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Oriana Skylar Mastro is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. She is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her recent book, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power, offers a framework to understand how China formulates its strategies. We began the interview by discussing that book: the following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Q: You argue in your book that China is closing the power gap with the U.S. through what you call the ‘upstart’ strategy. What do you mean by that term?

A: The upstart strategy is a combination of three components, which I call the ‘three Es’. It looks at the conditions under which China emulates U.S. strategy, when they exploit vulnerabilities or gaps in U.S. strategy and when they’re entrepreneurial. It’s a way to describe how a rising power tries to close the gap with an established hegemon. 

The assumption, whether it’s in policy or academia, is that to become a great power, you must emulate the successes of the great power. The upstart strategy looks at other choices that China can make. Exploitation, for example, happens when China takes the U.S. strategy but applies it to a new area of competition. Entrepreneurship is when they do something completely different. The book looks at 22 different cases — in foreign policy, economics, military strategy — of these three different components of the upstart strategy. 

The logic behind Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of ‘hiding your strength and biding your time’ was to avoid tensions with other countries. When did that calculus start to shift for Beijing and why?

I don’t think that calculation has shifted. It is now just one of five things that China considers when it’s choosing a strategy, and it has become a lesson less weighted against the other ones. 

There was a conventional wisdom in China that the number one thing that could keep it from rising was a strong negative reaction from the United States. The view was that the established hegemon might try to lash out against the rising power and keep it from rising if it felt threatened. When China was deciding which strategy to employ, its leaders would often ask themselves: how is the United States going to view this? In some cases, emulating the United States would reassure Washington, for example, joining international institutions and embracing free trade. But in other cases, emulating the United States would not be reassuring — like China building a large military or nuclear arsenal. 

In the recent Xi years, post-2019, the understanding has developed that presenting China as non-threatening to the United States is no longer really possible. And therefore that approach receives less consideration than the four other factors that China considers, which are: how effective is this strategy, how efficient would China be at it, what are their competitive advantages and domestic liabilities, and are there any gaps or vulnerabilities that they can exploit.

Can you give us some examples of where China has been successful in emulating the U.S. foreign policy, and some instances where it has gone down a different route? 

Before I go through them, it’s not always the case that China gets it right. This isn’t a book about everything China touches turning to gold. There are cases where they emulated the United States and they shouldn’t have, and it turned out to be a failure.

One example of emulation is the way that China has embraced mediation diplomacy, serving as a mediator between disputed parties to gain political influence, prestige and legitimacy. China, in the initial stages of its rise, was not a party to most international institutions, but it has since joined them. One area where they have tried to emulate the United States, but where they do not have a competitive advantage and therefore haven’t really seen a lot of gains, is in the area of soft power. 

In terms of exploitation in foreign policy, arm sales have been a successful tool of foreign policy for the United States, which sells weapons to the majority of countries in the world. China recognizes that directly competing with the United States in that area doesn’t make a lot of sense. So it sells arms to countries that cannot buy them from the U.S., or certain types of arms that the U.S. does not sell. 

With diplomatic outreach, they have the same strategy of high level visits to gain political influence, but Chinese leaders visit a greater variety of countries. While the U.S. President usually spends a lot of time in places like the UK or Germany, none has ever been to Central Asia, or the majority of countries in Africa, places where Chinese leaders often go. They’re exploiting some of those gaps in U.S. presence. 

As for entrepreneurship, there are three things they do differently in foreign policy. They don’t have alliances; instead, they have strategic partnerships. China is not trying to be the external security partner of choice for other countries, meaning training foreign militaries the way the United States does. Instead, they are trying to be the internal security partner of choice. China has training programs for domestic law enforcement in the majority of countries in the world. And while the United States pursues democratization to various degrees, China observes regime neutrality, and that is a very entrepreneurial approach to building political influence.

Why do you think China has taken this approach of becoming an internal security partner of choice and how have these efforts panned out so far? 

The first reason is that there are demand signals coming from other countries. It’s not that China avoids the strategy of training foreign militaries because they think the United States is making a poor decision to do that: it’s more that its leaders recognize that they can’t really compete in that area. China hasn’t fought a war since 1979. They focus on law enforcement because there is a demand signal and it’s something that they have to offer. It is a component of the entrepreneurial approach to protecting overseas interests. 

Even if China were to have 0 percent growth over the next 30 years, they would have more economic resources than they have had in the past 30 years. So why do we feel like we can just write off the competition, given how they’ve performed so well with less in the past?

I would argue — and it’s one of the more controversial arguments in the book — that China doesn’t have, and isn’t interested in, projecting military power globally. They instead have a multi-pronged strategy to protect the hundreds of millions of Chinese people and thousands of Chinese companies overseas. One component is relying on host nations’ law enforcement forces to protect Chinese assets.

Other countries respond relatively well. The thing with the regime neutrality approach is that the Chinese are able to cater what they have on offer from country to country. The United States would not feel comfortable training forces of countries where there are human rights abuses, while China has less of an issue with that. And while the United States has a lot of experience fighting wars, China has a lot of experience with internal repression. They spend more on internal security than they spend on their whole military, so this is an area of competitive advantage where they can offer lessons to other countries.

In the realm of military strategy, in what ways has China exploited U.S. vulnerabilities and blind spots, and how should Washington be countering these efforts?

There’s no example more perfect than what we refer to as the A2/AD strategy, or the anti access/area denial strategy. This is China’s attempt to deliberately assess where U.S. vulnerabilities were in power projection and develop the capabilities necessary to attack those specific areas. This is how you get Chinese anti-satellite systems, anti-ship ballistic missiles, and missiles that can hit U.S. bases — so that the things that the United States needs and the bases in the Indo-Pacific region, specifically within the first island chain, are all under threat from Chinese attack. 

Now, an entrepreneurship aspect of the military realm is China not having overseas bases. They have one in Djibouti, but during their rise over the past 30 years, they have not been trying to project power globally. The reason is not lack of capability, but because Beijing considers it to be a really ineffective way for the United States to project power, because the cousin of overseas power projection is foreign military intervention, which China sees as very costly.

The other controversial area is nuclear strategy, in which I argue that everything about China’s approach to nuclear weapons is different from that of the United States, from posture to doctrine to strategy, to organization and training. The rationale behind it suggests that China is not striving for parity with the United States, despite all the concerns about their current buildup.

The problem for the United States is what it needs is different from what China needs to prevail in this type of competition. People often ask me, how can the Chinese military be so much better than the U.S. military? It’s because we’re trying to achieve two very different things. If China tries to project power farther than 300 miles from their coast, the United States dominates the rest of the world. The problem is that the majority of conflicts that we are going to potentially have with China are in the first island chain — Taiwan, the Senkaku islands (in Japan) and even the South China Sea. 

And so what the United States needs is a military posture that is more forward leaning, but also to develop technologies that allow for strikes from farther away in real time. China has capabilities in intermediate range ballistic missiles, so that 70 percent of its arsenal are missiles that can put U.S. aircraft carriers and bases at risk. The United States doesn’t have this type of capability because we were in a treaty with the Russians for many years for strategic stability reasons. 

If I had a wish list, my top two things would be to have many more submarines with the ability to reload and replenish in countries like Japan and the Philippines, instead of only relying on places like Hawaii and Guam; and then intermediate range ballistic missiles stationed in second island chain countries. If I could add a third, I would get the nine bases back in the Philippines that we lost. That would be an ideal way of enhancing deterrence in Asia. 

On the issue of Taiwan, you open one chapter with a description of how U.S. military officers realized back in 2018 that they could lose to China if a conflict broke out, based on war game scenarios. How has China achieved that position, and what’s the situation now?

The whole purpose of war games is worst case scenario planning. It’s not the case that the United States would lose every war over Taiwan. The issue with the Taiwan scenario is that China is going to choose the time and place of their attack. In 95 percent of the cases, the conditions would not be ripe for China to succeed in taking Taiwan quickly and they’re not going to start a war in those cases. They’re going to wait for the 5 percent scenario where the United States is not conducting some major exercise in the area at the time, where there’s a lot of ambiguous signals. 

It’s an issue of quality and quantity. If China moves fast, the United States doesn’t have the forces that can respond quickly enough against Chinese forces in the numbers that we would need. Could we sink a handful of Chinese ships? Sure. But is that going to stop an invasion of thousands of ships? No. It’s about not only having that firepower close, but also having it at scale. And the United States just hasn’t been thinking about conflict in that way. We haven’t stockpiled the quantity of things that we would need to be able to stop that invading force in a timely manner.

The United States is very clear, because we think that for coercion to work, the threat has to be credible and communicated very clearly. China believes that ambiguity and uncertainty is what gets them ahead…

You argue that the U.S. should itself take entrepreneurial approaches to enhance deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. What do you mean by that and what are some examples?

One thing about entrepreneurial approaches is that what is considered new is relative to yourself in the past. There may be things that China has done that will still be new to a degree for us, such as offering certain types of defense to allies and partners. Right now, U.S. defense agreements do not include exclusive economic zones. That would be new if we decided that we are also going to protect those areas. We could also expand U.S. military operations in those areas to include more strategic assets, whether it be submarines, bombers, missiles being hosted in allied countries, instead of places like Guam, which is a U.S. protectorate, or Hawaii. 

China is much better at ‘let me try this with one country, and expand if it works’. In the U.S. system, there’s a lot of “oh, that’s just not what we do.” For example, the United States doesn’t take a position on the disputes in the South China Sea. Maybe, as China continues to be aggressive in those areas, we do take a position, and we take the sides of other countries against China. 

And on the economic side, we see the U.S.’s growing use of sanctions.How is China doing things differently, and how does it work to their advantage?

They also use sanctions in a different area of competition. The United States uses economic sanctions, usually to punish a country if we don’t like what they’re doing in a human rights realm or some violation of a norm. When China institutes sanctions, it’s usually because those countries have said something mean about China. 

Moreover, they often like to pretend those sanctions aren’t happening. China really does love deniability. They just say, “it’s not our fault that all of a sudden, no tourists want to go to Korea and no Chinese students want to study in Australia.” The United States is very clear, because we think that for coercion to work, the threat has to be credible and communicated very clearly. China believes that ambiguity and uncertainty is what gets them ahead, and to a degree, they’re right. 

And ultimately, what is China’s end game, or vision? Is it to overtake or replace or compete with the United States? 

China has been in a weaker position than the United States this whole time. In the mid-1990s, their economy was smaller than France’s. There’s generally an understanding that China is going to continue to grow and even if they’re not going to overtake the United States, the two countries are going to be in a different category than others. Overtaking the United States is not really necessary, if China is able, through its upstart approach, to have a disproportionate impact and get what they want. They don’t need to have a military that’s exactly the same size as the United States. They don’t need to have a GDP that’s exactly the same as the United States to be a competitor and to get countries around the world to care about their preferences more than they care about U.S. preferences. 

There are certain aspects of Chinese policy that we know about: Reunification with Taiwan is a set target. But on a broader scale, they want the power and influence to have the strategic space to make the decisions that they think are best for their country, without having to worry about what other people say about it. They don’t want to be deterred. They don’t want their decisions to be constrained by the United States or other countries’ threats of rewards or punishments. 

There’s a debate over whether China has peaked. You suggest that framing itself is problematic. Can you tell us why?

One of the things that comes out in this book is how we think about power. A lot of American strategists assume China is emulating us and that their emulation has been successful. So they measure things like whether the U.S. has more military bases or alliances than China does. I worry that it’s a lot like a taxi company looking at Uber and saying, we own more cars. Is that really the right metric of success? 

The second thing is related to China’s entrepreneurial approach. I learned a lot of this from business literature on competition. When people do things differently from you, it takes you longer to recognize what they’re doing, and you tend to underestimate what they do. I am concerned about the peak China argument, because in a lot of cases, we underestimate what is going to be the effectiveness of certain Chinese approaches.

Even if China were to have 0 percent growth over the next 30 years, they would have more economic resources than they have had in the past 30 years. So why do we feel like we can just write off the competition, given how they’ve performed so well with less in the past?

Some have argued that the U.S. has been too slow in recognizing China’s authoritarian shift under Xi Jinping and countering the country’s rise. Do you agree with that assessment?

Part of this is not really to say that we underestimated or overestimated the threat. It’s just that we continue to mischaracterize it by identifying this as an authoritarian threat. That’s not the nature of the threat that China poses. Their number one success is their ability to woo U.S. partners and allies. The hardest thing the United States has to do is getting our partners and allies on board with what we need, because those countries often have positive relations with China. China is avoiding becoming a leader of autocratic Iran, North Korea, and Russia, because they can have the best of both worlds. Their number one trading partners are still European countries, even while they have political, security and military support from these problematic countries. And they are also able to weaken the United States through these proxies. 

Presenting it as an ideological challenge mischaracterizes what we’re facing. It’s not necessarily the case that interacting with China makes [countries] more autocratic. But trying to find a framing that is both more nuanced and that resonates with the American public is difficult. 

What are the lessons here for the U.S.?

We are complacent. We have this hubris that everything that we do is the right way to do it. With the United States being the most powerful country, we are used to being in this position of privilege, and we assume that we will stay there forever, regardless of what we do. 

Being a non-political animal, my job is not to appease anyone. My job is to try to figure out what’s best for the United States, and what strategy is going to get us there, even if it’s politically unpopular.

Being the underdog, being the upstart, you inherently have more motivation than when you’re at the top. And that’s what I worry about with the United States. This feeling we have that China will solve the problem for us by imploding on their own, or that surely we’re on the right side of history, so even if we don’t work hard or come together, or embody the values that we espouse, people are still going to want to be our partners — a lot of that concerns me. 

What are the differences in approach towards China between former President Trump and Vice President Harris, and how impactful would those differences potentially be?

When I talk to my Chinese colleagues, they see no difference between the two sides. They have determined that the U.S. reaction is always going to be negative, whether it’s Harris or Trump.

What I try to convey to them is, while they might be right about that, the reasons are very different from a Trump to a Harris administration, and that makes a big difference. The Democrats don’t like how China’s been behaving, but there’s always the possibility that if Chinese behavior changes, the relationship would change. While the Trump administration believes for ideological reasons that China, in its inherent nature, is bad. And there’s nothing China could do, besides completely changing the fundamentals of what makes the PRC the PRC, to have a better relationship with the United States. The Chinese are really missing out on an opportunity to recognize the nuanced difference between the two sides.

Politicians such as Mike Gallagher [a former Congressman who led the House’s select committee on the CCP], who have been at the forefront of turning Congress more hawkish on China, have cited you as a major influence. Do you see yourself as part of a particular grouping or school of thought on China?

I have written things that everybody hates. I have argued that a Chinese role in a Korea contingency would be beneficial, and that we shouldn’t deter Chinese military intervention in Korea. I think the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan did nothing to encourage the Chinese to take Taiwan. I am not concerned about their nuclear buildup and I think it’s overblown. So some people would find me too dovish. On the other hand, I think the Chinese are absolutely planning on taking Taiwan by force, and that they want the U.S. military out of Asia, and that they want to be the dominant power in Asia.

What does or doesn’t concern me is very issue specific. More and more, the United States and China have conflicting interests and China having influence is bad for the United States. But it’s also relative. Where maybe I and some conservatives would disagree is that to me, what China wants is completely understandable. I don’t think it’s an evil empire that just hates freedom and is trying to destroy the whole world. I gave a lecture on Taiwan, where I spent 50 minutes describing all the reasons why Taiwan is China’s and then I ended by saying, but China still can’t have it. 

People tend not to tell me the things they disagree with. They tend to call me and write me mean letters when they’re upset with something I have written. And there have been one or two things I’ve written, after which Mike has sent me a text saying that he wasn’t happy about it. But that’s what I see as the role of an academic. Being a non-political animal, my job is not to appease anyone. My job is to try to figure out what’s best for the United States, and what strategy is going to get us there, even if it’s politically unpopular.

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