For much of my time as a journalist, the story of China’s rise has come with a familiar undertone of alarm. China is either becoming the next great global power, challenging the West, rewriting the rules of international politics or quietly building a parallel system that the rest of the world will eventually have to adapt to.
All of these arguments have some basis. But I sometimes wonder whether we make the China story too simple, especially from Central Asia, where China is not some distant geopolitical competitor, but a country next door, a major trading partner and an increasingly visible part of our economic landscape.
Jiyang Dong. Photo credit: Nazarbayev University So I wanted to ask a broader question: if China continues to gain economic and geopolitical weight over the next 10 years, what will that power actually look like by 2035, and what will it mean for Central Asia? I spoke to several experts and their answers were more nuanced than the usual China-versus-the-West narrative.
The most interesting conclusion was not that China will necessarily replace the existing international order. It may not have to. China may reshape the order without replacing it Jiyang Dong, assistant professor at Nazarbayev University’s Graduate School of Business, made a point that immediately shifted the question for me.
“Ironically, the key variables impacting China’s future role in the international system are not necessarily within China,” he said. China’s policies, he said, are already laid out in successive five-year plans and implemented with consistency. What matters just as much is what happens elsewhere: whether the United States (U.S.) continues to retreat from multilateralism and whether institutions such as the World Bank and IMF continue to meet the development needs of the Global South.
If they do not, Dong believes, institutions in which China plays a central role could gradually become more important. He points to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as one example. That means China’s rise may not depend entirely on Beijing building a new system from scratch.
It may also depend on whether existing institutions leave enough space for China and other emerging powers to build something alongside them. Gulnar Shaimergenova, director of the China Studies Center in Kazakhstan, sees the process in similar terms. “I would rather speak not about the creation by China of a completely alternative world order, but about an attempt to change the balance and rules within the existing international system,” she said.
By 2035, she expects a more polycentric system in which China becomes one of the key centers of economic, technological and political influence. The real question, she said, is not whether one world order will simply replace another, but which institutions and norms will adapt to the new balance of power.
Ken-Moriyasu-Hudson. Photo credit: nationalinterest.org Deputy Chairman of the Institute of Foreign Policy Studies under Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Amangeldy Tazhenov reaches a similar conclusion. China, he said, is not trying to “break” the existing system.
It is pushing for its transformation and reform so that it better reflects current realities and the changing distribution of power. But Ken Moriyasu, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, offered a sharper interpretation of the same trend. For much of the post-Deng Xiaoping era, he noted, China largely adapted to an international system shaped by Western powers.