In recent months, a growing consensus has emerged that the liberal international order is collapsing and being replaced by a club of great powers, each entitled to supremacy over a distinct sphere of influence. In this view, as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration aggressively asserts its control over the Americas, it appears content to stand by as Russia pushes westward into Europe and as China extends its influence across Asia and the Pacific.
Like the United States and Russia, China wants to increase its power and decrease that of its competitors, and it has concerns about foreign powers acting within or around its territory. However, it is a mistake to think that China shares these states’ desires or would even tolerate a world divided into spheres of influence.
Such a view both overstates and understates the scope of Beijing’s interests and ambition, which are primarily economic rather than militaristic and global rather than regional. Worse, the assumption makes it harder to recognize a real, potentially destabilizing source of geopolitical risk: attempts to exclude China from the global economy.
Officially, Beijing has rejected “blocs” and “hegemony” for decades. Although Mao Zedong initially positioned China as a member of Soviet camp during the Cold War, rising tensions with Moscow and the geopolitical benefits of engaging with nonaligned countries—and later, the United States—shifted China’s foreign policy toward flexibility and opportunism. As China’s reach has grown, so has its insistence that great powers should not carve up the world into spheres. Of course, official rhetoric cannot be taken at face value—China has supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example—but neither can it be dismissed, especially when Chinese strategy documents do not depict spheres of influence as legitimate or desirable.
