In both the United States and China, opinion has moved from a cautious embrace of the other to a conviction that earlier collaboration was naïve and that a “clear-eyed” analysis discloses the other to be possessed of a fundamentally hostile essence. In Washington, policymakers increasingly view Chinese economic statecraft as an attack on the ideals of a neutral market framework and call for confrontational measures to save the liberal international order.

In a new working paper, Jake Werner follows present-day tensions back into recent history and, in the process, effaces new possibilities for resolving today’s conflicts. China’s economic orientation—both its universal and particular elements—is not external to the liberal international order but emerged from China’s specific position within it. A critical understanding of China’s vision and how it arose is essential to rethinking globalization’s possible futures.

The visions of global economic governance developing in the United States and China today both mark a break with neoliberal globalization. Understanding this allows reconceptualizing the relation between the two, not as different in essence, but as potentially complementary, a crucial step toward imagining a future for globalization beyond nationalist conflict.

Main Findings:

• The Chinese Communist Party in recent decades has elaborated a coherent worldview and set of prescriptions with which to evaluate and reform the global economy, the latest iteration of which is known as “Xi Jinping foreign relations thought” 习近平外交思想. Understanding Party ideas on their own terms is a necessary first step toward making sense of Chinese economic statecraft, as well as a precondition for the kind of critical engagement with Chinese foreign policy that might lead to productive change rather than deepening conflict.
  • Though often treated by Western observers as meaningless window dressing that conceals authoritarian power politics, uninformed dismissal is no wiser than uncritical acceptance.
• The incumbent power holders of the global system feel the rise to prominence of Chinese particularity to be profoundly threatening not simply because it has unsettled their worldview and overthrown their optimism that history ended with them. More significantly, the neoliberal form of global growth has lost much of its dynamism since the 2008 crisis, leading to rising competition and increasingly zero-sum dynamics in the struggle to secure growth and opportunity for one’s own country.
  • The US-led Western confrontation with China since 2018 has strengthened these reactionary currents while ignoring other possibilities within the Chinese vision.
• There are thus two broad possibilities for the near future of the global economy: intensifying nation based conflict over growth that, in a vicious cycle, further undermines the conditions for continued growth or structural reforms that create the grounds for a return to broad growth and popular legitimacy by remaking the logic of the global system.
• A different approach would aim to remake China—and, along with it, to remake the rich countries and the Global South as well—by embracing the potential for a new universality and seeking to overcome the inequalities and divisions that today threaten global society.
  • If China wants to promote global growth, its future relies on the structural incorporation of labor rights, a green remaking of production and cultural pluralism.