China Competition Reading List

Pillsbury spent four decades as a China analyst for the U.S. government — advising multiple administrations, running covert programs to strengthen Chinese military capability, and helping construct the strategic framework that brought China into international institutions. Then he concluded that he and everyone else had been wrong. His argument: that China has been executing a century-long strategy to replace the United States as the world's dominant power by 2049, and that American analysts failed to see it because they assumed China would westernize as it modernized. The intelligence failures he documents are not bureaucratic errors — they are systematic misreadings of Chinese strategic intent that shaped U.S. policy for fifty years. On the Secretary of the Air Force's China competition reading list because it is the argument that changed how the U.S. government thinks about the pacing threat.

Doshi served on the NSC and as China Director at the White House when he published this analysis of Chinese grand strategy. His argument, built from Chinese-language party documents rather than American interpretations of Chinese behavior: that Beijing has been pursuing a consistent strategy of blunting U.S. primacy since the late 1980s, and that the shift from passive blunting to active construction of Chinese-led alternatives began around 2008. The evidence is granular and the sourcing is primary — Chinese Communist Party documents, Politburo speeches, internal planning records. The most rigorous available analysis of how Beijing thinks about strategic competition with the United States. Essential for anyone advising on China policy or preparing for great power competition.

McGregor spent years as the Financial Times bureau chief in Beijing and wrote the most accessible account available of how the Chinese Communist Party actually works — not its formal structure, but the informal mechanisms of power, patronage, and control that function beneath the official institutions. His account of how the Party maintains control over nominally separate institutions (the military, state enterprises, the legal system, the media) is the operating manual for understanding Chinese strategic behavior. The key insight: there is no meaningful separation between the CCP and the Chinese state in any domain that matters for great power competition, and Western analysis that treats Chinese institutions as analogous to their Western counterparts systematically misreads what China is doing.

Kissinger opened China to the United States in 1971, conducted the secret negotiations that established the framework for the relationship, and spent the next fifty years as the foreign policy world's most credible interpreter of Chinese strategic thinking. This book is his account of Chinese foreign policy from the imperial era through his own negotiations with Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and their successors — and his analysis of how Chinese strategic culture differs from Western strategic culture in ways that make misunderstanding structurally likely. Whether you agree with his prescription for managing the relationship or not, his analysis of how Chinese leaders think about strategy, sovereignty, and the relationship between diplomatic form and political substance is the most informed available from an American source.

Rudd served as Prime Minister of Australia, speaks Mandarin, and has spent his career in the middle of the U.S.-China relationship from the Indo-Pacific side. His framework: that conflict between Washington and Beijing is not predetermined — that a managed peace is available if both sides understand each other's red lines and build durable guardrails around the competition. He lays out, chapter by chapter, the scenarios that could trigger war and the conditions that would make each more or less likely. The most operationally useful framework available for thinking about what deterrence in the Indo-Pacific actually requires: not just military capability but political signaling, alliance management, and a clear-eyed understanding of Beijing's domestic political constraints.

Economy runs the Council on Foreign Relations' Asia Studies program and has spent her career analyzing Chinese foreign policy. This 2022 book is her most direct account of Beijing's current strategy: what China actually wants to accomplish in international institutions, in the global economy, and in territorial disputes in the Indo-Pacific — not what its diplomats say it wants. Her analysis of how China uses multilateral institutions to pursue unilateral objectives, and how it applies economic coercion to enforce political compliance from smaller states, is the most current available account of the operational toolkit of Chinese great power competition. The companion volume to her earlier The Third Revolution.

Fravel's academic analysis of Chinese military strategy from 1949 through the present — the most rigorous available account of how the People's Liberation Army actually thinks about military operations and deterrence, reconstructed from Chinese-language military documents, party records, and the operational history of how Chinese military strategy has changed in response to external threats and internal politics. His central finding: that Chinese military strategy is not static or simply reactive but has evolved through distinct phases driven by both threat perception and leadership politics. The essential companion to the political and economic analysis of China — the military doctrine that the strategic competition is ultimately designed to support.

Brown directs the Lowy Institute's Asia program; Wu is a Taiwan-focused analyst. Their book is the most direct analysis available of the Taiwan problem from all three perspectives simultaneously — Beijing's, Washington's, and Taipei's — and of the domestic political constraints that make the problem harder to manage than the military and diplomatic analysis alone suggests. The argument: that Taiwan is a problem that cannot be resolved, only managed, and that the management requires understanding how domestic politics in all three capitals interact with the strategic calculation. The one book on the SecAF list that addresses the specific contingency INDOPACOM most needs to prevent.

Blanchette tracks the resurgence of Maoist ideology within the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping — the revival of political movements and institutional forms that most China analysts had assumed were permanently discredited after the Cultural Revolution. His argument: that Xi is not simply a pragmatic modernizer who uses leftist language for domestic legitimacy, but a genuine believer in Maoist political organization as a tool for consolidating power and preparing for strategic competition with the West. The implications for how to read Chinese intentions are significant: a leadership that has revived Mao's ideological framework is not operating on the same incentive structure that Western analysts have been modeling since Deng's reforms in 1978.

Haddick spent his career in the Marine Corps and at SOCOM, and this book is his analysis of the challenge China's anti-access/area-denial capabilities pose to U.S. power projection in the Western Pacific — the missile systems, submarine force, and electronic warfare capabilities that China has built specifically to prevent the U.S. from reinforcing Taiwan or projecting power in the South China Sea in a crisis. His argument: that the U.S. military has been slowly priced out of the Western Pacific by a Chinese strategy that exploits the asymmetry between cheap missiles and expensive aircraft carriers and bases. Published in 2014, the trends he identified have become more acute every year since.

Economy's focused analysis of Xi Jinping's transformation of the Chinese state — the concentration of power in Xi's person that reversed thirty years of collective leadership, the revival of ideology in party governance, and the ambitions Xi has articulated that his predecessors deliberately avoided expressing. Her argument: that Xi represents a genuine break with the post-Mao era, not a continuation of it, and that the assumptions about convergence and gradual liberalization that shaped Western China policy were not just wrong but were actively exploited by the party leadership that always intended something different. Essential context for understanding why the entire SecAF China competition reading list exists as a list.

Cole retired as a Navy captain and China analyst at the National War College, and this book is his assessment of Chinese maritime strategy — how Beijing is using its rapidly expanding naval power to assert control over the South and East China Seas, protect sea lanes critical to Chinese energy imports, and position the PLA Navy for eventual power projection beyond the first island chain. The specific analysis of how Chinese oil dependency shapes military strategy is directly applicable to INDOPACOM planning: the sea lanes Cole identifies as critical to Chinese strategy are the same sea lanes INDOPACOM is responsible for defending. Written by someone who spent a career studying the problem from inside the Navy intelligence community.

Shambaugh is the preeminent American scholar of Chinese foreign policy in Southeast Asia, and this is his most current analysis of how Beijing has displaced American influence throughout the ASEAN region through economic investment, diplomatic engagement, and military pressure — and what that displacement means for the regional architecture that American security in the Indo-Pacific depends on. The book maps the actual terrain of the competition: country by country, institution by institution, the specific mechanisms by which China has been consolidating influence in the most strategically consequential region in the world. The ground-level view of what great power competition actually looks like to the states caught between the two.

Khanna's argument that the twenty-first century's center of gravity is not the U.S.-China bilateral relationship but the broader Asian integration — the economic, technological, and demographic trends that are producing an Asian-led world order centered on the Indo-Pacific. His analysis of the infrastructure, trade, and connectivity projects creating new regional dependencies is the broadest available context for understanding what INDOPACOM is actually competing for: not just military dominance in the Western Pacific but the shape of the economic and political order that will define the century. A corrective to the tendency to treat China as the only story in the region.

Spence spent his career at Yale studying China and wrote the standard comprehensive history of China from the mid-Ming dynasty through the modern era — the book that China historians assign when someone needs to understand how the current Chinese state emerged from two centuries of internal collapse, foreign humiliation, and revolutionary politics. The argument that runs through it: that China's sense of itself as a civilization temporarily deranged by foreign intrusion, rather than a developing state like any other, explains both its foreign policy and its domestic political culture. On the Secretary of the Air Force's China competition reading list as the historical foundation for understanding why contemporary Chinese strategic behavior looks the way it does.

Tuchman won a Pulitzer for The Guns of August and wrote this history of Joseph Stilwell's experience as commander of American forces in the China-Burma-India theater — and as the American officer assigned to reform a Nationalist Chinese army that refused to be reformed. Her account of the gap between what American advisors were trying to accomplish and what the Chinese military and political leadership was actually doing is, seventy-five years later, one of the most useful frameworks available for understanding the structural obstacles in U.S.-China military engagement. The frustrations Stilwell documented in 1944 reappear in every subsequent account of American-Chinese military interaction. On the SecAF China list because the history rhymes.

Lim covered China for the BBC and NPR for years, and this book is about the deliberate erasure of June 4th, 1989 — the Tiananmen Square massacre and its systematic removal from Chinese public consciousness. The argument is not primarily about what happened (that history is well-documented) but about what the deliberate forgetting reveals about the Chinese state: its relationship to its own population, the brittleness that forced the crackdown, and what the suppression of memory produces in a society whose government maintains that it never happened. On the SecAF China list because understanding the CCP's relationship to historical truth is necessary context for evaluating everything the Chinese government says about its intentions.

Wang's analysis of the social and institutional origins of imperial Chinese state development — how the examination system, bureaucratic structure, and gentry class produced a political order simultaneously resilient and brittle across two thousand years. More academic than the other books on the SecAF list, but on it for a specific reason: the patterns Wang documents — the tendency to recentralize power under threat, the relationship between elite compliance and regime stability, the way the Chinese state absorbs and depletes reformers — are the same patterns Xi Jinping is replicating. Understanding why those patterns are structurally embedded rather than contingent is prerequisite to understanding why they are so hard to change.

Meredith's comparative analysis of the Chinese and Indian economic rises and their strategic implications — the demographic, economic, and military trajectories of the two Asian giants and what their competition with each other and with the United States means for the regional order. The Indo-Pacific strategic competition is not bilateral; India's relationship to both the United States and China, its naval ambitions, and its own claims in the Indian Ocean are part of the same strategic environment that INDOPACOM navigates. Meredith's comparative framework is the most readable introduction to the three-way dynamic, written before the relationship hardened into competition but more useful now than when published.