Degrowth opens the path to Chinese hegemony – maintaining economic growth and credible diplomatic power is key.

Yet there are reasons to wonder whether this is indeed the path that China will take, if in fact it seeks global superpower status. In international affairs, there is always great peril in mirror-imaging—in assuming that an adversary sees the world the same way that we do, or will try to replicate our own experience. This is particularly the case here because it must be apparent to Beijing by now that it will be far harder for China to subdue its regional periphery than it was for the United States.

The United States never faced a Japan—a significant regional power allied to an even greater power—in its own hemisphere, and getting beyond the first island chain means getting beyond Japan. It never had to deal with the number of rivals—India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and many others—that confront China along its territorial and maritime peripheries. It never had to face a superpower that viewed the United States as its greatest challenge, as opposed to simply viewing it as an annoyance or a lesser rival that should be appeased to ensure its support against more pressing threats. Making a bid for regional dominance risks focusing the strategic competition on a challenge at which the United States typically excels—winning high-end, high-tech military competitions—and simply driving China’s neighbors further into Washington’s arms. So far, in fact, Beijing’s efforts at seduction and coercion have been partially successful in shifting the geopolitical orientation of the Philippines and Thailand, but they have backfired in dealing with Australia and Japan. In short, it is not clear that Beijing can successfully take a regional path to global power—which raises the question of whether there may be a second road to Chinese global leadership.

What if, instead of focusing on regional hegemony before turning to consider global hegemony, China approaches things the other way around? This second road would lead China more to its west than to its east, in service of building a new Chinese-led security and economic order across the Eurasian land mass and Indian Ocean, while establishing Chinese centrality in global institutions. In this approach, China would grudgingly accept that it could not displace the United States from Asia or push the U.S. Navy beyond the Western Pacific’s first island chain, at least for the foreseeable future. It would instead put increasing emphasis on shaping the world’s economic rules, technology standards, and political institutions to its advantage and in its image.

The central premises of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological power is fundamentally more important than traditional military power in establishing global leadership, and that a physical sphere of influence in East Asia is not a necessary precondition for sustaining such leadership. By this logic, China could simply keep managing a military balance in the Western Pacific—attending to its immediate periphery and especially its territorial claims through its anti-access/area -denial doctrine, and slowly shifting the correlation of forces in its favor—while pursuing global dominance through these other forms of power.

Here, Beijing would consider a different variation of the U.S. analogy. U.S. leadership of the international order that emerged after World War II and was consolidated after the end of the Cold War rested on at least three critical factors. First, the ability to convert economic might into political influence. Second, the maintenance of an innovation advantage over the rest of the world. And third, the capacity to shape the key international institutions and set the key rules of global conduct. In traveling this second road, China would seek to replicate these factors.

This would start with the widening ambition of the Belt Road Initiative across Eurasia and Africa. Building and financing physical infrastructure puts China at the center of a web of trade and economic links spanning multiple continents. And the digital component of the effort, the Digital Silk Road, advances China’s stated goal from the 2017 Party Congress of becoming a “cyber-superpower,” by deploying Chinese foundational technologies, driving standard-setting in international bodies, and securing long-term commercial advantages for Chinese firms. (There are indications that China is even using its head-start in recovering from the coronavirus to advance this agenda by claiming additional market share in key industries where competitors are temporarily laid low.) Combining an aggressive foreign economic policy with massive state-directed domestic investments in innovation, China could emerge as the leading player in foundational technologies from artificial intelligence to quantum computing to biotechnology.

As China builds economic power through these efforts, it will sharpen its capacity to convert that power into geopolitical influence. Carnegie’s Evan Feigenbaum has identified multiple types of leverage China can use to “lock in its political and economic preferences,” ranging from latent-and-passive to active-and-coercive. He assesses that Beijing will keep refining a “mix and match” strategy that deploys the full range of these tools in dust-ups with a diverse array of countries, from South Korea to Mongolia to Norway. Eventually, China may well adapt a more systematic ladder of escalation to produce preferred outcomes.

And just as the United States built the key postwar institutions in its political image, this second road would lead China toward reshaping the central political norms of the international order. A number of studies have documented Beijing’s full-court press across the U.N. system to both protect narrow Chinese equities (denying Taiwan status in the United Nations, blocking criticism of China) and to reinforce a hierarchy of values in which national sovereignty trumps human rights. And the phrase “sharp power” has now become commonplace to describe China’s intrusive efforts to influence the political discourse in democratic countries including Australia, Hungary, and Zambia. Beijing is also rapidly enhancing its diplomatic throw-weight, passing the United States in the number of diplomatic posts around the world and persistently expanding its influence in multilateral finance, global climate and trade institutions, and other key rule-setting bodies. The Brookings Institution’s Tarun Chhabra aptly observes that Beijing’s approach to ideology may be flexible, but its cumulative effect is to expand the space for authoritarianism and constrain the space for transparency and democratic accountability.

Another key driver of U.S. leadership in the postwar and post-Cold War era, of course, was a robust and resilient alliance system. This is less available as an asset to Beijing. Nonetheless, Chinese leaders have begun establishing a potential network of military bases beyond China’s shores, starting in Djibouti. And to compensate for its own alliance deficit, China has embarked on a strategy to weaken and divide the Western alliance structure, cultivating the countries of Eastern Europe and fraying the bonds between the United States and its Asian allies.

All of these efforts come at a time when the United States has stepped back from its traditional role as guarantor of the order. And that may be the most critical ingredient of all.

U.S. President Donald Trump has continued to emphasize traditional military and security investments, which give the United States the ability to sustain its role as a resident physical power in Asia. But he has shown far less interest in meeting the global challenge posed by China—at least in a coherent way. The U.S. response to the coronavirus has been sadly emblematic so far, combining clumsy efforts to remind the world that the virus originated in China with an inept domestic response and a relative absence of the principled international leadership that has traditionally been the best advertisement for U.S. primacy. In the past, one might have expected to see the United States spearheading international efforts to coordinate economic stimulus and global public health measures; one certainly would not have expected the federal government to fail so badly in crafting a national response and disseminating accurate information. For all of the talk of great- power competition, a plausible scenario is that China gradually fills a vacuum left by the United States, with the rest of the world accommodating to a world of growing Chinese power, in the absence of any viable alternative.

It seems unlikely, of course, that a globally preeminent China would forever accept the United States as the dominant power on its maritime periphery. But it could be that reaching for global leadership is simply a way of outflanking the U.S. position in the Western Pacific—of rendering it untenable through the accumulation of economic and diplomatic influence rather than through political-military pressure or confrontation.