What China Wants With Global Governance

Steven Langendonk and Matthew D. Stephen

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What does China want from world order? Many observers, especially in the West, look upon China’s growing assertiveness and expanding ambitions with trepidation. In a speech on China-EU relations in 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned that “the Chinese Communist Party’s clear goal is a systemic change of the international order with China at its center.” She went on to characterize China’s diplomacy in multilateral institutions as demonstrating a “determination to promote an alternative vision of the world order. One, where individual rights are subordinated to national security. Where security and economy take prominence over political and civil rights.”

Similarly, in a speech at the Körber Foundation in Berlin in January 2025, Friedrich Merz – then Germany’s opposition leader, currently the chancellor – lumped China in with Russia as the leaders of a new systemic conflict between liberal democracies and “anti-liberal autocracies,” which aggressively oppose the multilateral order as it has existed since the end of World War II Such statements follow in the footsteps of the United States, which classified China as a “revisionist” power in 2017.

While increasingly widespread, the view of China as an existential challenge to world order reflects political alarmism more than sober analysis. Our research on China’s ambitions for world order leads us to a different conclusion. While China does indeed pose a challenge to some aspects of the contemporary world order, there is little evidence to suggest that it poses a greater challenge to world order than other revisionist powers, including today’s United States. Moreover, China’s ambitions vary across different domains of world order, where it faces challenges that limit what it can achieve.

Owing to its growing influence around the world, what China wants for world order has become one of the decisive questions of our time. Scholars have sought to identify and understand China’s goals using a variety of methods. Some look at China’s domestic political and economic order, which is authoritarian capitalist, and extrapolate this to the international level. Others infer China’s preferences based on theoretical arguments about its position in the international system. We argue that a more accurate picture can be gained by looking empirically at China’s track record. In particular, we focus on two aspects of China’s behavior: what it says (i.e. its vision for world order) and what it does (i.e. its behavior in different international regimes).