Transcript | What Does China Want? The Authors of a New Paper Challenge the DC Consensus

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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One of the more consequential and frequently asked questions when it comes to China is, what does China actually want? On this program, I have interviewed numerous guests who address just that question and provided their answers. Off the top of my head, I mean, there was, of course, Jessica Chen Weiss, who joined me several years ago to talk about her very influential piece in Foreign Affairs, provocatively titled Making the World Safe for Autocracy, in which, I mean, just to summarize, she argue that domestic political imperatives primarily drive China’s foreign policy to ensure the Party’s survival rather than some deliberate effort to export autocracy globally. She sees mainly defensive actions by Beijing aimed at making the world, as she says, more accommodating for its own autocratic political system.

Ali Wyne, who’s now at the Eurasia Group, he talked about a paper, when he was at Rand, that he worked on that challenged the portrayal of China as a revisionist power that was hellbent on global dominion. Describing it instead as pretty selectively revisionist.

I’ve had Kerry Brown on the show talking about one of his recent books. I mean, the guy is crazily prolific, and there’s been at least two since. And he argued that what we really need to do is invert the question and ask, you know, what do we want from China? And to really interrogate our own expectations and our own desires.

Just now, just before we jump down, I was reading an interview in the SMP from Da Wei at Tsinghua University at the Center for International Security and Strategy, who has been on the program before. And he said, let me just quote from him here — “I don’t think China has a very strong appetite to fill that vacuum.” And the vacuum he’s talking about is the vacuum left by Trump, globally in leadership. And also, he goes on, “I don’t think China has the capability to fill that vacuum. The U.S. has been kind of a hegemon for decades, if not a century. I don’t think China is in that position. At the same time, I don’t think China is so eager to replace the U.S. to be the leading country in the world.”

Anyway, the question of what China really wants, which no one will be surprised to hear I actually have pretty strong opinions about, and I think nobody would be surprised that the positions of my previous guests that I’ve just outlined all line up pretty well with my own thinking. I mean, nobody who’s been listening to this program is going to wonder where I stand on that question. And I think it’s important that I say that up front. It has seemed to me for a very long time that America’s China hawks, if you will, they project onto China from their own experience, and not just at the level of strategic intention of grand strategy. Still, I think this question of what China wants, what its ultimate ambitions are, is very much a live debate. And I would argue that it’s actually one of the defining disagreements that fundamentally divides the so-called China watchers of the world. It’s one of probably the best litmus test, indeed, if you want to get a sense of one’s overall posture toward China.

But with both Democratic and Republican administrations in succession, embracing increasingly confrontational strategies toward Beijing, I mean, maybe not so much just in recent months with Trump, but still, it’s an incredibly important question.

So, I was very glad to see a new academic paper published in International Security — this issue is Summer of 2025 — simply titled, What Does China Want? It challenges the central assumptions driving U.S. strategy, the prevailing narrative, which I think it’s fair to say, assumes that China seeks global hegemony. It seeks territorial expansion. It seeks to displace American leadership in the world. This belief fuels policies of military deterrence, alliance building for containment, and economic decoupling.

But what if this consensus is based on misperceptions? Misperceptions that risk unnecessary conflict while obscuring opportunities for cooperation on all sorts of critical global challenges

So, joining us today are the three authors of What Does China What? Who argue that a close, systematic reading of Chinese official rhetoric, historical patterns of territorial claims, and quantitative analysis of leadership statements suggests a very different reality, one in which China is primarily a status quo power, not exclusively, but primarily a status quo power focused on regime stability rather than external expansion. Their research, which integrates computational text analysis, authoritative Party media, and a broader historical lens, takes aim at the assumptions that undergird massive military spending and defines how the world’s greatest power treats its most consequential strategic competitor. Now, the paper has engendered, not surprisingly, quite a bit of pushback from people who hold to the China as revisionist and hegemonic power perspective. And we’re going to get into that criticism in due course.