For rising states, the act of peacefully displacing the hegemon consists of two broad strategies generally pursued in sequence. A hegemon’s position in regional and global order emerges from three broad “forms of control” that are used to regulate the behavior of other states: coercive capability (to force compliance), consensual inducements (to incentivize it), and legitimacy (to rightfully command it). It focuses on the strategies that rising powers like China use to displace an established hegemon like the United States short of war. The book argues that the core of US-China competition since the Cold War has been over regional and now global order. Understanding them sometimes requires proficiency not only in Chinese, but also in seemingly impenetrable and archaic ideological concepts like “dialectical unities” and “historical materialism.”
The most important of these is the Party line (路线), then the guideline (方针), and finally the policy (政策), among other terms. Within them, the Party uses hierarchical statements that represent internal consensus on key issues to guide the ship of state, and these statements can be traced across time. While no one master document contains all of Chinese grand strategy, its outline can be found across a wide corpus of texts. Many of the documents take readers behind the closed doors of the Chinese Communist Party, bring them into its high-level foreign policy institutions and meetings, and introduce readers to a wide cast of Chinese political leaders, generals, and diplomats charged with devising and implementing China’s grand strategy. To do so, the book makes use of an original database of Chinese Communist Party documents-memoirs, biographies, and daily records of senior officials-painstakingly gathered and then digitized over the last several years from libraries, bookstores in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Chinese e-commerce sites (see Appendix). 3 China’s leadership and foreign policy elite declared that a “period of historical opportunity” had emerged to expand the country’s strategic focus from Asia to the wider globe and its governance systems. The West’s subsequent response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and then the storming of the US Capitol by extremists in 2021, reinforced a sense that “time and momentum are on our side,” as Xi Jinping put it shortly after those events. Beijing believed that the world’s most powerful democracies were withdrawing from the international order they had helped erect abroad and were struggling to govern themselves at home. From China’s perspective-which is highly sensitive to changes in its perceptions of American power and threat-these two events were shocking. Then, a little more than three months later, a populist surge catapulted Donald Trump into office as president of the United States. On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. For Xi, the origin of these shifts is China’s growing power and what it saw as the West’s apparent self-destruction.
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