Zhou Bo

A senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Centre for International Security and Strategy, Zhou Bo has spent more than four decades thinking about the uses and limits of Chinese power. Does China seek to overturn the global order? Is its partnership with Russia a geopolitical axis? Could the Taiwan Strait ignite the world’s next great war?

Educated at the Air Force Engineering College in China and later at Cambridge University, with further stints at Harvard, Westminster, and Australia’s Land Warfare Studies Centre, Zhou situates Chinese strategy not in the slogans of “peaceful rise” or “systemic rivalry,” but in a longer historical dialectic between China’s self-perception and the world’s unease.

Zhou Bo began his military service in 1979, when China was still emerging from the shadows of the Cultural Revolution. He rose through the Guangzhou Air Force Regional Command before shifting into foreign affairs, where his postings included: Deputy Director General of the West Asia and Africa Bureau, Deputy Director General of General Planning at the Ministry of National Defense, Defense Attaché to Namibia, and Director of the Centre for Security Cooperation.

In his recent book, Should the World Fear China?, Zhou gathers more than a decade of essays to probe the fault lines between perception and policy. Unflinching in his assessments, he argues that China, as the largest beneficiary of globalisation, is not a revisionist power but a stakeholder in stability. He defends Beijing’s military restraint, from its adherence to a no-first-use nuclear policy to its decision to confine overseas operations to peacekeeping, counter-piracy, and humanitarian relief. Yet he acknowledges the inevitability of friction as China grows more assertive in its near seas. Zhou Bo’s writings compel audiences to see China not as a monolith but as a country wrestling with the paradoxes of power: a “developing” nation that is also the world’s largest economy; a beneficiary of globalisation that is cast as its disruptor; a military giant whose international deployments remain limited by design.

In international debates, Zhou’s voice carries the weight of both experience and provocation. He questions assumptions, unsettles orthodoxies, and pushes policymakers to reconsider what China wants and what the world fears.