‘The Dragon Roars Back’: How China’s Foreign Policy Is Reshaping Global Power

With the makings of a tariff war and heightened tensions between the United States and China, it’s uncertain what will happen in the coming months when it comes to the two world powers.

Amid these geopolitical tensions, we look to experts in foreign policy to help us make sense of what’s going on—and what could be next.

One of those experts is the University of Denver’s Suisheng Zhao, a professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and the executive director of Korbel’s Center for China-U.S. Cooperation (CCUSC). His 2024 book on the history of Chinese foreign policy, “The Dragon Roars Back: Transformational Leaders and Dynamics of Chinese Foreign Policy,” was named a best book of the year by Foreign Affairs magazine. 

The DU Newsroom caught up with Zhao to chat about his book and his take on U.S.-China relations.

How would you characterize Xi Jinping—the current leader of China—and his approach to foreign policy as compared to that of his predecessors?

He has a totally different leadership style. Mao Zedong had what I call “revolutionary foreign policy.”. He had China stand up against the foreign imperialist powers to make China independent. Deng Xiaoping's foreign policy was “developmental foreign policy”; he used foreign policy to serve China, [developed] economic modernization and economic development objectives to create a more peaceful regional and international environment. 

Xi Jinping has tried to, in his own words, make China powerful and strong. So, he has developed what he calls “Great Power” diplomacy. China behaves, under Xi Jinping’s leadership, just like the United States, a big power. [It] tries to expand influence globally, tries to protect and defend its expanded national interests, tries to redefine China’s relationships with its neighbors and also with the United States. To a great extent, it tries to compete with United States.

How has domestic public opinion influenced Chinese foreign policy?

Because China is an authoritarian, one-party state, public opinion has normally been shaped and manufactured by the state to serve its domestic and foreign policy agenda. 

Xi Jinping just tells the Chinese people what he wants them to know. For example, on the internet, he has built a very powerful firewall so that Chinese people only read and know what the government wants them to read and know, and he has mobilized Chinese people to support his foreign policy. And his foreign policy has become much more confrontational—it targets “evil Western power” and U.S. and Western values. He tells his people, “They don't want to see China rise. They will do anything to undermine China's rise.” 

What do you think the next four years will hold for the relationship between the U.S. and China?

It’s very, very difficult to make a prediction. Nobody can predict what will happen with Trump in the White House. But the trend has been very clear; these two big powers have been in a competition for the global leadership on three issues, basically.

The U.S. is the so-called “top dog” and tries to maintain that top dog position; China is a rising power and wants to become a peer of the U.S. Xi Jinping has talked about profound change—seeing a century in which the East is on the rise and the West is in decline, basically saying that China is rising, and the UK and the U.S. are in decline.

The second is competition. For quite a while, it was ideological competition, although ideological differences between these two countries have been there since the normalization of the relationship in the 1970s. After Xi Jinping came to office in last decade, China is now challenging the U.S. democracy to a certain extent. China emphasizes its own path of modernization, which is totally different from the liberal democratic path of modernization.

The third issue is the Taiwan issue. China, for quite a while, emphasized peaceful unification, but that has not worked well. Taiwan become democratic and China became authoritarian, and the U.S. also became more sympathetic to Taiwan—to Taiwan's democratic development—and the U.S. has increased support to Taiwan, both economically and diplomatically. Taiwan has been a very hot issue that could spark military confrontation between China and the U.S. But now that Trump has come into office, all this has changed. He does not care if the U.S. protects Taiwan or not.