The struggle over what China wants

This article appeared in East Asia Forum on October 21 2026.

The current debate on the question of what China wants shows no sign of reaching a consensus. Some may be of the impression that agreement is possible so long as methodological differences can be resolved, yet few acknowledge that the fault line in the debate is epistemological rather than methodological.

In August 2025, Dave Kang, Jackie Wong and Zenobia Chan published a peer-reviewed article in International Security titled ‘What Does China Want?’, which concluded that China is a status quo power with limited global aims, not a revisionist state seeking to dramatically expand its power and reshape the world order.

The paper has generated significant debate. In August 2025, the same journal published four critical responses, all focusing on methodological issues. The most developed critique is from former Biden administration senior policy advisor Rush Doshi. His 2021 book, The Long Game, came to the opposite conclusion: that Beijing has pursued a long-term strategy to displace US influence regionally and globally.

This raises the question of what methodology could reliably establish China’s intentions. Kang, Wong and Chan evaluate intent through a large-scale analysis of 12,000 official Chinese articles, supplemented by a qualitative reading of hundreds of Xi Jinping’s speeches. But Doshi argues that the authors draw the wrong conclusions by ‘cherry-picking’ from an overly narrow selection of Chinese sources and ‘treating the resultant absence of evidence as the evidence of absence’. His own approach examines China’s actions alongside textual evidence, drawing on a more curated selection of official and unofficial sources.

Yet a consistent and rigorous triangulation would require not only analysing official and internal statements, elite writings, policy decisions and actual behaviour, but also examining these decisions against alternative courses of action and tracing the changes over time. Neither critique seems to fully meet this benchmark.

Beyond methodology, the debate also exposes the disciplinary limitations of international relations and political science. Understanding intent is as much a psychological process as it is an analytical one, involving emotion as well as reasoning. Robert Jervis famously examined the role of psychology in shaping US misperceptions of the Soviet Union’s malign intentions during the Cold War. In other words, to get closer to knowing an adversary’s intentions, there must be an analytical mechanism capable of dealing with emotions such as anxiety and fear.

The third question is whether China’s intentions can be meaningfully evaluated at all in a political climate shaped by mutual distrust. While Kang, Wong and Chan reached their conclusion that China does not intend to become a global hegemon after analysing 12,000 articles and speeches, sceptics may argue that Beijing is simply concealing its intentions — a claim that no amount of empirical evidence can disprove.

The easiest way out of this cognitive conundrum could be to simply equate capacity with intention, but this would be dangerous. Capability tells us what a state can do, not necessarily what it wants to do. China’s capabilities are real — its nuclear arsenal is growing, its navy is enormous; and Beijing’s military spending is substantial. But a country can acquire capabilities for several reasons, including deterrence, concerns about an adversary’s capabilities, the need to project might to its domestic public, competing bureaucratic interests and a perceived need to shore up security against an uncertain future.

This raises the difficult question of whether changing capabilities may lead to a change in intention. Doshi argues that China’s growing capabilities have changed its operational tempo and increased its risk tolerance, and that its behaviour, such as clashes with neighbours, should be incorporated into assessments of its intentions.

The epistemological challenge of gauging China’s intentions has taken on added urgency under intensifying US–China rivalry. As one commentator remarks, the question of ‘what does China want’ has become so perennial that it is now a ‘genre unto itself’. Perhaps the main value of Kang, Wong and Chan’s paper lies in reopening a debate that may have been prematurely treated as settled.

The debate reveals a deeper institutional tension. A March 2026 study found that US policymakers are far more likely to view China as a threat than think tank researchers, academics and the public. One possible explanation could be that academics and researchers seeking scholarly credibility are concerned with producing reliable and falsifiable evidence about China’s intentions, whereas policymakers align more closely with the political values, ideological commitments and institutional interests of powerful elites.

The same study finds that among researchers and academics, self-identified security experts have a higher threat perception of China than self-identified East Asia experts. This epistemological divide cannot be resolved by methodological rigour. Instead, we should go beyond methodology to examine how geopolitics shapes knowledge production and how these power dynamics in turn determine which approach prevails in answering the question of what China really wants.

And above all, we should acknowledge, as David McCourt, a sociologist of knowledge production, argues, that China expertise is always a field of ‘intense struggle’ over expertise, and that how we come to know China depends as much on our own professional ‘convictions’ and ‘institutional dispositions’ as on how we respond to the ‘objective distributions in the balance of international power’.