At a time when understanding China has become more critical than ever, it has become more difficult to do so. This is both because of real constraints, such as the increased difficulty of access given hardening outlooks on the Chinese side, as well as because of an atmosphere in the West that has made China less attractive as an object of study, inflicting a perceptible chill on China scholars.

To tackle this from a different angle, I propose a heuristic exercise to challenge three common frames that are often deployed in public discourse — at times implicitly — to describe China: “unity,” “power,” and “predictability.”¹ Instead, I suggest that we look at international Chinese government behavior through the frames of “heterogeneity,” “vulnerability,” and “uncertainty.” I hasten to add that these three frames should not be understood as mutually exclusive alternatives to more dominant frames but rather as additional ones. Indeed, in more ways than one, China is at once a unitary power and a heterogeneous one; it wields great power and exhibits serious vulnerabilities; its path ahead is to some extent predictable and to a large extent uncertain.

This heuristic exercise is deployed to deepen and diversify debates on China and to help challenge received wisdom on China policy. It should be useful no matter whether you think conflict with China is likely and unavoidable, or whether you think conflict with China is unlikely, avoidable, and highly undesirable. Challenging common frames can bolster our analytical acuity by making sure we perceive a challenge from all possible angles and do not neglect potentially promising avenues of reflection. Fostering open deliberation should be one of the West’s distinctive advantages and a foundational element of any debate regarding a future relationship with China.

What does deploying a frame of “heterogeneity” rather than “unity” mean in the context of China’s rise? It means being attuned to variation in the Chinese domestic context, in Chinese governmental behavior, and in China’s international impact. For more than two decades, the main lines of debate regarding China’s rise were drawn between those who believed that China was either going to mostly play by the international rules or try to disrupt them. Most Western observers have now converged around the notion that China is intent on disruption. Some go further and argue that Chinese government behavior has the hallmark of a grand strategy decades in the making. This narrative is based in part on accurate observations, as recent Chinese foreign policy has indeed become more assertive, but the issue is that other equally accurate observations paint a different picture. As Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri put it in a recent book, “Chinese behaviour actually displays both status quo and revisionist behaviour simultaneously.” A growing group of noted China scholars, including Alastair Iain Johnston, have made the point that Chinese behavior is simply not uniform across the board and varies across issue areas in non-random ways.²

Why can the tendency to ascribe excessive unity to Chinese government behavior be misleading? First, failing to pay attention to important variations in government behavior within policy areas has the unfortunate consequence of obscuring the varied interests of different Chinese stakeholders, especially when their preferences do not align with central party-state organs. This includes situations where they may, in fact, align more closely with those of an external actor. In my book entitled China’s Vulnerability Paradox, I argue that China behaves differently even across different global commodity markets due to variance across these markets as well as the diverse interests of different Chinese domestic actors. As a result, the market power asymmetries that develop between Chinese stakeholders and different global market actors vary substantially across markets, as does China’s international procurement behavior.

Second, by failing to pay attention to important variations in Chinese government behavior across policy areas, we are less able to modulate foreign policy postures accordingly. Only by recognizing that China does not oppose a rules-based order in every area of global affairs can the United States’ China policy — based on “competing with confidence,” “cooperating wherever we can,” and “contesting where we must” — begin to make operational sense. The same goes for the Canadian government, which has stated it will “challenge China when necessary” but “cooperate when we must,” and the European Union, which has simultaneously defined China as “a cooperation partner,” “a negotiating partner,” “an economic competitor,” and “a systemic rival.”

Third, the tendency to use the frame of unity when analyzing China, without differentiating the greater Chinese diaspora or ordinary Chinese citizens (even if they are party members) from Chinese party-state decision-makers, also contributes to a rise in anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment in the United States and beyond.

Finally, being more attuned to variation also enables an honest evaluation of China’s international behavior. We ought to be clear about the areas where the Chinese government is broadly comfortable with existing rules, where it wants to shape them, or where it wants to reject them. This facilitates coalition-building in areas where China demonstrates unacceptable international conduct, such as political interference, economic coercion, or arbitrary detention, and clarifies the areas where functional workspaces can be pursued.

The second common analytical frame of Chinese government behavior abroad, and one that we can gain analytical leverage by challenging, is the frame of “power.” Of course, China is a great power, but an appreciation of Chinese positions of “vulnerability” can yield important insight. This is not unique to China; all great powers have idiosyncratic vulnerabilities. For instance, one of the United States’ most discussed vulnerabilities is its domestic political polarization. In my research on China’s impact on global commodity markets, I uncovered what I call a vulnerability paradox.

In the context of the current debate on critical minerals procurement and supply chain security, China is usually portrayed as the dominant player. With 60% or more of the global production of rare earths or graphite and a similar percentage of the global processing of lithium or cobalt, Chinese actors’ mindset in this sector is assumed to be one of confidence. China’s international behavior and largest impacts abroad are thus usually understood as both deriving from this position of dominance and having been intended from the start. I suggest here, however, that paying attention to positions of vulnerability can help us better understand China’s current procurement behavior and what led it to where it is today.

First, there are many ways in which China’s vulnerability manifests itself. In the commodities space, it is vulnerable insofar as it depends on global markets for imports. Despite the extensive coverage of China’s dominance in rare earths production, China is actually import-dependent for the majority of raw minerals, including copper, iron ore, nickel, cobalt, and lithium. It is also vulnerable because it was a latecomer. In some cases, this provided an advantage, but in the case of resource procurement, this meant that global markets and rules were established before its rise and that the best mineral deposits in the most accessible and stable polities were already discovered and owned. This has led China to become entangled in difficult undertakings such as the Simandou iron ore project in Guinea. China also rose to find that global mining giants had acquired strong positions of market power. All of this has had an impact on China’s international behavior in the commodities space over the past decades.

Second, the drive with which China has pursued a more dominant position in global minerals supply chains is the direct result of a deep sense of vulnerability felt by Chinese commodities markets stakeholders over the past decades, one that is lingering today. When discussing the global iron ore market in 2012, one interviewee said to me: “China is the largest iron ore importer, and it thought that this would provide it with a strong hand to influence the market, but it found itself in a position of weakness, and it doesn’t know what to do about it.” This sense of vulnerability and exposure to global market forces out of its control was felt throughout the iron ore industry in China. Many Chinese iron ore market stakeholders complained to me that even though China was the number-one iron ore importer in the world, it had no control over international market arrangements (or even its own domestic industry, one might add). This explains the genesis behind the creation of the China Mineral Resources Group in 2022, a $3 billion state-owned entity meant to help coordinate the plethora of Chinese iron ore market actors’ multifaceted interactions with the global iron ore market. Trying to understand China’s positionality in the global commodities space without looking at the vulnerability angle is a little bit like trying to understand China’s foreign policy doctrine without considering the role of the century of humiliation.

Other authors have looked at the role of vulnerability in the context of China’s international behavior. For instance, in a 2008 book, Taylor Fravel argued that, regarding historical border disputes, China has displayed more assertiveness in cases where it was insecure vis-à-vis other large powers, whereas it has been more compromising when it is vulnerable domestically. A better understanding of China’s domestic vulnerabilities is critical to grasping the lens through which its leadership approaches both foreign policy and domestic issues of global import. One could argue that the wolf-warrior diplomacy of the recent past was driven at least in part by internal political one-upmanship dynamics that were the direct consequence of Xi Jinping’s centralization of power. Here, not only are those dynamics the result of a vulnerability in China’s political system, but they arguably backfired and opened up new vulnerabilities for China internationally. Similarly, China’s December 2022 COVID-zero reversal cannot be understood from the perspective of a powerful, all-seeing central government, nor can related domestic policy decisions, such as the absence of a vaccine mandate.

More attention should be devoted to studying the consequences and ramifications of domestic and international vulnerabilities on China’s international behavior.

The third frame that can hinder our analysis of China’s rise is one of “linearity” and “predictability” regarding historical trajectories, as opposed to a highly “nonlinear” or “uncertainty” frame. Uncertainties are always present in foreign policy, but the current state of global polycrisis means that it has arguably become even more difficult to anticipate future developments and their potential interactions. We should therefore be more attuned to contingencies, unintended outcomes, and nonlinear developments when thinking about China.

At times, it can seem like China not only has coherent preferences across issue areas (unity frame) and that it can easily achieve its objectives internationally (power frame), but that, in addition, we should have known that China would be where it is today 30 years ago (predictability frame). This discounts the role of unforeseen circumstances, the complex interplay of variables at the international level, and the role of leadership, and tends to overestimate both the capacity of Chinese actors to achieve their goals internationally and mischaracterize the potential for other actors to shape and respond to China’s behavior. The goal here is not to discount the challenges presented by China’s rise. Rather, it is to operate within a more cautious frame of analysis, one that acknowledges Chinese actors’ strengths and limitations as well as our own while right-sizing the challenge. The benefit of hindsight can make it seem like our present-day circumstances were the most likely outcome all along — that back in the 1990s, the West should have been able to predict where China is today. This perspective can help explain the popular view that Western governments’ engagement policies toward China have “failed,” in that they were oblivious to the signs that China was going to go down the path it did.³

By adopting a linear view of Chinese developments, we run the risk of falling into four traps. First, it discounts the array of possible futures that were (and are) on the table. It was simply impossible to know where today’s China would be back in 1995, not because Chinese politics are opaque (although they are), but because different alternatives were always possible. Thinking otherwise can lead to overconfidence and post-hoc reasoning (in this case, because some experts were gloomier, presuming they had better frames of analysis).

Second, it runs into the trap of assuming that China’s impacts abroad were intentional or the result of a strategic vision.⁴ In addition to strategic intent, there is also much muddling through, internal debates and conflicting interests, course corrections, failed attempts, and unintended consequences. When I asked an official at a Chinese state-owned enterprise whether the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA), the lead negotiator at the time, intended to cause the fall of the iron ore benchmark pricing system in 2010, he responded, “No, CISA did not want to end the benchmarking system at that point. They just thought that the price was too high. It wasn’t their intention to see the end of the benchmark.” Many of China’s international impacts are unintendedconsequences of Chinese domestic dynamics. Why does this matter? It matters because China has become systemically significant and impacts the world, whether (all) Chinese stakeholders want it or not.

The third trap is to overestimate the role external forces exert on Chinese domestic politics. Accepting nonlinearity also means recognizing that there have been ebbs and flows in Chinese domestic politics over the past 40 years. Periods of liberalization and periods of hardening are very much the result of domestic dynamics.

At the same time, there are resonance mechanisms between global trends and Chinese domestic politics. China has been transformed by the intensification of its interactions with the world over the past 40 years, such as via its entry into the World Trade Organization or via the millions of Chinese students who have studied abroad. Another consequence of arguing “we should have known better” is that we also fail to properly assess the different forms of engagement that took place between the West and China over time, their limits, and their actual impact.

Indeed, the fourth trap is to underestimate the West’s own agency — one of the most damaging effects of high confidence in future Chinese government behavior. In a recent critique of deterministic realist arguments, Jonathan Kirshner reminds us that “great powers enjoy the luxury of choice.” True, the West should let go of the wish to determine China’s regime type, but it remains that certain behaviors on behalf of Western governments will make certain responses by the Chinese leadership more likely. As Jessica Chen Weiss articulated in 2019, “Overreacting by framing competition with China in civilizational or ideological terms risks backfiring by turning China into what many in Washington fear it already is.”

We tend to forget that Graham Allison, in his book Destined for War, in fact urges us to learn from historical patterns and try to “escape the Thucydides Trap” via “twelve clues for peace.” These include, to name but three, the fact that international institutions can impose constraints on great powers, that cultural commonalities can help prevent conflict, and that domestic performance is decisive. This points us to what many U.S. allies believe to be true: multilateralism matters, continued exchanges with Chinese counterparts matter, and investing in the resilience of our democracies at home is as important as what we choose to do internationally.

By going beyond assumptions of unity, power, and linearity and bringing in considerations of heterogeneity, vulnerability, and uncertainty, we can develop fresh insights, challenge common assumptions, and consider a fuller array of variables in today’s debates on China. We know that civic spaces — the spaces around and amidst official constraints — have narrowed in China in recent years, just as China narratives in the West have narrowed. The two trends are not unrelated, of course, and feed off of each other. But we need to preserve as much freedom of thought as we can in debating how best to respond to the China challenge, for the sake of sharper analysis, more robust debates, and more broadly attractive solutions.

1. This essay draws on remarks delivered at the 2023 Tony Lau Lecture on Contemporary China at the University of Manitoba on September 21, 2023.
2. Others include Jessica Chen Weiss and Jeremy Wallace; Scott Katsner, Margaret Pearson, and Chad Rector; Yves Tiberghien, Michael Mazarr, Timothy Heath, and Astrid Stuth Cevallos; and Wang Hongying and Eric French.
3. See the December 2023 CSIS Asia Chessboard podcast with Evan Medeiros, which provides a good discussion of this general view along with a rebuttal, or Alastair Iain Johnston’s 2019 piece, “The Failures of the ‘Failure of Engagement’ with China.”
4. In a recent Sinica podcast, Iza Ding discusses what she calls the functionalist tendency of “authoritarian teleology,” which leads analysts to ascribe any Chinese government behavior as motivated by regime survival.