Image: Source: Photo by Marin Tulard on Unsplash
Can China Lead the Next Order?
A global shift is unfolding before our eyes. It is fast, raw, and likely irreversible.
The post-war order that defined the twentieth century is crumbling under its own contradictions, and new forces are pushing through the cracks. For decades, the West assumed the world would run on its terms but that assumption is slowly collapsing.
China, long content to bide its time and build its strength, has stopped waiting and it is no longer a quiet participant but acting more like an impatient contender for the top seat. After forty years of compounding power, Beijing seems confident enough to challenge Washington directly.
"Yet confidence is not the same as readiness and one must not forget that, power lies not only in factories or output but on the structures that has the capacity to endure risk, maintain alliances, command legitimacy, preserve independence, and inspire trust and that is where the real contest for the next world order begins."
China’s economic rise has been staggering, in 1980, its nominal GDP was about US $190 billion, smaller than Italy’s roughly US $480 billion and by 2024, it accounted for roughly 18–19% of global GDP (IMF data).
China produces roughly 30% of the world’s manufactured goods, refines around 70–80% of global rare-earth elements, and holds leading positions in solar panel production, 5G infrastructure, and electric vehicles and this dominance makes much of the global economy, including major powers, deeply dependent on Chinese manufacturing and supply chains.
Yet structural weaknesses persists within China and growth has slowed to around 5% and i remember reading about the youth unemployment data, which was climbing before the data releases were suspended, all this together with the working-age population which has been shrinking since 2015.
China has also made significant progress in transitioning toward renewable energy as part of its strategy to navigate the Malacca dilemma. Unfortunately, while the Straits of Lombok and Sunda offer potential alternatives to the Strait of Malacca, they are either impractical or unprofitable for now.
Around 80 % of China’s crude-oil imports still transit the Strait of Malacca, exposing Beijing to a major strategic vulnerability and how China manages this chokepoint risk remains to be seen.
Another question that i keep asking myself is, if the Chinese public ready to see body bags return home in case Beijing enters a direct confrontation for global dominance? Unfortunately, the legacy of the one-child policy means many families could lose their only child.
"So i ask myself, is China’s current impatience a preemptive reach for power before demographic decline limits its strength?"
Add to all this, China’s mounting real-estate debt is estimated at roughly 25–30% of GDP and the ballooning local government and off-balance-sheet liabilities, which may reach 50–60% of GDP when broadly measured, adding further strain to the economy.
Still, China’s challenges do not make it any less of a formidable contender and it remains one of the world’s oldest continuous civilisations and has made immense contributions to human progress.
However, certain recent developments cannot be ignored. China’s dismissal of numerous CCP officials suggests signs of an internal purge, though the reasons remain unclear or highly speculative. Moreover, it is yet to be seen how Chinese weapons perform in real war scenarios, which would provide a clearer perspective on its military capabilities.
So the real question is not just whether China is confident, but what durable structures it has built to project power and sustain that confidence. So far, there is little evidence of this.
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Understanding World Order
To understand this shuffle, we must ask what a World Order truly is. Professor John Mearsheimer calls it a collection of institutions working in tandem with each other.
"The world doesn’t run on slogans but on institutions of trade, energy, finance, and security, and whoever controls the institutions that govern these, the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO, SWIFT, and their modern equivalents, effectively writes the rules."
Today, we live within an American or more broadly, Western-led world order. Global security institutions like the UN, financial arteries such as SWIFT, and the dominant trade networks and energy flows all originate from and remain under Western influence and protection.
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A Short history
For simplicity, I’m not delving into every earlier world order predating the Islamic period, though several pre-Islamic civilisations built formidable systems of power and exchange such as the powerful Hindu and Buddhist empires dominated much of South and Southeast Asia, extending their reach from the Indian subcontinent to Sumatra, Java, and Thailand. Their cultural and philosophical influence still echoes across Asia. One can see it in the art, language, and even traces within Japan’s Shinto thought in the Far East. But that is a larger story.
The Islamic caliphates that followed created a civilisational framework linking commerce, scholarship, and governance from Spain to Central Asia and it was a genuine world order in its own right.
Their scientific engine ran on synthesis: Greek philosophy, Persian astronomy, and Indian mathematics. The early Indian works by Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, translated into Arabic during the Abbasid period, shaped Al-Khwarizmi’s development of algebra and numerical systems. Additionally Indian astronomical tables likewise merged into Arabic zij compilations, creating an integrated body of knowledge that later flowed into Europe through the translation networks of Toledo and Sicily.
"By the thirteenth century, the great caliphates had fractured and the Invasions shattered cities and trade routes, while growing theological rigidity curbed the spirit of open inquiry in some regions, yet the intellectual corpus they had built did not vanish completely but simply migrated."
Through various translation centres, science, mathematics, and philosophy seeped into Europe’s universities and merchant cities, and over time, this diffusion of knowledge helped lay the foundations for the modern West we see today.
Europe’s ascent was born of desperation, curiosity, and an entrepreneurial spirit. After being cut off from costly overland trade routes dominated by the Ottomans, small maritime kingdoms turned seaward. Here, innovations such as the Chinese compass, the Arab lateen sail, and the Portuguese caravel, a fusion of diverse technologies made the oceans navigable..
Further more, Italian bankers in Florence and Venice invented double-entry bookkeeping and sovereign credit, forging the architecture of modern finance.
"By the seventeenth century, European powers, Iberian then Dutch and English controlled the global flow of goods, gold, and ideas."
Centuries of expansion, however, came at a price. The two world wars ultimately bankrupted the Old World and shattered its empires. Structures may collapse, but the legacy of power endures, only the actors behind it change.
That role passed to the United States and at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, global finance was tied to the dollar, backed by gold. When rising expenditures made this system unsustainable, the Petrodollar Agreement under Nixon ensured that oil which is the lifeblood of modern economies, would be traded primarily in U.S. currency and this particular move cemented the United States as the dominant global power, giving it extraordinary financial leverage through its control over the dollar.
"America has built an empire without colonies and ruled through banks, trade routes, and bases and now possess some 750+ military installations abroad and a defence budget approaching US $900+ billion and commands both the map and the narrative of the modern world."
The American Century promised prosperity through liberalism and globalisation and, for a time, it delivered, well atleast to the selected few.
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Cracks in the American-led Order
The foundations of the Western order are beginning to strain, one can see that in the institutions that were once designed to provide stability now often generate dependency. Between 1980 and 2020, roughly 70% of IMF loans required borrowing nations to cut public spending or privatise industries, these measures sometimes restored short-term balance but often choked long-term growth, leaving countries trapped between debt obligations and weakened state capacity.
"Global trade rules have deepened this imbalance and the Global South still tends to export raw materials and import high-value goods and the profits flow north. The pattern we see today is structural, not conspiratorial, it’s how the system was built."
When the U.S. Federal Reserve raises interest rates, investors shift their money into safer, higher-yielding dollar assets and that surge in demand strengthens the dollar but drains capital from emerging markets. As funds flow out, local currencies weaken, dollar-denominated debts grow heavier, and imports for developing nations become more expensive.
It must be also noted that the Fed’s mandate is first and foremost to control American inflation, not global fairness, yet its decisions ripple across continents, reinforcing a world where financial power tilts toward the dollar and those who control it. I see dollar’s reserve status not as a plot but more of a structural bias, an imbalance embedded deep in the plumbing of global finance.
Then came COVID-19, and the mask slipped and showed us another crack in the order and we saw how the wealthy western states hoarded vaccines while poorer nations waited months for basic doses and if that wasn’t enough, we saw how during the Russia–Ukraine war, the order in charge froze about $300 billion in Russian reserves, one of the largest financial sanctions in modern history.
"The message was clear, the west controls the dollar and it could also be used as a weapon and that realisation further reduced global trust in the US-led order."
The consequences followed quickly and according to IMF COFER data, within a year, central banks in emerging markets cut their dollar holdings by roughly 8% points, shifting instead into gold. But to be precise here, i must add that the dollar still accounts for about 58% of global reserves which is down from 71% in 1999 but nevertheless, its perception of neutrality has cracked a bit.
After decades of regime changes globally, covert interventions, arm twisting and resource extraction carried out under the banner of US-led order, global fatigue and skepticism are setting in.
"In Africa and beyond, many now ask: how can the most resource-rich continent on Earth remain poor and unstable? What invisible logic sustains this? Why do internal conflicts and wars seem never-ending in and around the Global South? What forces create such a vast imbalance of power? Why does the number of NGOs increase every year, while prosperity still seems out of reach? What, exactly, is happening?"
Even in the United States, leading scholars sense the strain, on one hand we have the Realists who see a world divided into competing spheres of influence while idealists imagine overlapping spheres of security. In my opinion, both schools miss the deeper fault line and they both just try to patch the structure without repairing the foundation. Both the parties are more interested in defining what is happening rather than coming up ideas on solving the deeper problems that lies in the society.
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The Tell Signs
Trust is the hidden currency of any world order, and it’s leaking fast. Many actions have eroded global trust in the vast Western-led system. One can see how Saudi Arabia and China now settle part of their oil trade in yuan, meanwhile India pays for some Russian energy in rupees. Additionally, more than 40 nations including countries in Europe have applied or expressed interest in joining BRICS, hoping to shield themselves, at least partly from dollar risk, yet again i must add that scale matters here, rather than sentiment.
We know that BRICS-denominated trade makes up around 3% of global settlements, and the renminbi accounts for just 4.5% of international payments compared with the dollar’s 46% (SWIFT, 2024), so one can see that the movement is symbolically powerful but materially still very limited.
"More importantly, China’s currency is not fully convertible on the capital account, and that is a major reason why renminbi use remains constrained in global finance. so for now, de-dollarisation is diversification, not replacement."
Across Africa, assertion is also clearly visible with countries like Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso expelling French troops and reopening mining contracts on their own terms. Meanwhile, the United States faces its own structural stress with federal debt crossing US $39 trillion and the interest payments now exceed spending on both defence and Medicare (CFR, 2024).
"As for the war in the Middle East, it could increase global reliance on major energy and fertiliser exporters, including the United States and Russia, but any claim that this would financially “save” the American empire or restore trust in the dollar goes well beyond what the evidence can firmly support."
Having said all that, one must also face the facts: the dollar’s network effects remain formidable. It still dominates international banking, bond markets, and foreign exchange, while the latest data show that the dollar and euro together account for more than 80% of global trade invoicing.
Decline, for the U.S., in my opinion is relative not absolute and it remains the world’s largest innovation hub and productivity anchor. One must remember what historian Paul Kennedy said in his book: The rise and fall of the great powers about what happens to the nations when ambition outpaces resources. Something we are seeing today happening as well, how US being highly dependent on China even for its defence while being stretched all over the world.
"The rivals of the Western-led order are pressing forward, but each faces limits of its own. For example, China’s energy dependence and internal conflicts, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and India’s infrastructure deficits all constrain their ascent. These countries have to get serious and work smart in order to have their say in the future order."
Multipolarity is inevitable, but it won’t arrive overnight, it will take time, leverage, and persistence while the Western bloc uses tariffs, sanctions, and other extracurricular activities to slow the shift.
What seems to be emerging is not a single replacement but a collection of power, one can see it in:
- China’s manufacturing base,
- India’s vast internal market, demographic and defence momentum, and
- Russia’s resources and ambition.
During the pandemic, it was India not the West that exported vaccines to more than 90 countries, an inversion of old aid hierarchies.
"The next world order will be multipolar and negotiated rather than imposed, it is bound to be messy, competitive, and unpredictable but also more reflective of the planet as it truly is. One must not forget that the American order is not yet gone, and the new one is not yet born and we are living in the dangerous middle, a kind of a churn between eras. Instability will certainly follow, but so will new relations."
From history , we know that power transitions rarely happen peacefully and therefore war is inevitable, the strong will certainly assert itself and the challengers will push back, and in the noise between them, a new world order will come forth.
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Conclusion
Power, like all things, shifts, decays, and reforms and the global order is no exception to that, one order will rise, another will fall but in time, each fades into memory.
Change is the most fundamental property of matter and of everything made from it and therefore the current world order will also not last forever and nor does any other order. Transformation in world politics in my opinion is never sudden, nor does it follow a schedule, it unfolds quietly, through crises, corrections, and rebalances of strength and the inevitability of change is already in motion.
"Geopolitics, like all human constructs, is a passing film projected onto the surface of a much larger reality. We take it seriously, we build theories around it, we act through it, yet the Western thinkers who shaped the Western-led world order, they have already faded, and their ideas will follow, just as every empire has."
The Earth, the vast universe, will endure these punitive, insignificant shifts. It owes no allegiance to our ambitions, nor to the child’s play we call global power politics. What causes the churn can be speculative: for some, it is evil capitalism, for some, it is eschatological, and for some, it is simply the enjoyment of chaos.