The Dual Threat: Why Beijing’s Collapse Is Just As Dangerous as Its Rise

For years, Washington’s strategic debate on China has swung between two contrasting fears: an unstoppable colossus destined to rewrite the global order, and the hope that its economic headwinds will simply stall its momentum. But as analysts begin to introduce the possibility of a sudden and severe structural fracture within Beijing, this binary view misses a far more dangerous reality. Western policymakers are not facing a single trajectory. Instead, they must prepare for a dual threat, the danger of a sudden, desperate collapse on one end, and the consolidation of an illiberal hegemony on the other.

When looking at the world, Western democracies tend to project the stability and equilibrium of their own liberal systems onto others, assuming that foreign powers operate under similar rules. We often forget that China is an autocracy, and autocracies are unstable by definition and prone to sudden surprises. Western leaders know this history very well, yet they repeatedly choose to forget it. China’s system is not a model for anyone.

Historically, superpowers do not fall solely due to military pressure or direct competition. The Soviet Union collapsed because it could no longer sustain the staggering financial burden of its global ambitions while its domestic economy hollowed out.

For Beijing, entering this phase of economic strain introduces a dangerous variable: the cornered autocrat. A regime facing internal decay and declining legitimacy does not gently reform. Pressed to the wall, it risks becoming erratic and desperate. Any potential military adventure or escalation, such as a sudden crisis in the Taiwan Strait, would not be triggered by an external military threat against China, but rather by Beijing’s own overreach: its desperate attempt to play a global multipolar game while lacking the sustainable economic and internal capacity to do so. In short, manufactured crises and external escalations become the tools of choice for a struggling dictatorship seeking to spark nationalist fervor and mask its own decline.

Yet the reverse scenario is equally concerning. Even if Beijing somehow manages to survive its deep financial hurdles and successfully completes its logistical encirclement, securing critical supply chains from the Western Pacific through the Global South while simultaneously forging a formidable military apparatus, the result is an entrenched revisionist hegemony.

This dual threat means that democracies can neither rely on passive containment nor assume an inevitable, peaceful implosion. Waiting out a superpower is neither a strategic nor a wise policy. Crucially, in today's multipolar context, the United States must finally leave behind its traditional bipolar and unipolar mindset. Washington must understand that to face the Chinese challenge, it cannot act alone. Moreover, whenever policymakers and the public hear the phrase “Chinese threat,” they immediately picture a conventional military invasion or a direct strike. While that remains a theoretical risk, it is not the primary danger. The most probable and disruptive threat is a sudden, destabilizing collapse from within.

To hedge against both extremes, democracies must stop treating security as a static exercise confined to the Western Pacific. True deterrence requires building systemic resilience across vulnerable regions, like Latin America. This is why empowering agile, values-based partners like Japan is so critical. Through its Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) vision, a diplomatic and economic framework that champions the rule of law, sustainable infrastructure, and maritime security without trapping developing nations in debt, Tokyo offers a genuine, high-quality alternative to financial dependency. Whether Beijing stumbles into internal fracture or succeeds in projecting its model outward, a tightly networked coalition of resilient democracies is the best insurance policy for the twenty-first century.

Efraín Vázquez-Vera, Ph.D. is full professor of International Relations and former Chancellor at the University of Puerto Rico.