What Chinese Scholars Actually Say about NATO
A bibliometric analysis of 1,663 Chinese IR articles finds that scholarship frames NATO through great-power competition and largely reinforces Beijing’s official position.
An image of the Chinese flag.
At the 2024 NATO summit in Washington, the alliance’s joint communiqué declared that China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge NATO’s interests, security, and values. Then secretary general Jens Stoltenberg called China the chief enabler of Russia’s war in Ukraine and warned Beijing it cannot have a normal relationship with the West while fuelling the war in Europe.
China-related rhetoric in NATO’s recent communiqués has been escalating. The 2019 London summit named China for the first time in an official NATO document. The 2022 Strategic Concept, approved in Madrid, identified China as posing systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security.
What does China make of all this? The Western literature contains an extensive discussion of NATO’s emerging China policy, but the Chinese side of the conversation has been largely opaque. Because the Chinese foreign policy apparatus is closed, Western analysts have struggled to gauge how Beijing’s leadership actually understands NATO. Our research argues that Chinese IR scholarship is a usable proxy. It is not a perfect window on the leadership’s mind, but it is the best one available, and it has been almost entirely unexamined.
We ran a bibliometric analysis of Chinese-language IR scholarship on NATO from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure database. The initial keyword search using “北约” (NATO) returned 2,577 articles in the Politics and International Relations category. After filtering for indexed and core-journal publications, 1,663 articles remained. We then read a representative sample of articles by leading scholars and from prestigious journals. The picture that emerged is more textured than either dismissive Western readings of Chinese academia, or the official Chinese state line, would suggest.
NATO is a Modest Topic that is Suddenly Less Modest
The first finding is that NATO has not been a major topic in Chinese IR. From 1978 to 1994 the field produced about 19 NATO-focused articles a year. The single dramatic spike came in 1999, when 507 articles appeared in the year that NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Publication levels then collapsed and stayed low through the 2000s and 2010s. The most recent four years (2020 to 2023) show a renewed climb, with 117 articles in 2023. The Russia-Ukraine war, the intensifying US-China rivalry, and NATO’s growing engagement with Indo-Pacific partners explain most of that increase.
The second finding is that no Chinese IR scholar specializes in NATO. The top ten most-published authors on the topic are typically experts in Russian studies or alliance theory who treat NATO as a case rather than a primary research object. The institutional centre of gravity sits in government-affiliated think tanks: the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies and the Institute of European Studies, both at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR); and the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS). These institutes guide the research themes and trends. They also have privileged access to diplomatic cables, presidential letters, and other classified materials, which they reflect in internal reports prepared for foreign policy decision-makers.
The Interpretive Frame is Great Power Competition
Across the literature, Chinese scholars consistently view NATO through the lens of great power competition rather than as a security alliance with its own institutional logic. The keyword that co-occurs most frequently with “NATO” is “Russia,” followed by “the United States,” “Russo-US relations,” and “EU.” NATO is studied as an instrument of US strategy, an extension of the post-Cold War American hegemony, and a tool whose post-1991 existence requires the manufacture of new threats to justify itself.
Three propositions recur. First, NATO is a Cold War legacy that has outlived its original purpose and needs adversaries to sustain itself. Second, the alliance is a proxy for US power, often pursued at Europe’s expense, and the project of “Asia-Pacific NATO” (印太北约化) is read as Washington’s attempt to extend the same architecture to the Indo-Pacific to contain China. Third, NATO has shifted from a regionally limited defensive alliance to a globally interventionist one, with Afghanistan, Libya, and the partnerships in the Indo-Pacific cited as the trajectory. These framings precede the recent NATO-China rhetoric. They have been a steady undercurrent in Chinese IR since the late 1990s.
The 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing remains a defining moment, mentioned repeatedly across the literature. So does the suspicion that NATO sustains itself by inventing enemies. So does the conviction that the United States dominates NATO and that European member states have less autonomy than they publicly claim. The 2022 Russia-Ukraine war reinforced rather than disrupted this framework: Chinese scholars read NATO’s eastward expansion as a contributing cause of the war, not a response to Russian aggression. Whether one finds that account persuasive is beside the point, since this is the dominant lens in Chinese IR.
Policy Orientation, Not Theory
The scholarship is almost entirely policy-oriented. Where Western IR scholarship on NATO tends to engage with alliance theory, power transition theory, or social constructivism, Chinese IR on NATO mostly does not. Articles characterize the Biden administration’s China policy as “composite” without specifying what that means theoretically or providing empirical foundations for the claim. Recommendations to China about how to handle US-led containment networks tend to skip the theoretical apparatus and move directly to strategy.
This reflects what Nele Noesselt has observed about the Chinese context: a scholar’s intellectual capacity is evaluated based on the ability to guide policy rather than on theoretical or methodological soundness. Government-affiliated think tanks reinforce that incentive structure. CICIR, CIIS, and CASS analysts produce internal reports that incorporate classified information and are disseminated upward through official channels. Their academic capital is policy access.
This is not, however, a story of pure propaganda. Chinese IR scholars do offer recommendations that diverge from official rhetoric and probe topics the foreign ministry has not directly addressed. Their work also informs and is informed by official statements. When a Chinese scholar argued in Nanfang Daily in 2022 that NATO, not China, was the genuine “systemic challenge,” a foreign ministry spokesperson directly referenced that article. When a 1999 scholarly description of NATO as a US hegemonic instrument was picked up by Chinese diplomats more than two decades later, the borrowing was explicit. Academic discourse and diplomatic rhetoric move in close coordination since each legitimizes the other.
Why this Matters for NATO
The Chinese reading of NATO is unlikely to soften. As long as the alliance continues to expand its rhetoric on China and to deepen partnerships with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, the framing of NATO as a US-led containment instrument will gain rather than lose currency in Chinese IR. The 2024 joint Chinese-Belarus military exercise near the Polish border, timed to the Washington summit, signalled how the relationship is now being conducted on both sides. The framing is not a misunderstanding to be corrected by better diplomacy. It is an interpretive frame with deep roots in the Chinese academic and policy communities, and it shapes the menu of options that Chinese policymakers consider.
For NATO members thinking about how to engage China, the Chinese-language scholarship is a usable input. It reveals where Beijing’s deliberations sit, where they might be flexible, and where they will not move. The “monster looming on the horizon,” as the framing of NATO in some Chinese writing has gone, is a politically constructed monster. Understanding that construction does not require accepting it. It does, however, require taking it seriously.
Their recent article, “The ‘Monster’ looming on the horizon? Research on, and understanding of, NATO in Chinese IR literature,” is published in International Journal and available here.
