Jiandong Ju's US-China Great Power Competition and The New World Order (henceforth New World Order) is an ambitious and unusually wide-ranging attempt to construct a unified framework for understanding the economic foundations, strategic dynamics, and possible future of US-China rivalry. The English edition is based on the author's Chinese-language book and on seven years of teaching at Tsinghua University, while incorporating developments through the 2025 tariff confrontation. This origin is important. The book is simultaneously an academic synthesis, a work of public-facing political economy, and a window into how one prominent Chinese economist interprets the transformation of the international order.
Summary
The book begins from a deceptively simple question: why do great powers that benefit from economic interaction nevertheless come into conflict? Ju's answer is built around "competitive coexistence." Rather than treating US-China relations principally as a contest for world hegemony, he sees the present disorder as arising from a growing mismatch between changing global economic fundamentals and an international monetary and governance "superstructure" that still reflects an earlier distribution of power. His stated ambition is therefore larger than explaining the tariff war. He seeks a general framework connecting trade, growth, technology, finance, international governance, and ultimately the evolution of world order.
The first chapters establish the analytical foundations. Chapter 1 supplements comparative advantage with two additional principles: international monopoly profits and the "growth trap of specialization solidification." Comparative advantage explains why international specialization can enlarge the economic pie; monopoly power concerns how that pie is divided; and specialization solidification introduces a dynamic concern - countries may become locked into existing positions in the international division of labor and therefore fail to upgrade. Ju consequently organizes national interests along two dimensions: overall versus specific interests and long-term versus short-term interests. This provides the conceptual matrix that is then used throughout the book.
Chapter 2 turns from trade to growth. Its central idea is the "Dual-Wheel Drive" model: sustained development requires both technological innovation and sufficiently large markets. Innovation generates new products and productivity gains, but market scale turns innovation into profits that finance further research and development. Ju connects this mechanism to a "Growth Theorem," according to which long-run growth requires continuous industrial upgrading. He then interprets the history of globalization as a sequence of four stages - global discovery, global trade, global production, and, since 2018, global innovation. The current era differs because human capital, knowledge, and innovation increasingly replace physical capital as the central forces of development.
Chapter 3 applies this growth-centered approach to great-power rivalry. Ju proposes an accessible "six fields, three elements, five stages" framework. The six fields are manufacturing, aggregate economic size, technology, finance, military power, and global governance. The three elements shaping cooperation and conflict are relative strength, political and cultural identity, and third-party effects. The five stages describe the historical and prospective evolution of US-China relations, from confrontation before 1979 through the cooperative "small country-big country" period, to present and future stages of great-power competition and, ultimately, competitive coexistence. Historical comparisons with Britain and Germany, Britain and the United States, the United States and the Soviet Union, and the United States and Japan are used to illuminate why catching up in only some dimensions of power may be insufficient to transform the international order.
Chapters 4 and 5 move from general theory to trade conflict and strategy. Chapter 4 combines the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, optimal-tariff reasoning, and the Hicks theorem with the earlier distinction between overall/specific and long-term/short-term interests to reinterpret the US-China tariff war. Chapter 5 develops the idea of "mirror tactics": cooperation should be met with cooperation, while confrontation should be met with proportionate resistance. A simple game-theoretic model shows how credible commitment to such a strategy can, under certain conditions, move countries away from a prisoner's-dilemma outcome. The EU-China photovoltaics/wine dispute is presented as a favorable illustration, while the Huawei case demonstrates the limits of tactical reciprocity when long-term and overall strategic interests are involved.
The middle of the book contains its most distinctive account of changing global structure. Chapter 6 argues that global trade, production, and consumption networks have evolved from a system centered disproportionately on the United States into a "tripod" organized around China in Asia, Germany in Europe, and the United States in North America. Chapters 7 and 8 then identify two "fundamental misalignments." The first is between this tripod real economy and a still dollar-centered international monetary system; the second is between the same economic structure and a global governance order that remains disproportionately shaped by the United States. Ju's proposed long-term direction is therefore neither Chinese replacement of American hegemony nor restoration of unipolarity, but a two-layer system combining global institutions with stronger regional governance, alongside a more multipolar international monetary system.
Chapters 9-12 extend the framework to the possible trajectories and major arenas of competition. The Growth-Crisis Model in Chapter 9 generates four broad outcomes: win-win, US-win/China-lose, China-win/US-lose, and lose-lose, depending on whether either country remains on a growth path or falls into crisis. Chapter 10 distinguishes incremental from disruptive innovation and introduces the memorable concepts of the "chaser's trap" and the "leader's dilemma." Lagging economies may struggle to catch established leaders through cumulative R&D, yet technological disruption can create opportunities for leapfrogging because incumbents have more invested in old technologies. Chapter 11 examines dollar dominance, capital-flow volatility, sanctions, renminbi internationalization, and digital payment technologies, while Chapter 12 turns to global trade governance and advances the idea of an Asian Community as one leg of a future regionalized governance structure.
Chapter 13 is the book's most philosophical chapter. Its "Innovative World Model" begins from the proposition that ideas, knowledge, and human capital increasingly drive development. Ju describes an "idea cloud" feeding a process from ideas to innovation, technological progress, and market realization, and identifies three basic tensions in the innovation system: centralization versus decentralization, public versus private ownership, and creation versus imitation. Chapter 14 brings the argument together in a strategy for China for 2025-2035, summarized as "Not Seeking Hegemony; Anchoring Asian Market; Sharing for All." China, in this vision, should neither retreat into isolation nor seek global domination, but should support an open Asian economic community while contributing to a more plural and cooperative international order.
Commentary
The greatest virtue of this book is its intellectual ambition and breadth. On the one hand, contemporary geopolitical discourse is often remarkably fragmented, with even prominent commentators and policymakers displaying a surprisingly weak understanding of the mechanics and geopolitical power of the economy. Leading international-relations scholars such as Graham Allison, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt, for example, tend to place excessive weight on military confrontation while underestimating the extent to which economic capacity, technological capability, and productive power shape the outcomes of geopolitical competition. In policy circles, meanwhile, Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have repeatedly advanced highly questionable claims about who ultimately bears the burden of tariffs, yet such claims have often encountered remarkably little resistance within the upper reaches of American policymaking.
The problem is no less serious on the economics side. Too many economists remain preoccupied with highly specialized, reductionist quantitative exercises characteristic of the postwar mainstream economics tradition - methods that are increasingly ill-suited to understanding today's multidimensional geopolitical competition. This is not because economists exercise admirable restraint in avoiding fashionable subjects. Quite the opposite: a proliferation of journal articles on geopolitics has appeared, new courses and research centers have been established, and substantial research funding has been allocated to the topic. Yet much of this activity remains firmly confined within the profession's familiar intellectual pigeonholes. The result is often less an expansion of understanding than an effort to assimilate geopolitics into existing econometric and modeling routines, thereby preserving the discipline's self-image of methodological superiority while producing relatively little genuine geopolitical insight.
A revealing example is the influential American Economic Review article "Measuring Geopolitical Risk," which constructs a geopolitical-risk index from newspaper coverage. The index is undoubtedly useful for allowing economists to insert "geopolitical shocks" into regressions, VARs, or DSGE models. But beyond providing another quantifiable variable with which mainstream economists can continue to assert the relevance of familiar research routine, it is far less clear what such exercises teach us about the underlying mechanisms of actual geopolitical conflict.
Why have there been so few attempts to establish a unified geopolitical framework capable of addressing the pressing challenges of today? To understand this, we must recognize that academia is not a fairyland of disinterested truth-seekers, but a world populated by ambitious human beings competing for publications, resources, positions, and prestige. As Veblen pointed out, rather than genuine intellectual inquiry, the most effective way to succeed in such invidious competition is through specialization, sophistication, and pedantry - means of awe and intimidation that conspicuously establish intellectual superiority. The postwar rise of academic careerism has strengthened precisely these incentives and encouraged the dominance of such conspicuous research, which is antithetical to the holistic and generalist understanding required of geopolitics. Few scholars therefore aspire to genuine geopolitical synthesis for fear of being accused of trespassing into the turfs of other disciplines and of being amateur economists, political scientists, historians, or sociologists, which is more than just about losing face but can cause material career damage.
It is on precisely this account that I found Ju's New World Order doubly refreshing. It is an ambitious and unusually rare attempt to construct a grand framework of geopolitical competition, rather than merely offering a marginal extension of the author's previous work or of existing models. Chapter 2, for example, develops a dual-wheel-drive model of economic growth; Chapter 3 presents a five-stage theory of geopolitical competition; Chapters 6 and 7 develop models of international trade and finance; Chapter 8 turns to global governance; and Chapter 10 examines technological competition and catch-up. These theoretical components are then synthesized and systematically applied to explain, interpret, and predict the evolution of U.S.-China rivalry in the twenty-first century. Chapter 13 introduces the concept of the "idea cloud," which appears somewhat less tightly integrated into the overall geopolitical framework, but functions instead as a more foundational expression of Ju's broader aspiration for an innovative, peaceful, and cooperative world order.
Overall, I found the book an illuminating and rewarding read for anyone interested in geopolitics, and particularly in U.S.-China strategic rivalry. Given the extraordinary breadth and scope of the project, it inevitably cannot achieve the same degree of detail or technical meticulousness as the highly specialized work typical of academic economics. But nor should it be judged by that standard. Indeed, I would argue that more mainstream economists - especially economists in China - should aspire to break free from the stringent methodological constraints of the profession and make greater use of their comparative advantage in economic reasoning to contribute to a more holistic and, perhaps more importantly, more realistic understanding of contemporary geopolitics.
Suggestions
Precisely because the framework is so ambitious, two aspects, in my view, invite further development. First, although Ju deliberately focuses on the non-military dimensions of geopolitical competition, as stated in Chapter 1, this may nevertheless constitute an important omission given how deeply intertwined military and economic power are in actual geopolitical conflict. China's restrictions on rare-earth exports, for example, emerged as a major strategic trump card in the second U.S.-China trade war in 2025. Yet China had already established a dominant position in rare earths by around 2010. Why, then, did China refrain from using this leverage more forcefully in earlier economic disputes, particularly during Trump's first trade war in 2018?
There is good reason to hypothesize that this difference in strategic behavior reflected not only economic considerations but also the military balance of power. In 2018, China's military modernization had only begun to accelerate. Its first fifth-generation fighter, the J-20, had entered service only in 2017, while the first Type 055 destroyer was launched in the same year. At that time, the United States and its NATO allies still enjoyed overwhelming advantages in advanced combat aircraft, naval capacity, global deployment, and overall military reach. Had China deployed its rare-earth leverage as aggressively as it did in 2025, it might have exposed itself to forms of military and strategic pressure that China was then far less capable of absorbing.
By 2025, however, the strategic environment had changed substantially. The United States and its NATO allies had entered the quagmires of the Russo-Ukrainian war and the Israel-Gaza war, which have severely depleted their military inventories and strategic resources. China, meanwhile, had significantly expanded and modernized its own arsenal, including a much larger fleet of J-20 fighters, a growing number of Type 055 destroyers, and the Fujian, its first aircraft carrier equipped with electromagnetic catapults. The performance of Chinese-made military hardware during the India-Pakistan conflict in May also provided a stark demonstration of its capacity, if not superiority. It was against this broader shift in the military balance of power, I would argue, that China became increasingly willing to employ its economic arsenal more assertively, with less concern about inviting military pressure it could not withstand.
Second, geopolitical competition is not only a struggle over wealth, technology, and military power, but also a struggle for hearts and minds. As Confucius famously suggested, the first task of politics is to establish legitimacy - "必也正名乎！" Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has remained the world's undisputed discursive hegemony, boasting the world's most influential legacy media, social-media platforms, intelligence networks, NGOs, and social sciences and humanities. This exceptional discursive power has enabled it to impose economic sanctions, technological blockages, and military operations with little domestic resistance and international backlash.
Discourse has also been systematically weaponized in the recent U.S.-China trade war. China's comparative advantage in manufacturing has been reframed as "industrial overcapacity"; technological catch-up as "intellectual-property theft"; financial support to the Global South as "debt-trap diplomacy"; and China's trade surpluses as the product of unfair trade practices and state subsidies without any economic merit. Had these narratives achieved dominance in the global discursive space, China would have faced enormous diplomatic pressure abroad while simultaneously losing much of the domestic legitimacy and political resolve required to resist American economic coercion. In the extreme, it might have faced a trajectory resembling Japan's experience around the Plaza Accord, when external pressure combined with limited strategic autonomy sharply constrained its policy choices. From this perspective, China's long-standing pursuit of discursive sovereignty and the development of indigenous philosophy and social sciences (讲好中国故事, 中国哲学社会科学自主知识体系) may have contributed no less to its eventual victory in the trade war than its dominance in rare earths.
To conclude, Ju's New World Order is a timely and urgently needed theoretical contribution to China's geopolitical discourse, which has long been dominated by empirical observation and strategic analysis built around Western theoretical frameworks. The book offers valuable insights for academics, commentators, business leaders, and policymakers interested in geopolitical affairs, and would also make an excellent addition to university reading lists and classroom reference materials.
References
- Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. London: Hachette, 2016.
- Caldara, Dario, and Matteo Iacoviello. "Measuring Geopolitical Risk." American Economic Review 112, no. 4 (2022): 1194-225. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20191823.
- Ju, Jiandong. US-China Great Power Competition and the New World Order. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2026.
- Mearsheimer, John. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
- Zhang, Tong. "Reinterpreting Science as a Vocation." Max Weber Studies 22, no. 1 (2022): 55-73.