CHINA’S TWO PATHS TO GLOBAL DOMINATION

XI JINPING’S CHINA IS DISPLAYING a superpower’s ambition. Only a few years ago, many American observers still hoped that China would reconcile itself to a supporting role in the liberal international order or would pose—at most—a challenge to U.S. influence in the Western Pacific. The conventional wisdom was that China would seek an expanded regional role—and a reduced U.S. role—but would defer to the distant future any global ambitions. Now, however, the signs that China is gearing up to contest America’s global leadership are unmistakable, and they are ubiquitous.

There is the naval shipbuilding program, which put more vessels to sea between 2014 and 2018 than the total number of ships in the German, Indian, Spanish, and British navies combined. There is Beijing’s bid to dominate high-tech industries that will determine the future distribution of economic and military power. There is the campaign to control the crucial waterways off China’s coast, as well as reported plans to create a chain of bases and logistical facilities farther afield. There are the systematic efforts to refine methods of converting economic influence into economic coercion throughout the Asia-Pacific and beyond.

Not least, there is the fact that a country that formerly disguised its ambitions now asserts them openly. China has entered a “new era,” Xi announced in 2017, and must “take center stage in the world.” Two years later, Xi used the idea of a “new Long March” to describe China’s worsening relationship with Washington. Even strategic shocks that originated within China have become showcases for Beijing’s geopolitical aspirations: Witness how Xi’s government has sought to turn a coronavirus crisis made worse by its own authoritarianism into an opportunity to project Chinese influence and market China’s model overseas.

The precise intentions of opaque, authoritarian regimes are difficult to discern. And there is danger in definitive declarations of hostile intent because they can lead to fatalism and self-fulfilling prophecies. The two of us have different priors about whether stable, constructive U.S.-China relations are still possible. But it requires a degree of willful ignorance not to ask whether China is in fact seeking (or will inevitably seek) to establish itself as the world’s leading power and how it might go about achieving that goal. The architects of America’s China strategy, no matter how instinctively accommodating