Washington, D.C: The Chinese government has perfected the art of having it both ways. It is at once the world’s second-largest economy and a self-styled “developing country”, a lender and aid recipient, aggressor and victim, socialist crusader and capitalist opportunist. This identity duality is not accidental—it is the foundation of Beijing’s global strategy, a deliberate balancing act that allows it to extract benefits from every system it touches while avoiding the obligations of full membership in the rules-based international order. When Beijing wants climate indulgence, it claims to be a developing nation still climbing out of poverty. When it seeks geopolitical influence, it insists on the privileges of a great power. When criticized for coercive lending under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it dons the cloak of solidarity with the Global South. China’s self-imposed glaring contradictions are not weaknesses—they are strategic assets.
At global forums like the UN and COP summits, China presents itself as the champion of the developing world. It insists that stringent carbon-reduction standards should apply only to wealthy countries while it continues to build and finance coal plants from Pakistan to Kenya. Beijing styles this as climate justice; in practice, it is just climate hypocrisy. At the Paris Climate summit, the world’s largest carbon emitter pledged net-zero targets that begin after 2030, while simultaneously exporting its dirtiest technologies abroad under the guise of “South-South cooperation.” The message is clear: China is “developing” when it needs leniency and “developed” when it wants leverage.
Nowhere is this duality clearer than in China’s foreign policy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) invokes its Century of Humiliation at every perceived slight, portraying today’s assertiveness as redress for the depredations of Western imperialism. Yet China’s own behaviour—militarizing reefs in the South China Sea, coercing neighbours through debt diplomacy, and bullying Taiwan—is indistinguishable from the very imperial practices it condemns. China’s narrative of victimhood serves a political purpose. It allows the CCP to justify authoritarian control at home and deflect criticism abroad. Any external pressure—from human-rights advocates or foreign governments—is labelled interference in its “internal affairs.” Yet China feels no compunction interfering elsewhere, whether through cyber espionage, intellectual-property theft, or subsidized corporate expansion that distorts global markets.
Perhaps the most galling manifestation of China’s double standards lies in its simultaneous roles as both donor and borrower. Despite lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and amassing the world’s largest foreign-exchange reserves, China continues to receive billions in low-interest loans from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank—funds originally intended for the world’s poorest nations—while it simultaneously lends money via its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Beijing insists that regional provinces still “need” multilateral aid because domestic banks cannot allocate credit efficiently. That rationale might sound plausible until one recalls that the inefficiency stems from Beijing’s own state-controlled banking system. Meanwhile, China dispenses hundreds of billions in outward financing through its policy banks, often to authoritarian regimes that the West avoids. The result is a new form of “reverse aid”, where a country still receiving development assistance simultaneously holds more developing-country debt than the IMF and World Bank combined.
China’s leadership insists that its behaviour is no worse than that of earlier Western powers, but this argument ignores the global norms Beijing helped draft as a UN Security Council member and WTO signatory. Such rules matter only when they restrain others, not when they restrain China. The CCP has mastered the politics of plausible deniability: blocking sanctions on North Korea and Iran while invoking “noninterference.” China’s exceptionalism is justified by an elastic moral code that bends to fit every occasion.
Much of the blame lies not in Beijing’s cunning but in global complacency. The world made China the epicentre of global manufacturing. For decades, foreign governments and corporations have tolerated Chinese exceptionalism for access to its vast market. Western companies, enticed by cheap labour and regulatory favouritism, helped build the industrial base that now challenges them. Because of its size and importance, China has gotten away with things most nations would never attempt. Governments, fearful of economic retaliation, have occasionally scolded Beijing, but rarely sanctioned it—until Trump came along. The longer the world indulges China’s double standards, the harder it will be to restore balance to the international system.
The coming decade will test whether Beijing can continue playing both sides. As China edges toward becoming the world’s largest economy, its insistence on being treated as a developing nation becomes increasingly untenable. Global institutions should condition participation on transparency and reciprocity: if China wants to lead, it must play by the same rules as everyone else. That means phasing out concessional lending, ending special-treatment clauses in trade agreements, and accepting that global power brings global responsibility absent of conditions.
Likewise, recipient nations need to rethink their dependence on Chinese credit. The BRI’s web of “friendship loans” may appear generous, but its 99-year leases and resource-for-debt swaps tell a different story. True partnership is built on mutual benefit, not subservience. Until the Chinese government reconciles the contradiction between grievance and greatness—between developing-country privilege and superpower prerogative—its vision of a China-led world will remain a double-edged sword. The rest of us must stop pretending not to notice which side is cutting deeper.
Daniel Wagner is managing director of Multilateral Accountability Associates and co-author of The New Multilateralism.
