The rise of China poses one of the defining questions for world peace: can a rising power be accommodated within the existing order, or must its ascent mean confrontation? Conventional dialogue offers Beijing a problematic dichotomy: either assimilate into the liberal international order (L.I.O.) and change its own political regime, or position itself as an aggressive challenger in the name of an alternative system. Fearing the latter, many voices in Western governments frame China’s engagement with liberal institutions as strategic and disingenuous. U.S. policy advisor Miles Yu dismisses Beijing’s rhetoric of “co-operation” and “win-win development” as a “veneer” for a drive to “reshape the world in its authoritarian image.” This fear finds theoretical cover in scholars such as Andrea Schneiker, whose typology of norm “saboteurs” offers a tempting label for a perceived Chinese threat.

This fear is not baseless: China is self-interested, and much of its engagement is strategic rather than sincere. However, this convenient framing problematically shapes the Western response directly, including attempts to contain China as a bad-faith rival through tariffs, technology export controls, and alliance-building such as the Quad and A.U.K.U.S. The post-World War order was largely Western-built and Western-serving, sustained by the U.S., G.7., I.M.F., and World Bank, so by default any challenger is read as Schneiker’s “saboteur.” The stakes are set, from the 2025 tariff war to the May 2026 Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, where the two powers both stressed “strategic stability” but shared no common definition of what it means in this new geopolitical arena.

An alternative reading reveals something more uncomfortable for the West. China is not rejecting liberal norms but wielding them; it is a norm entrepreneur whose sharpest tool is the West’s own inconsistency. Rather than rejecting liberal principles such as human rights or multilateralism, Beijing re-hierarchises them, prioritizing development, sovereignty, and social and economic rights above the civil and political rights that Western nations tend to promote. It does this from within the institutions rather than in opposition to them. China is certainly selective, willing to invoke sovereignty and the Charter when convenient and to ignore them elsewhere, but selective use is not the same as rejecting the order; it is proof it is playing inside it.

A key indicator of this is the phrase “community of shared future.” Since 2015, China has promoted this idea rather than universal values. In 2017, Beijing managed to get the phrase “community of shared future” into its first H.R.C. resolution titled “The Contribution of Development to the Enjoyment of All Human Rights.” By 2020, the U.N. Council adopted a resolution entitled “Promoting Mutually Beneficial Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights,” and later resolutions used Chinese sponsored language such as “shared future” and “mutually beneficial cooperation.” Xinyuan Dai and Lucie Lu, who analysed over 93,000 recommendations by states in the Universal Periodic Review between 2008 and 2021, concluded that there is “no evidence that China is seeking to overturn or abandon the international human rights order.”

The problem, therefore, is that the containment and often hostile reaction from the West, treating China as a bad-faith rival, gives Beijing the moral high ground. It backfires because it exposes a problematic gap; the West, especially the U.S., preaches a rules-based order while acting outside it. When the U.S. imposes unilateral tariffs, cuts funding to U.N. agencies, and withdraws from climate and humanitarian commitments, China can credibly cast itself as the true defender of multilateralism. This control and battle over discourse have significant historical precedent. Xi Jinping at the 19th Party Congress emphasised that China created “a new option for other countries … and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.” However, the present offers a live illustration: the U.S. in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz.

Both China and Russia used their Security Council votes to veto the Security Council Draft Resolution on the Strait of Hormuz presented by the Gulf States. Certainly, China may have ulterior motives for this, and Russia was condemned by the Ukrainian representative for being an “accomplice to Tehran’s ongoing illegal acts.” However, the explanation of the vote by Chinese Ambassador Fu Cong feeds into this ongoing pattern of Beijing and Washington fighting over the discourse of liberalism and China overcoming a notable challenge. The ambassador highlighted that the Israeli and American military strikes were in “clear violation of the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter and the basic norms of international relations.” Upon hearing the position of the U.S. representative, Ambassador Cong concluded that, “China’s position” is the one that reflects “the image of a responsible major country that upholds international fairness and justice.” The claim is, of course, skewed. Beijing invokes the Charter over Hormuz while shielding its own conduct, such as in the South China Sea.

Nonetheless, China gains credibility in its argument that “Civilian and non-military targets must be given necessary protection.” Months later in July 2026, Trump made comments on a Fox News interview, claiming, “We’re going to knock out all their [Iran’s] bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.” U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk responded that, “Under international law, deliberately attacking civilian and civilian infrastructure is a war crime.” The significance is not who is legally correct, but who now sounds like the defender of the rules. Washington finds itself cast as the aggressor against the very Charter it authored, while Beijing occupies the moral vocabulary the West once monopolised. The West is, in effect, being beaten with its own language, and its instinct to grip that language tighter only tightens the trap.

The solution is unlikely to come quickly, as it requires unlearning complicated habits and tendencies. However, peace, or at least, cooperation, will not come from winning the argument over who owns the rules and language of international liberalism, rights, and multilateralism, but rather by making this something that is genuinely shared. The counter-intuitive move is to relinquish ownership and instead compete on delivery.

Firstly, the primary goal of the U.S. and other Western nations must be to restore consistency. Authority will be rebuilt not by asserting the rules louder or in liberal forums, but by living up to them. This requires condemning Charter violations regardless of who commits them, including allies. If the West wants to invoke the Charter against Iran, it must accept the Charter’s judgement on unauthorised strikes, too.

Secondly, institutions must be reformed to suit the changing balance of the world and to answer the frustrations of countries, including B.R.I.C.S. nations. I.M.F. and World Bank voting weight for emerging economies or backing permanent U.N. Security Council seats is a strong starting point. The World Bank allocates shares and votes by a formula that gives most weight to a country’s G.D.P.; the US holds 16.09% and is the only country with a veto. By purchasing-power-parity, China’s G.D.P. is significantly bigger than the U.S.’s and second biggest at nominal exchange rates. It should rank number two, behind the U.S. but ahead of Japan. In terms of per capita, the inequalities in the I.M.F. are stark. Analysis from the Global Inequality database illustrates that in the I.M.F., “for every vote that a person in the U.S.A. has, a person in Kenya has one-twentieth of a vote, and a person in India has 1/25th of a vote.” Reform in these areas would help to remove accusations that the West hoards power in the L.I.O., allowing it to break its own rules. 

Lastly, rival forums should be turned into shared tables. Countries should engage with the B.R.I.C.S. Summit as a bridge to build on, as it is an organisation that arose to answer needs not sufficiently considered in the current system. The September 2026 New Delhi B.R.I.C.S. Summit could be a powerful opportunity to work with Southern powers and negotiate. The Carnegie Endowment has highlighted that there is equivocation as to whether B.R.I.C.S. signals a “turn against rather than simply away from the West.” B.R.I.C.S. has become an avenue some states find more responsive than the Western-dominated institutions. It is therefore the West’s responsibility to illustrate that it can work with B.R.I.C.S. nations and directly address the worries that are pushing nations to China’s often predatory loans.

In the last decade, China has learnt to speak the language of the liberal order better than some of its historical authors. They invoked both the “community of shared future” in the Human Rights Council while the West cut funding to the institutions it built and the U.N. Charter over the Strait of Hormuz while Washington threatened the very civilian infrastructure the Charter protects. If the West keeps gripping the vocabulary of liberalism as private property, it will keep being beaten with it, in Geneva and in the Gulf alike. If it shares authorship instead, applying the rules to itself, reforming the institutions that carry them, and meeting rising powers at the table rather than across a line, it may find that the order it fears losing is the one it finally makes durable.