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Oriana Skylar Mastro, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Why didn’t China’s rise trigger containment sooner?

For three decades, Beijing’s economic weight expanded dramatically, its military modernized at speed, and its diplomatic footprint widened across every region. Structural theories of power transition would lead us to expect sharper and earlier confrontation as capabilities converged. Instead, the U.S.-Chinese rivalry deepened gradually, punctuated by crises but rarely exploding into decisive pushback. The United States remained engaged economically, its alliances held but were not quite mobilized to balance Chinese power, and many countries hedged rather than chose sides.

One explanation for the lack of a containment strategy is that American policymakers misjudged China — seduced by engagement, distracted by the so-called Global War on Terror, or overly confident that economic integration would produce political convergence. Another is that China’s intentions hardened only recently. Both narratives are politically convenient, but neither fully explains the pattern. A more uncomfortable possibility is that China rose not despite American awareness, but partly because it competed in ways that made containment difficult to justify, costly to organize, and slow to mobilize.

The dominant language of U.S.-Chinese competition discourse is linear. Power is rising. Gaps are closing. Deterrence must be restored. Advantages must be accumulated. The implicit model is mechanical: capabilities grow, responses follow, equilibrium is recalibrated. But great power competition rarely unfolds in straight lines. Rather, it is iterative interaction. Every move reshapes the environment. Every gain risks triggering a countervailing reaction that diminishes its value. Strategy in such a context is not simply about maximizing power — it is about managing reactions to it.

Since the 1990s, China appeared to understand this dynamic better than the United States. Beijing did not rise by openly challenging the U.S.-led geopolitical order. Nor did it passively accept it. Instead, it advanced while carefully calibrating its actions against anticipated backlash. It competed, but it did so in ways that complicated, delayed, or diluted decisive counterbalancing. Gains were real, but thresholds were managed.

Much of the debate in Washington still revolves around these two narratives. But both miss a key point: China did not rise simply because the United States misjudged it, but because it competed in ways that made decisive containment difficult to mobilize. Seen this way, China’s rise looks less like abrupt revisionism and more like disciplined interaction. Beijing sought advantage, but it also sought time. It accumulated leverage while minimizing the risk of galvanizing a broad counter coalition.

This is where Oriana Skylar Mastro’s Upstart: How China Became a Great Power becomes particularly useful. Her book does not simply document China’s growing capabilities. Instead, it provides a framework for understanding how China competed. Mastro argues that Beijing alternated among emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship — choosing different pathways depending on what promised gains without provoking disproportionate reaction.

The value of this framework lies less in the labels themselves than in what they reveal about strategy. Where participation in U.S.-led institutions  — such as joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, expanding contributions to U.N. peacekeeping operations, or engaging in multilateral climate negotiations —  reassured others and reduced suspicion, China emulated. Where blind spots existed, it exploited them. Where American approaches appeared costly, inefficient, or politically risky, it innovated. None of these moves required direct confrontation. None demanded a clean break with the existing order. Yet cumulatively, they shifted the balance.

The connective tissue across these choices is anticipation. How would Washington respond? What would trigger alliance consolidation? What would accelerate balancing? What would fragment coalitions or harden opposition?

Great power competition is rarely about choosing between aggression and restraint. Instead, it is about calibrating pressure against expected reaction. The military domain illustrates this clearly. China’s anti-access and area-denial capabilities were geographically tailored and asymmetric. They complicated U.S. operations in Asia without immediately signaling ambitions for global power projection. Gray-zone tactics enabled coercion below the threshold of open conflict. Even overseas presence expanded incrementally, often through commercial or dual-use arrangements rather than overt basing. These were not merely cost-saving alternatives. They reflected a strategic discipline rooted in interaction — an effort to raise costs for the United States while limiting the likelihood of galvanizing decisive countermeasures.

A similar pattern emerged diplomatically. To be sure, such a pattern was not driven by Chinese strategy alone. It was also facilitated by periods of American retrenchment — including withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, and the World Health Organization, as well as persistent doubts about U.S. commitments to alliances such as NATO. These moves created openings that China could exploit and amplified the effects of its own calibrated approach. Rather than constructing a rigid alliance bloc, Beijing cultivated looser strategic partnerships. Rather than presenting itself as the architect of a rival order, it embedded itself within existing institutions while selectively reshaping them at the margins. It did so, for instance, by expanding its influence within U.N. agencies, promoting alternative governance norms around “cyber sovereignty,” and launching parallel institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank alongside — rather than in outright opposition to — existing financial bodies. Engagement and revision were not mutually exclusive; they were intertwined.

Economic strategy followed a similar logic. Deep integration into global supply chains increased the costs of decoupling for others. State-directed industrial policy unfolded gradually, often below thresholds likely to provoke coordinated pushback. Integration and insulation proceeded in parallel.

Across domains, the logic was iterative. Each step forward was evaluated not only for its intrinsic value, but for its likely reaction. This perspective also helps explain why competition unfolded unevenly across regions and issues. Great power rivalry does not take place in a vacuum. It unfolds within a wider environment populated by allies, partners, and states seeking to preserve room for maneuver. Their reactions matter. Their choices shape the strategic landscape.

China’s calibrated approach made it harder for others to consolidate firmly against it. When responses did harden — as they eventually did in parts of the transatlantic space and the Indo-Pacific — Beijing often adjusted. It moderated its economic coercion against European states after backlash to measures targeting Lithuania and recalibrated its “wolf warrior” diplomacy following negative reactions across Europe and Southeast Asia. Objectives were narrowed. Tactics moderated. The aim was not always to win outright, but to slow or limit alignment drift. That dynamic underscores a deeper lesson: Competition is not simply about imposing costs on an adversary. It is about shaping the environment in which others make choices.

Mastro’s framework helps illuminate how China did this, but it also exposes an asymmetry. While Beijing often incorporated reaction management into its strategic design, Washington oscillated between engagement and alarm. U.S. policy frequently responded to discrete actions rather than internalizing the cumulative pattern of calibrated competition. It alternated between economic engagement and selective decoupling and reacted episodically to Chinese technological advances such as Huawei and semiconductors rather than embedding these responses within a coherent long-term competitive strategy, as several analysts have noted.

None of this implies that China’s strategy was flawless or centrally choreographed. Domestic politics, bureaucratic contestation, and miscalculation undoubtedly shaped outcomes. Nor does it suggest that Beijing was purely defensive. Competitive ambition was evident throughout. But ambition was paired with calibration.

That calibration blurred familiar categories. China was neither a straightforward status quo power nor an overt revolutionary challenger. It competed within a U.S.-dominated system even as it reshaped aspects of it. It advanced without forcing immediate polarization.

The strategic environment today is different from the post-Cold War period, characterized by U.S. primacy and lower levels of strategic distrust. Blind spots have narrowed. Suspicion has hardened. Exploitation triggers quicker countermeasures. Emulation reassures less. Entrepreneurship is scrutinized. The space for calibrated advance has tightened.

But the underlying logic of competition has not changed. Great power rivalry remains interactive. It is shaped not only by relative capabilities, but by how effectively each side anticipates and manages reactions — from adversaries, allies, and those who prefer not to choose sides.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that calibration will remain the dominant mode of Chinese strategy. The very success of China’s earlier approach — and Washington’s growing recognition of it — may be altering Beijing’s incentives. As the United States hardens its posture, securitizes interdependence, and narrows the space for incremental gains, the returns to cautious, iterative expansion may diminish. Under such conditions, China may have stronger incentives to act more assertively, to move faster, or even to pursue more unilateral or disruptive options — particularly in high-stakes scenarios such as Taiwan. The risk, in other words, is not only that the United States misreads calibrated competition, but that it overlearns that lesson and assumes that China will continue to play the same game under fundamentally different conditions.

The risk for the United States, then, is twofold. A purely dyadic mindset — focused narrowly on capability gaps, technology races, and deterrence postures — risks neglecting the broader interactional dimension of rivalry. Moves intended to strengthen deterrence can accelerate counter-alignment or alienate strategically important partners if not carefully calibrated. At the same time, an excessive focus on iterative competition risks leaving Washington underprepared for the possibility that China may abandon calibration in favor of more rapid or disruptive action.

Upstart is most valuable, then, not simply as a taxonomy of Chinese behavior, but as a reminder of what disciplined competition looks like. Strategy under conditions of power transition is rarely linear. It is a continuous process of adjustment, signaling, restraint, and opportunism.

That insight also points to a way forward. If the U.S.-Chinese rivalry to late 2010 saw China’s ability to expand without galvanizing decisive counterbalancing, the future phase will reward the side that can shape reactions without forcing premature consolidation against itself. That requires discipline. It requires distinguishing between actions that build long-term positional advantage and those that merely signal resolve. It requires recognizing that not every contest needs to be elevated into a systemic confrontation.

For years, Beijing avoided competing on terms that favored the United States. It did not seek to replicate America’s alliance architecture wholesale. It did not mirror expeditionary overreach. It chose instruments, arenas, and pacing carefully. The United States now faces the mirror-image challenge: How to compete on terms that favor itself without driving others into tighter alignment with China.

China did not rise simply because material power shifted in its favor. It rose because it understood that great power competition is interactive — and acted accordingly.

As rivalry intensifies, a key question is whether the United States can compete iteratively rather than episodically — for example, by developing sustained approaches to technology competition, alliance management, and economic statecraft that anticipate second- and third-order reactions rather than responding ad hoc to individual developments. Put differently, the challenge is whether Washington can sustain a coherent competitive approach across political cycles, rather than oscillating with changes in leadership from one administration to the next. Doing so, however, will require balancing iterative discipline with preparedness for discontinuity — competing in ways that shape reactions while remaining ready for a more abrupt and disruptive turn in the rivalry.

Luis Simón, Ph.D., is director of the Centre for Security, Diplomacy, and Strategy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and director of the Brussels office of the Elcano Royal Institute.

Image: Dan Scavino via Wikimedia Commons