Race to Reorder the World: The PRC-USA Rivalry

Introduction: From the China Order to the China Race

In an admittedly immodest manner, I have published “The China Trilogy” on China: The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power (2017), The China Record: An Assessment of the People’s Republic (2023), and The China Race: Global Competition for Alternative World Orders (2024), all by The State University of New York Press.

In The China Order, I attempted to reread Chinese longue durée history and worldviews to ascertain the Chinese political tradition and ideation. I argue that the Chinese ideation and tradition of political governance and world order — the China Order — is based on an imperial state of Confucian-Legalism as historically exemplified by the Qin-Han polity. Claiming a Mandate of Heaven to unify and govern the whole known world or tianxia (all under heaven), the China Order dominated Eastern Eurasia as a world empire for more than two millennia, until the late nineteenth century. Since 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been a reincarnated Qin-Han polity without the traditional China Order, finding itself stuck in the endless struggle against the current world order of Westphalian system of nation-states, and the ever-changing, Westernizing, Chinese society for its regime survival and security.

In the following sequel of The China Record, I tried to assess the (PRC) under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as an alternative mode of political system and a distinctive model of socioeconomic development. After evaluating its overall efficacy, efficiency, power, sustainability, and desirability — or the lack thereof — I conclude that the PRC is suboptimal while formidable, undesirable yet feasible, derisory but serious, with many real and profound consequences for the world.

In the last volume of the trio, The China Race, after having hopefully answered the questions of what it has been and what it is, I set out to answer the questions of so what and what to do. The PRC is found to be locked in a global competition with the United States for power and leadership. Its aim is to secure its autocratic governance at the minimum and, at the maximum, to recenter and reorder the world in its image to, ultimately, build a singular world empire. The United States, just by being itself and regardless of what it does or does not do to or for China, other than a capitulation, has been a political foe to the PRC for more than seven decades and, currently, the main obstacle to Beijing’s ambitions abroad, even though the U.S. has literally provided the income and technology to enrich and strengthen China. The unrivaled importance of the race is fully seen in both Beijing and Washington. U.S. President Joe Biden told the United Nations in 2021 that the world stands “at an inflection point of history,” facing “a decade that will quite literally determine our futures.”¹ The PRC Chairman Xi Jinping echoed it as he told Biden in October 2023 that “the world is in a grand change unseen in 100 years” and the choices by the two men will “determine the future of the humankind and Planet Earth.”²

With the above introduction of my overall effort to understand and explain the Sino-American relations, in the following pages, I will focus on a discussion of the PRC-U.S. rivalry, or the China Race, and showcase some ideas on how to win it for the world including the Chinese people.

Why the United States Must Win the China Race

Despite their clear undesirability, autocracy and unitary world government are in fact more “natural” and traditional. The tyrannical or oligarchical tendencies in human politics render democratic rule of law a learned practice that requires conscious effort to cultivate and maintain. The same is true about the Westphalian world order. Historically, world empire has been highly attractive to many all over the world, including ambitious autocrats for power and control and noble idealists for world peace and solution of world problems. Only the European-Mediterranean World managed to lastingly avoid the world empire world order — to escape from Rome, as historians have observed,³ leading to the so-called East-West great divergence and the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, which set in motion the qualitative transformation of human civilization over the past few centuries.

The U.S.-led variety of the Westphalian world order, the Liberal International Order or LIO, naturally has its share of arbitrariness and irrationality as any human political system. But it is perhaps the only iteration of the Westphalian system since its codification in 1648 to have a leading power that is so unlikely (a near impossibility) to transmute it into its opposite, namely a world empire. Internally deeply structured and long internalized pluralism, diversity, and checks-and-balances in a system based on democratic rule of law seem to have ideologically and legally ensured the American distaste for and vigilance against a centralized, solo political authority both at home and abroad. In 1961, when asked to name his proudest accomplishment as President of the United States, Harry Truman replied, “That we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back to the community of nations. I would like to think that only America would have done this.” And “all of Truman’s successors have followed some version of this narrative” in the decades afterward.⁴ Since early 2025, many in and outside of the United States have worried about the autocratic politics and performative policy moves seen in Washington that could be realistically endangering the American democratic rule of law and displacing key American values and worldview. Of course, at this stage, how the so-called “Trump Shock” will play out remains to be seen; but this author is cautiously optimistic that the United States will struggle to continue its leadership of opposing world political centralization, with more or less the same bipartisan consensus about competing with the PRC.

Ideally, the existing world order can and should be improved and strengthened further. Scaling back and even leadership change are all fully warranted for the vitality and sustainability of the Westphalian system, when needed. Other nations of different geographical, ideological, and ethnic persuasions, including a successfully reformed and reoriented China, could take over world leadership from the U.S. and ensure the survival and functioning of the Westphalian system, provided that they are similarly or superiorly organized and equipped to equally or better safeguard the key principles of the system. But perhaps other than the still unlikely “United States of Europe,” none of such nations are remotely visible at this moment. As a bulwark against CCP ambitions, and for the survival and functioning of the Westphalian system, U.S. leadership is therefore the least unreliable option. Resentments and threats to the U.S. leadership are plentiful, but none represent the credible safekeeping much less upgrading of the current world order.

Therefore, the United States must prevail in the China Race to fend off serious challenges from illiberal world powers, potent domestic threats of extreme populism and infeasible tribalism, as well as unbridled globalism. The U.S. should “remain the world’s sole superpower” and continue the Westphalian world order.⁵

The PRC Can Also, Though Should Not, Win the China Race

The rising Chinese power of the CCP partocracy is currently the force most capable of remaking the Westphalian system, presenting a viable but suboptimal and undesirable alternative to the American leadership in the world. It is in the genes of authoritarianism and totalitarianism of the traditional Chinese imperial polity, which are now embodied in the PRC with the trappings of the radical European ideology of Marxism, rather than the rising power of China as a nation or the great aspirations of the Chinese people, that have inevitably and consistently reasoned and resolved to reorder the world. Born to rebel against the West-led world order, the PRC has never changed its main mission, despite its many colorful rhetoric and tactical acrobatics. Having long used “national sovereignty” as a shield, same as its use of the Chinese people, the insecure CCP is actually very candid about what it wants to accomplish in the world, reflecting its deep-held Confucian-Legalist power- and control-fetishism and expressing in its imported Leninist-Stalinist communism: In other words, a political unification and centralization under one ruler or one small ruling group, a new China Order-like world empire or a Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist communist world utopian.

The current world order apparently enjoys worldwide support that may weaken Beijing’s prospect of taking its place as a new world hegemon through the popularity of its ideology. It is also clear that, at home, the PRC faces tremendous problems such as political illegitimacy, economic inefficiency, lack of genuine innovation, demographic pressure, and popular discontents. Indisputably suboptimal and undesirable, however, the PRC autocracy is a powerful predatory state that tightly controls the world’s second largest economy, from which it has been extracting disproportionately enormous resources. Fundamentally, world politics has been mostly shaped by sheer force, which can powerfully arrogate and effectively asphyxiate popular ideals. The skilled unscrupulousness of the PRC autocracy also gives it a paradoxical optimality in the game of international competition and conquest, especially against pluralistic democracies, which are bound by rules and norms with numerous internal and external checks. With centralized and focused efforts, with Western technology in its possession, but without the framing and constraining Western institutions and norms, the PRC state has the capacity to acquire the “superiority in applying organized violence” that was key when “the West won the world” over the course of recent centuries.⁶

The growing globalization of the world economy, culture, and society may amplify the possibility for the CCP variant of world governance to replace the U.S.-led LIO. “The worst uses” of new technologies like artificial intelligence may have allowed the PRC state to rule more effectively and expand its power: “every blip of a citizen’s neural activity [is fed] into a government database” enabling a totalitarian social control “by precog algorithms [that] identify [and even incapacitate] dissenters in real time.”⁷ A world empire under the guise of globalism could emerge with minimal kinetic battles, delivering a nasty surprise to many of us who may believe that the modern weapons of mass destruction, especially the terror of nuclear weapons, have rendered empire-building futile and obsolete.

Therefore, the pretense of good intentions, utilized by a determined and self-serving political force, combined with actions and inactions by all others, could well pave the road to hell (or heaven, depending on one’s standpoint) for the whole world, as with the Qin’s unification of the entire known world in east Eurasia over two millennia ago. The Westphalian system, like the market economic system, which inevitably produces monopoly to destroy itself from within, indeed harbors seeds of its own displacement. The PRC currently represents the only global power determined and capable enough to unscrupulously galvanize and utilize the transmuting forces to systemically replace the Westphalian world order, perhaps with greater ease and speed than anyone can anticipate. 

How to Win the Race: The Strategic Thinking of Contaformation 

To skip lengthier analysis and piles of evidence the reader may rightfully demand (and is more than welcome to read about them in my forthcoming book),⁸ I briefly propose here a strategic thinking of contaformation, a portmanteau for containment and engagement for the transformation and incorporation of China. To contaform the PRC, to contain, engage, and transform, not just “to incorporate China” as I so published before,⁹ may help to manage and win the PRC-USA rivalry for the world and the Chinese people.

The idea of contaformation is similar to, but broader than, the portmanteau congagement (containment and engagement). It suggests a conscious strategy rather than an expedient hedging. It has two key components: A firm containment and effective constriction of PRC state power, and a smart engagement and full communication with the Chinese people to facilitate the transformation of the PRC state and the incorporation of China as a full member of the Westphalian world. The U.S.-led West, if wholly and smartly engaged, is fully capable of managing and prevailing in the China Race, probably more efficiently and peacefully than it did in the Cold War.

Contaformation aims to achieve three hierarchical objectives in the China Race, ranked in descending order of importance. Objective One is the nonnegotiable top goal: the United States and its allies must race to prevent the CCP from recentering and reordering the world by taking over leadership of the world. Objective Two is that the United States should prepare for but deter and avoid an all-out war with the PRC, to the fullest extent possible. Objective Three is that the West should seek a sociopolitical and ideological transformation of the PRC to truly incorporate China as a contributing and constructive peer. The U.S. must ensure “that Beijing is either unwilling or unable to overturn the regional and global order.”¹⁰

To that end, the U.S. and its allies should have a comprehensive rethinking and firm course-change regarding globalization and world governance. A curbing of the idealistic but toxic enthusiasm for world uniformity and unification seems overdue. Multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and its overgrown agencies should not be used to compromise the nation-state system. The evolving ideals of RTI (the right to intervene) in other sovereign countries for RTP (the responsibility to protect) other country’s citizens, for example, should remain an inspiring ideal rather than a legal norm, only being attempted extremely rarely. Hypothetical and abstract “total” efficiency of the world economy should not supersede the concrete and dynamical national economic efficiency. Unsavory players in the international club, once caught and refusing to change, no longer belong; if the club is hijacked and rigged, then it must be replaced.

In balancing order, security and equality with efficiency and innovation to ensure the health and prosperity of human civilization, national division is the last reliable institutional guarantor. The structural and normative differences among the nations must be preserved to ensure lasting international comparison, choice, and competition, which fundamentally energize and drive human civilization. The noble pursuits of globally equal human rights and identical living standards for all individual humans must be treated with utmost respect but great caution. These are wonderful and intoxicating ideals, much like grand harmony, perpetual peace, and eternal happiness, and worth all efforts (cost permitting), but should never be allowed to compromise and destroy the fundamentals that have given rise to those ideals and enabled the possibility of approaching a maximization of those ideals.

Given that the United States has been the leading power least threatening to the Westphalian system, Americans therefore should unapologetically strengthen U.S. power through maintaining a dominant financial position, military superiority, excellence in education and innovation, and admired sociocultural and environmental conditions at home. It is in the greater interest of the world to “put America First,” “make America strong,” “rebuild America back better” and let America “lead again,” as the U.S. presidential contenders in 2016, 2020, and 2024 all advocated. Those ideas should be unlinked from the shortsightedness of isolationism and disassociated from any particular politician.

To run well and prevail in the PRC-USA rivalry, the United States and the West in fact have a great array of tools and the greatest ally in the Chinese people. It is both desirable and efficient to win the Race ultimately in China through an institutional and ideological reconfiguration and transformation of the PRC political system. In this way, the mighty power and the enormous potential of the Chinese people will no longer be manipulated and wasted in an effort to replace the Westphalian system but instead put to work toward the betterment of life for everyone, first and foremost for the Chinese people themselves. In addition to safeguarding the Westphalian system, freeing almost a fifth of humankind from a proven suboptimal, inferior, and repressive regime (that only provides a perceived optimal service to the very few ruling elites) would be, in and of itself, an incredible accomplishment of human progress. Richard Nixon propounded back in 1967 that the West should engage with the PRC and aim “to induce change” in China.¹¹ In hindsight, Nixon and his team, and successive U.S. administrations, often flouted his wise advice and “traditionally” dropped the requisite companion — the political transformation of the PRC — in a rush to enlist Beijing’s perceived indispensable help in dealing with Vietnam and Moscow and a host of other worthy or wishful objectives. The Western policy circa 1970s–2010s, generally entitled “engagement,” should be better and more completely implemented with a conscious and clear aim at facilitating sociopolitical changes in the PRC.

The sociopolitical transformation of the PRC in the direction of democratic rule of law is of high value and an efficient way to win the PRC-USA rivalry. However, a Chinese democracy is neither sufficient nor necessary for the West’s victory in the China Race.  The Westphalian system, even in its LIO version, stipulates that nations are entitled to choose and experiment with whatever political system they see fit, especially for a large country like China. To promote democracy is to share the most tested, least evil form of government known to humankind; but to impose it identically at the expense of the Westphalian system would be a Pyrrhic victory, risking a centralized world government in the name of a singular political ideology. A world empire is a world empire no matter what it is entitled and colored. To stop the Chinese version of world empire with a different world empire to replace the Westphalian system would still be a tragedy for all.

In this regard, victory in the China Race is not about the U.S. subjugating and remodeling China in its image. Nor is it about extinguishing the cross-Pacific competition. It is about ensuring that the contenders are competing in a decentralized world polity, the Westphalian system of sovereign nations, which can be a globalizing LIO or a less liberal collection of rival blocks and groups of diverse nations, some in disconnection and isolation. Nations compete ceaselessly through self-help, internal changes, emulation, balance of power politics, and utilization of international institutions to ensure that no state, especially not a suboptimal and undesirable one, singularly denominates the whole world and rules all other nations.

With an effective transformation of the PRC, it would be a different kind of new China Race, one that is transformed from an existential struggle for an alternative, passé world order to a virtuous and peaceful international competition, with the benefits of ever more efficiency and innovation, to enrich and uplift human civilization. A downside of that, of course, is the possibly more and tougher international competition, discomforting the few competition-averse monopolies or monopoly-wannabes, which is neither American nor good for human civilization: Americans and humankind have always thrived in competition and will surely continue to excel in the new China Race.

In short, to ensure the Westphalian world order and the political system of democratic rule of law, the United States and its allies must frustrate, weaken, and undermine PRC state power whenever and wherever possible. A successful transformation of the Chinese governance and world view would be an ideal way to win the PRC-USA rivalry and greatly benefit the Chinese people (except for the tiny ruling group of the CCP autocracy). The West should therefore fully engage the Chinese people to assist and empower them for the sociopolitical transformation of the PRC. But that is essentially a cause of, for, and by the Chinese people, as a sovereign member of the Westphalian world, who must take their fate into their own hands.

Over 150 years ago, Anson Burlingame, the legendary American diplomat then heading the U.S. mission in China, spoke with passion in New York City that the Chinese people are “a great, a noble people, […] a polite people; it is a patient people; it is a sober people; it is an industrious people” that has been under tyranny and excluded from “the council hall of the nations.” He then wisely advised that, so long as China was open and engaged in fair play with other nations, “let her alone” to manage herself. ¹²