Meanwhile, the CCP has patiently developed the PRC’s capabilities over the last 40 years with the long-term goal of achieving global preeminence and placing a socialist stamp on world order. Captive to the conventional wisdom, the United States and other countries proceeded largely unaware of or indifferent to the long-term strategic competition launched by the CCP and affirmed with increasing boldness by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping. As a veteran U.S. policymaker recently wrote, “This prolonged failure in China policy could turn out to be the biggest U.S. policy deficiency in the past seven decades, given the accumulating dangerous strategic consequences of the rise of Chinese power for world order as well as for the United States and its allies and friends.”8
Even as proponents of the conventional wisdom dug in their heels, keen observers of China effected a salutary shift in perspective. Their books and articles bring into focus the CCP’s one-party, repressive rule as well as its defiance of, and determination to remake, international norms, standards, and institutions.9
The Trump Administration achieved a fundamental break with the conventional wisdom. It concluded that the CCP’s resolute conduct and self-professed goals require the United States and other countries to revise assumptions and develop a new strategic doctrine to address the primacy and magnitude of the China challenge. The administration presented its thinking to the public in the 2017 National Security Strategy, 2018 National Defense Strategy, 2020 United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China, 2020 annual report to Congress on China’s military power, and in many high-profile speeches by senior administration figures.10
The administration’s outlook recognizes that it is unreasonable to suppose that today’s leaders of the Chinese Communist Party — who view themselves as heirs to a great civilization, who espouse a 20th-century ideology and political system the cruelty and repression of which have left tens of millions dead, and who pursue hyper-nationalist goals — comprehend domestic politics and world affairs as do the United States and other liberal democracies.11 In recent years, the CCP has consolidated authority and — by nefarious means ranging from digital surveillance to strict indoctrination to concentration camps for religious and ethnic minorities — intensified the subordination of PRC citizens to party-defined collective interests. The CCP has developed — and acquired illegally in many instances — advanced technologies not
