What does China want from world order? Many observers, especially in the West, look upon China’s growing assertiveness and expanding ambitions with trepidation. In a speech on China-EU relations in 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned that “the Chinese Communist Party’s clear goal is a systemic change of the international order with China at its center.” She went on to characterize China’s diplomacy in multilateral institutions as demonstrating a “determination to promote an alternative vision of the world order. One, where individual rights are subordinated to national security. Where security and economy take prominence over political and civil rights.”
Similarly, in a speech at the Körber Foundation in Berlin in January 2025, Friedrich Merz – then Germany’s opposition leader, currently the chancellor – lumped China in with Russia as the leaders of a new systemic conflict between liberal democracies and “anti-liberal autocracies,” which aggressively oppose the multilateral order as it has existed since the end of World War II Such statements follow in the footsteps of the United States, which classified China as a “revisionist” power in 2017.
While increasingly widespread, the view of China as an existential challenge to world order reflects political alarmism more than sober analysis. Our research on China’s ambitions for world order leads us to a different conclusion. While China does indeed pose a challenge to some aspects of the contemporary world order, there is little evidence to suggest that it poses a greater challenge to world order than other revisionist powers, including today’s United States. Moreover, China’s ambitions vary across different domains of world order, where it faces challenges that limit what it can achieve.
Owing to its growing influence around the world, what China wants for world order has become one of the decisive questions of our time. Scholars have sought to identify and understand China’s goals using a variety of methods. Some look at China’s domestic political and economic order, which is authoritarian capitalist, and extrapolate this to the international level. Others infer China’s preferences based on theoretical arguments about its position in the international system. We argue that a more accurate picture can be gained by looking empirically at China’s track record. In particular, we focus on two aspects of China’s behavior: what it says (i.e. its vision for world order) and what it does (i.e. its behavior in different international regimes).
First, we find that China’s vision for world order has become increasingly explicit over the last decade. Today, China strives for what it calls “discourse power”: the ability to shape global narratives. China’s vision builds on many elements of the existing order, but it also emphasizes some aspects while de-emphasizing others.
As Xi Jinping has consolidated his control over the Chinese Community Party, the Chinese government has articulated increasingly ambitious visions for international order. Soon after coming to power at the end of 2012, the Chinese leadership announced the Belt and Road Initiative and called for a “Community with a Shared Future for Mankind” as a new normative vision for the international community. While China is still a realpolitik power par excellence and continues to rely heavily on bilateral relationships, it now publicly promotes itself as a guardian of the extant order and an advocate for “true multilateralism.”
China’s vision does not divide the world into liberal democracies and illiberal autocracies, and mostly ignores liberal ideals such as human rights, free markets, and constitutional government. Instead, the Community with a Shared Future emphasizes values such as peace, cooperation, harmony, development, inclusiveness, and mutual respect. It is tempting to dismiss such ideas as empty rhetoric and sloganeering. Yet these concepts resonate with many audiences around the world, especially those who share China’s criticism of “hegemony by certain countries” and Western double standards.
Reshaping global norms would help China to boost its legitimacy and build coalitions with other states in the Global South. Yet China can be criticized for its own double standards: its talk of cooperation and harmony is challenged by its posture in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait, and its call for indivisible security is hardly commensurate with its toleration of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Second, instead of writing China off as an existential threat to international order, it pays to examine China’s real behavior in specific international regimes. In recent years scholars have offered an increasingly nuanced and empirically founded image of China’s behavior in different areas of global order. In some areas, China’s behavior does indeed conform to the skeptics’ image of China as a challenger and threat to established rules and liberal norms. Yet in others, China’s behavior upholds and deepens the existing order.
For example, China behaves in a way that undermines the idea of universal human rights. As China has increasingly been subject to international criticism – especially over human rights abuses in Xinjiang – it has sought to shape the international human rights agenda. In recent years, Beijing has tried to counter criticism by supplanting political and civil rights with the “right to development” as the fundamental human right.
In human rights bodies at the United Nations, China leads the “sovereigntist” agenda that subordinates individual rights to sovereign discretion. This includes sidelining independent civil society voices and promoting participation of state-backed NGOs (so-called GONGOs).
While its influence in the secretariats of U.N. human rights bodies remains limited, China has gained backing from many developing countries. Research from Hyunkyu Kim and Sanghoon Park even shows that nations involved in China-led international organizations tend to use more favorable language in their U.N. human rights reviews.
It remains to be seen whether China will be successful in its aim to center economic development. However, the inconsistencies in the human rights policies of many Western countries – notably in relation to the recent Israeli conduct in Gaza – demonstrate that challenges to robust human rights norms do not only originate from China or its close partners.
The global security regime, centered on the United Nations, offers a different and more mixed picture. China’s role in global security is growing – a sign of increasing engagement that belies depictions of China as a destroyer of multilateralism. Scholars point to its increasingly active presence at the U.N. Security Council (UNSC), where China has become less shy about using its veto power, typically alongside Russia. In recent years, its politics at the UNSC is increasingly being couched in the narrative of a “Global Security Initiative,” espousing lofty ambitions for the future of global security, and backed up by funding and forces for peacekeeping efforts.
Yet, at the same time, China avoids leading on key resolutions and Chinese nationals are yet to hold top security positions at the United Nations. What explains this gap between support for security governance and limited participation in its implementation?
Besides the enduring dominance of Western powers (the P3) in this domain, we find that China’s approach to security governance may be less about raw power and more about how China wants to be seen. China’s support for U.N. peacekeeping is about boosting its global image as much as achieving strategic goals. Part of China’s preferred image is its long-standing commitment to noninterference, hence the lack of participation. While this may not be the behavior of a principled multilateralist, it is also not the behavior of a revisionist power bent on undermining the system. In fact, China’s desire for status may lead it to expand support for security governance at the U.N. while leaving Western hegemony over global security governance largely intact.
At a time when the United States has rejected the postwar trade regime and declared trade wars against all its trading partners, it is also difficult to portray China as the main disruptor of global economic governance. In fact, China has a real interest in upholding the institutions of economic governance that have facilitated its astounding economic ascent. Rather, China wants two things from international economic institutions like the World Trade Organization and the World Bank: more control, commensurate with its economic size, and continued access to world markets.
In participating in the global economy, China pursues a kind of strategic mercantilism, using government control to build national champions and dominate strategic economic sectors. This is not markedly different from the practices of other rising economic powers in the past, like the United States, Japan and the European Union, to which they are now seemingly returning.
Contrary to Western fears, new Chinese initiatives like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) don’t aim to replace the global financial system. The AIIB, for instance, closely mirrors traditional institutions and seems more about boosting China’s status or gaining leverage for reform. The BRI, on the other hand, is less a formal institution and more a broad, flexible strategy that varies by country and project. Researchers say it’s more about influence – both at home and abroad – than a clear, top-down economic plan, and claims about deliberate “debt trap diplomacy” have been conclusively disproven.
China’s position as a limited revisionist in the trade regime is illustrated by its dual identity as a major economic power and a developing country. In global talks on digital trade, for example, it walks a tightrope – protecting domestic tech policies while promoting its tech giants abroad. Researchers highlight how China’s alliances shift depending on the issue, sometimes backing developing countries, other times aligning with the West. Ultimately, China’s economic behavior doesn’t fit neatly into narratives of confrontation – it’s shaped by a mix of pragmatism, self-interest, and a desire for global recognition.
As these examples highlight, Western fears and Chinese aspirations are a far cry from the praxis of global governance. Like other powers, China is forced to operate within the constraints of the existing global order, which means that the potential for change is likely to be gradual and partial. This is not to downplay the concerning developments in global debates about human rights norms or deny that increased Chinese influence will affect the position of Western countries negatively.
As the world faces multiple armed conflicts and a coterie of strongmen, the image of a global order on the brink looms large. In this context, we would be wise not to neglect the diversity of Chinese preferences, as compromise and accommodation are possible and even advantageous in various elements of global order. To be sure, any path toward striking this balance will be fraught with challenges, not least because of China’s role in enabling Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and the United States’ confrontational course. As with previous periods of great power competition, we should hope that cooler heads prevail.
A German-language version of this article will be published in issue 189 of WZB-Mitteilungen in September 2025.