13

The Tenth Circle: Changing the Global Rules-Based Order

The final circle of Xi’s ambitions for China concerns the future of the global order itself. The United States and its allies—as the victors of World War II—constructed the underlying architecture of the postwar liberal international rules-based order. This architecture was laid out at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, from which emerged the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which later became the World Trade Organization). While the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek was present, Mao’s Communists obviously were not. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union refused to ratify these arrangements, calling them “branches of Wall Street.” Then, in 1945, following the San Francisco Conference, the United Nations was established, with both the Soviet Union and the Republic of China as inaugural members, both gaining permanent seats on the exclusive, veto-wielding UN Security Council. Then came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, again drafted by a group that included representatives from India and the Republic of China. The United States led the way in the creation of all these institutions and then sought to defend the order it had created with a global network of alliances: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe and bilateral and multilateral security alliances across East Asia. Throughout the postwar period and then through the Cold War and beyond, the United States remained the world’s dominant superpower politically, economically, and militarily.

The People’s Republic of China is challenging the political legitimacy and policy effectiveness of the Western liberal-democratic model that was inherent to the norms and rules of the order that had been created. The values espoused by these democracies and the international institutions and rules that have been built on them continue to represent a political and normative obstacle for Beijing. To combat this, China is creating its new multilateral institutions outside the framework of the postwar settlement, which China has consistently seen as an order created and imposed by the victorious Western colonial powers. This is despite the fact that China under the then nationalist government participated in the construction of this very order.

Nevertheless, the desirability of having some form of rules-based global system, rather than chaos, is also fixed deep within Chinese political consciousness. Ancient Chinese philosophers warned that the only alternative to order was chaos—a truth that Chinese who lived through the turmoil of war, Mao, and the Cultural Revolution have very much taken to heart. But it is important to remember that the order China has in mind is different to an American-made order, or for that matter a liberal international order. Instead, China’s expectations for the future global order are for it to change as necessary to better accommodate China’s national interests and values. At this stage, while China’s political aspirations are becoming clear, it is less clear how much China actually wants to change things, at what pace, or whether the rest of the international community will agree to these changes.

What is clear is that China’s growing influence will have implications for current international norms on human rights anchored in the three major international covenants and the Human Rights Council in Geneva. It will also have implications for the future international economic order, including the structure and operation of the WTO, particularly in the aftermath of the trade war with the United States. As for the future international security order—anchored in the UN Security Council, where China continues to enjoy the privileged position of being a permanent member with the full power of veto over any collective security action—we find ourselves in uncertain terrain.

China as an Outsider

Until 2014, China exhibited little interest in playing a greater role in shaping the future of the global rules-based order and the institutions that underpin it. China’s attitude to the United Nations and the plethora of its specialized agencies dealing with peace and security, economic development, and human rights—together with the Bretton Woods institutions—was largely defensive. China’s aims were to use its membership in these institutions to enhance its domestic political legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people, entrench its international legitimacy, keep Taiwan isolated, and block any actions taken by international institutions that might harm China’s core national interests. Until recently, that was because Beijing saw itself as having limited leverage either to challenge the system or to change it. The PRC therefore decided to work within the grain of the system it had inherited from the Republic of China after the West switched its recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Deng Xiaoping also realized that some multilateral institutions might be able to support his objective of rapidly developing China’s economy, lifting its people out of poverty, and laying the foundations of a strong Chinese state. This applied, in particular, to China’s early collaboration with the World Bank and the IMF during the first decades of Deng’s reform and opening policy. It was also evident in China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. Indeed, as noted in earlier chapters, for China, WTO accession was a game-changing opportunity to enter the global market.

All this changed, however, in 2014. The Communist Party Central Work Conference on Foreign Affairs convened in November that year by Xi Jinping represented a political watershed—launching a new era of Chinese multilateral activism. Such conferences are normally held every four to five years to set the party’s and the country’s overall foreign policy course for the period ahead. They are attended by the country’s entire foreign, security, and international economic policy establishment. At this pivotal meeting, Xi laid down an entirely new approach. He formally dispensed with Deng’s decades-long strategy of “hide your strength; bide your time; never take the lead” and replaced it with a new activist strategy of international policy. Specifically, Xi pointed to a new unfolding “struggle” for the future of the global order and declared that China must “strive for achievement” in that order. Or as he told another party meeting three years later, “[This] will be an era that sees China moving closer to the center stage and making greater contributions to mankind.”

His instructions reflected a view that China should shape the future form of the international system rather than passively accepting the structure of the system as it was. China, instead, saw an opportunity to proactively use multilateral institutions to articulate and advance Chinese interests and values within the international system. Those attending the meeting believed that China’s diplomats had, at last, been let off the leash to carve out a much larger international space for China in the multilateral world as befit—in their view—an emerging global great power.

The CCP had also been concerned that China’s historical approach of general support for the UN system had the effect of legitimizing the liberal-democratic assumptions of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights—and, as a consequence, delegitimizing China’s domestic political order. After 2014, however, Beijing used various multilateral alliances to redefine core concepts of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in a manner more compatible with China’s domestic practice. In doing do, China was able to draw on assiduously cultivated support from across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America, where support for liberal human rights norms was also fraying. The result was that when China acted, it did so with an impressive international chorus of support from both left- and right-wing authoritarian states across the world.

China had already launched a number of global and regional initiatives outside the UN and Bretton Woods framework before the seminal 2014 party work conference. These included the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the New Development Bank (established with the BRICS countries), and the BRI discussed earlier. But after 2014, the pace and scope of China’s new assertive and more critical approach within the existing multilateral system gathered pace. Xi was further emboldened by the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on the multilateral system, its defunding of the UN, and its effective withdrawal from a number of UN bodies and Bretton Woods institutions. This included a reduction in annual US funding for the UN, including a whopping $1.05 billion that the US continued to owe in unpaid dues. Meanwhile, the US withdrew or began the process of withdrawing from multiple UN agencies and initiatives, including the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC); the UN Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the Paris Agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It also crippled the World Trade Organization’s dispute-resolution machinery through its refusal to appoint new members of the WTO’s appellate body. China’s leaders probably couldn’t believe their luck that the US had willingly—indeed willfully—created a political, diplomatic, and financial vacuum in the very system that America itself created back in 1944–1945. And China was more than happy to occupy the ensuing institutional space with minimal public fanfare.

Under Xi, China’s new multilateral strategy has had two arms. The first has been to rapidly expand Beijing’s influence across the existing institutions of global governance through a combination of enhanced funding for the system, the appointment of Chinese nationals to lead (or be part of the senior leadership team of) major multilateral bodies, and the launching of a series of proactive diplomatic initiatives across the UN system that went beyond China’s largely defensive posture that we had seen in the past. For example, between 2010 and 2020, China’s combined annual contribution to the UN and Bretton Woods institutions increased by $30 billion. China also took a more active role within the UN, securing the leadership of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the UN Industrial Development Organization, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Telecommunications Union, and INTERPOL.

Within the UN Security Council, China—as opposed to Russia—routinely takes the lead on non-European and non–Middle Eastern matters when US, British, or French positions are to be challenged. Meanwhile, in the General Assembly, China’s capacity to marshal large-scale support from member states across all geographic regions to defeat Western resolutions is clear for all to see, including anything challenging China’s position on human rights in Xinjiang. Similarly, China has harnessed significant support—both from UN member states and the secretary-general—in advancing particular Chinese diplomatic initiatives, ranging from the BRI to Xi’s long-term, deliberately ill-defined proposal for a “community of common destiny” to issue-specific proposals where Beijing decided to take the lead. Beijing also remained committed to the UN Paris Agreement on climate change despite Washington’s decision to withdraw in June 2017 (although it would not take formal effect until November 2020)—a choice that would likely have led to the demise of the entire agreement if Beijing had followed suit. And in 2020, Xi used the UN to make his announcement that China aimed to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality before 2060, thereby seeking to assert China’s future claim to global leadership on sustained climate action. Meanwhile, China—a major contributor to UN peacekeeping operations—enhanced its contribution in 2015 by establishing a $1 billion fund to support a standing force of eight thousand dedicated Chinese UN peacekeeping troops and equipment for rapid deployment around the world.

Beyond the UN, China nearly doubled its World Bank shareholding from less than 3 percent before 2010 to a bit more than 5 percent in 2019 and secured the positions of deputy head, managing director, and treasurer of the bank’s $62 billion portfolio. As for the IMF, China’s quota (its contributions, access to financing, and voting power) also increased by almost 3 percent between 2010 and 2019, although this continues to represent a disproportionately small voting right within the Fund relative to the actual size of China’s economy. Beijing is the second-largest contributor to the WTO’s research secretariat, where China is exercising its influence over the organization’s overall policy agenda. And within the current WTO reform process, China—like the US—also seems determined to emasculate the institution’s critical dispute-resolution processes in order to lessen its national vulnerabilities to any adverse determinations on matters where Chinese interests might be at stake. In summary, China’s advances across the current multilateral system over the space of the last five years have been as remarkable as the disappearing presence of the United States.

The second arm of Xi’s post-2014 strategy to increase China’s influence over the multilateral system has been to build a new set of institutions altogether—ones where China, not the US, is the central organizing power. The BRI was launched in 2013 and, at the time of writing, had attracted 139 participating states that have accepted projects or endorsed the idea, including a number of OECD economies, such as Italy, Switzerland, and much of eastern Europe. In 2014, China also launched a Silk Road Fund for infrastructure development across Eurasia. This was followed in 2015 with the New Development Bank funded by BRICS member states, although China is by far the major shareholder and controlling vote. Then, in 2016, China launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which competes for funding with the Asian Development Bank (which it already rivals in terms of the size of its balance sheet) and the World Bank. As of the end of 2020, the AIIB already had 103 member states, compared to the ADB’s 68.

The concerns raised by many states across the international community on the proliferation of these Beijing-controlled institutions are straightforward: the diminution of previously existing multilateral institutions established under international treaty law; weaknesses in the internal governance structures of some of the new institutions (but not the AIIB), including their lack of transparency; their tenuous commitment to low carbon and sustainable development principles; their capacity to create new debt traps for poorer developing countries; and an undeclared geopolitical agenda to further entrench China’s global political and security interests.

China’s initiatives in international financial reform outside the formal institutional structures of the IMF predate Xi Jinping’s most recent efforts. In fact, China’s decision after the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 to establish the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) was China’s first step in breaking away from the preexisting multilateral order. It is possible that the CMI might evolve into an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF), which would be even more China-heavy than the CMI’s current arrangements. This would be deeply damaging to the standing of the IMF itself, just as the creation of the AIIB challenged the preexisting international standing of both the ADB and the World Bank. However, the jury is still out as to whether China would go this far. The vast bulk of the funding for any AMF would need to come from Chinese capital allocations. More importantly, under these circumstances, China—rather than the IMF—would then need to impose its own conditions for those drawing on the AMF facility in the future. This would, in turn, impact China’s financial and reputational interests, particularly in light of its experiences in relation to bad debts in both Sri Lanka and Venezuela. Beyond these multilateral financial initiatives, Beijing has also unleashed a range of region-specific investment funds for Africa, Latin America, and Eastern and central Europe as well as with the individual Gulf states. These are not small in scope. They are also designed to provide an alternative to private Western capital markets, principally the US.

Xi’s institutional innovations beyond the existing UN and Bretton Woods machinery has not been limited to the economy. On a number of security-related challenges, Beijing has also stepped outside the arrangements established under the preexisting multilateral system. Xi has championed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) and has gradually evolved a common security agenda for BRI member countries. All these institutional arrangements are designed to underline the concept of Chinese centrality, exclude the United States, and include Russia where necessary. As with the UN and Bretton Woods institutions, China’s new era of multilateral activism beyond the structures of the current international system has been impressive. And, once again, it has been largely accommodated by an America missing in action.

Determining the Global Technology Standards of the Future

Parallel to this geopolitical game within the wider international order is another ongoing form of competition that is deeply representative of shifting global influence between China and the United States. That is the struggle over the future of the digital world, including the next generation of mobile telecommunications technologies, the internet, and digital payment systems. This also involves competing national, international, and multilateral standard-setting and techno-regulatory frameworks for the major technology systems of the future.

The first of these arenas is fifth-generation (or 5G) telecom. The 5G data networks can transmit data at twenty times the speed of current 4G networks, drawing on the combination of mid-band and high-band radio frequencies used by those networks. The macrosignificance of 5G is that it is set to become a major new enabling platform for the deployment of AI systems globally, such as self-driving vehicles. China has become the undisputed leader in 5G technologies, infrastructure, and systems. The Chinese state is estimated to have invested some $180 billion since 2014 in the development of 5G technologies. This was based on a specific 2013 state plan aimed at making China a global 5G leader—including the generous allocation of high-band spectrum, the building of 350,000 mobile towers across the country, and direct state support of national champions such as Chinese telecom giant Huawei.

Now China has taken this advantage into the international arena, launching its global 5G network in 2019, an ambition that has greatly disturbed the United States, given the strategic and security implications. As the US Defense Innovation Board stated, “China is on track to repeat in 5G what the United States did with 4G.” China’s subsidy of its domestic 5G program extends offshore, through the rolling out of the Digital Silk Road across a growing number of Belt and Road participating states. These 5G networks—including mobile telephone, internet, and other digital services—are also likely to be vehicles for Chinese digital-governance frameworks, including the potential accessibility of local data holdings to China’s security and intelligence services.

China has argued credibly that neither the United States nor its allies have developed an alternative to Huawei’s 5G technology. Nor does the West have the intention or the capability of laying out a global system of undersea cables and mobile terrestrial towers necessary for supporting such a network. China, however, has a less convincing response to the American counterargument that Beijing, for similar national security reasons, has never allowed foreign providers into the Chinese domestic telecommunications market. Similarly, China is unable to provide assurances that US military, security, or intelligence communications around the world would remain sacrosanct as a result of China owning, operating, and regulating a 5G network that relied on a Chinese system, particularly at a time of crisis.

Washington’s decision in May 2019 to formally list Huawei as an entity whose activities are contrary to US national security interests meant that, in the absence of specific case-by-case approvals by the commerce secretary, US firms were banned from selling microprocessors to Huawei that were essential for the further rollout of its global network. Other Chinese entities have also been listed. This has complicated China’s ability to set the global industry standard for 5G, despite the fact that Huawei is the market leader in what remains a limited field of only two Chinese, two Nordic, and zero American firms. In many respects, the May 2019 Entity List represented the formal commencement of hostilities between China and the United States in a new global technology war.

Then, at a September 2019 meeting of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a team of Chinese engineers representing Huawei, China Telecom, China Unicom, and China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) jointly proposed a dramatic new idea to the global governing body: that the core structure of the internet be replaced by a new standard network architecture called New IP (meaning internet protocol). While the current Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) technical standard that developed organically in the West into today’s internet serves as an open and neutral conveyer of information without regard to borders, New IP would be radically different. With its centralized top-to-bottom design, it would give state-controlled internet service providers fine-grained control over what individual users could connect to on the internet. This would include what Huawei engineers described as a “shut-up command,” allowing the central network to cut off communication between individual devices or the entire network. Moreover, tracking features that would be built into the network would allow easy sharing of data on individuals and their network activity as well as between firms and governments. Delegates from countries including Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia reportedly expressed strong support for the proposed new standard, which Huawei said was already under construction.

Were the ITU—headed since 2014 by China’s Zhao Houlin—to legitimize New IP as a standard, it would allow state internet operators to choose between an open Western World Wide Web and a state-controlled network spearheaded by Beijing and built by Chinese telecom companies. Under this Chinese internet governance model, every government would have the technical ability to more easily define the boundaries and rules of its national internet. This represents a competing normative ideal for the future of the internet that China has promoted as cyber sovereignty. As one UK delegate to the ITU told the Financial Times after the meeting, “Below the surface, there is a huge battle going on over what the internet will look like.… You’ve got these two competing visions: one which is very free and open and… one which is much more controlled and regulated by governments.” This battle could help accelerate a broader decoupling of China and the West into separate technologies, information ecosystems, and governance systems—in many ways mirroring the ongoing geopolitical struggle over the future of the international order.

New IP is only one high-profile example of what Beijing has come to see as an important component of China’s efforts to enhance its global power. More broadly, the CCP wants to leverage China’s huge market power and potential and its growing technological prowess to set standards that will come to underlie key emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, 5G, the internet of things, and genomic biotechnology. As China’s 2017 New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan put it, “to build China’s first-mover advantage in the development of AI,” it is vital for Chinese “AI enterprises to participate in or lead the development of international standards,” including “a technical standard approach to promote AI products and services in overseas applications” by going out into the world. Meanwhile, as discussed in chapter 12, China has moved decisively to implement data governance standards that, while distinctly their own, also align much more closely with Europe, leaving the United States the odd one out.

While international standards and norms may seem intangible, China’s experience of being absent from the creation of most of the standards that, up until now, have quietly governed critical aspects of the liberal world order—whether for the internet or the law of the sea—means that China understands the enduring power of determining new standards when new technology fields emerge. It recognizes that shaping the new generation of technology standards that will govern the twenty-first century is powerful indeed. And it sees this as foundational for an era of long-term Chinese global influence and, if possible, dominance—as the collective West has done in the past.

The United States—long the country that set international standards in the modern era—also understands the importance of this reality. That’s why Washington has pushed back strongly against Huawei’s expansion beyond China. The behind-the-scenes clash over standards is therefore likely to continue as a key battleground for US-China strategic competition over the global order for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately for Washington, the battlefield on which this battle will be fought will be the same multilateral institutions that the United States has come to neglect in recent years.

An International Order with Chinese Characteristics?

Is there a detailed blueprint of what a China-led international system would finally look like in the inner recesses of the Chinese leadership? At this stage, I doubt it. As discussed in earlier chapters, that is not the way China has approached large-scale policy projects in the past—either at home or abroad. China’s preferred approach is more iterative. Beijing tends to announce an all-embracing concept and then throw it to its think tanks for further analysis before beginning a series of trials in the real world. In the domestic context, the CCP typically trials its policies in various localities, monitoring reactions and learning from mistakes—sometimes for years—before introducing them nationally. We have seen that approach with the Belt and Road Initiative, which lacked definition when it was first launched in 2013. At that stage, it was just an idea. But by 2016, it was being incorporated into UN resolutions with the new UN secretary-general, António Guterres, waxing lyrical on the BRI’s potential virtues. Then, gradually, through an evolving process of trial and error, the testing of international reactions to various Chinese initiatives launched under the rubric of the BRI, and learning from what the Chinese system happily acknowledges as mistakes in the implementation process, a more refined institutional shape gradually emerged—and will continue to emerge—from the clay.

On the broader question of what type of international system Beijing wishes to build for the future, Xi’s opaque response since 2013 has been that China is in the process of building a “community of common destiny for all mankind.” To Western ears, this sounds like a classically high-minded Chinese concept of limited practical utility. But for China, this is the beginning of the rollout of yet another big idea—or at least a central organizing principle—around which its future efforts to craft an international system more to its choosing can be aggregated. In fact, the common destiny concept was formally incorporated into the Chinese constitution in 2018 and is finding its way into various UN resolutions and a plethora of international conferences in order to enhance its normative standing.

China has, nonetheless, been careful at this stage not to articulate with any greater specificity what exactly will be incorporated into this community of common destiny. Indeed, as with the BRI, inarticulateness in the early stages of the evolution of the concept appears to be deliberate, not accidental. China’s foreign policy establishment is once again pushing and probing to see how far they can get and what international reactions are likely to be forthcoming before speaking more definitively. China’s diplomatic efforts at this stage of the development of the proposal are aimed at taking the commanding heights of the debate by deploying the full normative language of the UN system to legitimize the concept across the international community—well before defining what it will actually mean in the more brutal world of policy praxis. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, this community of common destiny is likely to remain little more than a hazy, hybrid amalgam of traditional Chinese cosmology that conceptualizes a broader multinational realm of “all under heaven,” blended with a superficial form of Kantian idealism from the West that emphasizes cooperation, collaboration, and converging communitarian interests but with a spine of Leninist power politics lying at the center.

Indeed, we should not be surprised if, following the Twentieth Party Congress, we see Xi’s community of common destiny assume a more Marxist framework of analysis. Xi spends a lot of time on ideology. Therefore, locating this new concept within a Marxist frame of reference, as part of a new set of international progressive forces engaged in a new form of dialectical struggle against the failing structures of the Western powers of the past, could become part of Xi Jinping’s brave new world. Certainly, his Marxist think tanks are working on this. But how their work will be expressed publicly, when, and with what level of explicit political authority remains to be seen.

One concrete idea that gives form and shape to the type of new international order that Beijing has in mind is China’s advocacy of its development model for the world at large. This has been gathering in momentum since Xi first floated the idea at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 2017, when he said that China would not only “take an active part in reforming and developing the global governance system” but also offer “Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind,” including by “blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization.” As noted previously, this was the first occasion on which Xi advocated China’s authoritarian capitalist system as an alternative development theory to that offered by the liberal-democratic world. Since then, Xi’s language has become progressively more expansive on the accumulated wisdom that China has to share from its experience—as well as the new contribution to global Marxism that Xi’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has to offer. Therefore, whether the West cares to recognize it or not, in Xi’s worldview, there is a new, unfolding ideological struggle underway between state socialism and democratic capitalism, which China is determined to win. It will also inform the final content of Xi’s vision for a new global order.

For the time being, however, we are left to speculate as to what form a Chinese-led international order might ultimately take—were China to eventually prevail in the face of a prevaricating America, a divided Europe, and an increasingly accommodating developing world. But at its heart, Beijing’s call is for a multipolar world, appealing to decades of international political resentment over American unilateralism—most dramatically demonstrated by the folly of the second Iraq War and more recent forms of Trumpian exceptionalism. In China’s internal discourse, multipolarity is a simple proposition: a dilution of American power and the increase of its own in the deliberative processes of the current multilateral system. Once again, China, to its great surprise, has found itself pushing on an open door.

But in Beijing’s view, multipolarity—as with America’s rendition of the same—will not mean subjecting its core interests and values to the political abstractions of a UN or WTO process. Indeed, based on its behavior to date, Beijing is likely to be as selective in its acceptance of multilateral deliberative processes in the future as—it must be said—Washington has been in the past. China’s previously mentioned outright rejection of the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration’s decision rejecting its nine-dash line claims on the South China Sea is the most recent and perhaps most graphic case in point. Similarly, while enthusiastically welcoming the WTO’s policies on free trade, China has ignored its obligations when these have conflicted with its core economic interests. For example, China has never declared the extent of its state subsidies for Chinese commercial firms operating in the global marketplace. China is not the first country to adhere to the rules it likes and ignore those it doesn’t. But for China—as the self-described architect of a new global order—not abiding by existing international standards challenges its political legitimacy as the author of any replacement system.

Conclusion

At this point, we can safely say that China is likely to support a future order that is more accommodating of authoritarian political systems, with negligible intrusion from human rights bodies in the internal affairs of member states. Instead, it will increasingly champion its version of human rights, including prioritizing the right to development, by drawing on its success in poverty alleviation and on the G-77’s dissatisfaction with progress in the implementation of the sustainable development goals. Beijing would also be unlikely to authorize any future intrusion in the internal affairs of member states on the grounds of “international humanitarian intervention.” The future purview of institutions such as the International Criminal Court would become even more circumscribed. As for arms control and disarmament, China is unlikely to be any more forward leaning than America and Russia have been in recent years, although Beijing is likely to share Washington’s and Moscow’s concerns that the nuclear club doesn’t get any bigger, despite likely viewing the North Korean program as too advanced to stop and not too problematic from the perspective of China’s core national security interests, given that Pyongyang is unlikely to ever target Beijing.

On the global economic front, we will see China continue to champion its position on international digital governance, preferencing its state-sovereignty model over the European and American versions, as it rolls out its internet, telecommunications, and digital payments systems across BRI countries and beyond. Finally, on climate, China may part ways with its traditional BRICS partners in Russia, Brazil, India, and South Africa by advancing the need for greater climate action—not least because China fears the extreme economic and environmental consequences for its national future if the emissions of global greenhouse gases are not significantly reduced. Therefore, with the singular exception of climate change, a new international order with Chinese characteristics, or an illiberal international order, is likely to be significantly different to the one to which we have grown accustomed over the last seventy years.

As we see the contours of Xi’s plans for the future of the international rules-based order, America’s response to this challenge, in many ways, remains amorphous. While this has meant inconsistency and weakness, it also allows for flexibility. And over the past several years, America’s response to China’s ambitions for the future of the global order is emerging, cohering, and gradually gathering momentum.