The Frankenstein Monster China

How the West Created Its Own Strategic Challenger

When Richard Nixon (1913–1994), toward the end of his life, reflected on the opening to China with the words “We may have created a Frankenstein,” he captured a concern that would only much later become widespread in the West. What in 1972 appeared to be a bold and brilliant geopolitical move – balancing Moscow through Beijing – can in retrospect be interpreted as the first step in building up the power that today challenges the U.S.-led world order.

This is the story of how a tactical masterstroke in the Cold War evolved into a strategic headache in the post–Cold War era.

Two Chinas – A Revolution and an Exile

When Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in 1949, it was the culmination of a long civil war. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists retreated to Formosa – today’s Taiwan – where they continued to call themselves the Republic of China.

During the first decades of the Cold War, it was the Republic of China that represented “China” in the United Nations and held the permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The United States recognized Taipei, not Beijing. The communist regime in Beijing was diplomatically isolated from the Western world.

But early on it became clear that the People’s Republic was prepared to use military force to assert its role. In the Korean War (1950–1953), Chinese forces fought directly against U.S.-led UN troops. Ever since the Korean War, it has been China that has kept the North Korean terror regime alive. And China has similarly supported other authoritarian regimes.

Kissinger, Nixon and the Strategic Shift

In the early 1970s, everything changed. Through Henry Kissinger’s secret diplomacy and Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in 1972, relations were gradually normalized. (See “The Idea of a Reverse Kissinger.”) The motive was clear: to exploit the split between Beijing and Moscow in order to weaken the Soviet Union.

This was realpolitik of the classic kind. China was then poor, politically chaotic, and militarily inferior to the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Integrating Beijing into the international system seemed a manageable price to pay in order to gain advantages in the power game with the Kremlin.

In the autumn of 1971, the People’s Republic of China replaced the Republic of China in the United Nations and took over the seat on the Security Council just months after Kissinger’s legendary trip to Beijing. At the end of the 1970s, the United States formally recognized only Beijing under the so-called One China policy. The chess move of the Cold War had succeeded, but at the same time a long-term process had been set in motion that was not fully understood.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

When the fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an almost euphoric conviction arose in the West: history had acquired a direction. Communism was falling. The market economy and liberal democracy had prevailed.

I myself remember how self-evident it seemed in the early 1990s that the remaining communist regimes – in China, Cuba, and North Korea – would sooner or later follow the same path. Just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s, I had visited both East and West Berlin and seen the differences in prosperity. In 1992 I visited both South and North Korea and saw even greater contrasts. That a communist regime could compete with liberal democracies in prosperity was difficult to imagine. The assumption was simple: a communist system was not compatible with long-term economic prosperity. Therefore, communist regimes would also have to open up to a market economy. Economic liberalization would in turn sooner or later lead to political liberalization. This assumption proved to be one of the most fateful miscalculations in modern Western policy.

The Tiananmen Square Massacre

1989 is the landmark year of the winds of change and Die Wende. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev pursued his policies of glasnost and perestroika. Across the entire Eastern Bloc, cracks in the communist system began to appear.

That same year, Tiananmen Square in Beijing filled with students demanding reforms, openness, and a measure of political participation. While the wall fell in Europe, tanks rolled forward in China. What in the West was interpreted as the beginning of a global democratic wave became in Beijing a decision to the contrary: the Party’s power would never be put at risk. Yet this was something the West did not want to recognize.

In official Chinese historiography, the events surrounding Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, have been erased. The subject is entirely absent from national curricula and school textbooks, and the regime employs extensive censorship – including the blocking of search terms, date combinations, and related images – to prevent any public discussion or commemoration. The massacre and the denial of the massacre at Tiananmen Square did not, however, prevent the West from inviting China into global trade.

The WTO and Global Integration

Under Bill Clinton, the United States pushed to integrate China into the global economy. When China became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001, it was granted full access to global markets – while at the same time retaining its status as a developing country and thus the benefits intended for far weaker economies. Once again, the idea was strategic and reminiscent of Germany’s Ostpolitik – the belief in Wandel durch Handel: that trade would create mutual dependence, strengthen the middle class, and thereby gradually liberalize the system. (See “Finlandization Is Not an Option for Ukraine.”) Instead, we witnessed something entirely different.

China used its accession to rapidly build up industrial capacity, attract investment, copy technology, engage in industrial espionage, and gradually advance from low-cost production to high technology. At the same time, WTO rules were broken or stretched in ways that the West often tolerated – out of convenience or fear of trade conflicts. The Western world became dependent. (See “The Chinese World Order.”)

China became the world’s factory, but the relocation of industrial production to low-cost countries was not perceived as a problem in the West, which believed it had entered the post-industrial information society. At the turn of the millennium, parts of the West even displayed a near contempt for “smokestack industries.” Successful companies – and successful countries – were no longer to dirty their hands with steel, textiles, or electronics assembly. The future was believed to belong to services, software, intellectual property, brands, patents, and financial instruments. What was not understood was that whoever controls the factory floors also controls supply chains, material flows – and ultimately strategic power.

Belt and Road – Global Infrastructure as a Means of Power

One of the clearest expressions of this new ambition is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Officially, it is about trade, infrastructure, and development. In practice, it is a global network of ports, railways, highways, and energy projects linking Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America with China as the hub. Examples include port investments in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, railway corridors through Central Asia, and large loans to developing countries – often with Chinese companies as contractors.

Critics argue that this creates economic dependence and political influence. Infrastructure becomes geopolitics. Trade routes become spheres of influence. The Frankenstein monster grows – not through military conquest, but through financing.

The Technological Race – From Copying to Innovation

During the 2000s, China was long synonymous with copying and industrial espionage. But the picture has changed. Today Chinese companies compete at the forefront in areas such as 5G and telecommunications, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, electric vehicles, and battery technology.

This has led to direct tensions with the United States, particularly under Donald Trump and later under Joe Biden. Export controls on advanced semiconductors, restrictions on technology transfer, and efforts to relocate production away from China show that the conflict is now structural. It is about who sets the standards for the technologies of the future.

Military Buildup – From Regional Power to Global Actor

Parallel to its economic expansion, China has carried out rapid military modernization. Under Xi Jinping, the People’s Liberation Army has undergone extensive reforms, including investments in space and cyber capabilities and an increased presence in the South China Sea. The goal is clear: to be able to challenge U.S. military dominance in the Western Pacific and to prevent American involvement in a potential conflict over Taiwan.

This marks a decisive difference from China in the 1970s. Then, the country was a regional actor with limited resources. Today, it is a global power capable of projecting strength far beyond its borders.

Rare Earths and Structural Leverage

A clear example is control over rare earth elements (REE). Through long-term planning and strategic investments, China has established a dominant position in extraction and processing. This is not merely an economic issue but a geopolitical tool – a potential lever against countries whose high-tech industries depend on these materials.

It is here that the Frankenstein metaphor becomes particularly apt: the creation that was meant to serve a tactical purpose has grown strong, independent, and possessed of ambitions of its own.

The Party’s Goals

The Chinese Communist Party has never relinquished its monopoly on power. On the contrary, in recent years it has consolidated it. The goal is not necessarily global ideological revolution in the Maoist sense, but rather to secure the Party’s survival, restore China as a central great power, reduce dependence on the West, and gradually reshape the international order so that it better reflects Chinese interests.

The challenge to the U.S.-dominated world order is thus structural rather than rhetorical. It concerns technology, trade, financial systems, military capabilities, and norm-setting. (See “The Multipolar World.”)

Control Over the Individual

One of the greatest mistakes in Western analysis of China has been the assumption that economic liberalization would gradually soften the system. Yet alongside the expansion of the market economy, the Chinese Communist Party has strengthened its control over the most fundamental dimensions of society: identity, culture, and faith.

Under Xi Jinping, this control has become more ideologically explicit. The Party tolerates no loyalty that stands above or beside its own.

Re-education Camps in Xinjiang

In the western region of Xinjiang, this has become particularly evident. There, hundreds of thousands – according to some estimates over a million – Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been interned in re-education camps. Human rights organizations have documented mass surveillance, forced labor, indoctrination, religious restrictions, and the separation of children from their families.

Beijing’s official line is that these are measures against extremism and terrorism. Critics describe it as systematic cultural eradication. Regardless of terminology, it is a clear expression of the Party’s refusal to accept any collective identity that can compete with the state-defined Chinese identity.

Falun Gong – The Movement That Became the Regime’s Enemy

An earlier example is the persecution of Falun Gong. The movement, which combines meditation and moral teachings, grew rapidly during the 1990s and gathered millions of practitioners.

When the leadership in 1999 perceived the movement’s organizational independence as a threat, a comprehensive repression began, including mass arrests, labor camps, propaganda and smear campaigns, and systematic abuses. The central issue was not doctrine, but independence. An organization capable of mobilizing millions of people outside Party control was, by definition, unacceptable.

The Catholic Church – When the Party Wants to Appoint Bishops

The Catholic Church has found itself in an almost tragicomic situation. In Catholic tradition, bishops are ordained in apostolic succession and stand in communion with the Pope in Rome – not with worldly rulers. Yet in China, the Party has long demanded that religious communities be placed under state control. The result has been two parallel structures: a state-approved “patriotic” church and an underground church loyal to the Pope.

That an atheist communist party claims influence over the appointment of bishops is in itself an illustration of the system’s logic: no authority may stand beyond the Party’s reach.

Tibetan Buddhism – Who Owns Reincarnation?

Even more symbolically charged is the question of Tibetan Buddhism, sometimes referred to as Lamaism. The Communist Party does not content itself merely with ensuring that the head of Ganden Monastery – one of the most central monasteries of Tibetan Buddhism – is politically reliable and approved by the state. When the current Dalai Lama one day passes away, the question of his reincarnation will arise.

Beijing has already made clear that the state reserves the right to approve – in practice appoint – the next Dalai Lama. This means that a communist party administers the rebirth of a Bodhisattva. Behind the absurdity lies a consistent principle: even the transcendental must be subordinated to the state – or to the Chinese Communist Party.

A Pattern – Not Exceptions

Uyghurs, Tibetans, Christian house churches, Falun Gong practitioners – the cases differ in form but follow the same pattern: tolerance as long as loyalty is clear, integration into state-controlled structures, and repression when independence emerges.

These are not accidental excesses. They are expressions of a system in which the Party’s monopoly on power overrides all other norms – cultural, religious, or universal.

The Normative Dimension of the Rivalry

The conflict with the West runs deeper than trade and technology. It is also about the view of the human being. The Western model – however imperfect – is based on the idea of individual rights vis-à-vis the state. The Chinese party-state is built on the opposite principle: the primacy of the state over the individual.

It is this combination – economic dynamism, technological capability, military strength, and internal total control – that makes the Frankenstein metaphor so relevant. It is not merely a strong state. It is a state that has shown it can combine modernity with repression – and survive.

The Great Firewall of China

If the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century relied on informants, secret police, and physical fear, the Chinese system increasingly relies on algorithms, databases, and real-time surveillance.

The Great Firewall of China – the system of internet censorship – filters, blocks, and directs information flows. Global platforms are blocked or strictly controlled. Domestic alternatives operate under state supervision. Content deemed politically sensitive disappears quickly.

But it is not only about censorship; it is about architecture. Through facial recognition in public spaces, extensive camera surveillance, AI-based data analysis, biometric databases, and the integration of digital payment systems, communication, and identity, the state has created a system in which an individual’s movements, contacts, and expressions can in principle be mapped in real time. This is particularly evident in Xinjiang, where digital surveillance has been combined with physical control. Technology is not a supplement to repression – it is its enabler.

Social Credit and Behavioral Control

With the help of advanced information technology, China has introduced a social credit system that collects and uses data to reward or punish citizens’ behavior. Economic, legal, and administrative records have been interconnected to influence people’s ability to travel, obtain loans, start businesses, or access services.

This is a model of governance that goes beyond classical dictatorship. It is technocratic. It is data-driven. The Frankenstein monster does not only have muscles – it also has intelligence, at least artificial.

Surveillance Beyond Borders

Digital control does not necessarily stop at China’s borders. There are documented cases in which Chinese authorities have exerted pressure on diaspora groups, threatened relatives in the homeland to silence criticism abroad, and conducted cyber intrusions against academic institutions, companies, and government agencies in other countries.

In some cases, even non-Chinese citizens – researchers, journalists, activists – have been subjected to cyber surveillance or influence operations when their work has been perceived as harmful to Chinese interests. This means that the party-state’s security apparatus has in practice acquired a transnational dimension. Criticism of the regime can have consequences even outside its territory.

Western companies have sold surveillance technology to China, but China has developed a surveillance system without parallel in the West. At the same time, China exports parts of this technological infrastructure to other states. Chinese companies supply surveillance systems, telecommunications equipment, and smart city solutions to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

It is not only hardware that is exported – but a model of governance. In this way, digital authoritarianism becomes not only a Chinese phenomenon, but a potential global norm.

The New Totalitarianism

The Soviet Union was militarily dangerous but economically inefficient. China is economically dynamic and technologically advanced – while maintaining an authoritarian one-party system.

The combination of economic strength, technological innovation, military modernization, ideological discipline, and digital total surveillance creates a regime type that the dissidents of the twentieth century could scarcely have imagined. It is not a return to the past. It is a modernized variant of political control – compatible with globalization and high technology.

A Threat to American Hegemony – and to the Entire West

China is not necessarily an existential military threat to Europe. But it is a threat to American hegemony – and thus indirectly to the order upon which the peace and prosperity of the Western world have rested since 1945.

In its eagerness to win the Cold War and later in its belief in the end of history, the West underestimated the resilience of the communist system and overestimated its own attractiveness. Nixon’s late self-reflection that he may have helped create a monster appears more prescient than many realized when his reflections on a Frankenstein monster were published in a column by William Safire in The New York Times in 2000.

The Frankenstein Monster China is not a story of malevolent genius on Beijing’s part. It is equally a story of Western strategic short-sightedness, ideological hubris, and economic greed. It is also a reminder that geopolitical decisions often have consequences far beyond their original context.

The question is whether the West understands how China became a great power that challenges the Western order – and what that implies. Just as Victor Frankenstein could not control his creation, the West has lost its grip on the monster it helped bring to life – and must now live with the consequences.

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