How do the Chinese party-state and its most senior officials think about the rule-based international order?

Yang Jiechi, Beijing’s top diplomat and Politburo member, delivered China’s definitive view on the concept at his first meeting with senior members of the Biden administration in Alaska, in March 2021.Footnote 1

On the Chinese Internet, the sharpest parts of the lengthy and now infamous diatribe delivered by Yang in Alaska, directed across the table at Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, and Jake Sullivan, the National Security Adviser, went viral.

In China, street vendors drummed up a brisk trade almost overnight selling T-shirts and tea mugs adorned with his words about how America should “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs” and so forth.

But the substance of Yang’s exposition lay elsewhere and was not destined to gain transitory fame as a meme.

Unprompted by his American interlocutors, Yang enunciated how Beijing believed the world should be ordered, and how its viewpoint differed from that of the United States.

China’s focus, Yang said, was on what he called the United Nations-centered international system, underlined by international law. The “so-called” rules-based order led by the U.S., by contrast, he said, was only followed by a “small number of countries.”

Beijing has a habit of attaching the adjective “so-called” to concepts or ideas when it aims to denigrate them. Its spokesmen often refer to America’s “so-called” democracy; they call the four-country grouping of the U.S., Japan, India and Australia the “so-called Quad” and they disparage western efforts to investigate human rights atrocities in Xinjiang by referring to the “so-called Uyghur tribunal.”

China’s objections to the “so-called rules-based order” run wide and deep, and across institutions and continents, but they can also be summed up simply. China believes that that rules-based system was established by the U.S. for the ultimate benefit of the U.S., and its allies.

U.S.-China competition covers multiple domains—military, trade, geopolitics, technology and so forth. But increasingly, especially through Beijing’s eyes, it is a contest of political systems, in which the party-state is constantly defending itself against attacks from western democracies.

Once that it understood, it is not hard to see how Beijing has concluded that the global system must be modified to suit their interests. Otherwise, it will inevitably conspire against them and corrode their grip on power at home.

As Yang said in Alaska: “The overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values advocated by the United States or that the opinion of the United States could represent international public opinion.”Footnote 2

Those countries would not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.

In other words, in rejecting the rules-based order, China—and other countries—are also rejecting universal values, at least as propagated by the West and its allies.

As one of the T-shirts printed after the Alaska meeting said, the U.S. cannot speak for China, nor for any other countries around the world.

It is not clear whether Yang’s use of the phrase “rules-based order,” instead of another term more favored in the U.S., “liberal international order,” was significant in any fashion. Whatever the distinction between the two, they are generally used interchangeably in foreign policy circles.

Many scholars, and not just in China, have long criticized the rubberiness and ambiguity of the concept of the post-war liberal order.

Graham Allison, of Harvard University, for example, says proponents of the “liberal order” credit it with the long peace between the major powers after World War II.Footnote 3

“But the ‘long peace’ was not the result of the liberal order, but the by-product of the dangerous balance of power between the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the four and a half decades of the Cold War, and then a brief period of U.S. dominance,” says Allison.

Still, both the U.S. and China at the very least accept the existence of a rule-based order, and the two countries agree that it has been a dominant force in global politics since the end of the war.

Chinese scholars also acknowledge that the international post-war order, at least once Beijing opted in after the reform-and-opening period from 1979 onwards, was beneficial in many ways for China.

Wu Xinbo, of Fudan University, in Shanghai, in an article for the Lowy Institute, said that China held a significant stake in the existing order, and, by and large, favored its preservation.Footnote 4

But Beijing also desired to reform the order, he said, as an important qualification, so as to better accommodate its own interests and preferences.

In other words, China is not going to overturn the current order or create a new one, but it will drive the order’s evolution and adaption in a fast-changing world. On the face of it, this position sounds positive.

How does China benefit? In Dr. Wu’s words, China enjoys special standing as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and its economy is now the world’s second-largest economy, thanks to an open international economic system.

On the security front, since the end of the Cold War, China has not been confronted with a major external military threat and has benefited from an overall peaceful international environment.

In the 1980s, when China’s economy started to take off in the first wave of reform, Deng Xiaoping refused to divert scarce resources to the military, effectively contracting out security in the Asia–Pacific to the nearby American forces.

But that was never going to last. Beijing has always harbored deep reservations about the liberal order because of its American roots.

In an era of superpower competition, such qualities render it immediately suspect, as other countries, especially ones which are not U.S. allies, will always occupy a lesser position in that order.

For Beijing which considers itself to be on a par with the U.S., that is not good enough. It wants a status commensurate with its growing power in major international economic and financial institutions.

Once China was willing to accommodate the rules-based order. Now the rules-based order must accommodate China. Inevitably, that meant a powerful China would challenge the U.S. and the rules-based order when it was able to do so.

In terms of pure power politics, with its economy approaching that of the U.S. in aggregate size and its military rapidly expanding, China can mount a strong argument that the old ways will not work anymore.

Much of the surviving rhetoric in western capitals assumes that Washington retains the luxury of deciding whether it would like to strike a deal with Beijing.

In truth, Beijing has been making the running in re-fashioning the world, and Washington is only now starting to catch up.

Beijing also argues that the current order does not address major global challenges and thus should not stand in the way of needed reform and adjustments. In that respect, Beijing says it is not detracting from the current order. Rather it is helping to strengthen the order and widen its ambit to make it more effective.

After all, throughout history, the global order has never been static. It has evolved constantly to meet new challenges and adapt to changing realities.

As Donald Trump has reminded the world, the threat to current order might not come from China anyway, but from the U.S. Any U.S. president could walk away from it, as Mr Trump constantly threatened to do.

The sorts of reforms and changes put forward by the likes of Dr Wu, of Fudan University—for China to have a seat at the table and for its security concerns to be respected—again sound reasonable enough on the surface.

Some of Beijing’s complaints are in fact reasonable. Given the size of its economy, China can rightly argue that it should have a bigger role and shareholding in archetypal post-war institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

But China’s changes are in fact quite radical on many levels. Consider the United Nations. Over more than a decade, Beijing has remorselessly chipped away at the definition of universal human rights.

In place of the founding ethos, China wants the definition to reflect its own governing values, with a focus not on political rights but economic opportunities—a radical change.

The changes to the current order that China insists on include an acknowledgement of its security, which includes unification with Taiwan, and command over the South China Sea.

Once these demands are taken into account, China’s stated position—of China adapting to the rules-based order and vice versa—looks a lot less benign, and much more dramatic and disruptive.

Once you accede to Beijing’s demands in the South China Sea, you are effectively unravelling the entirety of what we call the San Francisco System—the web of agreements covering the region struck in the wake of the war.

Most discussions about the rules-based order focus on competition between the U.S. and China. But in the South China Sea, China’s claims cut across those of multiple other smaller countries.

China’s security demands also include bringing Taiwan, a thriving democracy of 26 million people who have no desire to be ruled from Beijing, under its sovereignty.

Once again, this amounts to a radical rewriting of the rules, and the upending of the region which will be forced not just to acknowledge Chinese power but also to accommodate its core demands.

Thus far, in setting global rules, China has focused on the United Nations, international economy and finance, regional cooperation, and emerging areas such as the oceans, the poles, cyberspace, and outer space.

Beijing has also been an aggressive setter of new technology standards, largely through the Belt & Road Initiative and initiatives like Huawei’s smart cities in Africa and the Middle East.

On top of playing the game in existing institutions, China has pursued a strategy of establishing rival or parallel bodies in areas where it feels underrepresented, or where it sees a gap in the market.

There is already a plethora of them—the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, the BRICS grouping, consisting of China, Russia, Brazil, India and South Africa, and the “17 + 1” arrangement in Europe.

These parallel institutions can thrive and in doing so corrode the legitimacy of existing bodies, as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is doing with the Japan-led Asia Development Bank.

Alternatively, they can lie fallow, only to be revived at politically opportune moments, as in the case of BRICS, which is getting fresh life after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

At the same time, China is joining regional agreements where its suits its interests. For example, it was one of the key partners in negotiating the Regional Economic Comprehensive Partnership (RCEP). It has also signalled its desire to join the revamped version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which had threatened to fall apart when the U.S. dropped out.

Over time, however, if its economy continues to develop and its military power expands, Beijing will expect to be much more of a rule-setter than a rule-taker.

In Xi Jinping’s own words, the task of the party and its leaders is to “lay the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.”

That does not mean that China will try to export its own model to other countries.

A lot of sloppy analysis about China “exporting its model” misses the point—that the China model, which combines a centuries-old bureaucratic culture with a Leninist structure imported from the Soviet Union, is neither replicable elsewhere, nor fit for purpose in other countries.

Beijing is self-aware enough to know that other countries cannot structure their governments along its exact same lines.

Just as democracy in the United States looks very different from democracies in other countries, China’s authoritarian system does not fit neatly within the administrations of other non-democratic states.

But if China cannot export its model lock, stock, and barrel, it is already exporting segments of it in ways that extend its influence, in both governance and technological standards.

That means that China will set and export technological standards, and political values, and the rules that go with them. Over time, China will talk less about the benefits of the current rules-based order, and more about its own rules. That by itself, marks a seismic shift in the global order.