In contemporary global politics, the rise of China is no longer a matter of debate; it is a fact that commentators, policymakers, and scholars confront daily. Increasingly, this rising power is cast as the principal challenger to the United States-dominated international order, whether through high-tech competition, military modernisation, or overt geopolitical rivalry. The familiar storyline predicts a straightforward replacement: one hegemon falls, another rises.
But that story may be misleading. What if the more important question is not who builds the bigger fleet or the fastest chip, but who quietly rewires the levers of the global system? Its factories, its finance, its rules? So that others find it ever harder to live without it? This article teases out that possibility and asks what it would mean if structural dependence, not blunt force, becomes the central instrument of power.
Without a shadow of a doubt, China’s economic growth and its integration into the world economy are the most discussed aspects. The growth of Beijing makes it too big to be ignored, and it makes complete use of this fact in order to maintain a balance of power with both its competitors and the nations that consider it an ally. In a traditional sense, China uses liberal methodologies to pursue realist goals.
Here’s how…
In competitive areas, such as trade relations with the USA and Western countries, China strategically controls supply chains and essential materials, which are crucial capital for developed economies.
China’s electronics production currently constitutes approximately one-third of the global total, and the nation possesses over 25-30% of the worldwide semiconductor manufacturing and assembly capacity (Lee, Tan, & Au, 2025). Furthermore, China has maintained its position as the foremost global market for semiconductor consumption for over ten years, representing more than 40% of the global semiconductor demand (IC Insights, 2023).
These structural linkages make rapid economic disengagement difficult for advanced economies whose firms remain heavily reliant on Chinese manufacturing ecosystems, thereby always keeping China at the negotiation table.
For countries that view China as a ‘strategic ally’, particularly developing nations, China employs a more penetrative approach. Infrastructure financing and large-scale development lending, particularly under initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative, provide loans, grants, and infrastructure that often tie recipient states to Chinese markets, technology standards, and financial institutions for extended periods.
In both advanced and developing economies, the core idea is that China, by becoming part of important production networks and long-term financial systems, creates an unequal dependence. This dependence then increases the economic and strategic costs of finding alternatives (Klimek, Baum, Gerschberger, & Hess, 2025).
Through this asymmetric relationship, China creates hegemonic leverage over developing nations as well as counterbalances states that consider China a strategic competitor. In this way, it effectively uses (liberal) methods of trade and cooperation to strategically balance power and maintain its hegemony (realist goals).
Consider Russia, where a growing portion of its bilateral trade with China is now transacted in yuan and rubles, especially following the imposition of Western sanctions that limited Russia’s access to dollar-denominated financial networks. As of 2024, 90% of trade settlement between these two nations was executed using their respective national currency (Interfax, 2024). This makes Russia economically dependent and naturally inclined towards China. This ensures that China gains a diplomatic upper hand over nations like India, which also has close diplomatic ties to Russia.
While this structural economic dependency of China is well noted, this is by no means the only way through which China tries to be a hegemon in the existing global order. China’s expansionist strategies align with neoclassical realist claims. Rose (1998) argued that systemic pressures interact with domestic narratives and state perceptions to produce foreign-policy choices aimed at restoring perceived historical status.
China’s attempt to rejuvenate itself after the “century of humiliation” narrative helps explain why territorial questions (borders, maritime claims, and Taiwan) retain outsized salience for Beijing. Yet China rarely engages in open-scale conflicts and mostly resorts to below-the-threshold tactics like maritime militia, lawfare, island building, and calibrated border pressure (Sarjito, 2024).
A plausible explanation behind this phenomenon is that China purposefully evades large-scale escalation to prevent counterbalancing efforts by countries like the USA, India, etc., as of now.
Simply put, China’s foreign policy works on two pivots: asymmetric economic dependence, which renders China too big to ignore, and, at the same time, strategic escalation, so that territoriality remains, yet it never leads to systematic bloc formation against China.
The key idea is the use of asymmetric economic dependence as penetration, which will reduce a state’s capacity to make decisions sovereignly due to the interconnectedness of its economy with China. Thus, China can influence those state policies or simply weaken them by using supply chains as chokepoints for that nation, swiftly cutting the risk of nations countering China.
Research indicates that Southeast Asian nations are often unwilling to take ‘tougher stances’ against China’s maritime and territorial claims due to the fear of economic loss. For example, countries like the Philippines and Vietnam have previously avoided retaliating against economic pressure during standoffs in the South China Sea (Asia Times, 2025).
However, this dual-pivot mechanism isn’t China’s ultimatum either. China continues to improve its defence technologies, raw power accumulation, etc. This underlines a very important phenomenon. China wants to and will eventually stand steadfast on its territorial expansion once every country is dependent enough on it not to oppose it.
China could use this twin pivot structure until what can be called the “structural decay of the anarchical world”. China will eventually directly or indirectly influence the economy of a country, lessening its state capability, thereby creating an easy path for territorial aggression. This replaces the anarchical sovereign structure of IR with that of unipolar dependence on a single nation, making sure no states rise up as a counterpose to China. This is a catharsis of not only the power-based anarchical order, or the bloc-based liberal institutionalism, but also the Eurocentric understanding of this discipline.
If this trajectory continues, the future global order may not simply witness the replacement of one hegemon by another but the emergence of a system where structural dependence on a single state itself becomes the primary instrument of power. An international system structured around economic dependence on Beijing.
References
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