainly guiding Washington thinking, becoming explicitly clear in a recently published summary fact sheet about America’s national defense strategy, obsessing over China as a rising threat. However, a more rigorous realism, what we might call “Chinese realism,” reveals compelling evidence to the contrary.

China is a global power economically, and it is growing as one culturally and militarily. We