The People’s Republic of China was founded in opposition to empire. The Chinese Communist Party built its identity on anti-imperialism, presenting itself as the vanguard of a global struggle against Western domination. Chinese leader Mao Zedong saw the Bolshevik Revolution as the opening act of that struggle, and after the communist victory and the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, Beijing elevated “noninterference” to become a core principle of its foreign policy. The concept became a powerful diplomatic instrument, helping China position itself as a champion of postcolonial sovereignty and win support across the global South.
Yet even at its inception, this principle was more propaganda than doctrine. Mao backed communist insurgencies abroad and sent Chinese “volunteers” to fight in the Korean War. As China’s capabilities expanded, so, too, did the reach of its activities beyond its borders. Today, Beijing operates a global network of intelligence, influence, and security relationships designed to advance its interests overseas. Most recently, it has provided diplomatic cover and material support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. And it has established several formal military facilities overseas, in Cambodia, Djibouti, and according to some accounts, Tajikistan, although Beijing continues to deny this last one. Even so, China’s record of intervention to date has skewed toward staging influence operations and offering deniable support to its favored regimes. China did participate in the Korean War and invaded India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, but it has not routinely engaged in overt military interventions in the U.S. style.
For decades, China could sustain this approach under the umbrella of a U.S.-led security order that it did not have to maintain. As the analyst Zoe Liu has argued in Foreign Affairs, that order constrained China in important ways, but it also underwrote the stability of global trade routes and financial systems, allowing Beijing to funnel most of its resources into economic development and military modernization. As that order unravels and U.S. President Donald Trump energetically uses force abroad, China sees its globalized commercial, technological, and security interests—from the mineral deposits and shipping lanes of the Arctic to the oil flows of the Gulf—at immediate risk. Beijing is being drawn into the inescapable logic that has confronted all rising powers: to protect its interests abroad, it must assume a greater share of the costs of enforcing order.
As the world descends into what Chinese leader Xi Jinping has described as might-makes-right lawlessness, Beijing is priming its security apparatus to defend the transportation corridors, supply chains, and strategic resources that sustain Chinese power. China’s minister of state security has directed the national security bureaucracy to build an integrated system “across the entire chain” to protect China’s overseas interests, one that will likely require an expansion of China’s forward deployed intelligence and defense capabilities. The nature of China’s global dependencies means that this system cannot just stop at the country’s immediate periphery but must forestall risks as far afield as the Panama Canal and the mines of central Africa. In parallel, intellectuals loyal to the party are debating whether China should formally revise its commitment to noninterference. A country built on an anti-imperial story has arrived at the point in which it must, with some reluctance, assume a greater share of the burdens of empire.
Into the Jungle
Mao once described the United States’ extensive global network of military bases as “nooses around the neck of U.S. imperialism” that would eventually entangle Washington and sap its power around the world. In some respects, that judgment appears prescient. Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy acknowledged the reality of American overreach and sought to scale back the country’s commitments to a more confined set of core interests. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” it read.
Analysts within the Chinese security establishment registered this change early in Trump’s second presidency. In August 2025, the think tank of China’s powerful Ministry of State Security published a piece entitled “The End of the West?” The China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) is regarded as a constituent part of China’s Ministry of State Security, and its assessments both reflect and shape the strategic thinking of Beijing’s highest leadership. The piece argued that the West—by which the author meant the strategic bloc led by the United States, including Europe and other allies—was entering a phase of relative decline marked not by immediate collapse but by the erosion of its internal cohesion, legitimacy, and normative authority. Trump’s return, in this telling, was a structural rupture, signaling that the United States was willing to undermine its alliances, sideline the institutions it had built, and weaponize economic tools against friends and foes alike.
“Noninterference” was always more propaganda than doctrine.
Yet this reading offers more than blind triumphalism. Beneath the confidence lie grave concerns that the anticipated decline of American power will not lead to an orderly transfer of power but will result in a volatile superpower increasingly willing to use its hard power while it still can. In response to the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, Xi cautioned—as he has before—that the world must not return to “the law of the jungle.” The Chinese security establishment has quietly arrived at the more definitive verdict that it is already operating in the jungle. Whereas Xi’s warning served a diplomatic purpose, seeking to cast China as the normative counterpoint to global instability, the sober assessments emerging from the security establishment should be taken as Beijing’s analytical baseline and framework for future policy. In the view of Chinese leaders, Trump’s designs on the Panama Canal and Greenland and his interventions in Venezuela and Iran are confirmation that an age of anarchy has arrived, one that requires China to impose an order of its own making.
In December 2025, Chen Yixin, the minister of state security, published an essay in which he foresaw a “historic change” in China’s global position, accompanied by a new period of turbulence and risk. The many opportunities Beijing perceives in the structural weakening of the United States are counterbalanced by the immediate dangers presented by the Trump administration’s use of force abroad, threats of tariff escalation, and sweeping claims to critical strategic territories and assets. The assessments of CICIR’s top leadership elaborated the same conclusion. In January, CICIR’s outgoing president, Yang Mingjie, released a research paper that argued that the international system has entered “a period of dramatic upheaval and restructuring” in which the United States has abdicated responsibility for maintaining the existing order. This transitional phase will be characterized by turbulence, confusion, and disorder and severely complicates China’s security situation, he wrote. In March, Yang’s successor, Fu Xiaoqiang, published an analysis in Seeking Truth, the party’s leading theory journal, characterizing the current moment as a new historical period of heightened confrontation in which states will be forced to seek greater autonomy. Fu stated explicitly that the United States would be compelled to suppress the rise of emerging powers to protect its “fragile hegemony” and that foreign policy globally would become more “closed and exclusionary,” leaving diminishing space for dialogue between great powers.
These words are academic and polite, but they amount to an acknowledgment that China is now fighting in the wilderness, where only the laws of raw power apply. When strategic assessments cascade through the bureaucracy in this way, especially in these important nodes of the security state, they become the operative assumptions of the Chinese system. Beijing is now mobilizing to respond.
Tightening the Chain
The scale of China’s overseas exposure makes the anxiety of its security establishment readily understandable. China is the world’s largest trading state, with thousands of companies operating in more than 150 countries, millions of nationals living and working overseas, and its vast infrastructure investment program known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) stretching across volatile regions. This global commercial empire is now at risk because of the twin dangers of U.S. withdrawal from some domains and Washington’s chaotic intervention in others.
In response, Chen, the security minister, has issued what amounts to a mobilization order: “In the face of the grave situation of continuously rising security risks to our overseas interests, we must build an overseas security protection system across the entire chain.” In recent years, China has built out its capabilities to protect its investments abroad, including its naval bases in Cambodia and Djibouti, and a proliferating set of bilateral security agreements. Chen’s formulation codifies, expands, and lends a new urgency to this strategy.
Chinese society is suffering from a “peace disease.”
The phrase “across the entire chain” implies a connected security architecture designed to anticipate and forestall risks beyond China’s borders. Operationally, this begins with greater intelligence collection to provide early warning of “containment and suppression”—how Chinese officials describe U.S.-led economic and security pressure on China—as well as threats such as political instability, terrorism, and the targeting of Chinese nationals or firms. It extends to deeper integration with foreign countries on intelligence and law enforcement, enabling China to coordinate with host countries on policing, counterterrorism, and crisis response. Chen himself laid the groundwork for this in November 2023, when he made a rare ten-day tour of Southeast Asia, meeting heads of state and senior intelligence officials in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam and reaching what the Ministry of State Security described as an “extensive consensus” on security and intelligence cooperation. The details of these agreements are not public, but they likely encompass greater intelligence sharing, joint operational coordination, and the deployment of additional MSS assets and personnel in the region. During that trip, Chen inspected Chinese-funded enterprises and BRI projects.
Finally, the security framework will likely require a greater Chinese presence abroad to actively defuse risks as they materialize, something Chen hinted at by promising a “secure escort” for BRI projects. This may come in several guises, including the expanded use of private security firms that deploy former People’s Liberation Army personnel to countries hosting significant BRI projects, transportation corridors, and other strategic assets. Some reports suggest that since 2025, Chinese private security contractors have deployed personnel at sites along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to protect Chinese workers and commercial interests. Pakistan has long resisted a formal Chinese security presence within its borders even as militant groups have increasingly targeted Chinese projects in the country.
Beijing’s security officials have been explicit about the types of risks China faces and the existential stakes at play. Xi’s modernization campaign, his pledge to make China “strong,” and his determination to lead the next industrial revolution all depend on continued access to the resources and trade lanes that could be vulnerable to disruption in an increasingly volatile world. In March, Fu, the current CICIR president, captured this anxiety when he described U.S. designs on the Panama Canal, Greenland, and the Port of Darwin as imperiling the “strategic corridors” that are the “lifelines” of the global economy. Referring to critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths, he wrote that “securing these resources is essential for advancing the industrial revolution.” Chen, for his part, described great-power competition in technology and the associated supply chains as having entered “the most intense, most taxing, and most critical period of hand-to-hand combat.” Given this diagnosis, Beijing appears poised to scale up the defensive and coercive strategies prescribed by Chen in these pressing domains of risk.
THE PEACE DISEASE
Trump’s war against Iran increased the urgency of this recalibration. Prominent thinkers in the party’s intellectual ecosystem extended the implications of Beijing’s official rhetoric. Days after the U.S.-Israeli air campaign began, Zheng Yongnian, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an influential thinker in party circles, proposed that China revise its principle of nonintervention in favor of what he called “Interventionism 2.0,” which would permit coercive state intervention abroad in certain scenarios, including extraterritorial “law enforcement” operations under the Ministry of Public Security and not excluding the use of military force. Zheng cites China’s crackdown on a telecom fraud operation in the lawless border zones of Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar as proof of concept for what he calls “active intervention,” but the case reveals a more muscular doctrine than its framing as a cooperative operation suggests. Beijing achieved its objectives through proxy military force and coercive diplomacy, albeit under the cover of bilateral policing and law enforcement cooperation. Read against the context of Zheng’s remarks—and in light of the U.S. interventions in Iran and Venezuela, where Chinese assets face acute risks—Zheng’s model of active intervention looks like full-spectrum support for the actions that would bring about Beijing’s desired outcomes, stopping just short of a commitment to direct military action and invoking “bilateral cooperation” for the sake of legitimacy. A version of this model is on display in China’s support for the Russian war in Ukraine.
Although Zheng’s proposed triggers for intervention—contracts violated by host governments, third-party threats to Chinese assets such as the Panama Canal, foreign states actively working against Chinese interests—were carefully distinguished from the motivations of what he described as Washington’s “bandit-style” adventurism, the thrust of the argument was clear: it is no longer viable for China to maintain an official position of principled abstention as it seeks to both capitalize on the reordering of global power and insulate itself from the dangers of that reordering.
Beijing will seek to learn from the mistakes of American interventionism.
Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University and one of China’s most prominent hawks, has given the argument a harder edge. Jin has argued for some time that Chinese society is suffering from what he calls a “peace disease”—a generations-deep aversion to conflict that he regards as a strategic vulnerability rather than a virtue. His argument is significant because Jin borrowed the concept of the peace disease from Xi, who used it in a speech to a military delegation in 2018. In Jin’s telling, rising powers have rarely consolidated their position without at some point demonstrating their superior military power. Jin has consistently applauded China’s projection of force, including its island building in the South China Sea, the armed clash with Indian troops in the Himalayas in 2020, and the maritime confrontations with the Philippines over Second Thomas Shoal. In his view, avoiding such friction may ultimately imperil China’s global ambitions.
The day that U.S. forces struck Iran, Jin reposted a warning from an account linked to the People’s Liberation Army that urged the Chinese people to be prepared for danger. He called on anyone suffering from this “peace disease” to wake up and reckon with the reality that the security environment China once felt accustomed to is being replaced by a dangerous type of disorder. He concluded: “Peace is not bestowed by others, but earned through one’s own strength. War is already quite common in the world today, and it will likely increase in the future. . . . At this juncture, clinging to a blindly pacifist mindset like an ostrich with its head in the sand will only harm both ourselves and others.”
Zheng and Jin do not formally represent official doctrine, but nor are they peripheral. Zheng has played an important role in intellectually legitimizing major strategic policies, such as Beijing’s support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Jin’s ideas have been syndicated widely across party media. In Chinese discourse, voices such as these often serve as a conceptual vanguard, testing and prefiguring policy shifts that are actively being considered by government officials. The constellation of ideas now circulating in and around Beijing’s security establishment— from Chen’s mobilization “across the entire chain” to Zheng’s “Interventionism 2.0” and Jin’s “peace disease”—forms a coherent, mutually reinforcing argument that the current age of anarchy demands that Beijing shape and control its international security environment. It is not a matter of whether China should intervene abroad but when, how, and under what legitimating pretexts it does so.
The Logic of Empire
The rationale underlying the mobilization signaled by Chinese thinkers raises a question that cuts to the heart of China’s identity: Can Beijing protect its expanding overseas interests without becoming the kind of interventionist power it has always defined itself against?
The United States once faced a similar question. The Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed by Washington in 1823, was originally conceived as an anti-imperial instrument to keep the Western Hemisphere free from European colonial interference. But as American global interests expanded, the doctrine evolved. President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary asserted Washington’s right to intervene in Latin American countries to stabilize them in line with U.S. interests, effectively transforming an anti-imperial declaration into the architecture of an informal empire.
It is not a matter of whether China should intervene abroad but when and how.
Beijing has watched Washington’s global military infrastructure confer enormous advantage but, at the same time, surrender prestige and treasure in waging wars that yielded little strategic benefit—above all in the Middle East, where two decades of intervention produced instability, blowback, and the erosion of American credibility. As Beijing shifts—whether in name or in fact—to a more interventionist posture, it will seek to learn from the mistakes of the American experience.
Beijing will likely try to proceed as much as possible under the cover of bilateral or multilateral cooperation in order to avoid comparison with more cavalier U.S. policy. But such a veneer offers only partial insulation. The American example shows that even indirect interventions cause downstream resentments, ongoing dependencies, and credibility commitments. More pressingly, a crisis involving Chinese nationals, a chokepoint resource, or a collapsing client state may force Beijing’s hand before any diplomatic cover is in place. In whatever form, intervention tends to escalate: interests require protection, protection requires presence, presence invites resistance, and resistance demands further protection. This mechanism animates the imperial machine and leads to potentially dangerous entanglements and overreach.
Mao described U.S. military bases as the nooses that would eventually strangle the American empire. But as Beijing presses outward, it may discover that its global interests tighten into a snare of its own making.
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