This week on Sinica, I chat with Dave Kang (USC), Zenobia Chan (Georgetown), and Jackie Wong (American University in Sharjah, UAE) about their new paper in International Security titled "What Does China Want?" The paper, which has generated quite a bit of controversy, takes a data-driven approach to examine the claim that China seeks global hegemony — that it wants to supplant the U.S.
David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, and Zenobia T. Chan, “What Does China Want?” International Security 50:1 (Summer 2025), pp. 46–81.
Kang, Wong, and Chan’s article “What Does China Want?” is a rare exercise in methodological discipline. Through analysis of more than 12,000 People’s Daily articles and over 300 of Xi Jinping’s speeches, the authors establish that China’s aims are “unambiguous, enduring, and limited” (pp. 49–50). Their close reading demonstrates that Chinese leaders repeatedly emphasize regime stability, sovereignty, and economic development, rather than global conquest. The article rebuts the prevailing claim that Beijing is bent on displacing U.S. hegemony, positioning China instead as a status quo power with regional priorities.
In doing so, the authors also dismantle the myth of creeping expansion. They show that since 1949 China has resolved most border disputes and that its remaining claims are static, not expanding (pp. 76–77). Equally important, they find that key phrases in Chinese political discourse such as “struggle” (douzheng) overwhelmingly refer to domestic challenges — corruption, poverty, governance — rather than foreign conflict (pp. 62–64). These findings provide much-needed empirical ballast in a debate often dominated by conjecture and alarmism.
The Deeper Issue: Pedagogy and Reception
Yet there is a deeper issue the article does not address: the environment in which such findings are interpreted. While Kang, Wong, and Chan convincingly argue that China’s goals are bounded, they write within a disciplinary architecture that continues to treat the state as the rational actor in an anarchic system. Their framework — like the theories they are challenging — remains state- and leader-centric.
Indeed, even in their corrective to alarmism, the authors remain bounded by Kenneth Waltz’s ontological starting point: that anarchy is the ordering principle of international politics and states are the rational actors within it. Within this ontology, the telos of IR remains predisposed toward conflict, because the logic of anarchy generates security dilemmas and the perpetual anticipation of war. By not challenging this baseline assumption, the article reinscribes the very worldview it seeks to soften, leaving open the possibility that its findings will be absorbed back into the same war-prone theoretical frame.
The problem is not just what China wants, but what the West teaches. In the Anglo-American academy, International Relations pedagogy is dominated by Cold War paradigms. Undergraduates are drilled in Waltz’s structural realism, Mearsheimer’s offensive realism, Fukuyama’s “end of history,” and Ikenberry’s liberal institutionalism etc. Even critical or constructivist offerings tend to orbit around Western historical metaphors — Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 still appears as a lesson for maritime disputes in the South China Sea.
This intellectual conditioning matters. Graduates of these programs populate NATO, the G7, Five Eyes, Israel, and South Korea’s policy establishments. They enter government and think tanks with an intellectual toolkit that assumes anarchy, rational actors, and security dilemmas as natural law. Within this lens, China can only ever be framed as a threat. The banning of Confucius Institutes across the UK and North America illustrates how classroom narratives translate directly into securitized policy.
Implications
Kang, Wong, and Chan succeed in demonstrating that China does not seek to overturn the international order. But the tragedy is that their intervention may remain confined to journal pages, admired for rigor but absent from syllabi. Without confronting the pedagogical reproduction of threat-centric IR, even the most careful scholarship risks being structurally sidelined.
The authors are right: China’s aims are limited. But the academy’s imagination is not. Until the core curriculum is decolonized and students are introduced to Chinese, Indian, African, and Global South perspectives, Western policy will continue to reproduce the same binaries: conflict, Thucydides Trap, and regional hegemony.
Conclusion
“What Does China Want?” deserves praise as a corrective to inflated threat narratives. But its silence on pedagogy is telling. In a discipline where the hand that rocks the cradle of teaching also rocks the world of policy, the real question may not be what China wants, but what the West chooses to teach its next generation of policymakers.
Review of What Does China Want?
David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, and Zenobia T. Chan, “What Does China Want?” International Security 50:1 (Summer 2025), pp. 46–81.
Kang, Wong, and Chan’s article “What Does China Want?” is a rare exercise in methodological discipline. Through analysis of more than 12,000 People’s Daily articles and over 300 of Xi Jinping’s speeches, the authors establish that China’s aims are “unambiguous, enduring, and limited” (pp. 49–50). Their close reading demonstrates that Chinese leaders repeatedly emphasize regime stability, sovereignty, and economic development, rather than global conquest. The article rebuts the prevailing claim that Beijing is bent on displacing U.S. hegemony, positioning China instead as a status quo power with regional priorities.
In doing so, the authors also dismantle the myth of creeping expansion. They show that since 1949 China has resolved most border disputes and that its remaining claims are static, not expanding (pp. 76–77). Equally important, they find that key phrases in Chinese political discourse such as “struggle” (douzheng) overwhelmingly refer to domestic challenges — corruption, poverty, governance — rather than foreign conflict (pp. 62–64). These findings provide much-needed empirical ballast in a debate often dominated by conjecture and alarmism.
The Deeper Issue: Pedagogy and Reception
Yet there is a deeper issue the article does not address: the environment in which such findings are interpreted. While Kang, Wong, and Chan convincingly argue that China’s goals are bounded, they write within a disciplinary architecture that continues to treat the state as the rational actor in an anarchic system. Their framework — like the theories they are challenging — remains state- and leader-centric.
Indeed, even in their corrective to alarmism, the authors remain bounded by Kenneth Waltz’s ontological starting point: that anarchy is the ordering principle of international politics and states are the rational actors within it. Within this ontology, the telos of IR remains predisposed toward conflict, because the logic of anarchy generates security dilemmas and the perpetual anticipation of war. By not challenging this baseline assumption, the article reinscribes the very worldview it seeks to soften, leaving open the possibility that its findings will be absorbed back into the same war-prone theoretical frame.
The problem is not just what China wants, but what the West teaches. In the Anglo-American academy, International Relations pedagogy is dominated by Cold War paradigms. Undergraduates are drilled in Waltz’s structural realism, Mearsheimer’s offensive realism, Fukuyama’s “end of history,” and Ikenberry’s liberal institutionalism etc. Even critical or constructivist offerings tend to orbit around Western historical metaphors — Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 still appears as a lesson for maritime disputes in the South China Sea.
This intellectual conditioning matters. Graduates of these programs populate NATO, the G7, Five Eyes, Israel, and South Korea’s policy establishments. They enter government and think tanks with an intellectual toolkit that assumes anarchy, rational actors, and security dilemmas as natural law. Within this lens, China can only ever be framed as a threat. The banning of Confucius Institutes across the UK and North America illustrates how classroom narratives translate directly into securitized policy.
Implications
Kang, Wong, and Chan succeed in demonstrating that China does not seek to overturn the international order. But the tragedy is that their intervention may remain confined to journal pages, admired for rigor but absent from syllabi. Without confronting the pedagogical reproduction of threat-centric IR, even the most careful scholarship risks being structurally sidelined.
The authors are right: China’s aims are limited. But the academy’s imagination is not. Until the core curriculum is decolonized and students are introduced to Chinese, Indian, African, and Global South perspectives, Western policy will continue to reproduce the same binaries: conflict, Thucydides Trap, and regional hegemony.
Conclusion
“What Does China Want?” deserves praise as a corrective to inflated threat narratives. But its silence on pedagogy is telling. In a discipline where the hand that rocks the cradle of teaching also rocks the world of policy, the real question may not be what China wants, but what the West chooses to teach its next generation of policymakers.