The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) runs a global propaganda campaign portraying China as a benevolent power challenging U.S. hegemony and championing a fairer international order. Under the banner of building a “multipolar world,” Beijing claims it seeks a system that benefits all nations equally.
In reality, China’s vision of multipolarity is one in which it stands at the top. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi declared, “A multipolar world is not only a historical inevitability; it is also becoming a reality,” calling for “an equal and orderly multipolar world.” But this rhetoric of equality is sharply contradicted by China’s actions, which are consistently aggressive and self-serving.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the South China Sea. There, China’s version of multipolarity demands that the U.S. cease freedom of navigation operations and allow Beijing to seize maritime territory from the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and others, despite a 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration rejecting China’s expansive claims. Chinese Coast Guard vessels routinely harass Philippine ships, often using dangerous maneuvers and water cannons to assert control.
Part of China’s so-called multipolarity includes deciding what others are allowed to say. In July 2025, Beijing was accused of censorship after pressuring New Zealand’s DocEdge Festival to cancel the screening of a documentary about Philippine fishermen facing harassment by Chinese forces. Despite this campaign, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander observed that “China has failed to intimidate rival claimant states into surrendering their sovereign interests in the disputed South China Sea, despite its intensifying bullying tactics.”
China also demands global respect for national sovereignty, while simultaneously threatening to take Taiwan by force. Beyond the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, Beijing is embroiled in numerous other territorial disputes, including with India, where Chinese and Indian troops clashed in two recent skirmishes in the Himalayas.
China accuses the United States of bloc-building due to its participation in security alliances such as AUKUS, the Quad, the Five Eyes, and NATO. Yet at the same time, Beijing leads BRICS, a group with the stated goal of challenging U.S. trade dominance and displacing the dollar as the global reserve currency.
While BRICS members have disparate interests beyond opposing the U.S., China is the bloc’s dominant economic power, making it less a multipolar partnership and more a China-centric alliance. Beijing continues to push BRICS to settle trade in yuan as an alternative to the dollar.
Brazilian President Lula has expressed interest in creating a unified BRICS currency, but China has refused to give up the yuan. Since most other BRICS currencies are either too small, unstable, or non-convertible, the yuan is the only viable option. Some bilateral swap agreements have been used to bypass the dollar, but these are essentially prepaid arrangements, limited in scale, cumbersome, and tying up large amounts of capital for extended periods. As a result, BRICS members are left to trade in either dollars or yuan for most transactions.
Perhaps the most ambitious element of China’s “multipolar world” campaign is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure project that, rather than liberating nations from dollar dependence, has created a string of debt-ridden countries and abandoned or substandard construction projects.
In 2025, developing countries will owe China $35 billion in repayments, with $22 billion coming from 75 of the world’s poorest nations. Roughly 80% of China’s government or government-backed loans go to countries in some stage of debt distress, and more than half of those loans are already in the repayment phase.
Chinese loan and aid agreements often “contain clauses that restrict restructuring” and “frequently retain the right to demand repayment at any time,” giving Beijing leverage to pressure recipient countries on sensitive political issues, especially Taiwan. Nations receiving Chinese funds are routinely forced to adopt the “One China” policy, which Beijing interprets as recognition that Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China.
The U.S. also maintains a One China policy, but with a crucial difference: Washington holds that the relationship between Beijing and Taipei must be resolved peacefully, and it commits to providing Taiwan with the means to defend itself against aggression. Ironically, the U.S. position is far more consistent with genuine multipolarity than China’s, as it respects Taiwan’s agency and regional stability.
In its 2025 white paper on national security, the Chinese government accused “some great powers” of “disregarding their international responsibilities” and “damaging global stability,” a thinly veiled reference to the United States. China simultaneously cast itself as a force for good, claiming to be “injecting certainty and stability into a turbulent world.”
But at the end of the day, Beijing views its own expansionist policies and debt-trap diplomacy as stabilizing, while U.S. efforts to preserve freedom of navigation and defend the sovereignty of Taiwan and other partners are framed as destabilizing. China’s multipolarity is not about equality, it’s about controlling the entire planet.
The post China’s False Crusade for a Multipolar World Is Really a Bid for Beijing’s Dominance appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.