Evan Feigenbaum

3. This has got a lot about China right, in my view, and demonstrates, too, a lot of what is wrong with the current discourse. If you are a revisionist (but a highly strategic one) you value order and rules but seek changes ("revisions" ... literally) in line with your interests.

4. If, by contrast, you are a revolutionary, you seek to overturn the entire structure of order and rules ... And there is too much conflation of these in the current debate about China and the world, in my humble opinion.

5. I wrote a lot about this in my 2018 essay on China as a "reluctant stakeholder." China is a very strategic revisionist that (1) accepts many of the West's preferred forms but not necessarily its preferred norms; and (2) is pursuing "portfolio diversification," not revolution.

6. And that resonates with that paragraph of this interesting and important UK report ...

7. Here's how I put it in that essay: "China rejects the trans-Atlantic preference for a liberal bias to the existing system but not 'international order' per se. In other words, it subscribes to much of the existing order but not our desire to lock in a liberal bias."

8: My point was, of course, that US/Western efforts to adapt—but also defend—the existing architecture are surely going to be more difficult than many in Washington presume. And I think that's reflected in parts of the UK report as well.

9. And China seems unique to me because its Communist government combines a deep-seated Leninism with what I view as equally deep-seated foreign policy traditionalism. The roots of the latter lie in the 1990s—fully two decades before Xi Jinping, a committed Leninist, took power.