The World according to China

In her important new book, Elizabeth Economy makes a strong case that China is attempting to, as she puts it, “reorder the world order” (2). Over the past decade, she argues, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has moved to reshape the international environment to better suit its interests. In so doing, it has sought to both push countries to align their interests with China's own and to reshape institutions of global governance to adopt new norms, values, and standards. And yet, Economy argues, China's assertive push is creating a global backlash that may well undermine its efforts to achieve a more powerful position on the world stage.The World according to China focuses on several areas of China's growing global influence. First, Economy analyzes the CCP's use of soft and hard power tools, both to shape the policy choices of national governments and also to influence global public opinion. Economy then turns her attention to the CCP's efforts to unify the country, with a particular focus on those parts of China—including Hong Kong and Xinjiang—that Beijing believes pose secessionist threats. She also analyzes Xi Jinping's efforts to press Taiwan to return to the motherland.Perhaps the most ambitious element of China's global strategy is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Economy acknowledges the real economic development benefits that BRI has brought to participating countries, while at the same time highlighting the long-term geostrategic interests that underpin the initiative. Given BRI's high price tag and the fact that some BRI countries are now in danger of default, it remains to be seen whether BRI will deliver all of the economic and strategic benefits Beijing is hoping for.1Economy also takes a close look at China's efforts to dominate the global technology space. Years of heavy subsidies to leading Chinese tech companies clearly are “a bet that has already paid off” (128): top Chinese tech companies are now vital international players. There are, however, structural conflicts that could impact the tech sector's long-term trajectory: tech companies have to follow CCP political mandates first and pursue profit and innovation second.Economy's chapter on global governance also demonstrates the limits of China's influence efforts. Using four case studies—on the Arctic, human rights, cyber-governance and technology standards, and development finance—Economy paints a vivid portrait of China's efforts to assert itself more forcefully in global governance regimes. The CCP's influence efforts have yielded real dividends: on human rights, for example, China has successfully blocked any efforts by UN human rights bodies to criticize its abusive policies.At the same time, however, the decline in human rights in China has mobilized many inside the UN human rights system. In June 2020, a group of UN special rapporteurs and other experts issued a joint letter calling on China to address systematic and widespread rights abuses. Such efforts show that many experts inside the UN system are in fact responding to China's growing human rights crisis.One key weakness of the book is its dearth of Chinese-language source material. By my own count, of the nearly nine hundred footnotes in the book, only twenty-nine refer to Chinese-language sources. The World according to China doesn't engage as deeply as it might with the key political and ideological drivers of China's push to replace the United States as the leading global power, the deepest discussion of which is found in Chinese-language sources. As a result, the book provides a vivid picture of what China is doing but offers only limited glimpses at why it is doing it. The lack of Chinese-language source material also unintentionally creates an impression of a monolithic discussion inside China, when in fact there are some who disagree—often only in private, at other times, with a degree of circumspection2—with Xi's global push.That deficit aside, The World according to China offers an invaluable and wide-ranging overview of China's effort to displace the United States as the leading world power. Economy's core recommendation to Washington—that it double down on its network of alliances—has already been taken up by the Biden administration. In July 2022, for example, after intensive US lobbying, NATO member states referenced the systemic challenge posed by China's “coercive” policies, marking the first time that the security bloc explicitly mentioned the country in a formal communique.Still, doubts over America's long-term commitment to the international system remain. For decades, it was considered a truism of US foreign policy that America's network of alliances needed to be maintained and that international institutions were a core element of the US-led liberal order. The Trump years called those bedrock assumptions into question. Longtime US allies now ask themselves whether Washington will stay the course. The World according to China offers many excellent suggestions on how to respond to China's rise. But it doesn't address the crucial underlying question of whether America's own deep-seated political woes will hamstring American foreign policy in ways that could benefit Beijing.