As the US dismantles its global hegemony, will China step up?

As the US voluntarily dismantles its global hegemony, China has neither the will nor the capacity to fill the role, a prominent Chinese foreign policy expert has argued.
Beijing was forging an alternative path rooted in sovereign equality and multilateralism, rather than a quest for global dominance, said Da Wei, director of Tsinghua University’s Centre for International Security and Strategy.
“I believe America’s global institutional hegemony is coming to an end,” Da told a public seminar at Renmin University of China in Beijing on Wednesday, noting this demise was unlikely to be reversed.
“It’s hard to return [to that situation] as the world is rethinking liberalism – the very foundation of US hegemony – and marching towards nationalism and realism instead.”

Since the 1990s, the world has operated within a liberal multilateral system anchored by Washington. However, since Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Washington’s “table-flipping” diplomacy signalled that the US no longer wished to sustain this global structure, Da said.
However, he stressed that this did not equate to the decline of US national power, noting that the “post-American era” had not yet arrived. Rather, the execution of US leadership had shifted from an institutional focus to one that prioritised coercion and transaction.
Even if a new president tried to revive liberalism, global hegemony could not be reconstructed because America’s moral and international prestige had been severely damaged in the past several years, Da argued.
“It is difficult to imagine that after several rounds of political turbulence – especially since Trump’s second term – its prestige could ever return to the level at the end of the Cold War.”

But Da pushed back against the idea that China would replace the US as a world leader.
“I believe China is both unwilling and unable to replace the United States’ globally dominant position.”
China was fundamentally not a universalist power and, unlike Western countries, had no desire to demand that other countries reshape themselves in its image, Da said.
He also pointed out that the US became the world’s largest economy in the late 19th century but it took over 50 years to assume global leadership. China remained a developing nation with a long path of domestic growth ahead, he said.
He argued that China’s expanding global influence was following a path distinct from American hegemony: one built on sovereign equality, driven by development cooperation and anchored in a network of “partnerships rather than alliances”.
He said this path aligned better with the reality of the world today as it moved beyond binary confrontations and purely economic motivations.