Following the Second World War, America assumed a global leadership role because it drafted the governing rules it expected the global economy to follow. Those rules meant that the United States became the dominate player on the world stage. China is following a different path to global leadership. That path focuses on global trade; however, trade in a very different way than other industrialized nations. A few years ago, journalist Greg Ip observed, “China’s economy is unusual.”[1] He noted that China’s economy is not based as heavily on domestic consumption as other developed countries. He wrote, “This isn’t just a problem for China; it’s a problem for the whole world. What Chinese companies can’t sell to Chinese consumers, they export.” Ip explains, “The bedrock principle behind trade is comparative advantage: countries specialize in what they do best and then export it in exchange for imports. President Xi Jinping rejects this principle. In pursuit of ‘independence and self-reliance,’ he wants China to make as much and import as little as possible.”

This policy resulted in China becoming the world’s leader in manufacturing, green technologies, and essential minerals. Andrew Batson, a partner at Gavekal Dragonomics, told Ip that Chinese officials boast that it is the “only country to produce in every single one of the United Nations’ industrial product categories.” This “rule the world” by trade strategy is a result of Chinese leaders playing the long game. The editors at Wired Magazine explain, “A decade ago, China’s political leaders laid out an ambitious industrial plan: By 2025, they pledged, their country would be a world capital, with the goal of moving from ‘Chinese speed to Chinese quality, the transformation of Chinese products to Chinese brands.’ This is the difference, they wrote, between ‘Made in China’ and ‘Created in China’.”[2]

Roots of the Chinese Century

According to Elizabeth Economy, the Hargrove Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the roots of the Chinese strategy to garner global leadership can be traced back nearly seven decades. She observes, “As early as the 1950s, Chinese leaders discussed competition in the world’s literal and figurative frontiers: the deep seas, the poles, outer space, and what the former People’s Liberation Army officer Xu Guangyu described as ‘power spheres and ideology,’ concepts that today include cyberspace and the international financial system. These domains form the strategic foundations of global power. Control over them determines access to critical resources, the future of the Internet, the many benefits that derive from printing the world’s reserve currency, and the ability to defend against an array of security threats.”[3]

Julian Gewirtz, a China historian at Columbia University, points to an essay written in 1938 by Mao Zedong entitled “On Protracted War.” Gewirtz writes, “At its core, it is a meditation on how China can come from behind in a life-or-death contest against a stronger adversary. President Xi Jinping has praised the strategic foresight, discipline and patience espoused by Mao in the essay, which has emerged as a guiding framework for how China aims to face the United States. He has pointed specifically to Mao’s description of a dynamic, long-term struggle unfolding in three phases: A weaker China initially plays dogged defense, followed by a period of stalemate between equally matched forces, eventually culminating in a powerful, victorious Chinese counteroffensive.”[4] Gewirtz indicates that China is currently in phase two of this strategy and is coyly playing the long game. He explains, “Mr. Xi appears to see the competition with the United States through the same prism of long-term struggle that Mao developed to guide Chinese strategy almost a century ago.”

Chinese leaders have proven themselves adept at playing the long-game. Political analyst Bruce Mehlman explains, “Success compounds over time. Shortcuts rarely do. Great businesses, investors and families play the long game … seeking slow & steady progress while avoiding big mistakes.”[5] Playing the long game is also a characteristic of great nations. Three European academics, Timothy Garton Ash, Ivan Krastev, and Mark Leonard, report that recent polls “show that people everywhere expect China’s (already considerable) global influence to grow over the next decade. China’s technological success and manufacturing power may be what is driving these perceptions.”[6] They add, “Not only do more people think China is on the rise geopolitically and leading in important industries, but few seem to fear this course of events.”

The Way Ahead

Journalist Matt Oliver reports that business leaders visiting China “are coming back terrified.”[7] What’s terrifying these executives is not a demonstration of military might but an army of robots operating in “dark factories.” Greg Jackson, founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, told Oliver, “We visited a dark factory producing some astronomical number of mobile phones. The process was so heavily automated that there were no workers on the manufacturing side, just a small number who were there to ensure the plant was working. You get this sense of a change, where China’s competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad.” According to Oliver, “Far from being focused on low-quality products, China is now viewed as a leader in rapidly-growing, high-value technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, drones and advanced robotics.”

Like many developed countries, China finds itself with an aging population, which is one reason its leaders have focused so heavily on automation. Chinese leaders also realize that if its “rule the world by trade” strategy is going to succeed in the years ahead, it needs to secure customers in young countries, which are mainly located in the Global South. Anatoly Motkin, President of StrategEast Center for a New Economy, insists Chinese leaders will go to great lengths “to protect its control of digital infrastructure worldwide.”[8] While politicians and business leaders in the West fret about Chinese technology containing back doors associated with espionage and data exposure, Motkin insists “a more insidious dimension has largely been overlooked.” That dimension is legal contracts. He explains, “These telecommunications contracts with Chinese firms are, in practice, the first step toward making a country a technological satellite of Beijing.” He calls this contractual lock-up “the Silicon Curtain.”

Motkin explains, “Rather than a line on a map, it is defined by procurement decisions that include the vendors contracted to build a nation’s 5G network, the platform hosting their government data and the loans for financing digital infrastructure. … Contracting with Chinese vendors such as Huawei is genuinely appealing. These companies provide telecommunications infrastructure at prices 30 to 40 percent cheaper than Western competitors, and it is all funded by the Chinese government. For a finance minister on a constrained budget, it’s not a difficult sell. The problem is that this discount is hardly altruistic. Rather, it is a clever means of coercing dependency for a critical national infrastructure.” The idea is that if you lock-up a country’s infrastructure and you’ve locked-up the country’s consumers as well. This strategy has been variously described as “debt-trap diplomacy,” “creditor imperialism” or a “Trojan Gift.”

Not everyone’s convinced that China’s strategy will work. Columnist Matthew Lynn explains, “Over the last two decades, China has pumped huge amounts of money into owning the world’s critical raw materials and infrastructure. In effect, it was trying to buy an empire.”[9] He believes, however, “It failed, and in the end, financial power is no substitute for the real thing.” He adds, “In fairness to the geopolitical strategists surrounding Xi, a stealth empire was not a terrible idea. … If it owned all the infrastructure, plus the mines, plus the software that connected everything, then it could turn itself into a global superpower without the hassle of military invasions.” His problem with this strategy is that “financial and commercial power has its limits. … The lesson of the last decade is surely this: You can’t buy an empire, nor can you purchase global influence. It is only hard power that counts for anything.”

Concluding Thoughts

I would not dismiss China’s economic strategy as quickly as Lynn. Once infrastructure is in place and consumers trapped, economic relations are maintained over a significant period of time. That’s the long game. Elizabeth Economy concludes, “Beijing has positioned itself well for this contest. It approaches these frontiers with a consistent logic and playbook. It is investing in the necessary hard capabilities. It is partnering with other countries to embed itself in institutions and flooding these bodies with Chinese experts and officials, who then campaign for change. When it cannot co-opt existing institutions, it builds new ones. In all these efforts, Beijing is highly adaptive, experimenting with different platforms, reframing positions, and deploying capabilities in new ways.” It would be unwise for Western leaders to declare an early end to China’s Century.

Footnotes

[1] Greg Ip, “There’s a China-Shaped Hole in the Global Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 29 August 2024.

[2] Editors, “23 Ways You’re Already Living in the Chinese Century,” Wired, 2026.

[3] Elizabeth Economy, “How China Wins the Future,” Foreign Affairs, 9 December 2025.

[4] Julian Gewirtz, “Xi Is Planning for China’s Final Victory Over the U.S.,” The New York Times, 13 May 2026.

[5] Bruce Mehlman, “Six-Chart Sunday (#100) – How to Navigate an Age of Disruption,” Bruce Mehlman's Age of Disruption, 23 November 2025.

[6] Timothy Garton Ash, Ivan Krastev, and Mark Leonard, “How Trump is making China great again—and what it means for Europe,” European Council on Foreign Relations, 15 January 2026.

[7] Matt Oliver, “Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified,” The Telegraph, 12 October 2025.

[8] Anatoly Motkin, “China is laying a technological trap. Call it the ‘Silicon Curtain.’” The Washington Post, 5 May 2026.

[9] Matthew Lynn, “China tried to buy the world. It failed.” The Washington Post, 23 February 2026.