How Beijing is reshaping the global order from within — preserving institutions while rewriting the norms that animate them
China is best understood not as a revolutionary challenger seeking to overthrow the existing international order, but as a selective revisionist power aiming to reshape it from within — preserving institutional foundations while redefining their normative content.
In September 2025, Xi Jinping launched the Global Governance Initiative (GGI) — the fourth in a series of global initiatives since 2021. This came amid intensifying US–China competition and a turbulent shift in American policy under President Trump's second term.
Launched at the UN General Assembly, linked to UN Sustainable Development Goals. Focuses on addressing the global development deficit.
Emphasises sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-interference, and "taking legitimate security concerns of all countries seriously."
Advocates "diversity of civilisations" and civilisational interpretations of values — reframing universal human rights through a cultural lens.
Announced at the SCO summit in Tianjin. Elevates sovereign equality as "the most important norm governing state-to-state relations."
The balance of power that underpinned the post–Cold War order has shifted. While the US remains the preeminent military power, China has narrowed the gap in comprehensive national power.
Globalisation created deep structural imbalances — the concentration of manufacturing in China alongside deindustrialisation across much of the Western world.
Economic dislocations and immigration have fuelled nativism, populism, and anti-globalisation politics across Western societies.
Innovation is outpacing adaptation. Control over compute, algorithms, data, and network infrastructure is becoming a critical determinant of power.
To understand how Beijing thinks about world order, the chapter separates it into two dimensions: the institutional order and the normative order. This distinction reveals a crucial pattern in China's behaviour.
The visible architecture of global governance
The animating principles and values
If institutions provide the visible architecture of order, norms are the animating force that gives it purpose, direction, and legitimacy. They are the currents that flow through the system's foundations.
Beijing sees a world undergoing "great transformation," with the balance of power shifting East. This creates what Xi described as an era where "strategic opportunities, risks, and challenges are concurrent."
Hostile environment strengthens calls for inward consolidation and self-strengthening
Long-term prosperity remains tied to the global economy and deeper integration
This duality — between inward consolidation and outward openness — lies at the heart of China's contemporary grand strategy.
The Chinese leadership identifies four interrelated deficits as the principal sources of global instability:
China's approach to institutions is three-pronged: expand influence within existing bodies, sustain the post-WWII architecture, and build parallel platforms. The goal is not replacement but augmentation.
Enhance legitimacy and authority within existing institutions as a great power.
Recognise that the post-WWII institutional framework serves China's strategic interests and global stability.
Advance specific objectives and cultivate coalitions supporting its governance reform agenda.
This is where China's revisionism is most pronounced. Rather than simply rejecting liberal norms, Beijing engages in sustained norm entrepreneurship — redefining meanings, selectively adhering, and promoting alternative frameworks.
Beijing generally supports sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-interference — but is willing to dilute or circumvent them when they conflict with core interests.
Expansive maritime claims, artificial island-building, and incursions into other countries' EEZs — contradicting professed commitment to territorial integrity.
The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor traverses Indian territory occupied by Pakistan, raising concerns about sovereignty violations.
"Legitimate security concerns" framing dilutes Ukraine's sovereign right to choose its security alignments — serving Beijing's interest in weakening NATO.
In Sri Lanka, Nepal, Cambodia and others, Chinese financing has shaped elite decision-making, blurring external partnership and internal influence.
This is the frontier of China's norm entrepreneurship. Three domains illustrate the pattern:
"Open, fair, equitable and non-discriminatory" economic environment
Selective openness and increasing securitisation. Preferential treatment for domestic firms, strategic use of market access, export controls on rare earths (Oct 2025), and supply chain security regulations (Apr 2026) threatening countermeasures.
The GCI reframes universal human rights through three key shifts:
Democracy is about governance efficiency and development outcomes — not transparency, free elections, separation of powers, or individual rights.
Performance-based legitimacy replaces institutional accountability. The legitimacy of a system derives from material delivery rather than political participation.
Rejected Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling as "null and void" while continuing island-building
Widely seen as undermining obligations under the Sino-British Joint Declaration
Persistent concerns over subsidies and market distortions
Policies draw sustained criticism for contravening international human rights norms
China's strategy reflects a calibrated effort to redefine the rules of the system without dismantling its institutional foundations. Beijing remains deeply invested in the post-WWII architecture — the UN system and Bretton Woods institutions — which it leverages for legitimacy, influence, and stability.
But in the normative domain, through initiatives like BRI, GDI, GSI, GCI, and GGI, Beijing is engaging in sustained norm entrepreneurship — reinterpreting, diluting, or replacing elements of the liberal order while broadly endorsing Westphalian norms. The result is not a parallel order, but a transformed one: the same institutions, animated by different values.
"To reform and improve global governance does not mean to overturn the existing international order or to create another framework outside the current international system."
— GGI Concept Paper, 2025
The question is not whether China will break the existing system. It is whether the system will still mean the same thing once China has finished reshaping its normative foundations.
First articulated by Xi Jinping in 2013, the "Community with a Shared Future for Mankind" (sometimes translated as Community of Common Destiny, or CCD) is China's signature foreign policy concept — a vision of a world where nations' interests, security, and development are interwoven. It is framed as an alternative to what Beijing sees as a zero-sum, bloc-based liberal order.
Officially, the Chinese government has said that over 40 countries and regional organizations have partnered with China in establishing CCD mechanisms.
Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China
Click any highlighted country to open its bilateral CCD source document. Regional groupings are listed below the map.
Leading Chinese scholars and strategists are actively debating the contours of a fragmenting global order. Their arguments reveal the intellectual currents shaping Beijing's policy thinking.
Source: GDI Progress Report (September 2025), FMPRC
Sources: GSI Concept Paper (Feb 2023); SIPRI Yearbook 2025; IISS (Oct 2024)
Source: Xi Jinping's keynote at CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties (March 2023)
Source: GGI Concept Paper (September 2025), FMPRC
Source: Sinification — Chinese Debates on a Fragmenting World Order