Is China a peaked power? And so what if it is?

Previous U.S. foreign, security, and defense policies toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have failed. Contrary to the decades-long hopes and expectations of Western policymakers, the PRC’s rapid economic development via quasi-capitalistic mechanisms did not foster internal democratic norms. While the “opening up” dictates of the post-Deng Xiaoping era brought spectacular economic growth, they failed to transform the CCP into a responsible stakeholder in the U.S.-led international community. Unrealistic expectations that the PRC would cooperate as a stable security partner in the Indo-Pacific never materialized; in fact, the opposite occurred. The CCP has emerged as a revisionist adversary, systematically challenging U.S. and allied security sector dominance not only in the Indo-Pacific but globally.

For more than three decades, China was viewed as an irreversibly rising power. Many international relations (IR) experts, most notably Harvard’s Graham T. Allison, popularized this dynamic as the “Thucydides Trap“—analogizing modern tensions to ancient Sparta’s destabilizing reaction to a rising Athens. In this framework, catastrophic conflict is seen as the likely result when a rising power threatens to displace an established hegemon.

Recently, however, a critical cohort of IR experts and practitioners have challenged Allison’s model, arguing that the PRC is no longer a rising power, but rather a peaked power whose growth relative to the United States has hit its ceiling. In Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, Michael Beckley and Hal Brands demonstrate that the PRC is fundamentally stalling, projecting that it will fail to achieve its stated goal of global military dominance by 2049. They base this stark reassessment on a compounding matrix of internal and external structural failures. Internally, China faces irreversible demographic contraction (the third-order consequences of the One-Child Policy), massive economic distortions driven by real estate insolvency, and populace instability. Crucially, the regime faces a systemic failure of its agricultural sector to reliably feed its own population; intensive agricultural over-extraction has resulted in the severe depletion and degradation of deep aquifers across the North China Plain, triggering acute water scarcity and negative harvest quotas that threaten long-term domestic grain self-sufficiency.

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