China’s Emerging Grand Strategy: Timeline, Intellectual Origins, and Contours

Minxin Pei
2 hours ago
24 min read

Photo credit: Eseymour, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

After the first U.S.-China trade war in 2018, Chinese leaders began to formulate a new grand strategy that shifted their priority from economic development to security. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) blueprint for the 14^th Five-Year Plan (FYP), released in October 2020, provides a preview of this strategy. Conceptually, Mao’s doctrine of protracted warfare likely shapes how Chinese leaders see the Sino-American “new cold war” and influences their strategic calculus. Due to their obsession with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chinese leaders are also influenced by the lessons from the Cold War. However, because of the politicization of the debate within China over how the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, it remains unclear what exactly Chinese leaders have learned from the Soviet defeat. Overall, China’s emerging grand strategy emphasizes shifting the balance of power in its favor through a combination of reducing vulnerabilities, mobilizing domestic resources, developing substantial external partnerships, preserving China’s external economic linkages, and maintaining strategic focus. Although on paper it is intellectually more coherent than whatever guided its foreign policy during Xi’s earlier years in office, its effective implementation still faces serious obstacles.

Since its first trade war with the U.S. in 2018, China has adopted several momentous changes in its foreign and domestic policies. In the aggregate, these adjustments constitute a decisive shift from economic development to national security. The magnitude of the shift is comparable to the Sino-Soviet break in the early 1960s and the Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s – except that the roles of the U.S. and the Soviet Union (now Russia) have been reversed. A growing body of evidence suggests that recognition that China has entered a dangerous era of adversarial rivalry with the U.S. has prompted its leaders to craft a new grand strategy. Documentary evidence, such as Xi’s assessments of the external environment and the party’s blueprint for the 14^th FYP unveiled in October 2020, provides important clues to the evolution of Chinese leaders’ thinking about such a grand strategy and its principal components. Empirically, China’s more prepared response to the second trade war with the U.S. in 2025, its sustained support for Russia’s war in Ukraine despite substantial damage to its ties with Europe, and its all-out efforts to achieve technological self-sufficiency lend additional support for the assumption that implementation of this new grand strategy is well under way.

Despite mounting evidence of China’s new grand strategy, analysts have not paid sufficient attention to the timeline of its evolution, its intellectual origins, and its core pillars. This essay seeks to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge. By examining publicly available leadership speeches and official documents, the essay offers tantalizing clues about the events leading up to the formulation of this new grand strategy, its likely sources of intellectual inspiration, and its main components.

Timeline

An important empirical puzzle that has bearing on any discussion on China’s grand strategy is the approximate timeframe during which top Chinese leaders became convinced that the Sino-American relationship had turned fundamentally adversarial and that they needed a new grand strategy to deal with this stark reality. Our approach is to examine the appearance and frequency of certain keywords in Xi’s speeches that reflect his perception of the U.S. and his assessment of the external environment. It is reasonable to assume that the appearance of certain keywords signaling a fundamental shift in Chinese perceptions of the U.S. or assessments of its external environment after a certain event offers clues to changes in Beijing’s strategic thinking.

One criticism of using textual analysis to ascertain Chinese leaders’ perception of the U.S. is that they have long voiced fears of a U.S.-led containment strategy. Indeed, this is true. As hardcore structural realists, leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Xi all expressed concerns, either publicly or in internal speeches, that the U.S. and its allies would take preemptive actions to stop China’s rise. In his talks to senior leaders in September 1989, Deng warned that “many in the world want us to do better, but there are also plenty of people who want to do us harm” (整我们).[1] Jiang Zemin, and later Hu Jintao, repeated similar warnings while in office.[2] Xi was no exception after he became party chief. Addressing a national conference on law enforcement in January 2014, he sounded the same alarm. “As the balance of global power continues to move in a direction favorable to us,” Xi said, “the discomfort of the U.S. and other Western countries is becoming more intense, and they are escalating implementation of a strategy to westernize and divide us.”[3] On his state visit to the U.S. in September 2015, Xi twice referred to the “Thucydides trap” and urged that the two countries must avoid it.[4]

However, such broadly expressed paranoia did not seem to have a real impact on Chinese grand strategy until after the first U.S.-China trade war, as evidenced by the party’s blueprint for the 13^th FYP at the end of October 2015 and release of the full plan in spring 2016.[5] Both documents portray a relatively benign international environment and, like previous FYPs, regard economic development as the party’s top priority. By contrast, the party’s blueprint for the 14^th FYP, approved by the 5^th plenum of the 19^th Central Committee in October 2020, represents a fundamental shift from a development-centered to a security-centered strategy.[6]

A comparison of Xi’s optimism-infused political report to the 19^th party congress on October 18, 2017, and his far less optimistic political report to the 20^th party congress on October 16, 2022, also shows that his assessment of the external environment in general, and ties with the U.S. in particular, had fundamentally changed in the intervening five years. In October 2017, on the eve of the U.S.-China trade war, he told attendees at the party congress that “Our country is in a period of important strategic opportunity and our prospects are extremely bright although our challenges are also very severe. ... Peace and development is still the main theme of our era. The trends of multi-polarization in the world, economic globalization … are deepening. Changes in the global governance system and international order are accelerating. ... The correlation of international forces is trending toward greater balance. The momentum for peaceful development is irreversible.”[7]

The contrast with the grim international environment and China’s external challenges described in his political report to the 20^th party congress five years later could not have been more striking. Xi told delegates to the congress that, during the previous five years, “China faced a drastic change in the international situation, in particular external blackmail, containment, blockades, and maximum pressure.” He then laid out a set of new foreign policy tasks, which were notably absent in his report to the 19^th party congress. They include “resolutely opposing all forms of hegemonism, power politics, cold war thinking … protectionism, ‘building walls and fortresses,’ ‘decoupling,’ … formation of blocs targeting a specific country.”[8]

Of all the external events or developments between 2017 and 2022, the U.S.-China trade war in 2018-19, the near-total breakdown of bilateral relations during 2020, and the Biden administration’s competition-centered China policy were almost certainly the “drastic changes in the international situation” referred to in Xi’s report of October 2022. Additional evidence in support of the argument that the trade war of 2018-19 marked a turning point in Chinese leaders’ assessment of the Sino-American relationship can be found in the first-ever appearance of several key words and phrases in Xi’s speeches in 2018 and thereafter. For example, phrases such as “complex and severe external environment” (复杂严峻的外部环境) and “stormy seas and ferocious waves” (惊涛骇浪), Xi’s oft-used metaphors in describing external threats, did not appear in Xi’s published speeches before the first trade war.[9] The phrase “external suppression and containment” (来自外部的打压和遏制), an indirect but obvious reference to American actions against China, first appeared in Xi’s political report to the CCP 20^th national congress in October 2022, and later would become a stock phrase referring to hostile external pressures. Xi invoked a “new cold war” for the first time in January 2021 when he addressed the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.[10] Between April 2021 and April 2026, he used the term on twenty-two separate occasions and frequently framed the “new cold war” as a policy choice confronting the major world powers.[11]

Because “de-coupling” (脱钩) has now become part of the Chinese official framing of the “new cold war,” it is striking that Xi did not refer to the U.S.-China “decoupling” for the first time until June 2019 (during the height of the first U.S.-China trade war).[12] Although Chinese obsessions with “chokepoint technologies” (卡脖子技术) predated the trade war, Xi used it only once (in 2013) and did not use it again until 2018, after which the phrase would appear frequently in his speeches on the imperative of tech self-sufficiency.[13]

The rhetorical stridency of Xi’s speeches became more notable after the free-fall of Sino-American relations in 2020.[14] In his speech on September 3, 2020, commemorating the 75^th anniversary of China’s victory in World War II, Xi declared, without naming the U.S., “the Chinese people will never allow any person or any force to use bullying tactics to impose their will on China, change China’s direction moving forward, and thwart the Chinese people’s endeavors to build a better life for themselves!”[15] It is worth pointing out that Xi delivered a totally different speech marking the 70^th anniversary of China’s victory in World War II (a more significant occasion) in 2015: it contained no accusations that (unnamed) external forces were bent on keeping China down.[16]

In retrospect, the release of the U.S. National Security Strategy in December 2017 and the first U.S.-China trade war most likely prompted Chinese leaders to begin crafting a new strategy prioritizing security over efficiency. For Xi and his colleagues, a new cold war with the U.S. had become a stark reality by April 2020 when he spoke on the 14^th FYP to the Central Finance Commission. The key points of this milestone speech, “Several Major Questions on Our Country’s Medium-and-Long Term Strategy for Economic and Social Development,” would become, six months later, the central pillars of the party’s blueprint for the 14^th FYP.[17]

Doctrine of Protracted War

Mao Zedong’s “On Protracted War,” which is based on a series of lectures he delivered from May 26 to June 3, 1938 in Yan’an, is a classic on guerrilla warfare.[18] The term he coined, “protracted war” (chijiuzhan, 持久战), has since become a part of the Chinese political lexicon. Government officials and ordinary people routinely use it in referring to a time-consuming and difficult undertaking. Xi Jinping, for example, often compares his war on corruption to a “protracted war.”[19] In a speech on agriculture in December 2020, he called on the nation to be “prepared for protracted war” because “the world is undergoing changes unseen in a hundred years. ... The international environment is becoming increasingly complex; uncertainty and instability are rising each day. ... Economic globalization has encountered countercurrents, and the world has entered a period of turbulence and transformation.”[20] At a conference on domestic security in January 2021 Xi’s protégé, Minister of State Security (MSS) Chen Yixin, characterized the U.S. containment of China as a “protracted war.”[21] In discussions of the Sino-American rivalry, Chinese academics are fond of comparing it to a protracted war, with most arguing that the current stage in Sino-American rivalry is the first of a three-phase “protracted war” (strategic defense for China).[22]

Few should be surprised that, five decades after his death, Mao’s ideas continue to influence how Chinese elites think about “struggle,” to use a favorite phrase of the CCP. After all, the party is eternally indebted to Mao for his leadership and strategic acumen to prevail during the decades-long Chinese civil war against seemingly impossible odds. In the unfolding rivalry with the U.S., Mao’s insights in “On Protracted War,” which might sound mundane to most military theorists, can nevertheless offer useful strategic guidance for waging a struggle against a superior adversary. Stripped to its core, the real value of Mao’s “On Protracted War” lies in a set of principles for fighting a war from an initial position of weakness.

Of these principles, the most important one is that only a protracted war can change the balance of power in one’s favor. This can be accomplished through three mechanisms. First, the weaker belligerent can increase its own capabilities by mobilizing domestic resources and political support, thus gradually gaining more power relative to the adversary. Second, the adversary’s relative strategic position can deteriorate if an external coalition emerges against it. Third, attrition caused by a protracted war and declining domestic support for the war can weaken the adversary materially and politically. Of the three mechanisms, according to Mao, the first is the most important because this it is under one’s control and it can have the most direct impact on the outcome of a protracted conflict. The second and the third can determine how long a protracted war will last, but it would be unwise to count on them.

Conceived as a process of shifting the balance of power between belligerents, a protracted war has three distinct phases: strategic defense, strategic stalemate, and strategic offense. In the first phase, the adversary has the initiative due to its advantages. In the second phase, the balance of power between the two sides is more equally matched, with neither side possessing the initiative. In the third phase, a favorable balance of power allows one side to gain the initiative over the adversary. Mao stressed that the three phases are dynamic, their length cannot be pre-determined, and strategic stalemate can be “long and painful.” The success of strategic offense is not guaranteed, and it will critically depend on the international environment and the adversary’s domestic conditions.

As power is the determinative factor in a protracted war, setbacks are unavoidable when the balance of power is unfavorable. However, a weaker belligerent can increase its odds of success by “making fewer mistakes” and going on the offensive when in possession of absolute superiority. Thus, a guiding principle for fighting a protracted war is both decisiveness and caution in picking one’s battles. Mao divided battles into three categories: one must “resolutely fight” certain battles and campaigns when one is absolutely certain of victory; one must avoid battles and campaigns about which the odds of victory are uncertain; and one must absolutely avoid “betting a country’s fate” on a “strategically decisive battle.”[23]

On the whole, it seems reasonable to characterize Mao’s doctrine of protracted warfare as based on cold calculations of the power balance and overall strategic caution. A quick reading of “On Protracted War” could yield the mistaken impression that such a conflict usually unfolds according to some fixed rules. This interpretation overlooks two serious blind spots that Mao did not take care to correct. One is that judgments and assessments by top decision-makers are almost as important as the balance of hard power. Miscalculations can lead to calamities despite Mao’s caution against making mistakes. The other blind spot is to see the three phases of a protracted war as unidirectional, while in reality reversals are highly likely and the desired shift in the balance of power may not materialize. Such caveats aside, the broad contours of China’s emerging grand strategy suggest Beijing’s post-2018 policies generally adhere to the logic laid out in Mao’s “On Protracted War.”

Cold War Lessons

Avoiding the fate of the former Soviet Union has been an obsession of the CCP since the end of the Cold War in 1991. At the party’s direction, Chinese think-tanks and scholars have published numerous studies on the Soviet collapse.[24] Chinese propagandists have also produced several multi-part documentaries on the fall of the Soviet Union. The latest is “Thinking of Danger in Times of Safety: In Memory of the Collapse of the Soviet Party and State – Words from the Russian People” (居安思危之二：苏联亡党亡国20年祭 – 俄罗斯人在诉说). It was first aired in 2013 and re-broadcast in 2022.[25] Liberal and conservative scholars have fundamental disagreements over the cause of the Soviet collapse: conservatives blame Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. Liberals point to the Soviet regime’s resistance to economic and political reforms during the Brezhnev era of stagnation. The two camps also clash over the role of the Cold War. While conservatives emphasize the West’s “ideological infiltration” and “psychological warfare,” liberals argue that the Soviet Union’s imperial overreach and persistence in a costly and ultimately unwinnable arms race drained its limited resources.[26]

In recent years, the Chinese government has organized and funded new academic projects on the Cold War that are likely to draw useful lessons for the “new cold war.” One tantalizing piece of evidence is publication in 2019 of a volume of fifteen essays, titled “Lessons from the Cold War” (冷战启示录). Its editor, Shen Zhihua (沈志华), is one of China’s most prominent and respected scholars on the Cold War. The work was commissioned by the National Office on Philosophical and Social Science Work (全国哲学社会科学工作办公室), a bureau-level agency inside the CCP Central Propaganda Department responsible for organizing research projects prioritized by senior leaders.[27] Also revealing is the publication date, September 2019. As the academic publication cycle in China is much shorter than that in the U.S., the project was likely commissioned in 2018.

Although the phrase “new cold war” has appeared frequently in Xi’s speeches since 2018, he has not said much about what lessons China should draw from the Cold War. His analysis of the fall of the Soviet Union, which is contained in many of his speeches since the end of 2012, shows that he believes that the most important reason for the fall was that Soviet leaders had lost the ideological war with the West. In his speech to new Central Committee members on January 5, 2013, Xi pointed to “intense struggle in the ideological domain” as the deciding factor in the fall of the Soviet Union. The loss of this “struggle” resulted in “historical nihilism” and “ideological confusion,” which in turn caused the organization of the party to cease functioning and to lose its control of the military. Xi called this “a lesson from the past.”[28] Speaking to new members of the Central Committee exactly five years later, Xi provided further elaboration. “The Soviet Communist Party seized power when it had only 200,000 members; it defeated Hitler when it had 2 million members. But it had 20 million members when it lost power,” reflected Xi. “As I have said before, there was not even one real man during that turbulent event (在那场动荡中，竟无一人是男儿). Why didn’t anyone come out and resist? What was the reason? Because idealism and belief were totally lost.”[29]

Based on Xi’s preoccupation with the consequences of losing the war in the ideological sphere, it is reasonable to assume that he and other hardliners in the party leadership are convinced that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War because it first lost the battle over ideology on the domestic front. In terms of the party’s new grand strategy, it is logical to conclude that maintaining strict censorship and social control will be its core component.

Among the other lessons from the Cold War, there may be more consensus on how three specific mistakes contributed to the Soviet defeat. The first was the Soviet leadership’s resistance to meaningful economic reform, resulting in the loss of domestic public support and inability to fund its arms race with the U.S. The second was the Soviet Union’s isolation from the global economy, due both to its policy of autarky and the West’s success in keeping the Soviet Union “de-coupled” from its trading system. The third was strategic overreach as the Soviet Union unwisely contested American power in every corner of the world without maintaining strategic discipline and focus.[30]

Contours of China’s Emerging Grand Strategy

China’s emerging grand strategy is influenced by its own experience and the lessons its leaders draw from defining historical events. As discussed above, the doctrine of protracted warfare, which is distilled from the party’s own unlikely path to power, and the fall of the Soviet Union most probably exert a disproportional degree of intellectual influence when Xi and his colleagues think about how to fight the “new cold war.” There is sufficient evidence that current Chinese leaders have formulated and begun to implement a grand strategy fundamentally different from the one that guided their predecessors’ policy in the post-Mao era. As illustrated above, the different assessments of the external environment in Xi’s political reports to the 19^th party congress in 2017 and to the 20^th party congress in 2022 demonstrate that Chinese leaders are fully aware that they are in an entirely different world today than that which existed before the first U.S.-China trade war in 2018. Furthermore, while the 13^th FYP unveiled in 2016 provided a blueprint for a development-centered agenda, the 14^th FYP released five years later set a security-centered path forward. Finally, China’s apparent lack of a plan in responding to the first trade war in 2018 and its evident preparedness for the second trade war in 2025 provide further evidence that a more fully formed grand strategy now guides its policy.

Although China’s emerging grand strategy is subject to adjustment on the margins, and additional official documents and leadership speeches are required to know more about this strategy, its broad contours are largely visible. Based on observed Chinese foreign and domestic policies since the first trade war, we can offer the following insights into China’s emerging grand strategy.

Influence of the doctrine of protracted warfare

With the exception of its aggressive tactics in dealing with Taiwan, Taiwan-related issues, the Philippines since 2023, and Japan since Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae assumed office, China’s overall defensive strategic posture since 2020 indicates that its leaders are following Mao’s advice that strategic defense is to be preferred during the initial stage of a conflict when the adversary possesses significant advantages. What is notable about Chinese policy since the first trade war is its overwhelming focus on reducing current and potential vulnerabilities. The dual-circulation strategy formally unveiled in the 14^th FYP in the fall of 2020 is evidently designed to make the Chinese economy less dependent on Westen countries, the most important source of demand for Chinese exports in the post-Mao era. Similarly, an all-out effort to gain tech self-sufficiency aims to deny the U.S. and its allies leverage to use export controls as offensive tools. Equally noticeable is the absence of new policy initiatives that fit the description of strategic offense on a grand scale, unlike the costly and risky moves of Xi’s first term (such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the building of artificial islands in the South China Sea).

Another defensive move attributable to China’s emerging grand strategy is the strengthening of the Sino-Russian partnership. The central strategic dynamic of protracted warfare is the shifting of the balance of power. From Beijing’s perspective, it could tilt this balance in its favor by upgrading its partnership with Moscow. The most consequential move made by Xi since 2020 was to clinch a “no-limit friendship” with Vladimir Putin in February 2022 and the subsequent support he has provided to Putin for Russia’s war in Ukraine.[31] To be sure, Xi’s strategic bet on Putin may not pan out, but it is a logical move if he was hoping to achieve a more favorable balance of power vis-à-vis the U.S. and its allies.

However important allies or alliances may be, as Mao pointed out in 1938, success of winning a protracted war critically depends on mobilization of domestic support. Xi appears also to have followed this principle since 2018. Politically, he has made friendly overtures to the private sector, upon which his economic policies had previously inflicted enormous damage. Rhetorically, he has crafted a nationalist narrative to convince the Chinese public that the U.S. is determined to prevent China from becoming strong and prosperous. His speech on September 3, 2020, marking the 75^th anniversary of China’s victory in World War II is a representative example of this narrative.[32] Fueled by a powerful propaganda apparatus, the nationalist narrative appears to be effective, according to an opinion survey released by the Carter Center in March of this year.[33] Obviously, mobilizing nationalism alone will not be enough. That is probably why the party’s overall focus is still on the sustained growth of the economy as Xi continues to underscore the mantra of “concentrating our energy on doing our own things well” (集中精力办好自己的事情).[34]

Recent developments, in particular the truce in the second U.S.-China trade war and the temporary calm in Sino-American relations, may lead Xi to believe that China is now in the second stage of a protracted cold war – strategic stalemate. Due to the distractions of the Ukraine war, the war in Gaza, and the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, the offensive momentum of the U.S. has stalled in East Asia. The trade policy of the Trump administration evidently has also prompted its allies (with the sole exception of Japan) to hedge their China policy, at least for now. China’s recent success in undercutting American leverage by limiting U.S. access to China-made rare earth materials and progress in tech self-sufficiency must also have boosted Xi’s confidence that the transition from strategic defense to strategic stalemate may have already begun. From his perspective, a strategic stalemate is certainly preferrable to strategic defense as China is no longer as vulnerable as it was during the period immediately after escalation of the trade and tech wars not too long ago.

Influence of the lessons from the Cold War

Due to the highly politicized debate over the causes of the Soviet defeat in the Cold War, the influence of the lessons from the Cold War on China’s emerging grand strategy is not as clear and logically consistent as that in “On Protracted War.” On the one hand, Xi’s conviction that China can prevent a Soviet-style defeat by adhering to orthodox Communist ideology is reflected in the continuation of control, repression, and indoctrination as key pillars of regime survival at home. On the other hand, ideological rigidities have not completely blinded Chinese leaders to some of the obvious strategic mistakes that contributed to the Soviet defeat. Chinese foreign policy conduct since 2020 suggests that Xi is trying hard, at least for now, to avoid repeating two obvious strategic mistakes the Soviet Union made during the Cold War. The first is Moscow’s lack of strategic discipline and focus. Before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, his predecessors had taken on too many client states and had attempted to contest American power far away from Eastern Europe, its strategic center of gravity. Such overreach wasted precious resources and exacerbated Soviet disadvantages. One telling piece of evidence of Chinese strategic discipline in recent years is its resistance to be drawn into far-away conflicts tangential to its core interests. For example, China has shied away from entanglements in Venezuela or Iran even though these two countries are seen as part of China’s partnership network and failure to support them hurts Chinese reputation as a reliable patron.

The second is the Soviet Union’s isolation from the global economy, due both to the West’s successful “decoupling” policy and to Moscow’s folly of economic autarky. As indicated by the “dual circulation” framework Xi first unveiled in April 2020, China will remain deeply and extensively engaged in the global economy in spite of the U.S. strategy of “decoupling.”[35] To dispel the impression that his proposed new framework of economic development will mean a closed economy, Xi emphasized at the 5^th Central Committee plenum in late October 2020 that “domestic circulation” and “external circulation” are inter-connected and that successful domestic circulation will attract resources from other economies and improvements in China’s technological capabilities will enable China to gain competitive advantages in the global economy.[36] Official Chinese policy of selective “decoupling” (primarily technological decoupling), diversification of external investments by Chinese firms, diversion of U.S.-bound exports through third countries, and growth in exports all suggest that preserving its linkages with the global economy is a central pillar of China’s emerging grand strategy.

Concluding Thoughts

This essay makes the case that the first U.S.-China trade war marked a turning point in China’s assessment of its external environment and the nature of Sino-American relations. Within a relatively short period of time, Xi and his colleagues crafted a new grand strategy to deal with the new and dangerous reality of Sino-American rivalry. As conceptualized, the “new cold war” is seen by Beijing as a protracted conflict with distinct phases determined primarily by the “correlation of forces” between China and the U.S. Due to Chinese weaknesses, a defensive strategic posture is required – and has been largely adopted – at the initial stage. It may be too early to declare that the Sino-American “cold war” has entered a strategic stalemate, but the current period of fragile calm provides some support for this argument. While the Maoist doctrine of protracted warfare seems to have had greater influence on China’s emerging grand strategy, the lessons from the Cold War are less clear-cut. China’s disciplined strategic focus on East Asia and resistance to involvement in peripheral conflicts, at least for now, appear to suggest that Beijing may be trying to avoid the same mistakes made by Moscow during the Cold War.

An additional puzzle is whether Chinese leaders have absorbed the lessons of the role played by diplomacy and detente during the Cold War in preventing it from turning hot. Speeches by Xi and other senior officials mostly deal with diplomatic engagement with countries seen as potential partners, giving us few clues as to the role of diplomacy in stabilizing Sino-American relations. China’s recent embrace of “constructive strategic stability” as a framework for Sino-American relations is one encouraging indicator that Beijing is not unfamiliar with the concept of detente and the value of diplomacy in an adversarial great power rivalry. To be sure, whether this is merely a catchy phrase or a substantive element of China’s emerging grand strategy remains to be seen.

If Xi began to challenge American unipolarity during his first term without much of an intellectually coherent strategy, he appears to have developed a more coherent strategy in the post-2018 era. If such a strategy is successfully implemented, an obvious implication is that a more favorable balance of power will allow China to regain the strategic initiative, and the shift from an apparent strategic stalemate to strategic offense will most likely escalate Sino-American tensions. In reality, China faces serious obstacles in making the doctrine of protracted warfare work in practice. The balance of power between belligerents, as Mao noted in 1938, is dynamic and constantly shifting. The transition from strategic defense to strategic stalemate is neither unidirectional nor irreversible. The current relatively favorable environment, created both by China’s own efforts in reducing its vulnerabilities and America’s distractions, is not guaranteed to last. At the same time, the stagnation of China’s broad economy in spite of eye-catching achievements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), electric vehicles (EVs), and clean energy technologies will make it more difficult for Xi to further narrow the gap of “comprehensive national power” with the U.S. and to regain the strategic initiative.

Another obvious problem facing Xi is his interpretation of the fall of the Soviet Union. By attributing its collapse to the loss of ideological commitments among its ruling elites, Xi has missed other far more critical factors that brought down the once-mighty Soviet empire. His attempts to revive faith in communism are unlikely to succeed in a thoroughly secularized society. In the real world, obsession with ideological purity can lead to counterproductive policies, such as excessive repression, endless purges, and discrimination against the private sector. If the combination of an outsized risk appetite and the lack of a coherent grand strategy during Xi’s first term triggered a confrontation with the U.S., the more coherent grand strategy he has apparently crafted since 2018 may fail to deliver the desired outcomes due to his own ideological blind spots and misinterpretation of the Cold War.

About the Contributor

Minxin Pei, editor of China Leadership Monitor, is Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. His most recent book is The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (2025).

Notes

[1] Deng Xiaoping, “改革开放政策稳定，中国大有希望,” 等小平选集 (北京：人民出版社， 1994), vol. 3 pp. 319-320.

[2] Jiang Zemin, “目前形势和经济工作,” 江泽民文选（北京：人民出版社， 2006）， vol. 2, p. 423; Hu Jintao, “国际形势和外事工作,” 胡锦涛文选（北京：人民出版社， 2016），

vol. 2, p. 510; Hu Jintao, “统筹国内国际两个大局,” 胡锦涛文选, vol. 3, p. 235.

[3] Xi used two Chinse idioms, “如鲠在喉、如芒在背,” which literally mean “having a fishbone stuck in his throat and thorns on his back,” Xi Jinping, “在中央政法工作会议上的讲话,” 习近平关于防范风险挑战应对突发事件论述摘编 (北京：中央温县出版社， 2020)， p. 230.

[4] “习近平在华盛顿州当地政府和美国友好团体联合欢迎宴会上的演讲,” 人民日报, September 24, p. 1; “习近平会见美国国会参众两院领导人,” 人民日报, September 27, p. 1.

[5] “中共中央关于制定国民经济和社会发展第十三个五年规划的建议 2015 年 10 月 29 日中国共产党第十八届中央委员会第五次全体会议通过,” https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/fggz/fzzlgh/gjfzgh/201605/P020191029595710374318.pdf ;

“中华人民共和国国民经济和社会发展第十三个五年（2016－2020年）,”

https://www.12371.cn/special/sswgh/wen/

[6] “中共中央关于制定国民经济和社会发展第十四个五年规划和二〇三五年远景目标的建议,”

https://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-11/03/c_1126693293.htm

[7] “习近平：决胜全面建成小康社会夺取新时代中国特色社会主义伟大胜利,”

https://www.gov.cn/zhuanti/2017-10/27/content_5234876.htm

[8] “习近平: 高举中国特色社会主义伟大旗帜为全面建设社会主义现代化国家而团结奋斗,”

https://www.qstheory.cn/yaowen/2022-10/25/c_1129079926.htm

[9] 习近平系列重要讲话数据库，https://jhsjk.people.cn/

[10] “习近平：高举中国特色社会主义伟大旗帜为全面建设社会主义现代化国家而团结奋斗,” https://jhsjk.people.cn/article/32551583; “让多边主义的火炬照亮人类前行之路,” https://jhsjk.people.cn/article/32011673

[11] 习近平系列重要讲话数据库, https://jhsjk.people.cn/

[12] “习近平出席第二十三届圣彼得堡国际经济论坛全会并致辞,” 人民日报, June 8, 2019, p. 1.

[13]习近平系列重要讲话数据库，https://jhsjk.people.cn/result?keywords=%E5%8D%A1%E8%84%96%E5%AD%90&isFuzzy=0 .

[14] For a summary of key events in 2020, see Bonnie S. Glaser and Kelly Flaherty, “US-China Relations in Free Fall,” https://cc.pacforum.org/2020/09/us-china-relations-in-free-fall/

[15] “习近平在纪念中国人民抗日战争暨世界反法西斯战争胜利75周年座谈会上的讲话,” 人民日报, September 4, 2020, p. 2.

[16] “习近平在纪念抗战胜利70周年大会上发表重要讲话,” https://news.12371.cn/2015/09/03/VIDE1441289401933555.shtml

[17] 习近平, “国家中长期经济社会发展战略若干重大问题,” https://www.qstheory.cn/dukan/qs/2020-10/31/c_1126680390.htm For an informative account on how the 14^th FYP was drafted, see “中共中央关于制定国民经济和社会发展第十四个五年规划和二〇三五年远景目标的建议诞生记,” https://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-11/04/c_1126696728.htm

[18] 毛泽东，“论持久战,” https://www.marxists.org/chinese/maozedong/marxist.org-chinese-mao-193805b.htm

[19] 习近平系列重要讲话数据库， https://jhsjk.people.cn/result?keywords=%E6%8C%81%E4%B9%85%E6%88%98&isFuzzy=0

[20] “习近平坚持把解决好“三农”问题作为全党工作重中之重,” https://jhsjk.people.cn/article/32389142

[21] “陈一新在中央政法工作会议结束时讲话强调：形成‘五大共识’、推进政法工作高质量发展,” http://www.chinapeace.gov.cn/chinapeace/c100007/2021-01/11/content_12436892.shtml

[22] 黄仁伟, “中美战略相持阶段可能长达30年,” Center for International Security and Strategy, Tsinghua University, https://ciss.tsinghua.edu.cn/info/zmgx/5051

[23] “一切有把握的战役和战斗应坚决地进行决战; 一切无把握的战役和战斗应避免决战; 赌国家命运的战略决战应根本避免.” 毛泽东，“论持久战.”

[24] Many books on the Soviet collapse have been published in China, representing a wide range of perspectives. The liberal perspective is represented by陆南泉,姜长斌,徐葵,李静杰, 苏联兴亡史论 (修订版) (On the Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, revised edition) （北京：人民出版社, 2002）. The conservative perspective is represented by 李慎明, 刘书林,汪亭友, 苏联亡党亡国的根本原因、教训与启示 (The Fundamental Causes and Lessons of the Fall of the Party and State of the Soviet Union) （北京: 当代中国出版社， 2024).