No impact to loss of tech leadership.

Finally, the latter set of supposedly existential normative or ideological threats consists of many elements, including Beijing’s possible overturning of the so-called global liberal international order, Chinese influence operations aimed at U.S. society, the export of China’s political values and state-directed economic approach, and its sale of surveillance technologies and other items that facilitate the rise or strengthening of authoritarian states. These threats all seem hair-raising at first glance. But while significant, they are greatly exaggerated and do not rise to the level of constituting an existential threat.

Beijing has little interest in exporting its governance system, and where it does, it is almost entirely directed at developing countries, not industrial democracies such as the United States. In addition, there is no evidence to indicate that the Chinese are actually engaged in compelling or actively persuading countries to follow their experience. Rather, they want developing nations to study from and copy China’s approach because doing so would help to legitimize the Chinese system both internationally and more importantly to Beijing’s domestic audience.

In addition, the notion that Beijing is deliberately attempting to control other countries and make them more authoritarian by entrapping them in debt and selling them “Big Brother” hardware such as surveillance systems is unsupported by the facts. Chinese banks show little desire to extend loans that will fail, and the failures that do occur are mostly due to poor feasibility studies and the incompetence and excessive zeal of lenders and/or borrowers. Moreover, in both loan-giving and surveillance equipment sales, China has shown no specific preference for nondemocratic over democratic states.

Even if Beijing were to attempt to export its development approach to other states, the actual attractiveness of that approach would prove to be highly limited. The features undergirding China’s developmental success are not replicable for most (if any) countries. These include a high savings rate; a highly acquisitive and entrepreneurial cultural environment; a state-owned banking system and nonconvertible currency; many massive state-owned industries that exist to provide employment, facilitate party control over key sectors, and drive huge infrastructure construction; and strong controls over virtually all information flows. Moreover, such a model (if you can call it that) is almost certainly not sustainable in its present form, given China’s aging population, extensive corruption, very large levels of income inequality, inadequate social safety net, and the fact that free information flows are required to drive global innovation.

Although China’s combination of economic reform policies and authoritarian political system has been around since the early 1980s, not a single nation has adopted that system either willingly or under Chinese compulsion. There are certainly many authoritarian states and fragile democracies on China’s periphery, but none of them were made that way by China.

China’s challenge to the so-called global liberal international order is also exaggerated. In the first place, it is highly debatable whether in fact a single coherent global order even exists. What observers usually refer to as the “liberal international order” (a relatively recent term) actually consists of an amalgam of disparate regimes with different origins, including international human rights pacts, multilateral economic arrangements, and an international court.

The United States certainly plays an important or leading role in many of these regimes. But it did not create and does not drive all global regimes—and in fact does not support some of them, such as the International Court of Justice, and has not ratified some critical pacts such as the United National Convention on the Law of the Sea. And many very important global regimes (e.g., regarding the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, trade and investment, climate change, and pandemics) have no deep connection to liberal democratic values per se and are supported by Beijing, albeit sometimes more in letter than in spirit.

The challenge for the United States is not how to fend off the imagined existential threats posed by China. Rather, it lies in developing a much clearer and factually based overall understanding of the limited challenges, threats, and indeed opportunities China poses to the United States and the policies needed to address them. Rejecting the specious notion that China is threatening to destroy an entire way of life will make this task much easier.