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Tony Zhao

China has spent years articulating its preferred principles for the world order. In June, it went a step further, bringing many of them together in a white paper on global governance and setting out how its Global Governance Initiative should translate principles into practice. Two ambitions sat side by side: an “equal and orderly multipolar world” and a “universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalisation”.
The timing is telling. World leaders will gather in New York this month for the 81st United Nations General Assembly under the theme “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation”.
The difficult word in China’s formulation is no longer “multipolar”; it is “orderly”.
Multipolarity itself is becoming easier to imagine. Middle powers increasingly hedge rather than choose sides, seeking more room to bargain among multiple centres of power. Such diffusion of power, however, is far from the natural company of order.
The post-Cold War era was once sustained by an expectation that deeper economic integration would narrow political differences. Francis Fukuyama gave the idea perhaps its most famous expression. Today, if anything has ended, it is not history but the very confidence that history has a single political destination.
The problem of the emerging order is therefore not convergence, but sustained coexistence.




China is central to this question. Its vision for a multipolar world rests ultimately on the consequential proposition that countries fundamentally different can nevertheless stay economically connected and coexist peacefully.
Beijing has good reason to want this to succeed. A more diffused distribution of power could enlarge China’s strategic room for manoeuvre, giving other states more space to engage with Beijing without entering its orbit. But the erosion of hierarchy and the erosion of order are not the same thing: China may benefit from the first while becoming increasingly vulnerable to the second. This relates to the political economy of Chinese power.
Major disorder hurts both China and the US. Insecurity, however, changes what types of power are more valued. When governments worry more about war, coercion and physical security, alliances, intelligence networks and security guarantees become more valuable. These are areas of exceptional American strength.
Much of China’s influence travels through a rather different portfolio: manufacturing, trade, infrastructure, ports, commodity flows, investment and supply chains. These assets work best when sea lanes are safe, markets remain open and political risk is contained.
A dangerous world places a premium on protection. A stable world places a premium on connectivity.


Ukraine has shown how prolonged conflict can harden security alignments. The turmoil around the Strait of Hormuz illustrates the commercial side of the same problem even more directly. China has repeatedly called for the restoration of safe and free passage through the strait, describing it as an interest shared by the international community, including – notably – itself.
For China, insecurity in a major energy and shipping artery places a geopolitical tax on the networks through which its power travels. It consequently has a material interest in preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of a more multipolar world.
The Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement in 2023 offers a preliminary indication of what a different approach could look like. But one diplomatic breakthrough does not constitute a durable order. Restored Saudi-Iranian relations did not produce an architecture capable of containing a wider war. A communique signed in Beijing is one thing. Building institutions that survive the next crisis is another.
China itself appears increasingly conscious of this gap. Foreign Minister Wang Yi has argued that repeated turmoil should prompt regional states to explore a new regional security architecture. The harder question is what such an architecture would actually do.
Beijing already possesses an extensive vocabulary for its preferred international order. What remains less developed is the connective tissue between them: freedom of navigation could come into tension with sovereign discretion; non-interference may limit serious efforts at mediation; strategic autonomy may strengthen smaller states’ bargaining power while making trade and investment less predictable. Saying that all these principles matter does not by itself explain how an orderly system should respond when they collide.
That is the missing middle between world view and practice – and the starting point for institutional design.

China could treat global connectivity itself more explicitly as a public good, keeping commercial shipping, energy flows and civilian supply chains functioning when politics deteriorates. This need not require China to reproduce the network of bases, alliances and security guarantees associated with American primacy. The more interesting question is whether Beijing could help devise institutions that perform some of the stabilising functions of hierarchy without reproducing hierarchy itself.
China has long asked the world to see it as peace-loving. In a more fragmented age, that will no longer be sufficient. It must also show that it is peace-benefiting: that the sources of Chinese prosperity and influence give Beijing a material stake in international stability.
Increasingly, it will also have to become peacemaking – capable not simply of helping governments reach agreements, but of helping create the mechanisms through which agreements can withstand the next shock.
The post-Cold War era imagined that convergence would make peaceful coexistence easier. China now has the opportunity – and the interest – to demonstrate something harder: that a world which does not converge might still remain safe and orderly.
If it can do so, the strongest argument for multipolarity will certainly not be that it weakens American power. It will be that international order can endure without depending on any single power’s dominance.


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To translate its well-articulated vision into practice, Beijing must flesh out concrete mechanics, starting with institutional design


To translate its well-articulated vision into practice, Beijing must flesh out concrete mechanics, starting with institutional design.


China’s multipolar world order must prove it can be peaceful

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}To translate its well-articulated vision into practice, Beijing must flesh out concrete mechanics, starting with institutional design

To translate its well-articulated vision into practice, Beijing must flesh out concrete mechanics, starting with institutional design