Global China

The global implications of China’s rise as a global actor

In 2005, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration expressed the hope that China would emerge as a “responsible stakeholder” on the world stage. A dozen years later, the Trump administration dramatically shifted course, instead calling China a “strategic competitor” whose actions routinely threaten U.S. interests.

Both assessments reflected an underlying truth: China is no longer just a “rising” power. It has emerged as a truly global actor, both economically and militarily. Every day its actions affect nearly every region and every major issue, from climate change to trade, from conflict in troubled lands to competition over rules that will govern the uses of emerging technologies.

To better address the implications of China’s new status, both for American policy and for the broader international order, Brookings scholars conducted research over the past two years, culminating in a project: Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World. The project is intended to furnish policy makers and the public with hard facts and deep insights for understanding China’s regional and global ambitions.

The initiative draws not only on Brookings’s deep bench of China and East Asia experts, but also on the tremendous breadth of the institution’s security, strategy, regional studies, technological, and economic development experts.

Areas of focus include the evolution of China’s domestic institutions; great power relations; the emergence of critical technologies; Asian security; China’s influence in key regions beyond Asia; and China’s impact on global governance and norms.

Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World provides the most current, broad-scope, and fact-based assessment of the implications of China’s rise for the United States and the rest of the world.

Praise for Global China

“Put simply, no international relationship will be more consequential in the twenty-first century than that of the United States and China. Responding to this pressing need, the Brookings project—Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World—provides both unprecedented breadth and depth in the evaluation of China’s actions, and their implications for U.S. interests and values.”
—John R. Allen, president, the Brookings Institution

“If we expect to successfully counter the threats that China poses to U.S. economic and national security, we must first understand the complexity of the challenge, and then develop short- and long-term strategies that are comprehensive and multilateral. This book effectively underscores the most serious issues that lawmakers must consider in dealing with China’s rise, and provides a number of noteworthy recommendations going forward.”
—U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner, chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

“China’s transformation from a regional actor to global power and geopolitical rival will have profound implications for the national security of the United States, our partners, and our allies. Leveraging the insights of an impressive array of experts, this volume provides a clear set of recommendations designed to ensure that the United States can effectively contend with a rapidly shifting global environment.”
—U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

“For as long as I can remember, the breathless pace of change in China meant you had to see it firsthand, on a regular basis, to make sense of political, economic, and social developments. Global China provides that perspective to get past the unfortunate tendency to simply admire the problem, helpfully identifying comparative advantages and vulnerabilities brought by Beijing’s expanding interests, making it a ;welcome tool for strategists and policymakers.”
—David Stilwell, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

Tarun Chhabra was a Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and the Director of the Brookings Institution’s Project on International Order and Strategy. He previously served on the U.S. National Security Council Staff and Department of Defense. He has written on U.S. grand strategy, U.S.-China relations, and U.S.-allied technology cooperation.

Rush Doshi was the director of the Brookings China Strategy Initiative and a fellow in Brookings Foreign Policy. He was also a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. His research focused on Chinese grand strategy as well as Indo-Pacific security issues. He is the author of The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (Oxford University Press, 2021) and has testified before the Senate Commerce Committee and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Doshi received his doctorate from Harvard University and his bachelor's from Princeton’s School of Public Policy with a minor in East Asian Studies. He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese.

Ryan Hass is a senior fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. Hass also is a nonresident affiliated fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, and a senior advisor at McLarty Associates and The Scowcroft Group. His research focuses on policy development on the pressing political, economic, and security challenges facing the United States in Asia.

Emilie Kimball is an Executive Assistant in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. Prior to working at the Brookings Institution, she served as a Staff Officer at the U.S. National Security Council Staff from 2015-2018 where she helped manage the national security decision-making process and staffed President Obama on travel around the world, notably to Turkey, the Philippines, and Malaysia in 2015 and Cuba and Argentina in 2016.