China Doesn’t Have a Grand Strategy (Still)

China’s rise has been impressive but directionless. Without a coherent grand strategy, Beijing risks turning its power into instability—both for itself and for the world.

As Odd Arne Westad once observed, China “has no grand strategy to speak of”—a judgment that, more than a decade later, still rings true.

Back then, China’s ascent looked unstoppable, and many expected a historic eastward power shift. Now, more than twenty years on, China is wealthier, more technologically capable, and more assertive—yet the same question lingers, only more urgent. Behind the spectacle of power lies a deeper strategic vacuum.

The Mirage of Strategic Mastery

China’s rise is often mistaken for the product of farsighted design. In reality, it was largely opportunistic. The transformation since the late 1970s rode a rare confluence of global conditions: the end of the Cold War, Washington’s post-9/11 counterterrorism focus, and the 2008 financial crisis. These shocks opened a window for economic expansion without direct geopolitical collision.

Success bred illusion. Elites in Beijing came to believe that integration into global capitalism was itself a grand strategy—that economic interdependence would automatically bring peace, respect, and influence. They mistook momentum for mastery. Some Western analysts, for their part, projected onto China a mythical “hundred-year marathon”—a secret blueprint for global domination that explained every move after the fact.

Since 2008, however, confidence has curdled into misjudgment. A state that once rose through quiet pragmatism began to display strategic hubris: misreading U.S. intentions, underestimating the resilience of Western alliances, and alienating precisely the partners that could have anchored its ascent.

Europe: The Missed Axis of Multipolarity

Nowhere was this illusion more consequential than in Europe. In the early post–Cold War years, Europe offered China a rare historical opening. The European Union’s commitment to a multipolar world—and its skepticism toward American unilateralism—made it a natural counterweight to U.S. dominance at the height of the unipolar moment.

From 1992 onward, leading European governments publicly advocated lifting the post–Tiananmen arms embargo (blocked only by Washington’s fierce opposition) and sought closer engagement with Beijing as part of a more balanced global order. Europe was not merely a trading partner; it was the potential second pillar of a Eurasian equilibrium.

Beijing, however, failed to recognize the magnitude of this opportunity. Obsessed with cultivating ties with Washington, it treated Europe as a diplomatic appendage—useful for commerce, expendable in strategy. When China finally entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, it did so on humiliating terms of accession largely dictated by the United States. The European goodwill of the 1990s had been squandered; neglected and offended, the EU drifted decisively back into the transatlantic orbit.

That drift hardened over time. As China’s foreign policy grew more assertive—driven by the Party’s nationalism and coercive diplomacy—Europe’s perception shifted accordingly. By 2018, the European Commission had formally defined China as “a partner for cooperation, an economic competitor and a systemic rival.” Across the Atlantic, Washington and Brussels, despite many differences, converged on a shared view of China as a revisionist rising power.

Yet it was the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine that delivered the decisive break. To Europe, Moscow—not Beijing—was the primary existential threat. But China’s ambiguous stance, framed as “neutrality” yet widely seen as siding with Moscow, erased any remaining trust. What might have been a late opportunity for reconciliation turned instead into estrangement. By the mid-2020s, Europe had aligned almost completely with the United States on China, closing the door on a generation of potential Eurasian cooperation.

Strategically, this was a colossal failure—a lost chance for China to co-shape a plural order and avert the very encirclement it now laments.

When Donald Trump’s erratic presidency later fractured U.S. alliances, Beijing briefly faced what could have been its world-making moment: a chance to present itself as the stable alternative to American unpredictability.
As I argued elsewhere, this was China’s opportunity to anchor a new multilateralism grounded in Sino–European cooperation and historical reconciliation with Japan—a path that could have rebalanced the global order on a genuinely Eurasian foundation.

Instead, it doubled down on illiberal alignment—tightening ties with Russia, Iran, and North Korea after its so-called Victory Day of 2025—turning a potential strategic breakthrough into a geopolitical cul-de-sac. Few episodes better reveal the hollowness of China’s supposed grand strategy.

Three Structural Traps

China’s predicament today can be captured in three interlocking structural traps: exclusion from rule-making, failure of economic transition, and intensifying external containment. Together, they define the limits of China’s rise—and expose the absence of a genuine grand strategy.

First, China remains a semi-peripheral power in the global hierarchy: an indispensable economic actor, yet not a rule-maker. Barack Obama’s 2015 remark—“We can’t let countries like China write the rules of the global economy”—was not a passing quip; it reflected a durable Western consensus that continues to shape trade and technology policy. Recent WTO reform proposals led by the United States, the EU, and Japan have further constrained China’s policy space, eroding the developmental autonomy on which its earlier success depended.

Second, China’s domestic transformation has stalled. The state remains simultaneously overcentralized and weakly institutionalized—a soft state, in Gunnar Myrdal’s sense—incapable of fostering social justice or genuine economic rebalancing. Efforts to build a unified national market have faltered, while fiscal and administrative fragmentation persists. Meanwhile, a still-flawed national innovation system undermines Beijing’s ambition for technological sovereignty. These institutional defects form the soft underbelly of China’s so-called “high-quality development.”

Third, external containment has hardened into structure. Since the early 1990s, U.S. strategy has aimed to prevent the emergence of any peer competitor. Across successive administrations—from Trump to Biden, and Trump again, this logic has evolved into a systemic campaign of technological exclusion, supply-chain decoupling, and alliance consolidation. Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy has effectively multilateralized containment, while Beijing’s response—turning inward, preaching self-reliance yet resisting power-sharing and reform—has only accentuated its vulnerabilities. China’s economy remains export-dependent, its domestic demand suppressed, its innovation constrained by institutional distrust.

These traps are self-reinforcing. The more China clings to the illusion of control through centralization and nationalism, the less capable it becomes of genuine adaptation. The paradox of China’s rise is thus stark: a country powerful enough to unsettle the international order, yet too constrained—politically, institutionally, and strategically—to remake it.

Geography, Resources, and the Limits of Power

Grand strategy is never an abstraction; it must rest on geography, resources, and alliances. By these measures, China faces limits that its rhetoric cannot conceal.

Unlike twentieth-century America, China lacks the geographic and resource endowments to sustain a self-sufficient rise. Energy, food, and key minerals are all heavily import-dependent. A maritime blockade—or even a prolonged disruption of sea-lanes—would paralyze both its economy and defense industry. Autarky is not an option; vulnerability is structural.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was conceived to offset this weakness—to diversify trade routes and extend China’s strategic depth. Yet a decade later, the results have exposed as many risks as opportunities. Most BRI corridors cut through unstable or contested regions—from Central Asia and the Middle East to the South China Sea—leaving them acutely exposed to geopolitical shocks. What was meant to enhance resilience has instead magnified dependence.

Diplomatically, overreach has compounded these vulnerabilities. “Wolf-warrior diplomacy,” designed for domestic consumption, has alienated many of China’s potential partners. Europe, Japan, Australia, and even much of the Global South have grown wary of Beijing’s coercive style. The result is not strategic autonomy but strategic isolation. A state once known for quiet subtlety now mistakes volume for vision, mistaking performative nationalism for power projection.

China’s predicament is thus not accidental but structural—a product of material limits reinforced by political misjudgment. Without secure access to resources, credible partners, and a coherent sense of purpose, even the most ambitious projects risk becoming castles in the sand. Grand strategy begins with an honest reckoning with one’s constraints; Beijing has yet to show that it possesses either the humility or the imagination to do so.

The Grand Strategy Deficit

China’s challenge today is not merely tactical or material—it is civilizational. A true grand strategy requires coherence between means and ends, power and purpose. It links domestic governance to external behavior, aligning internal reform with international legitimacy. By that standard, China’s rise has been a triumph of execution but a failure of imagination.

The state commands vast resources, global reach, and a disciplined bureaucracy. Yet it lacks a unifying idea of what kind of power it wishes to be. The language of “rejuvenation” evokes pride but not purpose; “self-reliance” speaks to insecurity more than confidence. What Beijing calls strategy often amounts to a collage of slogans stitched together to mask uncertainty.

The danger for the world is not an expansionist China with a master plan, but a reactive and insecure one without one—a power oscillating between assertiveness and anxiety. Such a China is neither predictable nor strategically rational. It can disrupt, but it cannot design; it can project influence, but it cannot inspire.

For Europe and the democratic world, this demands clarity, not alarmism. The task is to engage where interests align, hedge where they diverge, and prepare for a future in which China remains powerful yet unanchored—a systemic actor without a stable grand strategy. Managing such a China will require the very qualities Beijing now lacks: patience, adaptability, and strategic imagination.

Until China reconciles its material ambitions with a sustainable political and moral vision, it will remain what it is today—a formidable state adrift in the very order it seeks to transform.

Jianyong Yue is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and previously taught Chinese politics and development at King’s College and LSE. He is the author of China’s Rise in the Age of Globalization: Myth or Reality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Crony Comprador Capitalism: The Institutional Origins of China’s Rise and Decline (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Photo by Jeswin Thomas