Loose Threads: The False Binary

What Lawrence Wong Understands About China That We Don’t

Our foreign policy debate has calcified around a choice that doesn’t exist. America or China. Values or economics. Security or trade. The framing is everywhere: in select committee hearings, in ministerial speeches, and on radio talk-back. It is also, I think, wrong.

Not wrong in the sense of morally misguided, though it may be that too, but wrong in the more fundamental sense of misapprehending the world we’re actually living in.

The binary assumes conditions that no longer obtain: a rising China moving towards convergence, a stable American-led order, and a choice between two coherent blocs. These are questions from 2010, and the ground has shifted.

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has shifted with it. For those of you who follow this Substack, you will know I think we have a lot to learn from Singapore, but I don’t know if we are ready to learn some of the lessons it offers.

In a lengthy interview with the Financial Times, Wong sketched a strategic vision that dispenses with the binary entirely. Not through diplomatic hedging or clever ambiguity, but through a clear-eyed assessment of economic and geopolitical realities that render the choice false.

I’ve spent the weekend working through the interview, reading his other speeches and generally parsing the arguments, trying to extract a strategic logic. What emerges is a framework considerably more sophisticated than the binary we’re trapped in.

Three points from Wong’s interview seem worth careful thought. First, his insistence that China is not a rising power but a risen one, and what that means for assumptions about convergence. Second, his argument about economic elasticity and why neither decoupling nor hegemonic transition is likely. Third, his emphasis on plurilateral coalition-building as the practical response for small and middle powers. Each complicates the debate we’re currently having, and each deserves closer attention than it’s received.

China: The Risen Power

The most provocative thing Wong says is also the most uncomfortable for Western policymakers to hear. China is not a rising power. It is a risen power, and that distinction matters.

A rising power is still climbing towards an established summit. The metaphor implies trajectory, eventual arrival, and convergence with existing norms. It suggests that China’s development is a process of catching up, that integration into the global economy would produce political liberalisation, and that engagement would encourage Beijing to become a responsible stakeholder in the American-led order. This was the animating assumption of Western China policy from the 1990s through to the mid-2010s.

Wong is blunt about the failure of the theory of convergence. China will not converge with Western norms. It will find its own path to modernity. More than that, it has already found it. In renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, and parts of the digital economy, China is not catching up but leading.

Indeed, it is now thinking about what responsibilities it might exercise as a leader in the global system. When Wong cites China forgoing special and differential treatment provisions at the WTO and doubling down on support for global institutions, he is pointing to a country that understands itself as having arrived.

China, my friends, has already risen.

This creates an analytical problem. If China is not converging, then engagement is not producing the outcomes assumed. Trade does not automatically generate political reform. Technology transfer does not guarantee the adoption of Western governance norms. Investment flows do not create neo-liberal constituencies demanding change. The causal mechanisms that the “anglo-club” assumed and relied upon have failed to materialise.

It’s perhaps worth noting that Aotearoa’s foreign and security establishment has been distracted. For the past several years, most of the Wellington policy advisory systems have been consumed by domestic matters: culture wars over identity, constitutional arguments about Te Tiriti, anti-woke fascinations, and now machinery-of-government changes. While these are not trivial matters, they have absorbed bandwidth that might otherwise have gone to strategic recalibration. The convergence assumption persists not because it has been tested and validated, but because our senior officials have not had the space to examine whether it still holds, and start socialising the nation to the change.

It is Prime Minister Wong’s framework that finally forces that examination. China’s developmental model: state capitalism paired with technological nationalism, Party control married to market dynamism, has delivered outcomes that contradict the convergence thesis. The model works, at least for China’s purposes. It has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, created globally competitive industries, and delivered sustained growth without political liberalisation.

This does not mean China can replace America as a global hegemon. Wong is clear about the limitations. China’s per capita GDP remains one-fifth of America’s. It faces significant domestic challenges. It is not yet able or willing to provide the public goods that American primacy supplied. But it is already too large, too technologically capable, too economically enmeshed to be isolated. The asymmetry matters. China is not strong enough to dominate but too strong to be dominated.

The Modus Vivendi

So, if China has risen without converging, must the world fracture into competing blocs? Wong’s answer is no, and his reasoning rests on economic logic rather than diplomatic optimism.

The core insight is about elasticity. When the United States restricts semiconductor exports to China, the immediate effect is to harm Chinese technological development. The medium-term impact accelerates China’s drive towards self-sufficiency. Chinese firms invest in domestic chip production, the state subsidises research, and supply chains reorganise. What was uneconomical becomes viable under the pressure of necessity. Wong puts it plainly: the restrictions give China the impetus to produce chips itself, paradoxically making it stronger through forced self-reliance.

The same logic operates in reverse. When China controls rare earth minerals and threatens to restrict supply, initial panic gives way to adaptation. Alternative sources are found, substitutes are developed, and recycling becomes economical. Wong notes: “we should never underestimate the elasticity of supply.” Markets adjust. Supply chains route and re-route around damage.

This dynamic means total decoupling is far more difficult than either Washington or Beijing might assume. Economic costs are too high, supply chain interdependencies too deep, and adjustment mechanisms too powerful. America and China may well come to a new modus vivendi, Wong suggests. Not because they like each other, but because they must. Economic reality imposes constraints that ideology cannot overcome.

This is where Wong’s analysis most clearly challenges our binary framing. If America and China can coexist whilst competing intensively, smaller states need not choose sides. The space exists not because of diplomatic cleverness but because of economic necessity.

Consider Singapore’s position, which Wong describes without apology. Strong political and defence relationship with the United States. Very strong trade relationship with China. America remains the largest investor in Southeast Asia. China is the largest trading partner. Both arrangements persist because both serve strategic interests that transcend the rhetoric of bloc competition.

There is a paradox worth noting. Wong observes that China views the relationship with America holistically, unable to compartmentalise. America prefers to compartmentalise: cooperate on climate, compete on technology, contest on security. This asymmetry creates instability. Yet the very fact of this tension means neither side can afford a complete rupture. The costs of instability discipline both parties. For if one side fails, so does the other.

Plurilateral Pragmatism

Wong’s diagnosis of the problem is clearer than his prescription for solving it, but the outlines are visible. We are in a messy transition, what I have been calling an interregnum, that could last a decade or more.

America is no longer the global insurer.

China cannot and will not replace it. No new hegemon is emerging.

The question for small and middle powers is what to do in this interregnum.

Wong’s answer is not to wait for stability but to build it. This means proactive multilateralism through plurilateral coalitions of like-minded states. Not grand global agreements requiring consensus among rivals, but practical partnerships among countries willing to move ahead on trade facilitation, regulatory harmonisation, digital standards, and climate architecture. The practical state, but at the level of the nation-state.

The ambition is to create working institutions that can later be multilateralised when great powers are ready.

Wong points to Singapore’s investment strategy and approach to trade partnerships as an example. A coalition of smaller economies innovating trade facilitation, standardising regulations, and pioneering plurilateral approaches that keep momentum even when the WTO is gridlocked.

The logic is straightforward: if we wait for America and China to agree, we wait forever. If we act now with partners who share our interests, we shape the emerging order rather than being shaped by it.

This is the part of Wong’s framework that feels most applicable beyond Singapore. Not as a blueprint to be copied wholesale, for Aotearoa simply does not have the skill or capability the Singaporean political and managerial class has, but as a provocation worth sitting with. What does it mean to build coalitions that create space for non-aligned engagement? How do small and middle powers exercise agency in a multipolar interregnum? What international and domestic institutions need to be built whilst the great powers sort themselves out? And, at home, how do we get ourselves out of the monolingual comfort blanket a minority appear to be wrapping us in, and wake up to the fact that we are an archipelago in the South-Eastern Pacific, and our future lies in ASEAN, APEC, the Blue Pacific and other like-minded small and medium nations who want to work together on practical things?

These are not questions Wong answers definitively, and perhaps they cannot be answered definitively. But they are considerably more useful questions than the binary choice we keep rehearsing.

Reflections

Wong’s framework does not offer certainty or comfort. It offers something potentially more valuable: a way of thinking about the emerging order that matches its actual structure rather than the structure we wish it had.

China has risen as a power with its own developmental model. Economic elasticity creates space for coexistence despite competition. Plurilateral coalitions as the practical response for small and middle powers unwilling to wait passively for a great power consensus.

None of this resolves the tensions in Aotearoa’s strategic position. We still face genuine trade-offs between economic interests and security commitments, between values and pragmatism, between alliance obligations and sovereign autonomy.

But perhaps the trade-offs are not as binary as our debate and political theatre currently assumes. Perhaps there is space to maintain relationships with both great powers, not through diplomatic cleverness but because the structure of the emerging order permits it: if we act strategically rather than waiting to be forced into camps.

Wong has thought through these questions from Singapore’s vantage point: a city-state wedged between great powers, dependent on both, vulnerable to either. His conclusions may not translate wholesale to Aotearoa’s circumstances. But they are worth engaging with seriously, if only because they operate on terrain our debate has not yet reached. The question is not whether we agree with Wong’s framework but whether we are willing to think as clearly about the world we’re actually living in, rather than the one being dominated by thinkers from another time.