What are China's global ambitions, and how is it pursuing them under Xi Jinping? In this meticulously documented account of China's actions over the past decade in global politics, Elizabeth Economy argues that Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership seek to “reorder the world order” (p. 2) by challenging the values, norms and institutions that underpin the US-led liberal global order. Gaining “reunification” with Taiwan and pre-eminence in East Asia are often cited as China's security objectives. Economy claims that China also seeks to supplant regimes of global governance by presenting alternatives to the liberal order that America and its allies have enshrined in international law and institutions. Benign-sounding ambiguities issued from Beijing to pursue “a community of common destiny for all humankind” have the potential to bring “radical change in the values currently expressed in international institutions on issues such as human rights, internet governance, and trade and investment” (p. 9).

Economy, a prominent China scholar and policymaking insider whose 2018 book chronicled China's “third revolution” under Xi Jinping, now serves as an advisor to the US Commerce Department in the Biden Administration. Her implicit advice to those puzzling over China's intentions as a global power is to look at China's actions more than its words as it pursues what she terms a “global governance gambit” (p. 171). In a fascinating chapter detailing this strategy, she documents China's approach to global forums on human rights; on resource sharing in the Arctic; on cyber-governance and global technology standards; and on development finance. Across the cases, a pattern emerges in which China influences institutions of global governance by placing Chinese officials in leadership positions of multilateral agencies, by stacking experts’ committees with those who will take China's position, and by strong-arming weaker countries represented in such global forums.

But China's bid to upend and replace the liberal global order is far from assured. The methods China has deployed to pursue its global objectives – combinations of soft power, sharp power and coercion – have triggered a backlash against China among the governments and people it seeks to influence. (Most chapters include illuminating interviews with key actors and targets of Chinese influence, from officials managing China's ports and infrastructure investments in Greece to a Hollywood executive at the frontlines of Chinese efforts to influence the content of American films.) The book opens with an account of the “diplomatic debacle” that occurred with China's initial responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, including a triumphalist narrative in which it sought to bestow aid to vulnerable countries and then to compel statements of gratitude from them. China's handling of the pandemic showed the world a “concerning picture” (p. 9) of how Chinese global leadership would look. The book was published before China suffered even greater reputational damage as the world witnessed shocking scenes of food scarcity and coercive lockdown measures in Shanghai and other cities in the spring of 2022.

A concluding chapter calls for a better calibration of America's China policy that takes into account China's challenges to the global order as well as the vulnerabilities that have been exposed in China's global strategy. Calling China a “strategic competitor” to be countered and contained – first adopted by the Trump administration and basically renewed under President Biden – is counterproductive, Economy argues. For the rest of the world, such a framing converts a global concern over China's influence into a bipolar conflict, forcing them to choose sides. America's China policy, Economy asserts, will be more effective if it is “not about China” but about the defence of the rules-based international order. But how satisfied are states in the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America and Africa with the America's leadership role in global governance, or more recently the lack thereof (i.e. “the world according to America”)? As the Biden administration mobilizes European allies to confront and sanction Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, it has the potential to rally global support for basic principles of international law regarding territorial integrity of states. But it has undercut this potential by framing the conflict as a battle between democracy and dictatorship.

One question raised by The World According to China is the extent to which Xi Jinping has pushed this assertive challenge to global governance norms, underpinned by the assumptions of America in decline and a rising China with legitimate claims to alter the US-led global order. For the near and medium-term, Xi's ambitions will be China's ambitions. But as Economy demonstrates in this highly readable account, China's actions in global forums (more than its words) can reveal continuities and shifts as it either ramps up or reins in efforts to “reorder the world order.”