FOREİGN AFFAİRS What China Doesn’t Want Beijing’s Core Aims Are Clear—and Limited David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, and Zenobia T. Chan September 19, 2025

 FOREİGN AFFAİRS

What China Doesn’t Want

Beijing’s Core Aims Are Clear—and Limited

David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, and Zenobia T. Chan

September 19, 2025

Waving flags ahead of a military parade in Beijing, China, September 2025 

Go Nakamura / Reuters

DAVID C. KANG is Maria Crutcher Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California.

JACKIE S. H. WONG is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University of Sharjah.

ZENOBIA T. CHAN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University.

It is now considered common knowledge in Washington policymaking circles that China aims to replace the United States as the dominant global superpower and to aggressively expand its territory. Democrats and Republicans alike have embraced this consensus. Elbridge Colby, who advises the Pentagon as President Donald Trump’s undersecretary of defense for policy, has written that if China took control of Taiwan it would serve as a steppingstone to extending its reach into the Philippines and Vietnam. Rush Doshi, the deputy senior director for China and Taiwan on the National Security Council under President Joe Biden and one of the architects of Biden’s China policy, argues that China has been playing a long game to displace the United States as world leader. This bipartisan understanding has shaped the United States’ China policy, which now focuses on warfighting, military deterrence, and decoupling.

The problem is that this understanding of China is incorrect. A careful review of what China says it wants reveals a very different picture: China is a status quo power with limited global aims, not a revisionist state seeking to dramatically expand its power and reshape the world order. China’s leaders are much more focused on internal challenges and regime stability than on expanding the country’s external reach. China does have foreign policy demands and often bullies its neighbors, but it does not seek to invade or conquer them. It is extremely sensitive about its control of territories that the rest of the world has agreed, at least diplomatically, are Chinese, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. But China’s ambitions rarely stretch further.

China is becoming stronger and richer, but its increasing power is not fundamentally reshaping its concerns or aspirations. China’s main objectives, including its specific territorial claims, are consistent with what it wanted in the mid-twentieth century, when the country was weak and poor. In fact, they date back even further: political authorities since the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, made similar claims.

If China is a status quo power with clear and limited aims, not a grave threat to U.S. dominance, the United States is taking the wrong approach to the world’s most important bilateral relationship. Washington’s emphasis on military deterrence and preparing for war risks creating exactly the type of military confrontation where none need exist and threatens to isolate the United States from East Asia. Rather than view China as a dangerous threat, the United States needs to understand China’s core interests so that it knows where China may be willing to compromise and where it will not. U.S. policymakers who want to effectively influence Beijing would be better served engaging China economically and diplomatically rather than trying to isolate and contain China with a military-first grand strategy.

SAY IT LOUD

The best way to understand what China wants is to listen to what its leaders, journals, and media outlets say it wants. Although many observers deride public statements as cheap talk or propaganda, there is good reason to think that China says what it means. Leaders and regimes take great care to communicate their goals, methods, and governing logics to both their own people and the outside world. And even if much of this is propaganda designed to flatter the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or push a particular narrative, studies have shown that even the most exaggerated propaganda can provide valuable clues to what leaders are thinking. At the very least, it reveals what Chinese leaders want their citizens to believe.

China has stated its core interests clearly and consistently. In September 2011, before Xi Jinping was inaugurated as China’s leader, Beijing published its first official foreign policy white paper that defined China’s core interests. These included internal political stability, national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the primacy of the CCP, and economic and social development. Under Xi’s rule, the party’s core interests have not changed. The same topics and messages have been enshrined in copious volumes of Xi’s collected works and used in national educational curricula for students starting as early as primary school.

What is largely absent in China’s description of itself and its interests is any grandiose ambition to be a global or even regional leader. In a major speech on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CCP, in 2021, Xi did not call for Chinese hegemony or global leadership. The only mention of foreign policy was to reiterate China’s opposition to aggressive actions overseas. If there were ever an opportunity to declare that China had greater ambitions, it would have been on the anniversary of the CCP’s founding, but Xi’s speech omitted the issue entirely.

China does not seek to replace the United States as the dominant global power.

Xi and other Chinese leaders frequently call for China to play a larger role in global governance, but this does not mean that China seeks to replace the United States as the dominant global power. Xi’s recent proposal for a so-called Global Governance Initiative, which he unveiled in early September, is explicit that it seeks to preserve the United Nations–based international system rather than to overturn it. Nor does China want to be the sole power in charge of these institutions. Instead, China is clear—and has been since the beginning of the Cold War—that the goal is multilateralism. China’s increasing influence in multilateral bodies such as the UN is also a consequence of its growing economy and the U.S. retreat from these institutions. As U.S. financial contributions dry up, China is inevitably taking on a larger role.

In its global actions, China seeks to boost both economic growth and political influence. But these international efforts are aimed internally, and they stem from domestic issues. China launched the Belt and Road Initiative, for instance, to alleviate excess capacity in industries linked to infrastructure construction. Chinese leaders frame the BRI as a tool to build international support for China’s development and governance models—but the goal is not to spread Chinese values or to encourage other countries to adopt China’s political and economic systems. Instead, the BRI and other programs aim to use China’s economic leverage to garner international support for its specific sovereignty claims, especially over Taiwan.

In contrast to what China says it wants, U.S. foreign policy rhetoric is replete with references to global primacy, the United States’ indispensability as a nation, and aspirations to maintain its status as a global hegemon. Both Democratic and Republican leaders, from Nancy Pelosi to Mitch McConnell, agree that the United States should pursue primacy. Trump has shown that he wants to reorient the United States’ role in the world, but he still appears to view the world as one in which the United States must and should dominate—and his actions so far, such as the use of tariffs and threats to force concessions even from longtime U.S. allies, make this apparent. No equivalent type of rhetoric or action at this scale can be found in anything from the CCP, which is explicit in its desire for multipolarity at most. While China often threatens and coerces other countries, such as in disputes with South Korea and Australia, its actions are often triggered by events that China feels directly threaten its core interests.

A LIMITED RISE

Critics often point to new phrases in Chinese rhetoric as evidence that China seeks to expand its power and potentially displace the United States. Since 2021, for instance, Xi has invoked the phrase “the East is rising and the West is declining.” But this phrase is descriptive, not aspirational: it reflects Beijing’s perception that China’s power is increasing while that of the United States and Europe is decreasing. Moreover, when Xi uses the phrase, it is often followed by another—and mostly overlooked—sentence: “China has no intention to change the United States, nor to replace it.”

The phrase is also far less common than is often believed. Despite the attention it has drawn in Western media and among policymakers in Washington, the phrase has appeared in only 32 articles in the People’s Daily, the CCP’s flagship newspaper, which serves as a gauge of the official party line. When leaders say “the East is rising and the West is declining,” it is largely to justify the need to further strengthen state capacity to address internal and developmental challenges, not to suggest displacing the United States’ global role. In an internal speech delivered in 2023, for instance, Xi invoked the phrase to hail China’s successful domestic policy agenda and portray it as a model for how to accelerate economic growth among developing countries while emphasizing that such a model could not be exported.

More broadly, Chinese leaders do not propose replacing the United States in their speeches or documents, regardless of their target audience. Quantitative analysis of the 176 speeches Xi delivered between 2012 and 2024 that referred to the United States reveals that the dominant theme is cooperation, not displacement. Even when addressing sensitive issues, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea, Xi focuses on China’s historical mission to defend its borders, not a desire to expand its territory. Mentions of the United States are most frequently paired with ideas such as engagement, cooperation, and development rather than confrontation.

Qualitative assessments to unpack the nuance and context of the language that Chinese leaders use tell a similar story. Our close reading of the 290 speeches by Xi and his foreign ministers Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi from 2012 to 2025—in both their original Chinese and English translations—found no mention of China’s desire to be a hegemon that can unilaterally set global rules. The leaders highlight cooperation and the desire for the United States and China to avoid a so-called Thucydides trap in which the two countries would inevitably clash.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Beijing’s focus on domestic politics, worries about internal sovereignty, and concerns about immediate borders and regional stability are not new. Rhetoric about Taiwan, the most prominent flash point for Chinese sovereignty, is an example of the historical origins of the issue. In 1895, Li Hongzhang, the Qing negotiator for the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which marked the end of the first Sino-Japanese war, wrote in reply to a Japanese draft of the treaty, “Taiwan has been established as a province and cannot be ceded to other countries.” In 1958, less than a decade after coming to power, Mao Zedong sounded a similar note, declaring, “Taiwan is ours, and we will never compromise on this issue.”

Although some scholars suggest that China wants Taiwan because of its semiconductor factories or its strategic location, China’s claims are deeply rooted in a national narrative that has endured for centuries. Chinese rulers considered Taiwan part of their territory long before 1949, when the Nationalist Party, or KMT, fled to Taiwan and retained control of the island after the CCP defeated its forces on the mainland. Leaders in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) focused on combating pirates and handling trade across the strait as Chinese settlers increasingly moved to the island. The Qing dynasty, whose Manchu rulers took control of China from the Ming in 1644, administered the island as part of coastal Fujian Province beginning in 1683 and redefined it as a separate province in 1683.

The Qing dynastic efforts to integrate Taiwan into the empire were not about wealth or conquest. There was no pre-Qing Taiwanese kingdom that could be defeated, nor did the island have tribute relations with any country. Instead, China’s incorporation of Taiwan was part of a process of closing off a frontier area, managing trade with Chinese on the island, and combating piracy. After the Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895 following the first Sino-Japanese war, subsequent rulers of China considered Taiwan territory that should be regained. KMT leaders representing China (then called the Republic of China) during and after World War II made this clear. At the Cairo Conference of 1943, which sought to determine the postwar future of Asia, the United States and the United Kingdom agreed that the “territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese,” including the island of Taiwan and the offshore Penghu Islands (now part of Taiwan), should be restored to Chinese control. With the surrender of Japan to Allied Forces in 1945, the ROC regained sovereignty over Taiwan in what is known as “retrocession,” which, rendered in Chinese as the word guangfu, means “honorably recovering lost territory.”

China’s claims over Taiwan are rooted in a national narrative that has endured for centuries.

After 1949, both the KMT in Taipei and the CCP in Beijing claimed to be the legitimate ruler of all of China—including both Taiwan and the mainland. It was only with Taiwan’s transition to democracy in the 1990s that a change in Taiwan’s sovereign status entered the discussion. Thus, diplomatically, the existence of a sovereignty dispute is only 30 years old, while Chinese concerns about Taiwan predate the contemporary military or economic value of Taiwan by more than 100 years. Chinese leaders would want unification with Taiwan even if it held no military or economic value.

China’s other territorial concerns also date back at least a century. Hong Kong and Macau, which were under British and Portuguese colonial rule starting in 1841 and 1557, respectively, were returned to China in the late 1990s. China’s rule over Tibet, Qinghai, and Xinjiang dates back to the Qing dynasty, which conquered some former Ming tributaries in northwestern China and Central Asia and reorganized them as new provinces. The Qing took over Tibet in 1720 and ruled it until 1912, when it became de facto independent until CCP leaders forcibly annexed it again in 1950.

In contrast, control of the East China and South China Seas has been less important to China. Disputes over maritime claims are rooted in the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century rather than in enduring Chinese claims. When leaders at the 1943 Cairo Conference settled postwar land disputes in Asia and insisted that both Vietnam and Korea should become independent countries, they failed to specify how to determine sovereignty over maritime islets and borders.

The origin of the so-called nine-dash line, which China uses to demarcate its claims in the South China Sea, is instructive. The nine-dash line encompasses much of the South China Sea, including waters near the coastlines of Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Although many observers believe such claims are new, the nine-dash line was originally an eleven-dash line, which was first shown on an official ROC map published in 1948. The demarcation may even predate that: historians have connected the 1948 map to an earlier “Map of Chinese Islands in the South China Sea,” published in 1935 by an ROC government agency. Yet in 1957, the CCP removed the two dashes that extended into the Gulf of Tonkin, the body of water separating northern Vietnam from southern China—a move widely interpreted as a gesture to improve diplomatic ties with North Vietnam. Although China will not budge on Taiwan or other long-standing sovereign claims, it has shown a willingness to compromise on other borders.

STAYING PUT

Analysts and observers have also misinterpreted China as an expansionist power. In fact, China’s aims are not increasing in scope or ambition. At its height, the Qing dynasty encompassed 13 million square kilometers of territory, far larger than the 9.42 million square kilometers that China comprises today. China’s willingness to clearly codify almost all its current borders is evidence that it views other states’ claims as legitimate. China is not making irredentist claims over almost four million square kilometers of territory—that is, it is not trying to reincorporate every single piece of lost territory in present-day Mongolia, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, among others.

China has often given up disputed territory to settle claims and establish firm borders when its core interests are not in question. To settle disputes with North Korea, for example, in 1962 and 1964 China relinquished the peak of Mount Baekdu and more than 500 square kilometers of nearby territory. And although hawkish observers believe that China may eventually have aims on Vietnam, the trend has been toward China resolving its border disputes, not expanding its claims. After China and Vietnam normalized their relationship in 1991, the countries took steps to resolve border discrepancies, some of which dated back to the nineteenth century. China and Vietnam signed bilateral treaties codifying their borders in 1999 and 2000. There is no indication that China has any intention of attempting to renegotiate or renege on any of these previous agreements with Vietnam. Indeed, despite contention in the South China Sea, Chinese-Vietnamese ties have improved: Chinese army troops recently marched in two Vietnamese military parades, held in April and September.

Although China has aggressively built military outposts on islands in the South China Sea and flexed its muscle against smaller Southeast Asian neighbors, China is neither the only cause nor is it the only solution to the competing border disputes in the South China Sea. But China’s bullying—or any country’s island reclamation projects in the area—is not an attempt to threaten another country’s existence. What is at stake are historical disputes that will require skilled diplomacy to resolve. China will not give up its claims, but it may be willing to compromise on managing the commons. Most important, China’s solution is unlikely to be led by its military.

THE REAL THREAT

Because Washington has misunderstood what China wants, U.S. policy toward China has been misdirected. Current policies aimed at isolating China diplomatically and economically, and U.S. withdrawal from multilateral economic institutions such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, are designed to combat a revisionist power that seeks to displace the United States and to act aggressively to expand its territory. But these will do little to engage a country that is much more focused on preserving the status quo and maintaining its internal stability. U.S. policymakers should view China not as a grave threat but as a normal competitor. Healthy competition in technology, business, and even education can be good for both sides without triggering fear-driven responses stemming from the view that the other side is an existential threat.

This means that the U.S. military buildup in the Pacific is unnecessary and counterproductive. An aggressive military-first policy toward China and the rest of East Asia wastes resources preparing for low-probability contingencies, which weakens U.S. military strength in the long term. It also increases the possibility of escalating tensions with China rather than lowering them. It is quite possible to reassure allies, maintain a military presence in the Pacific, and safeguard American security without a massive military presence in the region.

The U.S. military buildup in the Pacific is unnecessary and counterproductive.

Trying to use force to shape the future status of Taiwan is even more misguided. Because China’s claims to Taiwan are ideological and historical, not purely strategic, attempting to deter is more likely to provoke. The goal should be to preserve the status quo, which has worked for the past four decades. U.S. policymakers can do more of what George W. Bush and other presidents did: strongly emphasize to China that Taiwan’s unilateral change of the status quo would be unacceptable, which is the most likely way of ensuring the status quo continues. China is clear that it will not compromise on Taiwan, but its fundamental bottom line is Taiwanese independence. Any actions the United States can take to reassure Beijing on this front respects China’s clear core interests and increases the likelihood of preserving the status quo for longer.

The focus on war is counterproductive because the major issues are not military in nature. U.S. companies often find it difficult to work with Chinese firms, the Chinese government can be pushy and stubborn, and U.S. and Chinese interests do not align on many key issues. But this is a normal state of affairs in world politics and the issues at stake are standard components of healthy competition. Relying on diplomacy, rather than military posturing, can reduce tensions and solve global problems. The United States and China have room to cooperate on energy transitions, environmental protection, and preventing the next pandemic, to name a few. None of these global issues can be solved through a military-first approach by the United States.

Dealing effectively with China requires understanding China as it actually exists, not the China that U.S. policymakers of both parties have imagined and come to accept as fact. It is neither unrealistic nor unfairly sympathetic to China to examine what the country wants and realize that its aims are far less expansionary, confrontational, or threatening to U.S. interests than most policymakers believe. China is telling the world—and itself—what it wants. If Washington wants to deal with China effectively, it would do well to listen.

Topics & Regions: China Diplomacy Geopolitics Politics & Society Political Development Security U.S. Foreign Policy Chinese-Taiwanese Relations

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