For years, Western commentary has defaulted to a comfortable phrase: China is our greatest competitor. It sounds modern, measured, even sporting, like global affairs is an Olympic podium where everyone accepts the rules, shakes hands afterward and goes home.
That mental model is precisely the problem. It turns a strategic threat into a business rivalry, a regime project into a market challenge, and an adversarial system into a “peer” that merely wants to win within the same game.
Competition is what happens inside a shared framework: open exchange, reciprocal access, predictable rules and a baseline acceptance that the other side has the right to exist and succeed.
The “China-as-competitor” narrative rests on three assumptions: One, that China is part of the global free market and democratic rules-based system. Two, China accepts those rules. Three, China aims to be the gold medalist while conceding the legitimacy of silver and bronze. None of these assumptions survives contact with reality.
Start with the nature of the Chinese state. China is not simply “authoritarian with Chinese characteristics.” It is a Marxist-Leninist one-party dictatorship that treats political pluralism as a mortal threat and treats its own citizens as subjects to be managed, censored and surveilled.
Freedom House rates China “Not Free” with an overall score of 9/100, reflecting systematic repression of political rights and civil liberties.
Reporters Without Borders describes China as the world’s largest jailer of journalists, with more than 100 currently detained.
The point is not moral posturing; it is strategic clarity. A regime that cannot tolerate free speech at home will not behave as a rule-abiding participant abroad. A system built on coercion does not suddenly become a sportsman because it exports solar panels.
Consider also what “competitor” implies about reciprocity. If China were a normal competitor, then access would run both ways. Students, ideas, media, platforms and capital would flow with friction, but not with one-sided locks. Yet the imbalance is stark. In the United States, Chinese students remain one of the largest international cohorts; yet the communist government has made it unsafe, unfree and unwelcome for Americans to study in China.
For the 2024-2025 academic year, 265,919 Chinese students were allowed to study in the U.S. Only about 800 Americans were in China for the 2023-2024 academic year.
For every American studying in China, more than 3,000 Chinese are studying on American campuses. That is not a normal “exchange.” It is asymmetric openness. One side learns everything it can; the other side is gated, watched and deterred.
The information domain is even more lopsided, and here the “competitor” label becomes almost absurd. Americans can argue over whether to ban a Chinese-controlled app such as TikTok, but the Chinese Communist Party has executed a sweeping ban regime against American and Western platforms inside China — not because of privacy concerns but because free information is incompatible with totalitarian control.
In China, ordinary citizens cannot freely access X, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Drive, YouTube, WhatsApp, Signal, Snapchat, Wikipedia, Quora, Pinterest, Vimeo or the websites of virtually all major Western newspapers. This is not a minor regulatory dispute; it is a comprehensive, deliberate shutdown of the open internet.
That matters because censorship is not just domestic repression; it is strategic insulation. When a regime blocks the world’s biggest platforms, it is not “competing” in the marketplace of ideas. It is eliminating the marketplace entirely. It is cutting off its people from independent journalism, alternative viewpoints, investigative reporting and even basic tools that much of the free world treats as infrastructure.
The result is a society engineered for obedience, where narratives are not debated but issued.
Then there is the economic front. “Competition” presumes a largely market-based contest: innovate, price, manufacture, sell. When a command state floods strategic sectors with subsidies, directs capital through policy banks, shields domestic markets and leverages regulatory power to tilt outcomes, the contest is no longer “free market competition.” It is industrial coercion wearing a price tag.
Investigations into Chinese electric vehicles and other strategic industries have repeatedly highlighted patterns of massive state intervention that distort prices and overwhelm foreign producers. That is not fair competition; it is predatory statecraft.
The trade relationship shows the scale of imbalance. Even after years of tariff battles and “decoupling” talk, the U.S. still runs an enormous goods trade deficit with China: $295.4 billion in 2024. Call that “competition” if you want, but it is competition where one side is permitted to play defense, offense and referee.
Most important, the “competitor” framing misses the regime’s strategic end state. A competitor seeks to outperform you; an adversary seeks to destroy you. Beijing’s project is not simply to sell more products or file more patents. It is to normalize authoritarian governance as an alternative to free society and democratic governance, and to shape the global environment so that free nations face higher costs for remaining free.
You can negotiate with a competitor over tariffs. You cannot “outcompete” a system that views your political model as a contagion and a mortal threat.
Even U.S. regulatory language recognizes this distinction in specific contexts. Under the Code of Federal Regulations, the U.S. designates “foreign adversaries” for certain national security purposes. That list explicitly includes China, alongside Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. That designation is narrow and purpose-built, not a declaration of war. Still, it reflects a hard truth: In key domains, the U.S. government already treats China not as a rival but as a hostile strategic actor.
So, yes, precision matters. Words shape budgets, alliances, risk tolerance and public expectations. Calling China a “competitor” invites complacency: Just run faster, innovate more, build better. Calling China the No. 1 adversary invites realism: Defend the information space, de-risk critical supply chains, protect research integrity, harden democratic institutions, and meet coercion with collective deterrence.
You cannot compete with a regime that blocks your speech, harvests your openness, weaponizes your dependencies and seeks to make your system look obsolete. This is not a race for a medal. It is a contest over whether free societies remain free.