The People’s Republic of China was founded in opposition to empire. The Chinese Communist Party built its identity on anti-imperialism, presenting itself as the vanguard of a global struggle against Western domination. Chinese leader Mao Zedong saw the Bolshevik Revolution as the opening act of that struggle, and after the communist victory and the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, Beijing elevated “noninterference” to become a core principle of its foreign policy. The concept became a powerful diplomatic instrument, helping China position itself as a champion of postcolonial sovereignty and win support across the global South.

Yet even at its inception, this principle was more propaganda than doctrine. Mao backed communist insurgencies abroad and sent Chinese “volunteers” to fight in the Korean War. As China’s capabilities expanded, so, too, did the reach of its activities beyond its borders. Today, Beijing operates a global network of intelligence, influence, and security relationships designed to advance its interests overseas. Most recently, it has provided diplomatic cover and material support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. And it has established several formal military facilities overseas, in Cambodia, Djibouti, and according to some accounts, Tajikistan, although Beijing continues to deny this last one. Even so, China’s record of intervention to date has skewed toward staging influence operations and offering deniable support to its favored regimes. China did participate in the Korean War and invaded India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, but it has not routinely engaged in overt military interventions in the U.S. style.

For decades, China could sustain this approach under the umbrella of a U.S.-led security order that it did not have to maintain. As the analyst Zoe Liu has argued in Foreign Affairs, that order constrained China in important ways, but it also underwrote the stability of global trade routes and financial systems, allowing Beijing to funnel most of its resources into economic development and military modernization. As that order unravels and U.S. President Donald Trump energetically uses force abroad, China sees its globalized commercial, technological, and security interests—from the mineral deposits and shipping lanes of the Arctic to the oil flows of the Gulf—at immediate risk. Beijing is being drawn into the inescapable logic that has confronted all rising powers: to protect its interests abroad, it must assume a greater share of the costs of enforcing order.

As the world descends into what Chinese leader Xi Jinping has described as might-makes-right lawlessness, Beijing is priming its security apparatus to defend the transportation corridors, supply chains, and strategic resources that sustain Chinese power. China’s minister of state security has directed the national security bureaucracy to build an integrated system “across the entire chain” to protect China’s overseas interests, one that will likely require an expansion of China’s forward deployed intelligence and defense capabilities. The nature of China’s global dependencies means that this system cannot just stop at the country’s immediate periphery but must forestall risks as far afield as the Panama Canal and the mines of central Africa. In parallel, intellectuals loyal to the party are debating whether China should formally revise its commitment to noninterference. A country built on an anti-imperial story has arrived at the point in which it must, with some reluctance, assume a greater share of the burdens of empire.

Mao once described the United States’ extensive global network of military bases as “nooses around the neck of U.S. imperialism” that would eventually entangle Washington and sap its power around the world. In some respects, that judgment appears prescient. Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy acknowledged the reality of American overreach and sought to scale back the country’s commitments to a more confined set of core interests. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” it read.

Analysts within the Chinese security establishment registered this change early in Trump’s second presidency. In August 2025, the think tank of China’s powerful Ministry of State Security published a piece entitled “The End of the West?” The China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) is regarded as a constituent part of China’s Ministry of State Security, and its assessments both reflect and shape the strategic thinking of Beijing’s highest leadership. The piece argued that the West—by which the author meant the strategic bloc led by the United States, including Europe and other allies—was entering a phase of relative decline marked not by immediate collapse but by the erosion of its internal cohesion, legitimacy, and normative authority. Trump’s return, in this telling, was a structural rupture, signaling that the United States was willing to undermine its alliances, sideline the institutions it had built, and........

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