China Wants More Than Power
That China has emerged as a rising great power challenging the West and American hegemony has become increasingly evident. What this actually means, however, is far less obvious. In the West, it is easy to assume that China’s ambitions are primarily about expanding trade, strengthening its economy, and increasing its military power. Yet China is increasingly talking about something else: discursive power. China seeks influence not only over territory, natural resources, trade, and technology, but also over how the world is described and understood. For this, there is an illuminating Chinese concept: huàyǔquán (话语权).
In analyses of Chinese strategy, huàyǔquán is commonly translated as discursive power or the power to shape the narrative. The concept refers to the ability to set the international agenda, define key concepts, shape narratives, and influence how others interpret world politics.
Over the past few decades, geopolitics has gradually evolved from a struggle over territory, natural resources, and markets into a struggle over narratives, framing, and concepts. In this development, China has systematically sought to strengthen its position. Its stated objective is to break what it sees as the West’s monopoly over global discourse and to shift the image of China from one defined by others to one defined by China itself.
From Hard Power to Narratives
Over the past few decades, China has made it a strategic priority to strengthen its international discursive power, guójì huàyǔquán (国际话语权), in order to increase its influence over how international affairs are described and understood, thereby challenging the West’s long-standing interpretive dominance. Discursive power is sometimes described as a form of soft power, but there are important differences between the Chinese concept of huàyǔquán and the way the West—particularly the United States—has traditionally exercised influence through attraction.
China’s external communication is built around a coherent strategic narrative that is adapted to different audiences. Put simply, it contrasts a Western-led order portrayed as unbalanced or outdated with an alternative vision in which China presents itself as a champion of equality, mutual respect, and a fairer international order.
Xi Jinping has described the objective as “accelerating the development of a Chinese discourse and narrative system” (加快构建中国话语和中国叙事体系). The ambition is therefore not merely to improve China’s international communication. It is to construct a coherent system of concepts and narratives through which the world can gradually be described and understood in terms other than those of the liberal Western tradition.
In international scholarship, this is sometimes discussed as geopolitical storytelling—the way great powers use narratives to legitimize their foreign policy. China’s ambition, however, goes beyond simply telling a different story. It seeks to establish an alternative conceptual framework through which the world itself can be described and understood.
Foucault and Discursive Power
Michel Foucault argued that power is exercised not only through coercion but also through language, knowledge, and institutions. China has taken this insight very seriously. Although the concept of huàyǔquán has its own Chinese origins, it closely resembles the kind of analysis of discursive power that Foucault developed in the West.
In the twenty-first century, geopolitical competition has increasingly come to include the struggle to shape the very framing of reality. Whoever is able to define concepts such as democracy, development, human rights, or the international order already exercises power. It is precisely this form of power that China seeks to capture through the concept of huàyǔquán.
If Western liberal universalism loses its taken-for-granted status internationally, its potential to function as an alternative narrative within China diminishes as well. China’s struggle over discourse can therefore be understood as an effort to protect the legitimising narrative on which the continued rule of the Communist Party rests.
China’s pursuit of discursive power is particularly aimed at shifting the discussion away from the Western binary of democracy versus authoritarian rule, which is often used to criticise the Chinese regime. Instead, it promotes a different binary: good governance versus bad governance.
Good Governance
By good governance, or liángzhèng (良政), Chinese policymakers mean a political system that delivers tangible results such as economic growth, poverty reduction, and national stability. The emphasis is therefore on output—what political scientists often call performance legitimacy. The term liángzhèng is frequently combined with shànzhì (善治), which may be translated as good administration or good governance. Together they form the expression liángzhèng shànzhì (良政善治). In English, however, the full expression is usually rendered simply as good governance.
When the term appears in Chinese policy documents, it does not imply separation of powers, free elections, political pluralism, or the protection of civil society. Instead, it refers to efficient, centralised, and results-oriented governance under the leadership of the Communist Party. The message to the outside world is that a political system that delivers prosperity and security for its citizens constitutes good governance—whether or not it conforms to Western democratic standards.
China also emphasises the principles of strict national sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. Unlike Western donors or institutions such as the World Bank, which often attach conditions relating to democratic reforms and human rights to loans or development assistance, China promotes a model in which good governance is equated with administrative efficiency, strong state capacity, and economic development.
A common interpretation in the West is that China employs the concept of good governance in its external communication as a tool of ideological self-defence and diplomatic influence. By presenting its own model as successful, Beijing seeks to normalise authoritarian governance in the international arena while simultaneously reinforcing its legitimacy at home.
China deliberately adopts established international terms such as good governance, democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, but fills them with distinctly Chinese meanings. By using the same English terminology, it narrows the linguistic distance between competing political models, making its message appear more familiar and acceptable in international institutions such as the United Nations. At the same time, it rejects the idea that the West possesses a monopoly on defining these concepts.
From Discursive Power to Tianxia
China’s pursuit of discursive power, or huàyǔquán, also involves promoting its own vision of world order and its own strategic narrative. Central to this vision is the concept of tianxia (天下). The Chinese philosopher and political theorist Zhao Tingyang is particularly known for reviving the concept, which is commonly translated as “all under heaven.” Tianxia is often contrasted with the Westphalian order established by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Whereas the Westphalian system is based on sovereign states, juridical equality, and territorial boundaries, tianxia emphasises hierarchy, a civilisational centre, and political order.
Historically, tianxia found institutional expression in the Chinese tributary system, in which political order rested less on territorial control than on recognition of a civilisational centre. Contemporary Chinese thinkers do not advocate restoring the tributary system as a political institution. Rather, tianxia serves as a philosophical reference point for imagining an alternative international order.
Neither tianxia nor the tributary system forms part of the official vocabulary of Chinese foreign policy today. Nevertheless, both concepts occupy an important place in contemporary Chinese intellectual debates seeking historical and philosophical alternatives to the Western international order. Many of the concepts employed in China’s official international discourse can therefore be understood as modern translations or reinterpretations of older Chinese ideas, even if this connection is rarely made explicit.
Xi Jinping rarely cites Zhao Tingyang and does not use tianxia as a central concept in official foreign policy. Zhao nevertheless provides one of the clearest philosophical articulations of a vision of world order whose essential features reappear in China’s official language of “a community with a shared future for mankind,” global governance, and a reformed international order.
Many of the ideas underlying Zhao’s formulation have their roots in the Confucian tradition, although the contemporary Chinese state seldom presents them explicitly as Confucianism in official policy documents. Concepts such as harmony, order, meritocracy, and moral leadership have long occupied central positions in Confucian thought and reappear today in modernised form within contemporary Chinese political rhetoric.
It is hardly a coincidence that China chose to name its international cultural centres the Confucius Institutes. The choice signalled an ambition not merely to promote Chinese language and culture abroad, but also to anchor China’s international identity in an older civilisational tradition.
Multipolarity and the Civilization-State
If tianxia describes the international order that China seeks to promote, the concept of the civilization-state describes the identity through which China legitimises its own role within that order. Tianxia is possible precisely because China does not primarily see itself as a nation-state but as a civilization-state. Even the official name of the People’s Republic, Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó (中华人民共和国), reflects this duality. The state defines itself not merely as a territory but as the political representative of Zhōnghuá, the Chinese civilisation. China’s self-understanding therefore rests, at least in part, on a civilisational identity that predates the Westphalian nation-state. Multipolarity, in this perspective, is not simply about the existence of multiple great powers. It is also about the coexistence of multiple civilisations, each entitled to define its own norms and institutions.
This strategic translation nevertheless leaves considerable room for interpretation. Concepts such as multipolarity, mutual respect, and the equality of civilisations can easily be understood in the West as expressions of pluralism and equality, while in the Chinese context they rest on partly different historical experiences and political objectives. It is precisely this semantic openness that makes the language particularly effective.
While China internationally defends the right of different civilisations to develop according to their own traditions, it simultaneously places increasing emphasis on forging a unified Chinese national identity within its own borders. The Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (中华人民共和国民族团结进步促进法), adopted on 12 March and entering into force on 1 July 2026, illustrates this dual logic. Internationally, China rejects Western claims to universal norms; domestically, the state increasingly seeks to integrate diverse ethnic and cultural communities into a single national narrative.
The law also illustrates how the Chinese leadership appears willing to prioritise internal cohesion and political control over its international reputation. From a Western perspective, the legislation risks further damaging China’s global image. From the perspective of the Chinese leadership, however, domestic stability carries greater weight. Many Western observers view China’s policies toward Tibetans and Uyghurs as forms of repression or internal colonialism. From Beijing’s perspective, by contrast, it is Western criticism of China’s internal organisation that represents a form of imperial interference.
China does not have to advance this language alone. Anti-imperialism has become a shared vocabulary employed by China and Russia, as well as by parts of the Islamic world and segments of the Western far left. Their objectives and worldviews differ substantially, yet they share a common adversary: what they portray as an imperialist West.
China’s critique of Western universalism has also drawn, at least in part, on Western intellectual traditions. Since the 1980s, Chinese scholars have studied postmodern philosophy and postcolonial theory in considerable depth. The early Chinese reception of postmodernism was strongly shaped by the American Marxist Fredric Jameson, whose lectures in China during the 1980s profoundly influenced subsequent intellectual debate. In the late 1980s, his ideas inspired elements of China’s intellectual opposition. After 4 June 1989, however, the same intellectual currents were increasingly employed to challenge Western claims to universal norms.
Within this intellectual framework, concepts such as human rights, democracy, and liberalism came to be interpreted not as universal values but as historically and culturally situated Western metanarratives. Combined with anti-imperialist arguments, this critique provided a powerful language through which Western claims to universal values could themselves be portrayed as expressions of cultural and political domination.
Like Xi Jinping’s China, Putin’s Russia increasingly presents itself as the representative of a distinct civilisation—the Russian World. Both advocate a multipolar international order. Their strategies, however, differ in important respects. Whereas Russia primarily seeks to undermine confidence in the liberal international order, China seeks gradually to establish an alternative conceptual language through which a new international order can be described and legitimised. Where Russia largely tears down, China attempts to build and redefine. Although the two countries differ in many respects, both demonstrate how control over narratives, concepts, and historical interpretation has become an increasingly important dimension of twenty-first-century great-power politics.
Together, concepts such as good governance, multipolarity, civilisation, and tianxia form an alternative political vocabulary through which China describes both the international order and its own place within it. The question, then, is why the need for such an alternative conceptual framework has become so central to today’s Chinese leadership.
The Need for Narrative Legitimacy
The ultimate struggle may not concern which country becomes the world’s largest economy—or even which possesses the strongest military. Rather, it concerns who gets to define what democracy, development, or international law actually mean. Whoever controls these concepts also exercises considerable influence over political reality. This is precisely why the struggle over discourse has become a central dimension of contemporary great-power politics.
From a Western perspective, the struggle over narratives and discourse is often understood as an effort to win support in the Global South, particularly within international organisations. For the Chinese leadership, however, international influence and global power serve a more fundamental purpose.
The struggle over discourse is not only about how the outside world perceives China. It is equally about which alternative stories the Chinese people are allowed to encounter. China’s pursuit of discursive power seeks to create an international intellectual climate in which the Communist Party’s own narrative appears both legitimate and self-evident. If liberal ideas no longer seem universally valid internationally, they are also less likely to appear as self-evident alternatives to China’s political system.
Under Xi Jinping, this process of legitimation has become increasingly personalised. As political power has become concentrated in Xi himself, and as earlier Communist Party norms of collective leadership and orderly succession have been weakened, the narrative of China’s civilisational rejuvenation has become closely associated with his personal leadership. Protecting the official narrative therefore becomes not only a matter of safeguarding the Party’s legitimacy but also of reinforcing Xi Jinping’s personal authority.
While Western societies have become increasingly sceptical of grand legitimising narratives, China under Xi Jinping has attempted to restore one. Economic development is presented not merely as an achievement in itself but as evidence that the historical rejuvenation of Chinese civilisation is already well underway.
In his influential report La Condition postmoderne, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard argued that the grand legitimising narratives of advanced information societies were gradually losing their authority, to be replaced by performance—efficiency, utility, and measurable results—as the principal source of legitimacy. China’s trajectory points toward a different possibility. Through advanced information technology and extensive control over the flow of information, the Chinese state seeks not to abandon performance-based legitimacy, but to integrate it into a new civilisational metanarrative.
Under Xi Jinping, China has gradually developed a strategic narrative that simultaneously functions as a new legitimising metanarrative. It not only defines China’s place in the world but also provides the Communist Party—and Xi Jinping himself—with historical and civilisational legitimacy.
The New Role of Information Technology
China’s strategy is not confined to official diplomacy or state-controlled media. In recent years, Chinese authorities and state-linked actors have also been associated with extensive digital influence operations, including the network commonly referred to in the West as Spamouflage or Dragonbridge. Their objective has not merely been to promote positive messages about China, but also to undermine critical narratives, influence international public opinion, and reinforce the alternative narratives that China seeks to establish.
Whereas Lyotard argued that information technology contributed to the erosion of the grand legitimising narratives of the West, the Chinese state appears to be using the same technological developments for the opposite purpose: to reconstruct a coherent narrative of the nation, civilisation, and the Party’s historical mission through digital communication, education, information control, AI-based language models, and digital information systems.
Technological change has also transformed the very foundations of discursive power. Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) make it possible to produce and adapt messages on a scale previously unimaginable. State-supported information campaigns can now generate vast amounts of news-like content in multiple languages, while China’s own language models are increasingly trained to reproduce Chinese political and ideological perspectives.
The struggle over discourse is therefore no longer confined to media and diplomacy. It also concerns who will shape the digital knowledge infrastructure of the future. The same development is reflected institutionally in China's efforts to establish new international bodies for AI cooperation and governance, such as the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), formally established through an agreement signed by 29 countries in Shanghai on 16 July 2026. AI governance thus becomes yet another arena in which China seeks to formulate alternative international norms and institutions.
Information influence has consequently become increasingly cybernetic, in the sense that messages are continuously produced, distributed, measured, and refined through feedback from users’ behaviour. With generative AI and LLMs, this adaptive process can now be automated on an unprecedented scale.
If China’s effort to construct its own system of discourse and narrative ultimately succeeds, the crucial question will not be how the West describes China. Rather, it will be whether the Chinese state can establish an international intellectual environment in which its own narrative appears legitimate—not least to its own citizens. The struggle over global discourse is therefore, at its core, not about how the West perceives China, but about whether China can continue to legitimise its own political system before its own people.