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AbstractChina's evidently unstoppable "rise" energizes PRC political and intellectual elites to think seriously about the future of international relations. How will (and should) China's international roles change in the forthcoming decades? How should its leaders put the country's rapidly-increasing power to use? Foreign China specialists have tended to use an overly-streamlined "resisting" the West versus "co-operating" with it (or even simpler "optimistic" versus "pessimistic") scale to address such questions, partly reflecting the divide between Realism and Neoliberalism in American international relations theory. By 2002, a near-consensus had developed (though never shared universally) that China had become an increasingly co-operative power since the mid-1990s and would continue to pursue the policy prescriptions of Neoliberal international relations theory. But using more nuanced "English school" analytical techniques – and examining the writings of Chinese elites themselves, aimed solely at Chinese audiences – this article discovers an unmistakably cynical Realism to be still at the core of Chinese thinking on the international future. Even elites who appear sincere in their promotion of co-operation firmly reject "solidarism" among the world's leading states and insist upon upholding the difference between China and all others. Many demand – and foresee – China using its future power to pursue world objectives that would depart in significant respects from those of the other leading states and non-state actors.

The variations on power transition theory so widely used to frame analysis of U.S.–China relation tend to assume the inevitability or at least strong probability of China surpassing the United States in economic power if not necessarily military power. In the terminology of social psychology's attribution theory, China is imputed with the identity of a state that is inevitably rising. The Chinese Communist Party encourages this attribution among Chinese people and foreigners. But China's economic rise – the foundation of its comprehensive rise – appears to have entered an inflection point in the mid-2010s and may now be stalling. In critical respects, China increasingly resembles the last two countries that 'attempted' a globe-level rise: the unsuccessful cases of postwar Japan and the Soviet Union. China's labor force is shrinking; the country relies excessively on unsustainable debt increases to fuel economic growth; and pollution is seriously harming public health. But even if China's rise conclusively stalls, it may take quite some time before the Chinese public and outside observers recognize the new reality because of intrinsic biases in the cognitive logic of attributing identities to actors. (Pac Rev/GIGA)