The Once and Future China

If you dropped in to China at any point in its modern history and tried to project 20 years into the future, you would almost certainly end up getting it wrong. In 1900, no one serving in the late Qing dynasty expected that in 20 years the country would be a republic feuded over by warlords. In 1940, as a fractious China staggered in the face of a massive Japanese invasion, few would have imagined that by 1960, it would be a giant communist state about to split with the Soviet Union. In 2000, the United States helped China over the finish line in joining the World Trade Organization, ushering the country into the liberal capitalist trading system with much fanfare. By 2020, China and the United States were at loggerheads and in the midst of a trade war.

Twenty years from now, Chinese leader Xi Jinping might still be in power in some fashion even into his 90s; Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader from 1978 to 1989, retained considerable influence until his death at 92, in 1997. Since taking the reins in 2012, Xi has pushed China in directions that have increasingly placed it at odds with its neighbors, regional powers, and the United States. At home, authorities are widening and deepening systems of surveillance and control, clamping down on ethnic minorities and narrowing the space for dissent. On its maritime borders, China engages in ever more confrontational acts that risk sparking conflicts not just with Taiwan but also with Japan and Southeast Asian countries. Farther afield, Beijing has tacitly supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and is widely believed to be responsible for major cyber-interference in Western infrastructure. This trend is hardly promising, and things could get even worse were China to take the bold step of starting a war over Taiwan, an operation for which the Chinese military has long been preparing.

And yet another China remains possible—one that would allow a degree of coexistence with the United States and its allies and partners without requiring the sacrifice of essential global interests or values. To be sure, China may never become the kind of country many Western optimists imagined in the early post–Cold War decades: a gradually more liberal and obliging member of the U.S.-led international order. That horse bolted the stable long ago. But in 20 years, a version of China could emerge with which the West and the wider world can coexist, as long as both China and Western governments avoid the policies that would make conflict inescapable.

That coexistence would not be especially warm, but it would have shed the kind of friction and animosity that loom over relations today. The generation of Chinese leaders after Xi, many of whom came of age during the modest openings of the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of this century, might well want to return the country to the promise of those periods. They may also realize that entanglement in any significant military or geoeconomic confrontation will prevent China from achieving its other aims, such as reviving the economy to achieve middle-class growth at home and spread the country’s influence abroad. Beijing cannot wage a big war and still attain economic security. Its aging society and the imperatives of greater regional economic integration to sustain its growth make it harder to endure the consequences of a major conflict—or even just a more confrontational regional and global posture.

But even if China avoids triggering immense conflicts with its neighbors and the West in the near future, it will not simply become a placid member of a steadily eroding liberal international order. Its global influence could grow significantly, in ways that will cause Western countries and liberal democracies considerable angst. The United States and its allies, however, will have to determine whether a China that is a softer incarnation of its current self should be regarded as a legitimate part of a changing global order—or still be treated as an existential threat.

THE RETURN OF THE QING

To understand where China might be going, it’s worth examining a much older pattern that underpins Chinese foreign policy. When the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912, had to grapple with European imperial powers in the late nineteenth century, prominent officials crafted two slogans that defined how China should deal with the Western challenge: fuguo qiangbing, or “rich country and strong army,” and zhongti xiyong, or “Chinese for essence, Western for usage.” The ideas behind these phrases have remained constant across the century and a half since they first came to prominence during the late imperial decline of the Qing.

The first drew from famous rhetoric during China’s Warring States period over two thousand years ago. The slogan distilled the country’s abiding material ambitions, its need to attain power through militarized national security and prosperity. In the last century, other great powers have deprioritized the quest for military strength, whether because of defeat in war (as was the case with Germany and Japan) or imperial decline (as with the United Kingdom, which went from being a great power at the start of the twentieth century to a middle power by its end). China has not.

The second phrase denoted the idea that a non-Western country could adopt some of the frameworks of Western modernity—such as particular kinds of military technology or constitutional and legal reforms—without sacrificing its authentic cultural self. In 1865, Qing officials discussed the opening in Shanghai of the Jiangnan arsenal, China’s first modern weapons factory, in this language. Many non-Western societies embraced similar views, including Japan, a country that modernized rapidly in the twentieth century to compete with Western states while still retaining a distinct sense of its own identity. The challenge they set for themselves was to achieve material progress and improve state capacity without becoming “Western.”

The Qing dynasty ended, but the debate about how to achieve these two national goals did not. The Chinese Communist Party always believed that forging a militarily strong and economically secure China was one of its fundamental objectives. By the 1990s, the CCP wondered whether it should follow the model of Singapore: a country that won global admiration while producing stable governance, a balance between consensus and coercion, and the ostensible adherence to what its longtime leader Lee Kuan Yew called the “Asian values” of deference to authority and communitarianism.

In 20 years, a version of China could emerge with which the West can coexist.

The dual aspirations of these slogans are visible today. China has long wanted to become a wealthy and strong country, but only in the present has it come close to achieving this goal; it now has the world’s second-biggest economy and its second-biggest military. Becoming a great power has coincided with the need to underline the indigenous sources of Chinese greatness. Since at least the 1980s, the CCP has nurtured a modernized, authoritarian version of Confucian culture, stressing the importance of “harmony” in public life, a quality very much at odds with the churning revolution of Mao’s rule from 1949 until his death in 1976. Under Xi, significant resources have been poured into initiatives such as the Confucian canon project, which reached a 20-year milestone in 2023 by classifying over 200 million characters’ worth of texts from China’s cultural traditions.

The core aim of fuguo qiangbing, of becoming wealthy and militarily strong, will define Chinese policy in the years and decades to come. But it could prove tricky for Beijing to attain. Unlike in the imperial age of the nineteenth century, the assertion of military strength in the interconnected twenty-first century can jeopardize the search for prosperity. Precisely because China is not an old-style empire, its growth largely depends on its expansion of supply chains, its investments in other countries, and its unceasing quest to embed itself in new markets. That economic ambition can easily be undone if China engages in alarming military actions. Irredentist adventurism, notably in pursuit of territorial claims in Taiwan, the South China Sea, and along the disputed border with India, could make current and potential partners wonder whether they can truly rely on China.

China may well become more confrontational in its approach to the world. Appeals to economic rationality won’t convince nationalists in the party or on social media who want to see the country assert itself on the international stage. But if China uses force to transform its regional geography, it will change the way that others see it. China might argue that its ambitions are limited, that Taiwan or the South China Sea are exceptions to its general policy of nonconfrontation. But neighbors would find it harder to trust a China that chooses to define its own boundaries and fails to demonstrate any constraints on its own power. China would not be isolated, but it would struggle to build trust and encourage other governments to accept the norms it wants to define the world: untrammeled state power and the subordination of civil rights and freedoms to economic and development goals.

DIRE STRAITS

China would struggle even more to chart a better path were it to choose to wage a war over Taiwan. Such a war would be motivated, in China, by a politics of identity that is largely impervious to economic rationality and other strategic considerations. Still, such a war would create a lose-lose scenario for everyone.

A violent seizure of Taiwan would be hard to accomplish, but China could probably pull it off. The aftermath of such aggression, however, would be deeply damaging for Beijing. The use of military force and the human and economic cost of violence would make all of Asia nervous about Chinese intentions regarding regional maritime routes and provoke many of these countries to ramp up security measures and reject opportunities for greater regional integration. Asian states will worry that China might decide—much as Russia has done since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—that some countries are more sovereign than others and that the domestic actions and preferences of neighboring states can somehow constitute a violation of sovereignty. Chinese officials may reject comparisons with Russian actions in Ukraine or the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but decision-makers in Southeast Asia will find it difficult to trust Beijing.

Even if the seizure of Taiwan does not lead to a wider regional confrontation, any number of powerful economic actors in the global North might impose sanctions that would hurt China, and Asia more broadly. Beijing’s ideological coercion or “reeducation” of a conquered island under a regime like that in place in Xinjiang or Tibet would destroy the high-tech, export-oriented economy of the island, which is highly dependent on extensive interactions with the wider world.

The conquest of Taiwan would also deal a huge blow to Chinese soft power. In Asia, the story would take hold that Beijing was never able to peacefully persuade its compatriots to join a greater China. A China that can’t convince a culturally similar territory to join it will struggle to persuade others that it can create a meaningful wider “community of common destiny,” to use CCP terminology. In the region, East Asian and Southeast Asian countries would divert spending away from consumption to building up their militaries, and they would seek to disentangle their supply chains from China.

This post-conflict version of China would become increasingly ostracized. Sanctions from wealthy countries would disrupt the Chinese economy over the medium to long term. Russia was able to turn to China to limit the damage of sanctions after it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but China will not have any similar benefactor to provide new, lucrative supply chains or markets, even if it retains its access to much of the global South. Countries in wartime conditions that are cut off even partially from global flows often suffer significant inflation, as Russia has seen since 2022. Chinese policymakers in the 1990s who rejected the “shock therapy” visited on post-Soviet Russia remembered that hyperinflation under the predecessor Nationalist regime had helped usher in a Communist victory in 1949. In the 1980s, even more modest inflation of 20 to 30 percent led to widespread demonstrations and ultimately fueled the political protests that ended bloodily in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Were Beijing to attack Taiwan, it would risk another devastating inflationary period, with similar effects on social stability.

China will not abandon its claim to Taiwan, as Xi’s 2025 New Year message showed when he declared that “no one can stop the historical trend of national reunification.” The CCP’s close control over media and propaganda, however, means that it could easily choose to deprioritize the quest for unification. That action alone would have tremendous benefits for Beijing. Taiwan is important to Chinese citizens, but they care more about day-to-day issues such as the stability of the economy and jobs. Xi has built up forces on the mainland across from the island and ratcheted up rhetoric targeting Taipei. But China would bolster trust in its position in the region if it toned down its rhetoric and actions related to Taiwan and its maritime claims in the South China Sea, making it clear that these issues can be resolved at some point in the future. Lowering the temperature would go some way toward removing one of the most powerful causes for concern in the wider world about Chinese intentions.

GENERATIONAL SHIFT

Under Xi, China has become more authoritarian in its control of its citizens, more confrontational in its conduct with its neighbors, and more open in its desire to challenge U.S. supremacy. The next generation of Chinese leaders may pull the country in a different direction. In 20 years, the CCP officials now in their 40s will form the bulk of the leadership. Xi could still be in charge, but he will be in his early 90s and likely the only remaining leader whose teenage years were shaped by the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, an experience that seems to have given him an abiding desire for order above all. Instead, the remaining top leaders will be those who grew up in the 1990s and in the first decade of this century. The China of their youth was one where Chinese broadcasting and the press were significantly more open than they are now, where daring journalism was sometimes possible, and where there were still real debates about how China could reform its political system. Those who came of age in the early twenty-first century also experienced a decade of relatively free discussion on social media until that, too, was suppressed.

Just as the Cultural Revolution shaped the very top leaders today, the memories of a more open China will be powerful among leaders in the coming decades—not just high party officials but also figures in business, media, and the parastatal organizations, such as the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, that substitute for civil society. Many of these leaders won’t be liberal in the Western sense of that term; if the wider world expects committed Americanophiles in the Chinese leadership, it will wait in vain. But some are likely to be far more open-minded than they would admit in public today. Indeed, in private, many people in the business, media, and think-tank worlds are frustrated with and despondent about the atmosphere in China. Like their elders, they will remain wary of the United States, but they may not, for instance, be as interested in partnering with Russia, a country they regard as offering no serious economic opportunities. Xi’s father loved Russia because of its cultural and political influence on the revolution that would drive the Communists to power in China in 1949, and many Chinese citizens today tolerate Russia because it is vigorously anti-Western. But the public does not have a strong bond with the country. One 2024 survey suggested that around 120,000 Chinese are learning Russian; over 300 million are learning English.

The transfer of power to this jiulinghou (post-1990s) generation could encourage decision-makers in China to recognize that less is more. The country need not change its goals in the coming decades: it will still want to be a global power with a strong army and to see the world in the communitarian, authoritarian terms that suit the CCP. But future leaders may see value in moderating China’s authoritarianism in ways that would make it more powerful. Beijing’s attempts to expand its influence have been damaged by its encroachment on others and its lack of transparency and prickliness in international diplomacy. In contrast, countries such as India, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates have taken pains to project themselves as cooperative actors on the international stage even when their internal politics have moved in illiberal directions. These countries have frequently pursued goals not aligned with those of Western countries, such as India’s purchase of Russian oil and weapons, but the perception that they do not seek to reshape the world order to suit themselves has in fact magnified their influence.

Future Chinese leaders could well be nostalgic for the China of the late 1990s that was able to create a more favorable, global image for itself after the disaster of Tiananmen Square. This China would still strive for prosperity and strength, but it would assume that relative openness to the world is the best way to get to prosperity and strength. Even as it eschews any aspiration to be Western, it would be keen to acknowledge that Chinese identity has always been pluralistic and draws on many external influences. At home, it would recognize that would-be totalitarian surveillance states are never guaranteed survival—see, for instance, East Germany. It would relax the kinds of controls and systems of surveillance and censorship that it is now tightening, not just with the hope of producing greater social harmony and stability but also presenting a China that is more appealing to the world.

A more moderate but still authoritarian China will not be the pluralist democratic country once dreamed of by Western politicians, such as U.S. President Bill Clinton, and senior CCP figures from earlier eras, such as former Politburo members Li Rui and Zhao Ziyang. But it may be a realistic medium-term outcome. Such a China may also resemble much of the rest of the world, as the drift toward authoritarianism in global politics seems likely to continue into the 2030s and beyond. By that time, many countries in the West, never mind the rest of the world, may have adopted more illiberal policies at home, restricting personal freedoms and the movement of people. Few countries, not even the United States, will be in a rush to advance a global campaign for liberal democracy in the years to come. In that environment, a China under less sharp-edged leadership could very well seem more compatible with the future international system. A more illiberal global atmosphere, ironically, could allow China to loosen up in areas in which doing so might expand its global influence and in which it no longer feels vulnerable to liberal counterattacks.

A TALE TO TELL

In this scenario, China would still need to overcome immense global skepticism about its intentions. A 2023 Pew survey across a variety of countries concluded that, despite international concerns about U.S. interference, impressions of the United States were still much more favorable than those of China. During the Cold War, the United States managed to create a persuasive vision of itself as a leader of a liberal world order that ultimately triumphed over a rival Soviet order. China will need to conjure something similarly attractive if it wants to cement its global power and economic and political preeminence. It will want the world, particularly the countries of the global South, to see it as an economically robust and militarily strong country, one that remains rooted in its own core cultural identity while also serving as an exemplar for other societies seeking prosperity in difficult circumstances.

It would not be necessary for all of China’s ideological messages to be comprehensible across different cultures and societies. After all, it’s often said that the United States has a story that can resonate far beyond its shores, and that story helps create the country’s soft power, but in reality, the United States sells a highly particular version of itself abroad. Many aspects of American life—for instance, the view held by many Americans that freedom and the right to bear firearms are inextricable—do not resonate outside the United States. China’s internal debates, such as arguments about whether Communists or Nationalists were more instrumental in the defeat of Japan in World War II or reformulations of Marxist-Leninist theory (Xi calls himself a “twenty-first-century Marxist”), are of little interest to those outside the country. But China can still offer a vision of itself that appeals to the outside world.

There is a precedent. Modern China has produced a global ideology in the recent past: Maoism. It’s often forgotten how influential this strand of thinking was just over half a century ago. In India, in Peru, and on the streets of Paris, different rebel groups found the package of convictions that went under Mao’s name to be a potent source of ideological power. Many of the specifics of Mao’s thought were geared toward China’s own realities of peasant revolution and the search for a post-Qing political settlement. But Maoism seemed to fit a 1960s moment, when wealthy and developing countries alike were exploding in revolution against their existing systems. The vision of youthful rebellion against a calcified, aging system and of a revolutionary future anchored in the countryside offered more than enough for people outside China to use for their own purposes.

Of course, in the decades to come, China will not export a violent revolutionary cult. Instead, Beijing could succeed by offering a plausible story about itself in the turbulent 2030s, when liberal pluralist democracy may well have become a minority taste. By then, the majority of global political regimes could range from hybrid illiberal democracies to authoritarian states. As a stable, economically productive, and technologically innovative polity, China could comfort and even inspire elites and ordinary people in other countries. It already does so. As much as many Indians mistrust China’s intentions, for instance, many Indian political and business elites evince increasingly open admiration for the Chinese system and its undeniable material achievements. In selling its example and worldview, China could draw on Confucian ideas, including the notion that collective values are more meritorious than individualistic ones. China could champion “authoritarian welfarism,” in which governments combine coercive top-down control with significant social spending to provide public goods and reduce inequality—and in so doing, highlight the perceived failures of liberal free-market capitalism. Versions of this politics have already gained adherents in the United States, Europe, and Latin America in the past decade, as liberal individualism has been increasingly called into question. China could make the case that the endpoint for a prosperous and stable society looks like what is on offer in Beijing rather than in Paris and New York.

China can give substance to its global appeal by concentrating on one key issue, the green energy transition, portraying itself as a leader when the United States has turned in another direction. In 20 years, China could reach the apex of its current strategy of becoming the world’s dominant player in facilitating the transition by continuing to export electric vehicles and the components to make green energy more widely available and by increasingly shifting to cleaner sources of energy production at home. By providing global public goods, it can link the values of collective striving embedded in “authoritarian welfarism” with the moral imperatives of energy transition. If the West is split, with Europe more interested in green technology than a United States still significantly committed to fossil fuels, China will find it easier to make pragmatic clean energy partnerships with European states. China would be both an exemplar and a provider for growing, energy-hungry countries elsewhere, too, especially those that are particularly vulnerable to climate change. China will find it much easier than liberal Western states to speak to the needs of people in large countries susceptible to mounting environmental disasters, such as Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, whose large populations have rising consumer demands. It can frame its green offerings not just as a matter of practical necessity but also of justice, supplying what the Western countries principally responsible for this crisis cannot.

But to cast itself as such a savior, China will need to create a society that is at least broadly prosperous and stable and whose large armed forces are capable but seldom stray from the barracks or port. That sort of China could promote the idea that the country has a unique system of political and economic thinking and strategy (zhongti, “Chinese for essence”) that nonetheless can be used elsewhere by those who care to learn from it. As China courts middle powers with this narrative, the West could find it hard to push back.

China could also emerge as a hub for new technology by the 2030s, with considerable autonomy from the United States, should the trend toward technological and trade “decoupling” continue. Fewer Chinese young people will likely be studying in the West, and the already small number of Westerners who do so in China will remain limited. China and the United States will likely grow further apart as their ecologies of technology diverge further over time.

But even as China’s scientific development in fields such as artificial intelligence becomes more distinct from that of Western countries, tech developers and entrepreneurs will want to participate in both spheres. By the 2030s, technological norms might meet and compete in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and South America, sometimes forming hybrid tech cultures that mix elements from China and the West. China will seek to draw more people into its tech orbit. Chinese universities and research institutes will host a growing number of students and researchers from Southeast Asia and beyond. Some of the most creative scientific work might well happen in third countries, where researchers and entrepreneurs are freer to mix and match what they learn. Decoupling, which would force scientific research and development into separate silos, would be bad for the Western and Chinese science bases but might be the making of several emerging middle powers.

CHINA IN THE CRYSTAL BALL

In 20 years, China could be a very different geopolitical actor than it is now. It could have moderated its authoritarianism, possess but not use military force, and be constrained as well as enabled by its major trade and technology links. This China would still be a country whose norms are different from those of the ever-shrinking liberal world, and its capabilities would still undoubtedly make neighbors and rivals nervous. But Western countries would find such a China manageable and also harder to posit as an existential geopolitical rival.

To reach that point, China will have to change. It will need to convince other countries that it does not seek to resolve issues through confrontation, whether through conventional military means or the use of cybertechnology. It will have to wean itself from its tendency to switch between saccharine rhetoric about its own place in the global order and, on the other hand, harsh screeds and coercive trade and military tactics when countries don’t fall in line. Such rhetoric works in the closed media environment at home: it has little global appeal, even among countries that profess some sympathy with China’s worldview.

Change is inevitable in China over the next 20 years, but external factors will likely be secondary in shaping that change. Instead, long-term domestic trends will define China’s future. These include the country’s need to care for an older and sicker population, the rise to maturity of a generation that did not grow up with the belief that the United States is China’s primary enemy, and the need to create stable higher-value jobs with a shrinking working-age population. The current downturn in domestic professional middle-class employment can be solved only by long-term solutions that involve China doing a lot more work to become a trusted and cooperative actor in the global economy.

By the 2030s, liberal pluralist democracy may be a minority taste.

China and the United States should both note that by the middle of the twenty-first century, the powers of the global South will be much stronger political, economic, and technological actors in their own right, not chess pieces in someone else’s game. The wider world is unlikely to take the West’s negative assessments of China as gospel; many outside the West will see the benefits of a China whose economic power, huge markets, and capacity to innovate in green energy and artificial intelligence is useful to them. But China’s military buildups and mercantilist economics will rebound on the country, reminding its partners that they should not become dependent on Beijing. A version of China that the world, including the global South, can live with would not have to be democratic or liberal. But it would need to be one that acknowledges its own errors, is much more transparent, and understands that any use of military or other coercive force (including in cyberspace) will fundamentally damage trust in its international relations.

China may well succeed in fulfilling the paired aspirations of the Qing era, the quest for geopolitical and economic power, along with the retention of a fundamental “Chinese essence.” But it will not do so if it chooses to start major military conflagrations in Asia. As long as a plausible case can be made that China is a military threat, Beijing gives the Western world an argument that can be used against it. By taking a less confrontational and militarist posture, however, China will give the West greater dilemmas to solve. Some Western countries may find Chinese-style welfarist authoritarianism attractive. Western policymakers and thinkers will have to determine whether a powerful state that is a geoeconomic and ideological challenge but not a military one still deserves to be treated as an existential danger.

A China that looks like the creator of a peaceful order in the 2040s will be much harder to argue against in the West and the wider world than its current confrontational incarnation. It is unclear whether China can really take that path. Still, over the past century, the least reliable way to predict what China will look like in 20 years has always been to extrapolate in a straight line from where it is now.