China Is Putting Building Blocks for a New Global Order — Vijay Gokhale

ELI5/TLDR

India’s former foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale has a new book on how China uses war and pressure as tools of statecraft. His core argument: stop reading China as a country that thinks bilaterally. Since before 1949, Beijing has seen the world through a three-cornered balance of power — China, the United States, and Russia — and it judges every relationship, including India’s, by what it gains inside that triangle. China isn’t trying to blow up the current world order so much as quietly laying foundations for one that puts it on par with, or above, the US. And the threat India should worry about most isn’t a border skirmish — it’s being shut out of the room where the rules for AI, quantum, and cyber get written.

The Full Story

Read China the other way around

Gokhale’s starting move is a flip. Most Indian writing on the border is about India’s China policy. He decided to research China’s India policy — how Beijing sees Delhi — and found a pattern that goes back to before the revolution.

If you read Mao Zedong’s writings during the second world war and immediately after… he talks of China as the dominant power in the Asia-Pacific with the right to decide what the new Asian order will look like.

Mao always framed China inside a triangle: China, the US, and the Soviet Union. That triangle, Gokhale argues, is still the operating system of Chinese foreign policy. Only two things have changed. Russia replaced the Soviet Union, and the hierarchy flipped — China is now the bigger partner, where the USSR once dwarfed Mao’s China. Otherwise the logic holds. Beijing never weighs India on its own. It weighs India-plus-Washington, India-plus-Moscow, India-plus-the-Quad. Treat the relationship as a two-person conversation and you misread it, because China is never having a two-person conversation.

The unsettled border is a feature

On the line of actual control — the disputed, unmarked India-China frontier stretching thousands of kilometres — Gokhale offers a deflating thought. The boundary isn’t unsettled because talks keep failing. It’s unsettled because China may not want it settled.

It suits China to maintain uncertainty and a certain level of tension… they can tighten or loosen the the tension without necessarily a very heavy expenditure and without risking the escalation of conflict.

A permanent low simmer is cheap, controllable, and keeps India looking over its shoulder. He calls these tactics “grey-zone coercion” — pressure that stays below the threshold of open war. India should expect the simmer to last for the foreseeable future.

A beneficiary that won’t pay the bill

Here’s the irony at the heart of China’s relationship with the existing order: China is its biggest winner. Joining the World Trade Organization — even while still a “non-market economy,” meaning a state-managed one that doesn’t play by open-market rules — helped take Chinese GDP from one or two trillion dollars to roughly twenty trillion.

And yet, where the rules get inconvenient, China simply steps around them — building in the South China Sea against the UN’s law-of-the-sea convention, refusing reciprocal market access to imports including India’s.

It is a beneficiary but it is not willing to spend blood or treasure to uphold that when the United States, which is the creator and defender of that global order, is beginning to have doubts.

Does Beijing want the order to collapse? Gokhale isn’t sure China itself knows — it has no clear replacement in mind. But he can see the foundations going in: the Belt and Road infrastructure push, the Global Security and Development initiatives, the deliberately fuzzy slogan of a “community for the shared future of mankind.” Whatever the eventual structure, one rule is non-negotiable — it must seat China as an equal of the US, or above it.

Two kinds of multipolarity

India and China both say they want a “multipolar” world. Gokhale’s warning: they mean different things by the word. Globally, sure, Beijing likes the idea of several powers big enough to resist American pressure — and both India and China are eating into the West’s share of the pie, a genuine overlap. But zoom into Asia and the agreement evaporates.

If you come to the Indo-Pacific region, I don’t think they’re thinking a multipolar Asian order there, where China wants to be the deciding pole and they don’t want any competition.

Multipolar abroad, single-pole at home. A mixed bag, and the part nearest India is the competitive part.

Russia: an alliance of convenience

On the deepening Russia-China bond — and Indian anxiety that Moscow is being pushed into Beijing’s arms — Gokhale draws a careful distinction. Some alliances run deep: the US and UK share language, values, history, economy. Russia and China share almost none of that. Different religion (Orthodox versus officially none), a 19th-century history of Russian land grabs from China, one side European and one Asian.

I think they are standing with their backs against each other from a possible frontal attack from a common existential threat.

Not partners facing the same direction — partners covering each other’s backs against the West. Russia needs China as its biggest market and energy buyer now that the West has closed off. That dependence papers over real friction: Russian unease about China creeping into its far east and the Arctic, and the discounted prices Beijing pays for Russian oil and gas. India should watch the relationship closely — especially any transfer of military technology, since China’s habit is to pass such tech to Pakistan — but Gokhale won’t call it harmful to India yet. Russia, he notes, has stood with India in every crisis and is the only country to have actually transferred key technology, where others are pure buyer-seller.

West Asia, and the lesson of the strait

On the Gulf war and China’s quiet posture, Gokhale cautions against mistaking silence for impotence. China is “very studied,” and its interests are currently being looked after by others, including Pakistan, so it feels no urgency to act. Its core Gulf interest is energy, and that it will protect.

But look further out. With the Chinese navy set to enter the Indian Ocean before the decade ends, China’s ties to Iran, Oman, and Saudi Arabia start to look strategic, not just commercial. So long as Iran’s regime survives, China collects leverage: Chinese firms win the reconstruction contracts, China sells the arms once Europe’s embargo bites, and China gets access to Indian Ocean ports like Jask or Chabahar.

Then a sharp aside that links the Gulf to Taiwan. Both are stories about a strait, and about the limits of raw military power.

However technologically advanced you are, a weaker country can hold you at bay… bombing Taiwan will be different from taking physical possession of the island.

Overwhelming firepower can blockade or quarantine an island. It can’t make it surrender. Gokhale suspects the Gulf war has given Beijing pause to rethink exactly that.

The real worry is technological, not geopolitical

The interview’s strongest idea comes last. With Washington and Beijing talking about a “constructive relationship of strategic stability,” Gokhale reads a shift in US strategy — from outright containment of China to “accommodation through competition.” Compete fiercely, but manage rather than try to crush. For India that raises uncomfortable questions: Has India’s weight in American thinking dropped? Will Washington tolerate a bigger Chinese role in South Asia? (He recalls a 1997 Clinton-Jiang statement that openly granted China “a role in South Asia.”) And where does the Quad go if America’s focus has slid from the broad Indo-Pacific to the narrower Pacific, where Japan and Australia’s interests, not India’s, are at stake?

But the deepest concern is a possible “G2” — an informal US-China duopoly. Its danger, Gokhale insists, isn’t geopolitical. It’s about who writes the rules.

All the current rules are for 20th century technologies. Nuclear, missiles, biological, chemical, trade… the new technologies — cyber, outer space, underwater, AI, blockchain, quantum — there are no rules.

The two countries furthest ahead in those fields could simply set the standards between them. If India — likely the world’s largest consuming nation by mid-century — isn’t at that table, it could be locked into disadvantage for decades, maybe permanently. As one of the interviewers puts it, quoting the Canadian PM: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Where India is, and isn’t, awake

Gokhale’s audit of India’s defences is mixed. On security, India has genuinely ramped up — more troops, equipment, and infrastructure along the border, the new Zojila tunnel a fresh example. On economics, far less so. India imports more from China every year — electronics now rivals energy as an import bill — much of it legacy components that could be made at home. China has only lightly squeezed these supply chains so far (holding back tunnel-boring gear, recalling Apple technicians) rather than going full-throttle as it did against the Philippines, Japan, or Korea. The likely reason: Beijing doesn’t want to wreck what may become the world’s biggest market. But the levers exist, and one shouldn’t assume they’ll stay unused.

His closing label for China: an “opportunistic power.” Not a slur — he says all countries are opportunistic — but specific to the triangle. Whenever the other two big powers are distracted or at odds, China spots its moment to advance. Which loops back to his opening point: any India-China tension will be played for what it yields China in the global game, never just in the bilateral one.

Key Takeaways

China runs foreign policy on a triangular balance of power — China, US, Russia — set since Mao’s day. It never assesses India bilaterally, always India-plus-its-relationships.
The unsettled India-China border is deliberate. A controllable, low-cost simmer keeps India off balance without risking war (“grey-zone coercion”).
China is the biggest beneficiary of the post-WWII order (WTO entry took its GDP from ~$1-2T to ~$20T) but won’t spend resources defending it, and ignores the rules — South China Sea, non-reciprocal market access — when convenient.
China hasn’t decided whether it wants the current order to collapse, because it has no clear replacement. But it’s laying foundations: Belt and Road, Global Security/Development Initiatives, the “shared future of mankind.” Any new order must seat China as US-equal or above.
“Multipolarity” means different things to India and China. China wants it globally (to dilute US power) but rejects it in Asia, where it intends to be the sole deciding pole.
Russia-China is an “alliance of convenience” — backs against each other against the West, not a deep alliance. Friction over China’s Arctic/far-east ambitions and discounted energy prices. India should track military-tech transfers (which flow on to Pakistan) but it isn’t yet harmful to India.
In the Gulf, a surviving Iranian regime hands China reconstruction contracts, arms sales (Europe embargoed), and Indian Ocean port access (Jask, Chabahar). China’s navy enters the Indian Ocean before 2030.
Lesson of the strait, applied to Taiwan: overwhelming firepower can blockade or quarantine an island but cannot force surrender. The Gulf war may have made Beijing rethink a Taiwan invasion.
The US is shifting from containing China to “accommodation through competition.” This risks reduced US attention to India/South Asia and a weaker Quad as American focus narrows from the Indo-Pacific to the Pacific.
The G2 threat is technological, not geopolitical. There are no global rules yet for AI, quantum, cyber, space. If the two leading powers write them alone, India — likely the largest consumer market by mid-century — gets locked out for decades.
India is acting on the security front but is complacent on economic and tech dependence. Chinese electronics imports now rival the energy bill; China has only lightly tested its supply-chain chokehold so far.

Claude’s Take

This is the good version of the foreign-policy interview: a practitioner with a thesis, not a pundit reaching for the day’s headline. Gokhale’s two best ideas — that China never thinks bilaterally, and that the real contest is over who writes the rules for technologies that don’t have rules yet — are the kind of reframe that reorganizes how you read the next year of news. The triangle model is clean and probably overstated as a single explanatory key (a lot of Chinese behaviour is also just domestic politics and Xi’s personal hand), but as a corrective to lazy India-vs-China bilateralism it earns its keep.

The honest caveats. This is a former Indian foreign secretary, so the frame is unapologetically India-first; “is this good or bad for Delhi” is the only question on the table, which is fair for the audience but worth naming. The Russia section is the softest — “they’ve stood with us, let’s not jump to conclusions” reads slightly like a man reluctant to criticize an old partner, and he leans on assertion more than evidence there. And several claims (China’s navy in the Indian Ocean “before the end of this decade,” the G2 timeline) are confident forecasts dressed as analysis. But there’s almost no fluff, the interviewers actually push, and the technology-governance argument alone is worth the 26 minutes. An 8. It would be a 9 with a sharper interlocutor on the Russia point.