If you dropped in to China at any point in its modern history and tried to project 20 years into the future, you would almost certainly end up getting it wrong. In 1900, no one serving in the late Qing dynasty expected that in 20 years the country would be a republic feuded over by warlords. In 1940, as a fractious China staggered in the face of a massive Japanese invasion, few would have imagined that by 1960, it would be a giant communist state about to split with the Soviet Union. In 2000, the United States helped China over the finish line in joining the World Trade Organization, ushering the country into the liberal capitalist trading system with much fanfare. By 2020, China and the United States were at loggerheads and in the midst of a trade war.

Twenty years from now, Chinese leader Xi Jinping might still be in power in some fashion even into his 90s; Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader from 1978 to 1989, retained considerable influence until his death at 92, in 1997. Since taking the reins in 2012, Xi has pushed China in directions that have increasingly placed it at odds with its neighbors, regional powers, and the United States. At home, authorities are widening and deepening systems of surveillance and control, clamping down on ethnic minorities and narrowing the space for dissent. On its maritime borders, China engages in ever more confrontational acts that risk sparking conflicts not just with Taiwan but also with Japan and Southeast Asian countries. Farther afield, Beijing has tacitly supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and is widely believed to be responsible for major cyber-interference in Western infrastructure. This trend is hardly promising, and things could get even worse were China to take the bold step of starting a war over Taiwan, an operation for which the Chinese military has long been preparing.

And yet another China remains possible—one that would allow a degree of coexistence with the United States and its allies and partners without requiring the sacrifice of essential global interests or values. To be sure, China may never become the kind of country many Western optimists imagined in the early post–Cold War decades: a gradually more liberal and obliging member of the U.S.-led international order. That horse bolted the stable long ago. But in 20 years, a version of China could emerge with which the West and the wider world can coexist, as long as both China and Western governments avoid the policies that would make conflict inescapable.

That coexistence would not be especially warm, but it would have shed the kind of friction and animosity that loom over relations today. The generation of Chinese leaders after Xi, many of whom came of age during the modest openings of the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of this century, might well want to return the country to the promise of those periods. They may also realize that entanglement in any significant military or geoeconomic confrontation will prevent China from achieving its other aims, such as reviving the economy to achieve middle-class growth at home and spread the country’s influence abroad. Beijing cannot wage a big war and still attain economic security. Its aging society and the imperatives of greater regional economic integration to sustain its growth make it harder to endure the consequences of a major conflict—or even just a more confrontational regional and global posture.

But even if China avoids triggering immense conflicts with its neighbors and the West in the near future, it will not simply become a placid member of a steadily eroding liberal international order. Its global influence could grow significantly, in ways that will cause Western countries and liberal democracies considerable angst. The United States and its allies, however, will have to determine whether a China that is a softer incarnation of its current self should be regarded as a legitimate part of a changing global order—or still be treated as an existential threat.

To understand where China might be going, it’s worth examining a much older pattern that underpins Chinese foreign policy. When the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912, had to grapple with European imperial powers in the late nineteenth century, prominent officials crafted two slogans that defined how China should deal with the Western challenge: fuguo qiangbing, or “rich country and strong army,” and zhongti xiyong, or “Chinese for essence, Western for usage.” The ideas behind these phrases have remained constant across the century and a half since they first came to prominence during the late imperial decline of the Qing.

The first drew from famous rhetoric during China’s Warring States period over two thousand years ago. The slogan distilled the country’s abiding material ambitions, its need to attain power through militarized national security and prosperity. In the last century, other great powers have deprioritized the quest for military strength, whether because of defeat in war (as was the case with Germany and Japan) or imperial decline (as with the United Kingdom, which went from being a great power at the start of the twentieth century to a middle power by its end). China has not.

The second phrase denoted the idea that a non-Western country could adopt some of the frameworks of Western modernity—such as particular kinds of military technology or constitutional and legal reforms—without sacrificing its authentic cultural self. In 1865, Qing officials discussed the opening in Shanghai of the Jiangnan arsenal, China’s first modern weapons factory, in this language. Many non-Western societies embraced similar views, including Japan, a country that modernized rapidly in the twentieth century to compete with Western states while still retaining a distinct sense of its own identity. The challenge they set for themselves was to achieve material progress and improve state capacity without becoming “Western.”

The Qing dynasty ended, but the debate about how to achieve these two national goals did not. The Chinese Communist Party always believed that forging a militarily strong and economically secure China was one of its fundamental objectives. By the 1990s, the CCP wondered whether it should follow the model of Singapore: a country that won global admiration while producing stable governance, a balance between consensus and coercion, and the ostensible adherence to what its longtime leader Lee Kuan Yew called the “Asian values” of deference to authority and communitarianism.

The dual aspirations of these slogans are visible today. China has long wanted to become a wealthy and strong country, but only in the present has it come close to achieving this goal; it now has the world’s second-biggest economy and its second-biggest military. Becoming a great power has coincided with the need to underline the indigenous sources of Chinese greatness. Since at least the 1980s, the CCP has nurtured a modernized, authoritarian version of Confucian culture, stressing the importance of “harmony” in public life, a quality very much at odds with the churning revolution of Mao’s rule from 1949 until his death in 1976. Under Xi, significant resources have been poured into initiatives such as the Confucian canon project, which reached a 20-year milestone in 2023 by classifying over 200 million characters’ worth of texts from China’s cultural traditions.

The core aim of fuguo qiangbing, of becoming wealthy and militarily strong, will define Chinese policy in the years and decades to come. But it could prove tricky for Beijing to attain. Unlike in the imperial age of the nineteenth century, the assertion of military strength in the interconnected twenty-first century can jeopardize the search for........

© Foreign Affairs