Why America Plays Chess for Total Victory, But China Plays Wei Qi for Encirclement (The 100-Year Strategy)

by The US-China Narrative [11-27-2025].

(RAD: In today's world, China & the United States are playing different geopolitical & geoeconomic games. Study this brilliant analysis to understand why America's "zero-sum game" against China can't win. The land area of China is 3,705,407 square miles and America is 3,718,711 square miles, so they are equal in land area. But when measured in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), China's economy is bigger than America's. China also dominates manufacturing that many other countries in the world depend on where America's "containment" strategy can't work against China. "But if Washington insists on playing chess in a Wei Qi world, we are heading toward a tragedy that no one wants and no one will win. The game has changed. The only question remaining is, when will Washington learn the new rules?"

There is one correction about education that is needed for this article. The author thinks that American universities are still the best in the world. That used to be the case. Today, China & Russia have some of the best universities for advanced STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education. In the past, it was considered an advantage to get a PhD from MIT in these STEM areas, but now the equivalent education in the top Chinese universities is better. — RAD)

Why America Plays Chess, But China Plays Wei Qi

In this masterclass on global strategy, Kishore Mahbubani reveals the fundamental misunderstanding driving the world’s most important rivalry.

While America plays Chess—seeking decisive victories, regime change, and checkmate—China plays Wei Qi (Go), pursuing patience, encirclement, and quiet accumulation of power.

Through brilliant storytelling and decades of diplomatic insight, Mahbubani dissects the contrasting worldviews that define Washington and Beijing—and shows how America’s Cold War mindset could lead it into a strategic trap it doesn’t yet see.

In this talk, you’ll learn:

🧠 Why America’s “containment” strategy cannot work on a trading superpower
🌏 How China’s Wei Qi strategy uses trade, infrastructure, and patience to reshape the world
💼 The MPH Formula — Meritocracy, Pragmatism, and Honesty — behind China’s rise
🚫 Why forcing nations to “choose sides” is a losing move in a multipolar world
How America can still win—by learning the new rules of the game

Mahbubani’s message is urgent but hopeful:

China seeks rejuvenation, not conquest.
If America learns to play the long game, both civilizations can thrive.
But if it keeps playing Chess in a Wei Qi world, everyone loses.

Based on Kishore Mahbubani’s books

Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy [2022]

Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir [2024]

Full Transcript

We are currently living through the most significant geopolitical contests in human history. It is the friction between the world's oldest continuous civilization, China, and the world's most successful young republic, the United States of America. If you open the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal today, you will read stories about trade tariffs, about semiconductor bans, about spy balloons and naval patrols.

You will read about who is winning this week and who is losing, but if you only follow the headlines, you are missing the story. You are watching the moves, but you do not understand the game. I want to share with you a specific insight, one that became very clear to me during a private lunch I had with Dr. Henry Kissinger in Manhattan in March, 2018. Kissinger is perhaps the only American strategist who truly engaged with the Chinese mind, and the insight is this. The fundamental danger in this rivalry is not just conflicting interests. It is that Washington and Beijing are playing entirely different games.

The United States inheriting the strategic traditions of the West, plays chess. Chess is a game of total victory. It is linear. It is decisive. You deploy your assets, your knights, your rooks, your queen, to the center of the board. You seek a direct confrontation, and the ultimate objective is singular. You must capture the king.

You must achieve checkmate. In geopolitical terms, this translates to a strategy of containment or regime change. The goal is to knock the opponent out of the game, but the Chinese do not play chess. They play Wei Qi, known in the West as Go. In Wei Qi, there is no king to kill. There is no checkmate. If you try to play Wei Qi by chasing individual stones to destroy them, you will lose.

The goal of Wei Qi is not destruction. It is encirclement. The objective is to slowly, patiently and methodically place stones on the board to occupy empty space. You build territory, you build leverage, you build assets, and you do this until your opponent looks up from their aggressive battles in the center of the board and realizes that they have been surrounded, not by soldiers, but by a new reality.

This is the 100-year strategy. America is playing for the knockout blow. China is playing for the board. Today I want to walk you through exactly how this dynamic is playing out economically, diplomatically, and militarily, and why America's failure to understand the rules of Wei Qi may lead to the greatest strategic disaster of the 21st century.

To understand why America plays chess, we must look at its last great victory, the Cold War. When the United States faced the Soviet Union, it engaged in a strategy called containment formulated by the great strategist George Kennon. It was a brilliant strategy. It worked. America built a wall of alliances, NATO, and isolated the Soviets until the system collapsed.

Because this strategy worked once, Washington assumes it'll work again. This is a classic error in strategic thinking: fighting the last war. The American establishment believes that China is just another Soviet Union, a rigid, ideological, communist dictatorship that will eventually crumble under pressure. But this view is factually incorrect, and if your diagnosis is wrong, your prescription will be fatal.

Let us look at the coal hard data. When the Cold War ended in 1990, a moment of American triumph, the United States economy accounted for 20.6% of the global GDP. China's share was a mere 3.86%. China was economically irrelevant. Today, the picture has reversed. In purchasing power parity terms, which measure what money can actually buy in a country, China's economy is already larger than America's But the difference is not just size. It is integration. The Soviet Union was a military giant, but an economic dwarf. It was autocratic. It did not trade with the world. You could contain the Soviet Union because nobody lost money by stopping trade with Moscow.

China is the opposite. China is the world's largest trading nation. It trades more with the rest of the world than America does. So, when American leaders fly to capitals in Europe or Asia or Latin America and ask their allies to decouple from China or to join the Containment Coalition, they are asking these countries to commit economic suicide.

I have traveled to 191 countries in my career. I can tell you the mood in the room. Most countries welcome American security presence. They like having the United States Navy keeping the sea lanes open, but they love trading with China. If America forces the world to choose between its security partner, Washington, and its economic partner, Beijing, America will be surprised by the answer.

Most countries will not choose, or they will choose their own prosperity. This is the first move on the Wei Qi Board. While America moves its aircraft carriers, the chess pieces, to the South China Sea, China acts like a giant suction cup, pulling the economies of the world into its orbit. You cannot checkmate a nation that is the banker and the factory for your own allies.

Let me give you a concrete example of how this difference in strategy plays out in real time. In the game of Wei Qi, the most brilliant move is one that occupies a vast amount of empty space on the board without firing a shot.

A few years ago, the Obama administration negotiated the Transpacific Partnership, the TPP. This was a massive trade agreement involving 12 nations. It was designed specifically to exclude China. It was a brilliant move. It would've anchored the American economy at the center of the dynamic Asian region. It would've set the rules of trade for the next century. In Wei Qi terms, this was a powerful encirclement move by the United States.

But then what happened? In 2017 Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the TPP. Why? Because in the American domestic political game, which operates on a four-year election cycle, the TPP was seen as a bad deal for workers. In the game of chess, withdrawing was a pawn sacrifice to please the domestic crowd.

But in the game of Wei Qi, it was a geopolitical gift of monumental proportions to China. When America walked away, it left the board open. China did not have to fight to gain influence. America simply vacated the space. Now China is advancing its own agreements, like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the RCEP, and applying to join the very agreements America Abandoned.

We see this pattern repeat with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the AIIB. In 2014, China proposed a new bank to help build infrastructure in Asia. The need was obvious. Asia needs trillions of dollars for roads, bridges, and power plants. The United States dominated World Bank and was not providing enough capital.

How did Washington respond? They played chess. They saw the AIIB as a rival king. They viewed it as a zero-sum game. If China leads, America loses. So, the Obama administration launched a diplomatic campaign. They pressured their allies, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, South Korea, not to join the bank.

They tried to block it. It was a humiliating failure. One by one, America's closest allies defected. The United Kingdom joined, then Germany, then France, then Australia. Today, the AIIB has over 100 members. It is a respected, multilateral institution. Why did America fail? Because they tried to force a binary choice on a complex world.

China, playing Wei Qi, simply placed a stone on the board that was useful to everyone. They did not force anyone to join. They simply created an asset, a bank that was in everyone's self-interest to use. They built leverage through utility, not coercion.

This brings us to the Belt and Road Initiative, the BRI. If you read the Western Press, you will hear that the BRI is a sinister plot, a debt trap designed to colonize the developing world. I suggest we look at the data. Africa and Asia are desperate for infrastructure. When an African leader wants a bridge or a railway, the West often sends a consultant to lecture them on governance, human rights or environmental standards.

China sends an engineer to build the bridge. Is the BRI perfect? No, there is waste, there is corruption, there are bad debts, but strategically it is a masterpiece of Wei Qi. By physically connecting the economies of Eurasia, Africa, and Southeast Asia to China through railroad, digital cables and ports, China is rendering the concept of containment physically impossible.

How do you contain a nation that is a central node of the global supply chain? You cannot. While the US Navy conducts freedom of navigation operations, a necessary but symbolic chess move, China is cementing the trade routes that will define the next century. The stones are being placed on the board day by day, while the aircraft carriers sail by.

To understand why China is able to play this long game, we must look inside the black box. We must look at the Chinese Communist Party. There is a lazy assumption in the West that because China is an authoritarian one-party state, it must be rigid, brittle, and incompetent.

The Soviet Union collapsed. Therefore, the Chinese Communist Party must also collapse. This is a dangerous delusion. It underestimates the resilience of Chinese civilization. We must remember that the CCP is not just a party in the Western political sense. The CCP is a meritocratic machine that has fused Marxism with traditional Confucian Mandarin culture.

I call the secret of China's governance, the MPH formula, Meritocracy, Pragmatism, and Honesty. First Meritocracy. The West often assumes that CCP officials are chosen by nepotism or ideology. In reality, the organization, department of the CCP runs perhaps the world's most rigorous HR system. To get to the top in Beijing, you must first manage a village, then a city, then a province.

You are tested on economic growth, social stability, and disaster management. By the time someone reaches the Politburo Standing Committee, they have managed economies larger than most European nations. Compare this to the American system where a candidate can become president with no administrative experience, provided they can raise enough money and give a good speech.

The Chinese system selects for competence. The American system selects for popularity. Second: Pragmatism. In the Cold War, the Soviets were rigid. They would rather starve than embrace the market. The Chinese are different. As Deng Xiaoping famously said, “it does not matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”.

When China saw that the Soviet model failed, they abandoned it. They adopted markets. When they saw that the environment was degrading, they became the world's largest investor in green energy. They make mistakes, big ones, but they correct them ruthlessly. And third: Honesty. This may surprise you, given the corruption in China, but I mean honesty in a specific sense.

Honesty about results. The Chinese government knows that its legitimacy does not come from votes. It comes from performance. It comes from delivering a better life to 1.4 billion people. In 1980, China was one of the poorest nations on Earth. Today they have lifted 800 million people out of poverty. The greatest improvement in human welfare in history.

They have built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. The United States has built zero. The Chinese people support their government, not because they are brainwashed, but because their lives have improved. A Harvard Kennedy School study found that 93% of Chinese citizens are satisfied with their central government.

In the United States, public trust in government is near historic laws. If America builds its strategy on the hope that the Chinese people will overthrow the CCP, it is betting against the data. It is betting on a chess move. Checkmate the regime. That is not available on the board. So, does this mean China has won? Is the game over?

No. Far from it. While China plays a masterful game of Wei Qi. America possesses advantages that China can never replicate. America has the world's best universities. It has a culture of innovation and critical thinking that is unmatched. It has an ecosystem of freedom that allows for self-correction. Most importantly, America is an immigrant society.

It attracts the best and brightest from around the world. I have often said that the United States can draw talent from 7 billion people. China can only draw from 1.4 billion. In a battle for talent, America should win.

The tragedy is that America is wasting these enormous strengths on a geopolitical contest it has not properly defined. It is spending trillions on a bloated military budget to fight wars in the Middle East or to prepare for a kinetic war in the Pacific that would destroy both nations. It is neglecting its own infrastructure. It is neglecting its own social contract. It is becoming a rigid polarized society, traits that we used to associate with the Soviet Union.

If America continues to play chess, seeking to militarize the Pacific, forcing countries to choose sides and hoping for the collapse of China, it will likely fail. The world is too integrated and China is too big to be checked. But if America decides to learn the game of Wei Qi, if it decides to compete by building better infrastructure, by re-engaging in trade deals, by fixing its own domestic divisions, and improving the wellbeing of its own people, then it can coexist with China.

We must understand the nature of the Chinese challenge. The 100-year strategy of China is not to conquer the world. China does not want to occupy Washington DC. It does not want to send missionaries to convert Americans to communism.

China's goal is rejuvenation. It wants to restore itself to what it sees as its natural historical position, a great respected civilizational power. They want respect, not dominance. They want to ensure that no foreign power can ever humiliate them again. The question is not whether America can stop China. It cannot. The 1.4 billion people of China have stood up and they're not sitting back down.

The question is whether America can adapt to a new world order. Can America accept a world where it is no longer the undisputed king on the chess board, but a major player on a shared Wei Qi board? If America can make that psychological adjustment, if it can accept competition without seeking destruction, then the 21st century can be an era of peace and prosperity.

But if Washington insists on playing chess in a Wei Qi world, we are heading toward a tragedy that no one wants and no one will win. The game has changed. The only question remaining is, when will Washington learn the new rules?