As the US voluntarily dismantles its global hegemony, China has neither the will nor the capacity to fill the role, a prominent Chinese foreign policy expert has argued.

Beijing was forging an alternative path rooted in sovereign equality and multilateralism, rather than a quest for global dominance, said Da Wei, director of Tsinghua University’s Centre for International Security and Strategy.

“I believe America’s global institutional hegemony is coming to an end,” Da told a public seminar at Renmin University of China in Beijing on Wednesday, noting this demise was unlikely to be reversed.

“It’s hard to return [to that situation] as the world is rethinking liberalism – the very foundation of US hegemony – and marching towards nationalism and realism instead.”

The US became the world’s largest economy in the late 19th century but it took over 50 years to assume global leadership, Da Wei says. Photo: AP

Since the 1990s, the world has operated within a liberal multilateral system anchored by Washington. However, since Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Washington’s “table-flipping” diplomacy signalled that the US no longer wished to sustain this global structure, Da said.

However, he stressed that this did not equate to the decline of US national power, noting that the “post-American era” had not yet arrived. Rather, the execution of US leadership had shifted from an institutional focus to one that prioritised coercion and transaction.