This book has engaged debates about China as a risen, global power. Bringing together work in China Studies with scholarship from the ‘international disciplines’, it offers a critical analysis of the interplay of Chinese official and scholarly views and Anglophone discussions. By critiquing three dominant narratives of China – the return of geopolitics, contesting liberal order and collaborative governance – it highlights a much greater congruence between many Chinese and Anglophone Western perspectives than is found in most mainstream analyses, while exploring the implications and diversity of Chinese alternatives and ‘will to difference’. Moving beyond both ‘the quest for certainty rooted in the Western self-imagination’ (Pan, 2012, p 53) and existing binary ‘geo-narratives’ – market/state, east/west, authoritarian/liberal and fetishization of China's capitalist model as something entirely new requiring ‘radical countermeasures’ (Zhang and Lan, 2022, p 202) – requires us to take China seriously on its own terms as a distinctive entity but one whose visions emerge in dialectical relationships with many existing features of the international system and global order. There is deliberate tension or contradiction in this statement, a conclusion which emerges from the key insights of the ‘global China’ literature from which the book takes its title, and which underpins its analysis.

This concluding chapter summarizes the main findings and arguments of the book and comments briefly on some other contemporary policy themes which can shed further light on its conclusions.