Beyond confrontation: How China unveils the West’s imperative to adapt
Gordon Dumoulin 22.07.2025
The gloves of performative virtue are off in the West. For years, the “China threat” narrative was cloaked in moral superiority, recasting rules of law as a “rules-based order,” politicizing human rights, and wielding ideology as a strategic tools. Washington now openly anticipates a major power confrontation with China. Brussels appears to be following suit, with only a few lone dissenters standing apart.
Beijing, described by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the “sole pacing threat,” commands Washington’s full attention. The objective is clear: to contain China’s rise across multiple fronts: economic strength, high-tech innovation, military capability, and geopolitical influence.
If Europe, once clinging to its self-image as “the world’s garden surrounded by a vast jungle,” as described by Josep Borrell, the former EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, still hoped to wield ethics, norms, and human rights as instruments of moral superiority, those illusions were laid bare at last month’s NATO summit. European leaders almost unanimously endorsed Washington’s unlawful and deceptive strike on Iran, a sovereign nation, even as they continued to condemn Russia for similar breaches of international law. They backed Israel’s military actions against Iran under the banner of “self-defense,” yet refused to explicitly condemn the widely documented genocidal atrocities unfolding in Gaza, despite some having accused China of “genocide” only a few years prior. Unsurprisingly, though scarcely reported in Western media, both Japan and South Korea abruptly canceled their leaders’ attendance at the summit.
Much of geopolitics, of course, is theater; crafted perception and constructed narrative. “Geopolitics is a very cruel business,” as Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, former President of the United Nations Security Council, aptly put it. It has existed for millennia and follows the cold, calculated, and ruthless logic of power play.
Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power is an overview of such power play tactics, Machiavellian-like but also including tactics of ethical or virtuous nature, whether deceitful or otherwise. Just as the cold logic of such tactics appears intrinsic to human nature, so too is the need for respect and trust—essential not only for power projection but for building credible multilateral cooperation, and for sustaining legitimacy before one’s own people.
The rest of the world has been watching Europe’s theater of hypocrisy and double standards over the recent years. While the United States has increasingly abandoned ethical considerations since the Trump administration’s “America First” doctrine (originally aimed at domestic politics but now projected globally) Europe’s squandering of its soft power of ethics and morality may prove even more damaging for its geopolitical credibility and reputation for the foreseeable future.
French President Emmanuel Macron was absolutely right when he said at the Munich Security Conference in February 2023: “I am struck by how we have lost the trust of the Global South.”
A Second China Misconception
In the West, growing tensions with China are commonly framed as a historic power rivalry—the defining contest of the 21st century. It is cast as a decisive battle for global supremacy in economics, technology, and geopolitics, depicted as the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ or a ‘Thucydides Trap.’ This Western narrative is already in full swing: tariff sanctions, export controls on critical high-tech sectors (e.g., ASML), investment restrictions and business bans (Huawei, TikTok), targeted visa limitations on Chinese students and scholars, and an increasingly hostile diplomatic and military posture. In media, political arenas and even academic circles, China is reduced to a monolithic threat—an Orwellian entity characterized by repression, dystopia, and dangerous masses.
What is unfolding today is not merely another great power contest. It marks the first time in modern history that global power is emerging from a non-Caucasian, non-Anglo-Germanic civilization with a fundamentally different cultural and historical foundation. China and India were the world’s largest economies from the start of the Common Era until the early 19th century, yet neither engaged in major hegemonic contests with other civilizations. This context introduces a vital, often overlooked dimension to current power dynamics; a blind spot that forms the basis of the West’s second major misconception about China.
The first major misconception (dominant in Western policy circles since the 1990s) was the belief that China would inevitably liberalize and adopt Western-style governance, in other words aligning itself under the umbrella of Washington’s hegemonic order. That assumption has collapsed about a decade or two ago. Since 1978, China’s economy has grown more than 120-fold by pursuing its own distinct model of governance, policy, and development. Yet instead of prompting genuine curiosity about how such success was achieved outside the liberal-democratic framework, China’s divergence has increasingly been met with contempt and fear across the West.
The second major misconception—now playing out visibly in recent years—is arguably more dangerous, resting on three flawed assumptions.
First, the West has failed to grasp (largely due to its belief that China would eventually assimilate into its rules-based order) that Beijing has long anticipated for a Western pivot from engagement to confrontation once China emerged as a formidable economic force. And it has prepared accordingly, across economic, technological, and security domains.
Second, the West assumes that the architecture and projection of power are universal. While all great powers seek influence to safeguard their interests and status, the structure and especially the purpose of power differ substantially, shaped by distinct historical trajectories, cultural foundations, and evolving domestic dynamics.
Third, the West wrongly presumes that China will respond to provocation in kind by engaging in a direct, head-to-head power contest using the familiar tactics of past rising Western powers: overt rivalry, territorial expansion, and often Machiavellian maneuvering, as seen historically with the Spanish, Dutch, British, and Americans.
And just as with the first misconception, rather than provoking serious interest in China’s strategic thinking, this misunderstanding fuels again a misguided conviction: that every Chinese initiative (military modernization, infrastructure, diplomacy, or industrial policy) is a calculated step toward an inevitable confrontation with the West, aimed at displacing its global dominance.
Two Power Architectures : Shareholders and Stakeholders
A sustainable power structure is typically grounded in its historical and cultural legitimacy. Yet from a contemporary Western lens, the legitimacy of governance is reduced to simplistic binaries, most notably, the dichotomy between liberal democracy and autocracy.
The governance model of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is often viewed as illegitimate and repressive, based on the belief that a legitimate government should be freely elected by its people.
However, in China, legitimacy is rooted in a historical and cultural context prioritizing hierarchy, harmony, and stability as essential to good governance. This legitimacy is built on a foundation of trust between the state and its citizens, often through means that may appear intrusive from a Western perspective. For many Chinese citizens, these measures are seen as reasonable aspects of the social contract between individuals and the state. Unlike in the West, where hierarchy and equality are often viewed as opposing concepts, in China, they are seen as complementary.
Moreover, such binary thinking focused on procedures and ideological form reveals little and obscures much in an era of global transition. As the world moves toward a new configuration of power, the essential distinction lies not merely in politically ideological and procedural form, but in the underlying interests and projections of different power regimes: is power exercised in service of its shareholders, or grounded in the responsibility of its stakeholders?
In the West, power has increasingly become a tool, instrumentalized to serve specific interests. Decades of privatization waves in core public sectors like healthcare, welfare and security, combined with deepening financialization of economies, have ceded real political influence in governing capitals into the hands of industry lobbies, investment firms, and tech-military-pharma conglomerates. Think tanks and media (often funded or owned by these same entities) help legitimize and normalize power projections and its government policies tailored to particular shareholder interests: quarterly profits, specific market or supply dominance, ideological projections, or simply capital accumulation. This is a Shareholders’ Power Architecture.
Shareholders of power view the world through the lens of profitability and strategic investment; simply put, they follow the money to finance specific interests and priorities. Decisions are increasingly driven by capital as we have for example seen at the NATO summit last month. While European allies sought strategic reassurance of security, the United States offered little of substance or commitment other than securing long-term EU funding destined to flow for a considerable part into its own defense and industrial sectors. In the room next to the official leaders’ meeting, defense contractors were already lined up, ready to sign deals. The summit confirmed that Brussels, once viewed as a regulatory heavyweight, has largely surrendered to Washington’s shareholder logic in recent years, a pursuit of return over responsibility while no one truly holds the stake in or responsibility for the overall nation’s power projection, neither in its societal fabric, security architecture, nor in its long-term civilizational direction.
In contrast, although China has embraced far-reaching market reforms and privatization over the past decades, its extraordinary economic ascent (dynamic, at times volatile with significant setbacks, and marked by bold experimentation) has been one under retained decisive control of the Chinese state. When private interests are increasingly able to pose a potential threat to the power balance (as seen in the regulatory crackdowns on the tech sector a few years ago) Beijing moved swiftly and assertively. This underscores a fundamentally different configuration: power remains in the hands of a strategic, state-centered authority tasked with and accountability for upholding broader national interests; stability, security, and long-term development. This is a Stakeholders’ Power Architecture.
China’s power projection is restorative, not revolutionary. It does not seek to overturn the world order, but to reclaim its respectful place within it and to co-shape its future direction. This is not about reviving a sacred past or adhering to doctrines of socialism as historically defined by European thought. Rather, it reflects a long-term projection of civilizational reconfiguration and optimization drawing on China’s enduring cultural and philosophical traditions to construct a political and societal architecture suited to its place in a new multipolar world.
Although China has endured internal upheavals and foreign invasions throughout its long history, its power trajectory has remained largely defensive, never defined by outward territorial expansion. It built walls, not empires, to preserve its civilizational identity. China harbors neither illusions nor ambitions of exporting its values, norms, or system of governance. Its model is understood as historically grounded and culturally specific, not a universal template. China’s power projection is interest-driven, pursued through multilateral economic cooperation, infrastructure-led connectivity, and pragmatic bilateral relationships. While these forms of engagement may foster dependence (and are often perceived in the West as coercive or expansionist) they remain fundamentally transactional, non-prescriptive, and notably absent of military pressure or ideological conditionality.
A clear illustration of the contrast between shareholder’s and stakeholders’ power projections is the recurring question regarding the efficiency of China’s high-speed rail development. It is regularly dismissed in the West as a massive financial blunder; an overbuilt network hemorrhaging money and unlikely to turn a profit. While critical assessments of profitability, budgeting, design, or project execution may contribute to improved efficiency, such critiques miss the crucial point. They reveal a distinctly Western lens, one that evaluates infrastructure primarily through the metric of financial return, rather than its broader societal, strategic, or civilizational utility. China’s high-speed rail was never solely about profit. It is about national integration, the strategic interlinking of industrial, educational, and innovation ecosystems, enhanced security, labor mobility, and the elevation of overall living standards. In a stakeholder model, such investments are seen as long-term power assets, reinforcing national resilience, coherence, and future readiness.
And while governments in the West often acknowledge the strategic value of such infrastructure, projects are frequently delayed and over budget, or ultimately abandoned if they fail to meet the profitability benchmarks demanded by quarterly shareholder expectations. This core dynamic in power projection extends far beyond railways, affecting other critical domains essential to the long-term sustainability of power such as high-tech innovation, education, healthcare, and public welfare.
These fundamentally different architectures of power lie at the heart of the current standoff between China and the West. In China, power remains a subject, an integrated mechanism serving broader national aims: stability, security, sovereignty, and development. In the West, by contrast, power has increasingly become an object, a commodified instrument wielded to serve primarily private interests, detached from the foundational imperatives of power cohesion, long-term security, and civilizational purpose.
Different power projections: Different strategic boards
The delusive belief that all powers have same projections is further reflected in the fundamentally different strategies and tactics used in geopolitical arenas.
The West often assumes that everyone is playing chess. But China is also moving on a different board: Weiqi, better known in the West as Go. Chess is institutionalized and rule-bound, with defined battle lines, hierarchical pieces, and a singular objective: checkmate. Go is different. It unfolds in an open, fluid space without fixed frontlines. All pieces are equal and unranked; their value emerges from their position and relationship to others within the broader field. Power is not asserted through direct confrontation, but through ambiguity, strategic positioning, and influence. Here, it is not hierarchical command but contextual orchestration that matters: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
This difference in game logic reflects deeper cultural distinctions. Chess reflects a rule-based, institutionalized worldview dominant in Western cultures; universalist, specific, and linear. Go embodies an East Asian mindset: particularist, diffuse, relational, and cyclical. Chess legitimizes power through hierarchy and rules, often head-to-head. Go derives power from positioning, adaptation, and the flow of relationships in an open strategic space.
While China understands the nature of chess and occasionally makes calculated moves on that board as part of its broader strategy, the West often fails to see that another game, Go, is also in play. As a result, it finds itself increasingly bewildered and emotionally reactive to China’s maneuvers, moves that make perfect sense within the logic of Go, but appear opaque, unpredictable, and even “illegitimate” to those confined to the ‘rigid’ conventions of chess.
These often emotional reactions cause again bold moves on the chess board from Washington (and increasingly, Brussels) via tariff sanctions, containment strategies, rearmament, military alliances, and black-white narrative framing. But China resists playing the same game. It occasionally responds in kind, through limited moves of retaliatory tariffs or diplomatic pushback but primarily continues operating on the Go board, reshaping its environment, influencing others’ moves, and preparing for long-term outcomes.
As Henry Kissinger wrote in his book On China: “Far better than challenging the enemy on the field of battle is… maneuvering him into an unfavorable position from which escape is impossible.”
A telling example of this Go-like strategy has been articulated by
Warwick Powell as the “drip-by-drip” approach to critical supply chains: a calibrated method of economic pressure applied to the United States and its industrial base. Instead of dramatic standoffs or sweeping embargoes (as favored in Washington’s current playbook) China subtly modulates the flow of critical materials and components essential to Western economies, particularly in defense and high-tech sectors, which form the backbone of the West’s shareholder-driven power structure aimed at deterring and containing China. Like acupuncture, it targets specific pressure points, applying influence with maximum effect and minimal disruption.
China’s engagement with the West during the 1980s and 1990s (its so-called “opening-up” era) also offers valuable lessons about its particular strategic foresight and tactics in exercising power. While China appeared relatively submissive during this period, that posture was far from naïve. It was a carefully calibrated tactic, integral to its broader power projection. This appearance of deference lulled the West into a comfortable yet false sense of supremacy, a kind of sleepwalking assumption that China’s rise could be managed and molded within Washington’s hegemonic framework.
This tactic was codified in Deng Xiaoping’s 24-character strategy (二十四字方针) of the early 1990s, commonly encapsulated in the phrase “韬光养晦” (taoguang yanghui) or “hide and bide strategy.” It reflected strategic patience, humility, and restraint: concealing one’s capabilities, biding time, observing calmly, acting prudently, and quietly preparing the ground for future advantage when conditions become favorable.
The nature of China’s power projection and tactics is not merely cultural but also deeply historical. A notable precedent is the Cefeng system (册封体制), in English known as the Tributary System. Practiced especially during the Tang, Ming, and Qing dynasties (7th to the 19th centuries) this system extended influence and varying degrees of control over sovereign entities not through colonization or territorial domination, as in Western imperial traditions, but through structured diplomacy grounded in ritual hierarchy, civilizational respect, and reciprocal development.
Unlike the extractive and often assimilative nature of Western colonialism, tributary states under the Chinese system typically retained their rulers, cultural autonomy, and internal governance. China’s core expectation was recognition of its civilizational status, not territorial annexation. In return, tribute missions received trade privileges and political protection. Though frictions occasionally emerged (as with Vietnam’s periodic efforts evading tributary ties) the system generally sustained a flexible and enduring regional order and balance over the centuries.
Examples include Korea under the Goryeo and Joseon dynasties; Vietnam’s relationship with China during the Tang and Ming dynasties (7th–10th and 14th–17th centuries); and the Ryukyu Kingdom (present-day Okinawa), which maintained tributary ties with both China and Japan simultaneously from the 14th to the 19th century.
Today, the BRI, BRICS expansion, or China-Africa relations echo elements of these tactics: influence through trade and infrastructure, mutual development, and non-alignment in ideology. These are tactics of connectivity and influence—not of domination and conquest.
Returning to Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, he frequently draws on Sun Tzu’s Art of War (6th century BC). While both works explore power, strategy, and human behavior and at times offer similar insights. They stem from fundamentally different cultural and historical foundations, much like the chess–Go metaphor. Sun Tzu advocates harmony, restraint, and balance, treating power as something to be cultivated and contained. Greene’s perspective (foremost shaped by the Western tradition of court politics) leans toward manipulation, dominance, and securing tactical advantage.
Power choices: not inevitabilities
The West’s shareholder-driven power treats China as a threat because that narrative fuels capital. In this architecture, fear is not just a geopolitical power tactic, it is a commodity. And while profitable, it is also profoundly dangerous.
That danger did not suddenly emerge in recent years, as was again evident at last month’s NATO summit. It was already foreshadowed in U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, where he warned of the rise of a shareholder-driven power structure. He identified the military-industrial complex as a major threat: a system in which power risks becoming an object; instrumentalized to serve external interests, rather than the public good or the long-term sustainability of national power:
“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Despite Eisenhower’s warning, that disastrous rise has nonetheless come to pass. Its logic could not be expressed more bluntly than by Palantir CEO Alex Karp—whose company provides AI-driven surveillance, data analytics, and intelligence support to U.S. and allied military and security agencies, often in the context of proxy wars, regime change operations, and other conflict-driven interventions. Late last year, he stated:
“They (enemies) need to go to bed scared, they need to wake up scared… Safe means that the other person is scared.”
This is the visible manifestation of today’s power architecture in the hands of shareholder-driven entities like Palantir, a system in which deterrence and fear are no longer merely tools of geopolitical strategy, as outlined in Greene’s Laws of Power, but have become self-perpetuating cycles of threat, escalation, and profit, detached from the very foundations that make power sustainable: systemic coherence, ethical responsibility, and public legitimacy.
China’s rise is not without profound challenges in its power strategies and tactics. As it navigates a profound transformation, it must constantly balance internal stability, domestic development, and growing international influence, all while managing the rising expectations, uncertainties, and tensions of an evolving global order. It must also remain vigilant to the potential emergence of shareholder dynamics along with private interests within its own system, ensuring that power remains firmly tied to the societal and civilizational stakes that have guided its path.
No longer the silent cat moving through shadows, China has become the elephant in the room; its movements now carry global resonance. What once passed unnoticed must now be calibrated with care. Each step, each policy, each initiative trembles across continents. This new visibility demands constant precision, foresight, and coherence in how China exercises power and engages with the world.
But this does not make China a threat to Europe or the United States, though it undeniably poses challenges.
China is a direct challenge to the business model of the shareholder-driven plutocracy entrenched in Washington and increasingly mirrored in Brussels.
It is furthermore a challenge not because of expansionist ambition or ideological export, but because it represents a transformation towards new global configuration of power, one not seen for centuries. China’s rise, alongside the growing assertiveness of countries in the Global South, marks a shift in historical momentum. More and more nations are charting independent paths, engaging multilaterally, and questioning the legitimacy of institutions and hierarchies rooted in colonial and post-colonial legacies. Future historians may well look back on this period as a true end of that centuries-long unequal era.
Contrary to the zero-sum logic embedded in much of Western strategic thinking, China’s power projection does not seek dominance through replacement, but adaptation. It challenges the West not through confrontation, but by compelling it to adapt to a rapidly emerging multipolar world order.
And that is precisely the point: the real threat is not China, but the West’s own inability (or unwillingness) to adapt. Not just to Washington or Brussels, but to the world at large.
Containing China is not going to happen any time soon. In fact, it is already outpacing the West across multiple dimensions of power: geo-economics and trade, technological innovation, green energy, infrastructure, research and an advocating force for stability and peace. It is a continuous process of nourishing and revitalizing each vertebra of a stronger backbone, safeguarding the ancient and distinct spinal cord of its civilization.
Ultimately, it is the West’s choice to view China as a threat—not an inevitable scenario, but a deliberate decision. And that choice reflects a power projection shaped by the West’s own architecture of power.
Rather than clinging to a deterministic, narrow lens of realism and dichotomy, the West might do well to look beyond Thucydides in its own classical tradition—perhaps toward the Curse of Erysichthon, a myth not of rivalry, but of self-destruction through insatiable hunger. That metaphor may better capture the risk of a power structure that devours everything (including its own foundations, its ideologies, its credibility) for the sake of private interests and gain.
As former Singaporean Minister of Foreign Affairs George Yeo recently said “If we deny China its legitimate place in the sun, we create the very China we fear.”
Gordon Dumoulin
