‘China is an illiberal state seeking leadership in a liberal world order’ writes Elizabeth Economy (2018, p 17) in her book on China under Xi Jinping. This stark statement codes China as ‘illiberal’, in clear opposition to a ‘world order’ which is ‘liberal’. The implication of this and the claim that China is ‘seeking leadership’ is that ‘China’ desires not just a dominant position, but a world order which would be illiberal, not liberal.

There is perhaps more nuance in Economy's overall account, but this sentence reflects the second dominant framing identified in this book's debates of China, and one which has become a conventional wisdom in many Western discussions, particularly in policy research and advocacy. A similar formulation runs through a Foreign Affairs piece by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner (2018), the ‘Democratic Party foreign policy realists’ (McCourt, 2022, p 618) who went on to occupy key positions in the Biden administration's China team. Their core message was that ‘the liberal international order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected. China has instead pursued its own course, belying a range of American expectations in the process’. They argued that ‘greater commercial interaction with China was supposed to bring gradual but steady liberalization of the Chinese economy’ but ‘since the early years of this century, however, China's economic liberalization has stalled’ and ‘cooperative and voluntary mechanisms to pry open China's economy have by and large failed’.