A “multipolar” world is one with many great world powers, as opposed to a “unipolar” world with the United States as the greatest world power. Naturally, Chinese officials consider it a matter of “when” not “if” the multipolar era is ushered in.

US ‘chaos’ opens door for China’s 2049 vision

The Chinese government prioritizes involvement in the dialogue of international bodies and takes great pains to export to foreign partners.

Experts who spoke to the Washington Examiner about the Chinese obsession say these references, often couched as dispassionate geopolitical prognostications about economics, have an unambiguous meaning within the Communist Party — the crumbling of Western influence in world affairs and the rise of the Chinese dragon.

“By 2049, the vision is that they will have replaced what they view as Western capitalism — the U.S. as corrupt, colonial barbarians whose time has come and passed — much as the British Empire from 150 years ago is now a declining nation,” a former U.S. diplomat with extensive experience in China told the Washington Examiner.

He continued, “They point to us and our political system to say, ‘This is chaos. We are the future.’ So when they say ‘multipolar’, this is [Beijing] saying ‘We are going to overtake you.’”

Chinese ambitions to expand their influence are not exactly secret. Through transnational infrastructure projects like the “Belt and Road Initiative” to centering of the U.S.-opposed BRICS bloc, Beijing does not shy away from its aspirations for greater international muscle.

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In a landmark speech in 2012, the paramount leader introduced the concept of the “Chinese Dream” into the nation’s civic vocabulary — “Realizing the great renewal of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history.”

The next year, the implications of that “dream” became apparent when the People’s Liberation Army rolled out its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning. Chinese servicemen arranged themselves on its decked so that aerial photographers captured them spelling out the phrase “Chinese dream, military dream.”

“They have this kind of long term vision. We [Americans] are so short-term with administrations, politically. [The Chinese] say, ‘Okay, you guys go do your chaos, but we have a long term plan that within the next, you know, twenty-plus years, we’re going to have Taiwan back. We’re going to be dominating Asia.’ And yeah, [2046] that’s the marker,” the diplomat said.

The year 2049 is significant in the Chinese political imagination as the centennial anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao Zedong.

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Xi has marked that anniversary as the deadline by which China must “build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious.”

“In the Chinese mindset, 1949 — the founding of the CCP — was a huge moment for throwing off the repression of Western imperialism, and we [the U.S.] very much fit in that camp,” they continued. “They lumped us as Americans in with the British and the Opium wars and the humiliation of the Qing dynasty.”

Steve Yates, a senior research fellow on China at the Heritage Foundation and former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, is in agreement that a “multipolar future” is less about an ecosystem of powers and more about the centralization of Chinese influence as it was in the past.

“What they’re really trying to say is that their aim is to take America down a peg or to celebrate America being taken down a peg,” said Yates. “What they’re seeking is for the U.S. and its allies not to be able to impose standards, values, patterns of behavior upon them or to criticize them.”

Yates also agreed that the Chinese see a blueprint for their future in their past glories.

“One of their visions is going back to the classical notion of China being the center of the universe and others playing tributary state roles to them,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And if you’re a tributary, then you will defer to what Beijing’s permissions are for what you are aiming to do with other countries — you will not create challenges or problems or compete with China. And you certainly will not be colluding with competitor or hostile forces in the world to disrespect, criticize, or contain the influence of China.”

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He added: “It’s more of an imperial vision — which ironically, is what the Communist Party was campaigning against at its founding [and] in its first twenty-plus years.”

China’s approach is thousands of years in the making

For the majority of China’s imperial history, it was the unchallenged master of the Asian continent — and in their perception, ruled “all under heaven.” Successive dynasties ruled the Sino-sphere as “sons of heaven,” quasi-divine monarchs to whom tribute was owed by all neighbors and vassal states.

This celestial authority was jealously guarded for almost the entirety of Imperial China.

When a Japanese envoy in the 7th century arrived bearing a message from Japan’s “Child of Heaven in the land where the sun rises” to the mainland’s “Child of Heaven in the land where the sun sets,” the Chinese Emperor Yang was furious with the ego of his lesser Japanese counterpart.

More than a thousand years later, the Qing emperor rebuked King George III for having his ambassador request greater privileges in trade and diplomacy on equal terms, ordering the British monarch to “reverently
receive” his judgement that there is “no
need to
import
the manufactures
of outside
 barbarians.”

Ultimately, brushing off the British in the 18th century proved more dangerous than snubbing the Japanese emperor in the 7th. Tensions between the British and Chinese boiled over into the Opium wars and subsequent colonization by foreign powers throughout the 19th century.

This came to be known as the Century of Humiliation, a much-studied black mark on the nation’s history that the Communist Party refuses to forget.

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“We will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us,” Xi told a roaring crowd in Tiananmen Square in 2021, celebrating the centennial anniversary of the party’s founding. “Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

It is this desire to rectify the humiliation of the past that drives Chinese foreign policy.

Ambassadors have adopted what they call a “wolf warrior” mentality to international diplomacy, an aggressive and often offensive rhetorical disposition when China’s interests are challenged — even threatening to cut off a prime minister’s head.

On a global stage, the only individual nation with the military and economic resources capable of unilaterally crushing Chinese ambition is the United States.

Xi maintains faith in multipolar world in face of Trump

President Donald Trump has tried to use tariffs and other sanctions to punish what he claims have been imbalanced trade deals struck with Beijing under past administrations. At the same time, he asserts that he gets along well with his “friend” Xi.

The paramount leader has responded to Trump’s mercurial nature with an equally ambiguous stoicism — responding harshly with tariffs of his own while insisting that all these disagreements can be worked out diplomatically.

In the run-up to their largely anti-climatic summit sideline meeting in South Korea, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

The Chinese read-out of the conversation took an optimistic and conciliatory tone, affirming that despite having recently “experienced some twists and turns,” the two nations have “long-standing exchanges” and “respect each other.”

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But when Wang delivered a speech the same day at the Beijing office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he took a far nastier tone, with veiled jabs at the Trump administration “frequently withdrawing from agreements and reneging on commitments, while enthusiastically forming blocs and cliques.”

He snuck in a familiar, sinister observation: “The tide of history cannot be reversed, and a multipolar world is coming.”