Is China Waiting for the West to Collapse?

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 10 September 2026

There is an old expression, usually attributed somewhat vaguely to Chinese strategic wisdom, according to which a patient man should sit beside the river and wait for the bodies of his enemies to float past. Its provenance is considerably less certain than its popularity, but the image has become irresistible because it captures something Westerners have long imagined about Chinese statecraft. Europeans and Americans think in electoral cycles, quarterly economic figures and the frantic succession of crises generated by modern communications. China, by contrast, is supposed to think in decades, generations and dynasties. The conclusion is seductive. China does not need to defeat the West because, provided she remains patient, the West will eventually defeat itself.

There is a substantial truth concealed within this caricature, although not quite the one usually supposed. China is not obviously waiting for London to burn, Washington to descend into civil war or the European Union to disintegrate. Nor would any of these things necessarily be in China’s interests. She is waiting for something much more subtle and, from the Western perspective, perhaps more consequential: the passing of the historical period in which Western countries could assume that they occupied the natural centre of world affairs. Beijing does not require the collapse of Western civilisation. It requires only the collapse of Western predominance.

That is an altogether more plausible ambition.

China’s contemporary strategic identity is built around an unusual combination of revolutionary ideology and historical restoration. The People’s Republic remains formally a Marxist-Leninist state governed by a Communist Party whose official ideology understands history as a sequence of systems containing contradictions that eventually bring about their transformation. At the same time, Chinese nationalism tells a quite different story. In this account China’s weakness from the nineteenth century until the Communist victory in 1949 was not her natural condition but a grotesque historical aberration: the so-called “century of humiliation” during which foreign powers imposed unequal treaties, occupied Chinese territory and reduced one of the world’s oldest civilisations to political impotence.

Hence President Xi Jinping speaks repeatedly of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. The language is significant. One rejuvenates something that was once vigorous and became weak. From Beijing’s perspective China’s rise is therefore not necessarily the creation of a new world power. It is the restoration of an old one. China is returning to what many Chinese nationalists regard as her historically appropriate position: the dominant civilisation of East Asia and one of the principal centres of world power.

This is one reason why comparisons between contemporary China and the Soviet Union are frequently misleading. The Soviet Union was an evangelical power. In principle at least, she wanted world revolution. Marxism-Leninism was supposed eventually to become universal and Soviet governments devoted enormous resources to supporting revolutionary movements overseas. China today is much less interested in persuading Africans, Arabs or Latin Americans to adopt Chinese communism. Indeed Beijing is perfectly comfortable dealing with monarchies, military governments, democracies, dictatorships and hybrid regimes. What matters is not whether other countries resemble China internally but whether they acknowledge Chinese power externally.

This makes patience an extremely attractive strategy.

Chinese political discussion has periodically employed the proposition that “the East is rising and the West is declining”. Western observers sometimes dismiss this as Communist Party triumphalism, but the underlying assessment deserves more serious consideration. Chinese strategists can see perfectly well the pathologies of contemporary Western government: immense public debts, ageing populations, industrial decline in parts of Europe, political polarisation, increasingly fragmented media environments, difficulties controlling migration, declining confidence in institutions and democratic systems that sometimes appear incapable of maintaining a coherent policy for longer than a single electoral cycle. At the same time, Chinese observers see their own country possessing immense manufacturing capacity, increasingly sophisticated technology, the world’s second-largest economy and a state apparatus capable of pursuing industrial and strategic policies over periods far longer than most Western governments can contemplate.

The temptation to wait is therefore obvious. Why risk a catastrophic confrontation with the United States today if the relative balance of power may be more favourable in twenty years?

The essential Chinese wager is not necessarily that America will become poor or militarily impotent. It is that America will become progressively less able to determine what everybody else does. This distinction is fundamental. The United States may remain immensely wealthy, technologically sophisticated and militarily formidable while nevertheless losing the exceptional position she enjoyed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed that process may already be under way. China’s preferred language is that of “multipolarity”: a world in which no single country or bloc possesses the authority to determine the rules for everyone else. Recent analyses of Xi’s global strategy likewise emphasise Beijing’s attempt to construct international relationships and institutions that diminish Western dominance without simply reproducing the American alliance system in Chinese form.

The transformation China seeks therefore need not have a dramatic date attached to it. There need be no equivalent of the fall of Constantinople, the French Revolution or the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Imagine instead a series of comparatively mundane events. A government in Africa obtains its infrastructure finance from Beijing rather than Washington or Brussels. A Middle Eastern state conducts an increasing proportion of its commerce without Western financial intermediaries. India refuses to align consistently with the United States because she wishes to preserve strategic autonomy. European governments condemn aspects of Chinese policy while simultaneously concluding that they cannot afford serious economic confrontation with Beijing. American sanctions become progressively less effective because alternative commercial networks emerge. International institutions increasingly reflect the preferences of states that do not share Western political assumptions.

Nothing has collapsed. The lights are still on in New York. Paris remains beautiful. London remains rich. NATO continues to exist. Yet the international order has changed because Western governments can no longer presume that their collective preferences will prevail.

This is probably a more accurate description of the Chinese strategic objective than the melodramatic idea that Beijing wants to conquer the world. China does not need to govern Europe. She needs Europe to be unable or unwilling to obstruct her. China does not need to destroy the dollar. She needs the United States to lose some of the extraordinary leverage generated by the dollar’s centrality to international finance. China does not need to turn Brazil into an ideological ally. She needs Brazil to conclude that its relationship with Beijing is sufficiently important that Washington cannot dictate Brazilian foreign policy. The cumulative consequence of thousands of such calculations would be an international order in which Western countries remained powerful but ceased to be paramount.

There is another reason why Beijing may favour patience: the West has demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhaust herself. The United States spent immense amounts of money, political attention and military credibility upon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose strategic benefits proved questionable. European states spent much of the post-Cold War period reducing their armed forces on the assumption that major interstate warfare had become improbable, only for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to demonstrate otherwise. Western economies permitted significant portions of their industrial capacity to migrate overseas, much of it to China, and then discovered that supply chains were instruments of geopolitical power. Governments accumulated enormous debts while political systems became increasingly consumed by cultural disputes whose strategic importance to the international balance of power was negligible.

From Beijing these developments may look less like isolated mistakes than evidence of systemic distraction. The intelligent response is not necessarily to accelerate Western decline through aggressive confrontation. Excessive Chinese pressure risks producing precisely the outcome Beijing should wish to avoid: a frightened and reunited West. China’s increasingly assertive behaviour has already encouraged closer American relationships with Japan, Australia, the Philippines and other Indo-Pacific states. A direct attack upon Western interests could transform China from an economic competitor into a common enemy and thereby restore precisely the Western strategic cohesion whose erosion Beijing otherwise benefits from.

The more sophisticated Chinese strategy is therefore not conquest but indispensability. China trades, lends, manufactures, builds infrastructure and embeds herself within supply chains. She presents herself to developing countries as a partner that generally does not insist upon political reform as the price of commercial relations. Her diplomats repeatedly invoke sovereignty and non-interference. The appeal is readily understandable. A government in Africa or Central Asia need not admire Chinese communism to prefer a railway, a power station or a factory to a lecture about governance.

The purpose is not necessarily to make these countries pro-Chinese. It is enough to make them no longer reliably pro-Western.

Yet the theory that China can simply sit beside history’s river and wait for Western decline contains an enormous problem. China herself is sitting beside the same river.

Her economic and demographic difficulties are substantial. The property sector has undergone a prolonged crisis. Local government finances are strained. Domestic consumption remains comparatively weak and the economy continues to depend heavily upon industrial investment and exports. The IMF’s 2026 assessment describes an economy that remains remarkably resilient but whose existing growth model faces mounting difficulties from weak domestic demand, property-sector problems, high debt, a declining labour force, diminishing returns to investment and slowing productivity. The Fund expects Chinese growth to continue decelerating over the medium term.

The contradiction has become particularly conspicuous in 2026. Chinese exports have remained extraordinarily powerful: August exports rose by 25 per cent year-on-year, supported substantially by high-technology and AI-related products. Yet domestic consumption and investment remain comparatively subdued and the property sector continues to struggle. The spectacular industrial expansion of places such as Hefei tells a similar story. Advanced manufacturing can boom while household consumption remains weak, revealing the difficulty of translating China’s state-directed industrial successes into a more balanced economy.

This matters strategically because China cannot prosper indefinitely upon the ruins of her customers. A catastrophic Western economic collapse would devastate demand for Chinese exports. A disorderly destruction of the dollar-centred financial system would threaten Chinese interests as well as American ones. The disappearance of American military power from Asia would not necessarily produce a peaceful Chinese sphere of influence. It might instead produce a heavily rearmed Japan, a frightened South Korea and potentially a wave of nuclear proliferation across East Asia. The consequences could be considerably more dangerous to Beijing than the current system.

China therefore faces an intriguing strategic paradox. She benefits from relative Western decline but not necessarily from Western catastrophe. She wants the West weakened sufficiently that Western governments cannot dictate the rules of the international system, but not so weakened that the global economy collapses into disorder. She wants America to become less dominant in Asia, but not necessarily to disappear overnight and leave behind a collection of frightened states scrambling to acquire nuclear weapons. She wants alternatives to the dollar but has little interest in a global financial panic. In short, China wants controlled historical transition.

Taiwan complicates this strategy still further because Taiwan may be the one question upon which Beijing cannot wait indefinitely. If patience were China’s universal principle then the obvious policy would be to postpone the Taiwan question for another fifty years. Yet time does not necessarily favour Beijing forever. Taiwanese national identity may continue to diverge from mainland Chinese identity. Japan may rearm. American alliances in the Pacific may deepen. New military technologies may make amphibious operations still more difficult. Conversely China’s relative military strength may continue to grow. Beijing therefore confronts the classic dilemma of the rising power: waiting may make her stronger, but waiting too long may make the objective harder to achieve.

This is precisely where Western fatalism becomes dangerous. The assumption that China’s rise and Western decline are inevitable can become self-fulfilling. There is nothing inevitable about Chinese supremacy. The United States possesses almost absurd structural advantages: favourable geography, abundant natural resources, deep capital markets, extraordinary universities, a powerful culture of entrepreneurship, enormous technological capabilities and a continuing ability to attract ambitious people from across the world. Europe remains one of the greatest concentrations of accumulated wealth, technical knowledge and human capital ever assembled. The Western alliance system is itself an extraordinary strategic asset for which China has no genuine equivalent.

China has partners. America has allies. The difference matters.

Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India and other states that cooperate with Beijing do not form a coherent Chinese bloc. Their interests diverge profoundly. India and China remain strategic competitors. Russia’s dependence upon Beijing has increased as a consequence of her confrontation with the West, but Moscow has no historical enthusiasm for becoming a Chinese subordinate. Many developing countries want Chinese investment without Chinese domination just as they previously wanted American investment without American domination. Multipolarity is not necessarily a euphemism for Chinese supremacy. It may mean precisely what the word says: a world containing several centres of power, all frustrating one another.

The greatest strategic question is therefore not whether China possesses some secret timetable for the collapse of the West. She probably does not need one. Beijing can instead observe Western political disorder, encourage commercial relationships that reduce dependence upon Western institutions and patiently accumulate economic, technological and military capabilities. Every year in which Western governments become more divided while China becomes more indispensable appears to validate the strategy.

But Beijing is engaged in a race against time just as much as Washington is. China’s population is ageing. Her labour force is shrinking. Her debt burdens are considerable. Her property model has faltered. Her extraordinary manufacturing capacity risks producing political resistance abroad precisely because it is so successful. The IMF now argues that China must rebalance towards domestic consumption because ever-greater reliance upon exports cannot provide a durable model for growth. China may hope that the West grows old before she does, politically if not demographically. The West may hope that China’s internal economic contradictions become serious before Beijing can translate industrial power into geopolitical supremacy.

Both may be disappointed.

The twenty-first century may not belong to China any more than it belongs automatically to America. What may instead be disappearing is the idea that any single civilisation can possess the century at all. The post-Cold War period was historically exceptional because one country enjoyed an extraordinary concentration of military, financial, technological and cultural power. A more normal international system is one in which several great powers coexist, compete, trade, threaten, bargain and periodically retreat from one another because none can safely impose her will upon all the others.

If that is China’s objective, then Beijing does not need to wait for the West to collapse. She merely needs to wait for Western supremacy to become a memory.

There will probably be no single morning upon which this happens. There will be no announcement from Beijing and no surrender ceremony in Washington. There will simply come a day when an American President telephones the leader of a country that Washington once assumed would follow her lead and discovers that the answer is no. Another government will disregard Western sanctions. Another transaction will bypass Western institutions. Another European government will decide that economic relations with China matter more than an American request. Another developing country will conclude that Beijing offers the more useful partnership.

The buildings will still stand. The stock exchanges will still open. Elections will still be held. NATO flags will still fly. But something will have ended. China may not be waiting beside the river for the body of the West. She may merely be waiting for the current to change direction.