Last month Civic Future invited me to join a panel at their annual policy forum. The topic: what the United Kingdom should do about China. As I am neither a British citizen nor an expert in British affairs, I thought it impolitic to lecture my hosts on how they should be governing their own country. Instead I focused my remarks on the communist government in Beijing. My aim was to lay out several elements of Chinese foreign policy that must be taken into account by statesmen from any Western country.

It will be difficult to guide any nation through the storms of the next two decades; it will be harder still if our leaders chart their course without reference to the fundamental ways, means, and ends of Chinese strategy.  These ways, means, and ends are discernible. When you clear out the deadwood and the underbrush you will find that the many branches of Chinese foreign policy spring from five trunks, each vital and deep-rooted.

Others might parse the fundamentals of Chinese grand strategy slightly differently. What follows is my personal attempt to summarize the essentials of Chinese foreign policy in as few points as possible. These can be stated as follows:

  1.  The overriding goal of the Communist Party of China is to restore China to a position of glory and influence commensurate with its ancestral heritage.
  2. This can only be accomplished by pioneering a technological transformation of the global economy on the scale of the industrial revolution. 
  3. The greatest perceived threat to China’s rise is found in the ideological domain—and in a globalized world that domain is a global one.
  4. Chinese leaders imagine they will reshape the global order primarily through economic, not military, tools.
  5.  The main exception to this is Taiwan. With Taiwan economic tools have proven ineffective; the possibility of war is very real.

As I was limited to only eight minutes speaking time, I did not explore all five of these elements at great length. I decided to focus on points #1 and #3, which struck me as the most immediately relevant to the British state. However, I have explored most of the others in various essays I have published over the last few years.

Those who would like to read my assessment of the singular role that technology plays in Chinese grand strategy should read the essay Nancy Yu and I published in Foreign Policy earlier this year: “Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution.” (For those locked out behind a paywall, I excerpt a key paragraphs and expand my argument in my follow up blog post, and summarize my arguments on Bonnie Glaeser’s podcast China Global).

I have written a great deal about Chinese perceptions of threat and the relationship between their threat perceptions and their foreign policy. My best attempts to tackle the topic succinctly are my two contributions to the Lowy Institute round-table on a Chinese world order.

I outline the role Communist leaders believe that  economic integration will play in advancing their nation to “the center of the world stage” in my 2020 essay for Palladium, “The Theory of History That Guides Xi Jinping.” (The economic situation has changed somewhat in the years that followed. I analyze how these changes have impacted both Party theory and strategy here and here).

Finally: I have not yet written a piece that explains, with proper sourcing, why I believe the Chinese leadership will be willing to resolve the Taiwan problem through force of arms. I do describe the basic strategic dynamics at play, however, in the essays “We Can Only Kick Taiwan Down the Road So Far” and  “Sino-American Competition and the Search For Historical Analogies.”

A video of my opening statement, as well as the prepared statements of the other two panelists and our responses to the questions from the audience, has been embedded at the top of this post. You can also find it here, on the Civic Future Youtube channel.

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For more of my writing on geopolitics, you might also like the posts  “Sino-American Competition and the Search for Historical Analogies,” “Against the Kennan Sweepstakes,” “Of Sanctions and Strategic Bombers,” “Fear the First Strike,” “The Lights Wink Out in Asia,” and “Losing Taiwan is Losing Japan.” To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.

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