US-China Great Power Competition

Chinese soldiers from the People's Liberation Army (PLA) 196th Infantry Brigade perform drill at their barracks in Yangcun, 100 km east of Beijing, China

The U.S.-China Great Power Competition

How China builds power and what the United States can do to protect its interests at home and around the world

Rising power strategies

How has China managed to build power from a weaker resource position in a U.S.-led international system? A new conceptual framework answers this question and elucidates how the United States can counter unfavorable Chinese activities and successfully compete with China.

Research Focus

The most crucial challenge facing U.S. policymakers today is how to prevail in great power competition with China. The first step to devising an effective U.S. strategy for great power competition is to understand and correctly characterize how China builds power and influence in the international system. Yet serious analysis to answer this question is scant.

The U.S.-China Great Power Competition project aims to fill in this gap. Drawing heavily on Chinese sources and engaging with experts from the diplomatic, economic, technology, and military sectors, it pieces together the logic behind Chinese actions and behavior in foreign policy, military strategy, and the economics and technology realms.

The project uses the crucial case of China’s rise over the past 25 years to explore what shapes the strategic approach of rising powers as they accumulate influence, where they imitate, and where they innovate. It reveals that China builds power largely by differentiating itself from the United States. The findings will make significant contributions to key theoretical and policy debates about China’s intentions and goals and, more broadly, how states compete.

This research will result in a book that analyzes and explains the specific policies, strategies, and approaches China has employed over the past 25 years to build enough power to be considered a great power competitor. The book will make vital theoretical and policy contributions to China studies, international relations and power transition theories, and great power competition. It will allow policymakers to better anticipate China’s actions, develop more effective strategies to counter unfavorable Chinese activities, and understand how to push the competition with China into realms where the United States has the upper hand.

Lead Researcher

Oriana Skylar Mastro

FSI Center Fellow

Oriana Skylar Mastro

FSI Center Fellow

Full Biography

Featured Media

Hiding in Plain Sight: How China Builds and Exercises Military Power, 1995 2020
Stanford Seminar

Rethinking Our Assumptions About China’s Strategic Goals
World Class Podcast

Publications

Is China a Challenge to U.S. National Security?
In The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations (Harvard University Press), August 2022.
See also Assessing China’s Conventional and Unconventional Challenges to U.S. National Security, APARC website, August 2022.

Defense, Deterrence, and the Role of Guam
In Defending Guam, The Hudson Institute, July 2022

Understanding the Challenge of China’s Rise: Fixing Conceptual Confusion about Intentions
In Journal of Chinese Political Science, June 2022
See also Problems with Revisionism: A Conceptual Framework for Assessing Chinese Intentions, APARC website, June 2022

Chinese Grand Strategy
In Strategy in the Contemporary World, Oxford University Press, March 2022

China's Grand Strategy
Asia Policy 17.1, January 2022

Nuclear Deterrence and the US-China Strategic Relationship
In Alliances, Nuclear Weapons and Escalation: Managing Deterrence in the 21st Century (eds. Stephan Frühling and Andrew O’Neil), ANU Press, December 2021

Military Competition With China: Harder Than the Cold War?
SMA Perspectives, September 2021