No Constraints

A sweeping account of China’s global strategy from Mao to Xi, revealing its effort to court strategic partners, outmaneuver rivals, and reshape the global order on its own terms

Beijing wants global influence without global entanglements. That ambition is not new—it has been decades in the making. Rather than building rigid alliances, China has cultivated a vast and flexible web of partnerships spanning ideological divides. These ties—with Russia, North Korea, Global South states, and key US-aligned powers—are designed to avoid binding commitments, counter perceived containment, and expand Beijing’s room for maneuver amid intensifying great power competition. No Constraints offers an unprecedented look at this approach, showing how China’s global strategy is driven by a persistent fear of strategic encirclement and a relentless drive to break free of it.

In a study spanning China’s Cold War alliances to its search for partners today, Patricia Kim reveals how Beijing has managed and mismanaged its most consequential relationships. She demonstrates how China’s preference for autonomy, embrace of authoritarian regimes, and reliance on coercive tactics have often reinforced the very threats it seeks to diffuse. Its rejection of formal alliances raises hard questions about whether its partners would provide real support in a crisis. At the center of this story stands China’s enduring struggle with the United States. Kim traces a recurring cycle of attempted grand bargains, coercive pressure, and recalibration as Beijing seeks to resolve strategic encirclement at its source.

Written by an internationally recognized expert on Chinese foreign policy, No Constraints offers a clear-eyed assessment of what China’s global strategy means for a world in which alignments are fluid, order is contested, and global leadership is increasingly up for grabs. The book concludes with a warning that the greater danger lies less in a China bent on outright global domination, but one that destabilizes the existing order behind a veneer of global leadership.