Stop Inflating China's Ambitions

Exaggerating Chinese ambitions pushes U.S. leaders to react to a problem that isn’t real.

David Kang, Jackie Wong, and Zenobia Chan offer an important corrective to hawkish alarmism about Chinese ambitions:

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 hawks in this country have been trying for many years to make the Chinese government into something it is not. Hawks frequently exaggerate both the capabilities and ambitions of adversaries for the purposes of scaring the public into supporting their preferred aggressive policies, and they have been working overtime to do that with China. Whether it is fantastical claims about China’s desire to achieve parity in nuclear arms, panics about imaginary Chinese bases, or attempts to paint China as an expansionist power bent on displacing the U.S. as global hegemon, China hawks have been doing all they can to terrify Americans into embracing a costly militarized rivalry. To a disturbing degree, they have been successful in making U.S. China policy more confrontational and dangerous.