China’s new White Paper on Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation in the New Era is not just another technical document about weapons; it is a political manifesto that seeks to redefine the rules of global security in the 21st century. It frames China as an equal to the United States, positions both the “Global South” and the “Major Powers” as primary audiences. It advances a sweeping doctrine in which “development rights” and “cyber sovereignty” trump Western-led non-proliferation and internet governance norms.
From Participant to Architect
Most strikingly, the White Paper now narrates a shift in China’s view of the international system. The familiar trope of “profound changes unseen in a century” seems to be gone. In its place comes a more confident description: an “accelerated adjustment” in the strategic landscape, marked by a balance of power “moving toward greater equilibrium,” and multilateralism “taking deeper root in people’s hearts.” The subtext seems to be that China sees itself no longer as a rising challenger on the periphery, but as a near-peer power in a more levelled order.
This self-perception underpins the White Paper’s core ambition: a move from being a “participant” in existing arms control regimes to becoming an “architect” of new norms. The enemies here are “hegemonism,” a label that points squarely at the US, and “small yards with high fences” – Washington’s language of tech controls thrown back at it to describe export controls (or export control-oriented groupings), supply-chain “decoupling,” and club-like nuclear proliferation regimes such as AUKUS. China’s answer is to universalise its own projects – the Global Security Initiative and the “Community of Shared Future for Mankind” – as the normative backbone of a new order, where access to sensitive technology is recast as an inherent “development right.”
A diplomatic manifesto to the Global South
Unlike earlier defence White Papers that focused heavily on regional military modernisation and reforms in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, this document is written in the register of diplomacy rather than force structure. It is pitched to two distinct audiences: “major powers” (especially the US and other P5 states) and a broad, amorphous “Global South,” to which China offers itself as its chief advocate. This trend was already visible in the May 2025 National Security White Paper, which elevated the Global South as a key pillar of China’s external narrative; the new arms control document embeds that same logic into nuclear, cyber, space, and AI governance debates.
Throughout, Beijing frames its proposals as the codification of “rights” owed to developing countries. These include the right to peaceful use of advanced technology without being strangled by export controls, the right to protect domestic information infrastructures, and the right to shape global governance of the internet and emerging technologies. This vocabulary is not accidental. It is designed to transform what Western states treat as discretionary privileges – market access, technology transfer, or participation in supply chains – into quasi-legal entitlements whose restriction can be branded as injustice or even a violation of “human rights to development.”
Cyber Sovereignty or Anti-Freedom?
The most ideologically aggressive section of the White Paper is its discussion of cyberspace. Here, China openly advances a state-centric model intended to displace the multi-stakeholder framework that has underpinned internet governance since the 1990s. At the heart of this model is “cyber sovereignty,” explicitly defined as the “natural extension and application” of the UN Charter’s sovereign equality principle into cyberspace. In plain terms, Beijing is arguing that cyberspace is analogous to territory – just as states control borders, they must exercise uncompromised authority over data, infrastructure, and digital flows.
Around this concept, the paper wraps four principles: respecting cyber sovereignty, maintaining peace and security, promoting openness and cooperation, and building “good order.” They sound benign, but they function as a doctrinal rejection of “internet freedom” and a pre-emptive defence of censorship, data localisation, and the Great Firewall. Criticism of information controls becomes “interference in internal affairs” or an attempt at “colour revolutions” through information technology. In parallel, Beijing promotes its “Global Initiative on Cooperation in Cross-Border Data Flows” as an alternative to US-led frameworks like “Data Free Flow with Trust,” emphasising local regulatory primacy and “security measures” that place cross-border data transfers under state privilege rather than corporate or user rights.
The irony is hard to miss. On the one hand, the paper argues that cyberspace is a shared space for human activity, and its governance should be determined collectively. On the other hand, it codifies a vision in which the state exerts near-total control over digital life within its borders. The PLA’s institutional reforms sharpen that tension. In April 2024, Beijing dissolved the Strategic Support Force and created a dedicated Cyberspace Force, whose mission is not merely defensive resilience but “dominating the information environment” and actively engaging in cyber offence. A pacifist, rule-building rhetoric in the White Paper thus coexists with – and arguably sanitises – a very real investment in offensive cyber capability.
Responsible AI – On Paper
A similar duality runs through the section on artificial intelligence. On the surface, China presents itself as a responsible AI power. It endorses the mantra that “humans, not weapons, must remain the ultimate decision-makers in war,” calls for the military use of AI to remain under human control, and aligns these positions with broader initiatives like the Global AI Governance Initiative and its own position papers on military AI. To an audience of diplomats and Global South states wary of technologically driven arms races, this is designed to reassure.
Yet the operational reality points in a different direction. PLA modernisation is explicitly framed around “military intelligentization,” with doctrine shifting towards multi-domain precision warfare that relies on AI to compress decision cycles and accelerate kill chains beyond the speed of unaided human cognition. Chinese defence contractors have already showcased intelligent precision-strike systems and LLM-enabled battlefield command tools, indicating a trajectory towards high degrees of autonomy in target detection, selection, and engagement. Under these conditions, “human control” is likely to be interpreted as human-on-the-loop supervision rather than human-in-the-loop approval, leaving substantial room for autonomous swarming and automated targeting under the banner of compliance with self-defined norms.
Nuclear proposals as alliance-wrecking tools
Where the White Paper deals with nuclear arms control, the proposals are framed as contributions to disarmament and non-proliferation “with Chinese characteristics.” Still, they are also carefully calibrated to stress US alliances. Beijing’s flagship idea is a Mutual No-First-Use (NFU) treaty among the P5, under which nuclear-weapon states would legally bind themselves never to use nuclear weapons first. On paper, this appears to be a step toward risk reduction. In practice, it functions as a poison pill for Washington – the US nuclear posture depends heavily on extended deterrence, where the possibility of nuclear use is central to reassuring allies in Europe and Asia against conventional or nuclear coercion.
By championing among major powers a universal NFU treaty that it knows the US cannot accept without undermining its alliance architecture, China is positioning itself as the disarmament-minded responsible stakeholder. Subsequently, the US becomes the obstructionist hegemon before the eyes of the Global South and “middle powers.” The same logic is visible in Beijing’s attack on the AUKUS submarine deal, which it portrays as the first transfer of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium from a nuclear-weapon to a non-nuclear-weapon state and thus a violation of the NPT’s object and purpose. If China gains greater sway in multilateral non-proliferation forums, this framing can be weaponised to delay or complicate Australia’s nuclear submarine programme by mobilising the IAEA and other bodies in legalistic battles.
The White Paper’s advocacy of a ‘Middle East Nuclear-Free Zone’ fits the same pattern. On one hand, it taps into long-standing regional and UN debates, promising de-escalation and greater security. On the other hand, Beijing pointedly singles out Israel, urging it to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state and subject all its facilities to IAEA safeguards – while articulating the idea to be a desire expressed by Arab states. To some degree, the goal may hence be to position China as a champion of Arab concerns and build political capital in a region where US credibility is contested.
Historical Grievances, Global Consequences
The White Paper’s treatment of chemical and biological weapons is, for the most part, conventional – reiterating support for the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions (CWC & BWC, respectively), and related compliance measures. Yet one subsection stands out in its length and specificity – the discussion of Japanese abandoned chemical weapons on Chinese territory. Here, Beijing cites detailed figures – nearly 1,800 recorded incidents and over 200,000 casualties – and itemises Japan’s alleged shortcomings in information provision, recovery, and destruction over decades.
By embedding this history in an arms control document, China is doing more than seeking compensatory justice. It is linking contemporary obligations under the CWC to World War II atrocities and using the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as a platform to keep diplomatic pressure on Tokyo alive. Implicitly, Japan is framed as the actor standing between today’s world and a genuinely “chemical-weapon-free” future. It comes off as a ready-made narrative tool for Beijing, whenever it wishes to undercut Japanese activism on non-proliferation or regional security.
Biosafety Leadership and Contest Over Standards
On biosafety and bioterrorism, the document leans heavily into China’s leadership in global governance. It spotlights China’s strict enforcement of domestic biosafety laws, its comprehensive compliance mechanisms under the BWC, and its contributions to the Convention’s verification protocols. It also showcases initiatives like the July 2021 ‘Tianjin Guidelines for the Ethical Conduct of Scientists’, presented as a global benchmark for responsible science, and emphasises cooperation with groupings such as the SCO, BRICS, ASEAN, and joint China-Central Asia mechanisms to “forge broad consensus” on biosafety standards.
In a world scarred by COVID-19 and anxiety over dual-use biotech, biosafety standard-setting is becoming a significant theater in geopolitical competition. By presenting itself as the engine of biosafety norms and capacity-building for developing countries, Beijing is trying to inoculate itself against accusations of opacity or irresponsibility while pulling Global South states into its orbit of regulatory influence.
“Rights”: A Shield Against Sanctions
A most consequential articulation in this White Paper is its mobilisation of “rights” discourse in the context of arms control and technology governance. By insisting that non-proliferation “must not restrict developing countries’ rights to technology,” and by foregrounding the “legitimate right to peaceful use” of science, data, and advanced capabilities, China is building a conceptual shield against Western sanctions and export controls. And so, if a Chinese firm is targeted for proliferation-related activity, Beijing can frame the action not only as geopolitical containment but as a violation of a nation-state’s “developmental right.”
The same logic underlies the insistence on states’ right to manage data within their territory and to shape domestic internet laws as they see fit. What looks like a legal-technical argument seems, in effect, to be a justification for the Great Firewall, for data localisation, and for fragmenting the global internet into sovereign information blocs insulated from transnational flows that might threaten regime stability.
In that sense, the White Paper should be read less as a static statement of doctrine and more as a playbook. It offers Beijing technical and rhetorical instruments to contest US-led alliances, justify assertive cyber and AI postures, and rally the Global South behind a vision of security where sovereignty is paramount. The key question is whether other states – especially those outside formal blocs – accept this rebalancing of rights and obligations, or whether they see, behind the language of peace, a bid to normalise a world with harder borders, thicker firewalls, and more fragmented security regimes.