The question of how China's rise will affect the post–World War II international order carries considerable significance for the future of global politics. This report evaluates the character and possible future of China's engagement with the postwar order. The resulting portrait is anything but straightforward: China's engagement with the order remains a complex, often contradictory work in progress.

This report offers four major findings about the relationship of China to the international order. First, China's behavior over the past two decades does not mark it as an opponent or saboteur of the order, but rather as a conditional supporter. Since China undertook a policy of international engagement in the 1980s, the level and quality of its participation in the order rivals that of most other states. Second, looking forward, the posture China takes toward the institutions, norms, and rules of a shared order is now in significant flux; various outcomes — from continued qualified support to more-aggressive challenges — are possible. Third, partly because of this uncertainty, a strengthened and increasingly multilateral international order can provide a critical tool for the United States and other countries to shape and constrain rising Chinese power. Finally, modifications to the order on the margins in response to Chinese preferences pose less of a threat to a stable international system than a future in which China is alienated from that system. However, these modifications must be governed by strictly articulated end-points.