{"id":86,"date":"2026-05-15T05:04:58","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T05:04:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/housingnewsamerica.com\/?p=86"},"modified":"2026-05-15T05:04:58","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T05:04:58","slug":"china-was-ready-for-the-age-of-anarchy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housingnewsamerica.com\/?p=86","title":{"rendered":"China Was Ready for the Age of Anarchy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The People\u2019s 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\u2019s Republic in 1949, Beijing elevated \u201cnoninterference\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Read more Can Corporate America Protect Democracy?<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet even at its inception, this principle was more propaganda than doctrine. Mao backed communist insurgencies abroad and sent Chinese \u201cvolunteers\u201d to fight in the Korean War. As China\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, 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\u2014from the mineral deposits and shipping lanes of the Arctic to the oil flows of the Gulf\u2014at 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s minister of state security has directed the national security bureaucracy to build an integrated system \u201cacross the entire chain\u201d to protect China\u2019s overseas interests, one that will likely require an expansion of China\u2019s forward deployed intelligence and defense capabilities. The nature of China\u2019s global dependencies means that this system cannot just stop at the country\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Into the Jungle<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Mao once described the United States\u2019 extensive global network of military bases as \u201cnooses around the neck of U.S. imperialism\u201d that would eventually entangle Washington and sap its power around the world. In some respects, that judgment appears prescient. Trump\u2019s 2025 National Security Strategy acknowledged the reality of American overreach and sought to scale back the country\u2019s commitments to a more confined set of core interests. \u201cThe days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,\u201d it read.<\/p>\n

Analysts within the Chinese security establishment registered this change early in Trump\u2019s second presidency. In August 2025, the think tank of China\u2019s powerful Ministry of State Security published a piece entitled \u201cThe End of the West?\u201d The China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) is regarded as a constituent part of China\u2019s Ministry of State Security, and its assessments both reflect and shape the strategic thinking of Beijing\u2019s highest leadership. The piece argued that the West\u2014by which the author meant the strategic bloc led by the United States, including Europe and other allies\u2014was entering a phase of relative decline marked not by immediate collapse but by the erosion of its internal cohesion, legitimacy, and normative authority. Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cNoninterference\u201d was always more propaganda than doctrine.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2014as he has before\u2014that the world must not return to \u201cthe law of the jungle.\u201d The Chinese security establishment has quietly arrived at the more definitive verdict that it is already operating in the jungle. Whereas Xi\u2019s 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\u2019s analytical baseline and framework for future policy. In the view of Chinese leaders, Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In December 2025, Chen Yixin, the minister of state security, published an essay in which he foresaw a \u201chistoric change\u201d in China\u2019s 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\u2019s use of force abroad, threats of tariff escalation, and sweeping claims to critical strategic territories and assets. The assessments of CICIR\u2019s top leadership elaborated the same conclusion. In January, CICIR\u2019s outgoing president, Yang Mingjie, released a research paper that argued that the international system has entered \u201ca period of dramatic upheaval and restructuring\u201d 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\u2019s security situation, he wrote. In March, Yang\u2019s successor, Fu Xiaoqiang, published an analysis in Seeking Truth<\/em>, the party\u2019s 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 \u201cfragile hegemony\u201d and that foreign policy globally would become more \u201cclosed and exclusionary,\u201d leaving diminishing space for dialogue between great powers.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Tightening the Chain<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The scale of China\u2019s overseas exposure makes the anxiety of its security establishment readily understandable. China is the world\u2019s 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\u2019s chaotic intervention in others.<\/p>\n

In response, Chen, the security minister, has issued what amounts to a mobilization order: \u201cIn 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.\u201d 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\u2019s formulation codifies, expands, and lends a new urgency to this strategy.<\/p>\n

Chinese society is suffering from a \u201cpeace disease.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The phrase \u201cacross the entire chain\u201d implies a connected security architecture designed to anticipate and forestall risks beyond China\u2019s borders. Operationally, this begins with greater intelligence collection to provide early warning of \u201ccontainment and suppression\u201d\u2014how Chinese officials describe U.S.-led economic and security pressure on China\u2014as 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 \u201cextensive consensus\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201csecure escort\u201d for BRI projects. This may come in several guises, including the expanded use of private security firms that deploy former People\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Read more America Has Lost Its Leverage Over China<\/a><\/p>\n

Beijing\u2019s security officials have been explicit about the types of risks China faces and the existential stakes at play. Xi\u2019s modernization campaign, his pledge to make China \u201cstrong,\u201d 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 \u201cstrategic corridors\u201d that are the \u201clifelines\u201d of the global economy. Referring to critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths, he wrote that \u201csecuring these resources is essential for advancing the industrial revolution.\u201d Chen, for his part, described great-power competition in technology and the associated supply chains as having entered \u201cthe most intense, most taxing, and most critical period of hand-to-hand combat.\u201d Given this diagnosis, Beijing appears poised to scale up the defensive and coercive strategies prescribed by Chen in these pressing domains of risk.<\/p>\n

THE PEACE DISEASE<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Trump\u2019s war against Iran increased the urgency of this recalibration. Prominent thinkers in the party\u2019s intellectual ecosystem extended the implications of Beijing\u2019s 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 \u201cInterventionism 2.0,\u201d which would permit coercive state intervention abroad in certain scenarios, including extraterritorial \u201claw enforcement\u201d operations under the Ministry of Public Security and not excluding the use of military force. Zheng cites China\u2019s crackdown on a telecom fraud operation in the lawless border zones of Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar as proof of concept for what he calls \u201cactive intervention,\u201d 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\u2019s remarks\u2014and in light of the U.S. interventions in Iran and Venezuela, where Chinese assets face acute risks\u2014Zheng\u2019s model of active intervention looks like full-spectrum support for the actions that would bring about Beijing\u2019s desired outcomes, stopping just short of a commitment to direct military action and invoking \u201cbilateral cooperation\u201d for the sake of legitimacy. A version of this model is on display in China\u2019s support for the Russian war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Although Zheng\u2019s proposed triggers for intervention\u2014contracts violated by host governments, third-party threats to Chinese assets such as the Panama Canal, foreign states actively working against Chinese interests\u2014were carefully distinguished from the motivations of what he described as Washington\u2019s \u201cbandit-style\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Beijing will seek to learn from the mistakes of American interventionism.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University and one of China\u2019s 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 \u201cpeace disease\u201d\u2014a 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\u2019s telling, rising powers have rarely consolidated their position without at some point demonstrating their superior military power. Jin has consistently applauded China\u2019s 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\u2019s global ambitions.<\/p>\n

The day that U.S. forces struck Iran, Jin reposted a warning from an account linked to the People\u2019s Liberation Army that urged the Chinese people to be prepared for danger. He called on anyone suffering from this \u201cpeace disease\u201d 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: \u201cPeace is not bestowed by others, but earned through one\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Jin\u2019s 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\u2019s security establishment\u2014 from Chen\u2019s mobilization \u201cacross the entire chain\u201d to Zheng\u2019s \u201cInterventionism 2.0\u201d and Jin\u2019s \u201cpeace disease\u201d\u2014forms 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.<\/p>\n

The Logic of Empire<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The rationale underlying the mobilization signaled by Chinese thinkers raises a question that cuts to the heart of China\u2019s identity: Can Beijing protect its expanding overseas interests without becoming the kind of interventionist power it has always defined itself against?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 1904 corollary asserted Washington\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It is not a matter of whether China should intervene abroad but when and how.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Beijing has watched Washington\u2019s global military infrastructure confer enormous advantage but, at the same time, surrender prestige and treasure in waging wars that yielded little strategic benefit\u2014above all in the Middle East, where two decades of intervention produced instability, blowback, and the erosion of American credibility. As Beijing shifts\u2014whether in name or in fact\u2014to a more interventionist posture, it will seek to learn from the mistakes of the American experience.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Read more The Illusion of Reciprocity<\/a><\/p>\n

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