Introduction
World order projects are fundamental attempts to determine the future of international politics. Whether emerging from liberal or authoritarian contexts, world order projects function as instruments of ‘worldmaking’Footnote 1 and are designed to mobilize support and resources through a ‘vision of a better future for mankind’.Footnote 2 However, such projects operate under conditions of ‘radical uncertainty’, as the future is ‘unwritten’ and cannot be calculated via probability.Footnote 3 This creates a dilemma for great powers that conceive of world order projects: inevitability must be projected to solve coordination problems in the present. Yet, fragility, too, must be projected to mobilize domestic urgency and enforce political discipline to prevent complacency. How can a political project sustain these contradictory temporalities, claiming to be historically guaranteed yet existentially threatened, without collapsing? Although inevitability and fragility frequently operate as functionally complementary narratives to provide legitimacy and mobilize urgency, their concurrent maintenance within one authoritative discourse requires a specific mechanism of temporal governance. This article argues that the resilience and efficacy of world order projects depend on what we term superposed present futures. By maintaining multiple project-futures in a state of superposition prior to political closure, great powers assign different temporal tasks to different audiences and generate a productive tension that maximizes the utility of world order projects.
China’s current vision of the ‘Global Community of Shared Future’ (GCSF, renlei mingyun gongtongti) offers an illustrative case of this temporal governance technology in international politics. Since 2013, the GCSF has moved from a peripheral slogan to the overall goal of Chinese foreign policy.Footnote 4 Official discourse presents the GCSF as an inevitable ‘historical trend’Footnote 5 and a potential solution to the persistent deficits in global governance.Footnote 6 Yet, the same discourse concurrently warns that a return to ‘Cold War mentality’ and ‘bloc confrontation’ imminently threatens to derail the GCSF.Footnote 7 This divergence represents two coexisting and strategically produced expectations, as the project appears to be simultaneously succeeding and fragile.Footnote 8 However, while the existing literature maps geopolitical contests as clashes of ideology, institutions, or material power, it often overlooks the specific temporal mechanisms of how great powers configure and organize political time to stabilize these world order projects.Footnote 9 Rather than dismissing this apparent incoherence as confusion or hypocrisy, this article analyses the GCSF as a contested future-oriented project. Central to this approach is the analytical distinction between the ‘future present’ – the unknowable eventuality that will actually occur – and the ‘present future’ – the future that is imagined, planned, and projected in the present to guide current decision-making.Footnote 10 By investigating these projected present futures and not actual policy outcomes, this article explores the GCSF as a vision of the future and aims to illuminate the mechanisms through which world order projects configure time to define the ‘world-political present’.Footnote 11 The inquiry is guided by two research questions: (1) How are competing futures of the GCSF, particularly those of inevitable success and imminent fragility, generated? (2) Through which modes of future generation are these competing project-futures stabilized in the present? The article argues that the GCSF persists as overlapping ‘project-futures’ of success and fragility, which are stabilized through distinct and concurrent modes of future generation within the discursive architecture of the GCSF. Adapted from quantum social theory, the heuristic of superposition is introduced to denote the coexistence of competing and mutually exclusive interpretations of the likely outcomes of the GCSF (success/fragility). These futures function as ‘claims on the future’ and ‘collective imaginations’ used to mobilize or deny resources today.Footnote 12
Methodologically, the analysis shifts from the content of future visions to the process of their generation to understand how the GCSF is sustained amidst contradiction.Footnote 13 Applying Graf and Herzog’s four modes of future generation, we demonstrate how expectation provides the why of historical necessity, while creation provides the how of material reality.Footnote 14 Further, the concept of ‘future pasts’ is integrated to analyse how actors project a future retrospective to ‘unburden the present’ of ambiguities.Footnote 15 The analysis targets the discursive construction of the GCSF in policy and political texts from 2013 to 2025 through qualitative content analysis. The empirical sections analyse the same corpus of 20 proponent arena texts, which are passed twice to show how 1 discourse stabilizes 2 incompatible futures. The ‘future of inevitability’ utilizes expectation and creation modes to frame the GCSF as an objective reality driven by historical laws, and is comprised of official Chinese state discourse, including leadership speeches and White Papers. The ‘future of fragility’ utilizes risk and conservation modes within Chinese strategic discourse to frame the present as a dangerous crossroads and acts as a prophecy that the GCSF must be actively safeguarded to survive and become reality.Footnote 16
The findings indicate that the GCSF is not on a singular temporal trajectory, but a bundle of overlapping project-futures actively performed to manage an intra-actor paradox of power.Footnote 17 The analysis indicates that GCSF discourse stabilizes support by generating ‘creation futures’ via infrastructure projects like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and ‘expectation futures’ that frame the GCSF as an inevitable historical trend by effectively compressing time to perform success.Footnote 18 The article makes two contributions to IR theory. First, it advances the ‘temporal turn’ by moving beyond descriptive analyses of time to a functional account of temporal power and illustrating how great powers configure time to govern political uncertainty. Second, it offers an alternative to linear theories of order transition by demonstrating that world order projects by great powers require a sophisticated temporal management strategy. Here, success depends on maintaining a specific and productive tension in the discourse between confidence (inevitability) and vigilance (risk) to stabilize a preferred ‘superposed present future’.Footnote 19
The article proceeds as follows. The second section reviews the literature on temporality and world order projects. The third section establishes the theoretical framework and methods used, integrating Graf and Herzog’s typology of future generation with the discursive heuristic of superposition. The fourth section analyses the ‘future of inevitability’ and shows how official discourse utilizes creation and expectation futures to perform a temporal inevitability of the GCSF. The fifth section examines the ‘future of fragility’, demonstrating how proponents of the GCSF mobilize narratives of danger and existential threat to position the GCSF as the only solution against global disorder. The conclusion synthesizes the findings and discusses the broader implications of ‘superposed present futures’ of geopolitical world order projects for international relations.
Temporality, order building, and world order projects
Recent interventions in the ‘temporal turn’ of IR indicate that time itself is a site of political struggle. Scholars such as Hom and McIntosh demonstrate that political actors actively configure and manage time by imposing specific ‘timing’ to legitimize their power and constrain geopolitical competitors.Footnote 20 The strategic narrative is central to the configuration of time in international politics. Strategic narratives ‘construct a shared meaning of the past, present, and future of international relations in order to shape the opinions and behavior of actors at home and overseas’.Footnote 21 Such narratives operate as ‘power plays’ by political decision-makers, who actively shape the global order by redefining the parameters of the possible.Footnote 22 However, while the literature successfully theorizes how states project a future, it often assumes a linear competition between rival visions. It is less successful in explaining how a single state can productively sustain multiple contradictory futures simultaneously.
This gap is critical for understanding world order projects. A distinct strand of literature analyses how great powers construct world order projects as ‘measures of contrivance’ or conscious efforts to organize international anarchy through rules and shared expectations.Footnote 23 These projects and the subsequent order-building function as ‘aspirational and normative ambition’ or ‘secular internationalist utopias’ that define the legitimate ends of global governance.Footnote 24 The ambition to produce global futures is, however, not limited to the will of great powers; historical research initiatives such as the World Order Models Project demonstrate how transnational networks have long debated global futures of great powers and non-great powers alike.Footnote 25 Nonetheless, world order projects are not the only internationalist initiatives that govern through the generation of futures. As extensive scholarship shows, global development, human rights, and international order similarly rely on temporal projections of the future and progress amid uncertainty and religious politics.Footnote 26 Additionally, recent debates about history and international law discussed the politics of time, or ‘chronocenosis’, in significant detail, demonstrating that political reorganization is in its essence also temporal reorganization.Footnote 27 In international law, scholars have shown how normative orders rely on specific temporal narratives, whether by retroactively crystallizing customary norms during periods of transition between laws, or by weaponizing historical methods to legitimize contemporary legal authority.Footnote 28 However, world order projects articulated by great powers confront distinctive temporal demands. Where proponents of human rights and development navigate political uncertainty by projecting moral or economic progress, great power world order projects claim to comprehensively reorganize the structural distribution of security, power, and authority in international society. Because world order projects and pertinent orders serve the ideology of the hegemon, rising powers actively seek to delegitimize the incumbent power by articulating and propagating ‘alternative or imagined world[s]’.Footnote 29
Dominant theories of these geopolitical contests, such as power transition theory, often treat the future as a linear derivative of present capabilities.Footnote 30 Under such ‘Newtonian constraints’, a world order project is expected to send a singular coherent signal to other states.Footnote 31 Linear temporal models cannot conceptualize how mutually incompatible expectations, such as success and fragility, can coexist structurally without resolving into a single trajectory. Scholarship already provides robust frameworks that illustrate how differing philosophies of history shape international theory.Footnote 32 Yet, to conceptualize how a single actor actively sustains multiple claims to distinct forms of futures within one authoritative discourse, we introduce superposition as a heuristic. Fully acknowledging existing critiques, for instance by Kratochwil, that caution from importing Wendt’s Quantum Social Ontology as a ‘theory of everything’ due to its metaphysical overreach, we treat superposition not as ontology but as a carefully bounded analytical heuristic and analogy. Subsequently, Kratochwil also notably argues that ‘the above criticism does not rule out that the application of elements of quantum “theory” (…) could lead to some heuristically fruitful results’.Footnote 33 This allows us to theorize world order projects, such as the GCSF, as a future-in-superposition that is actively structuring political discourse in the present.
To empirically ground this heuristic and the empirical cases, we recognize that scholarship on Chinese foreign policy has identified the GCSF as a comprehensive world order project and a critical part of the ‘proto-ideology’ of Xi Jinping Thought. To avoid treating the GCSF as a catch-all label, it must be analytically distinguished from adjacent foreign policy concepts. For example, concepts like ‘multipolarity’ and the ‘New Model of Major Power Relations’ are used mainly as diplomatic tools, which are aimed at achieving the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ (Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing) and challenging the Liberal International Order (LIO) by operationalizing it through initiatives like the BRI, Global Security Initiative (GSI), Global Development Initiative (GDI), and Global Civilization Initiative (GCI).Footnote 34 The GCSF, however, constitutes the ultimate normative objective of Chinese statecraft that ties all of these concepts together. In short, the GCSF is the specific vision of world order that these tools and strategies are designed to achieve. Relating it to historical antecedents like tianxia (all under heaven), the GCSF is conceptualized as a teleological ‘blueprint’ for a future global governance system that emphasizes sovereignty, security, and the right to development.Footnote 35 Chinese-language scholarship also situates the GCSF in Marxist theory. Tian frames it as the ‘dialectical unity’ (bianzheng tongyi) of historical materialism and modern world development.Footnote 36 The GCSF is also identified as a necessary transitional phase to bridge the gap between a capitalist ‘illusory community’ (xuhuan gongtongti)Footnote 37 and the final Marxist destination of a ‘true community’ (zhenzheng de gongtongti)Footnote 38 or ‘association of free individuals’ (ziyouren de lianheti).Footnote 39 While critical future studies often emphasize that the future is unknowable, Chinese Marxists view the future as teleological and plannable through ‘effective realistic exploration’ (xingzhi youxiao de xianshi tansuo).Footnote 40 Marxist dialectics posit that having a condition of two contradictory factors, such as inevitable success and constant fragility, makes perfect sense, arguing that it is humanity’s goal to resolve these contradictions to transcend ‘false communities’.Footnote 41 Rather than a fixed structural precondition, this dialectic serves as a tool of statecraft with Beijing acting as a temporal entrepreneur who utilizes dialectical management to navigate the tension between inevitability and fragility.
The literature also highlights how the GCSF is materially linked to the BRI and China’s return to centrality in international politics. By framing the GCSF as the political objective of all prior development, Chinese discourse effectively performs a retroactive constitution of the BRI.Footnote 42 Despite the cohesive vision projected by Beijing, Hoang argues that a persistent ‘ambivalence’ in how the GCSF is received globally remains.Footnote 43 In fact, although official documents often celebrate an ‘international consensus’,Footnote 44 regional actors frequently engage in selective adoption by embracing economic cooperation while resisting the political and normative implications of a more Sinocentric hierarchy.Footnote 45 Critical literature frames the GCSF and related initiatives like the BRI through the lens of risk futures by stating potential outcomes such as debt traps, Chinese-style neocolonialism, and the erosion of democratic norms as inherent to the expansion of the GCSF.Footnote 46 This ultimately fuels scepticism about the true trajectory of the GCSF.
Recent literature has increasingly challenged the predictive qualities of forecasting and instead focused on how the future is socially constructed in the present. Hölscher argues that political projects as future expectations function as ‘hybrid reality formations’ (hybride Wirklichkeitsgebilde), exerting real force in the present regardless of whether or not their predicted outcome materializes in the future.Footnote 47 Moreover, existing research holds that contradictory narratives surrounding a political project, such as inevitable success or looming fragility, are not logical errors but competing present futures contending to define the political horizon.Footnote 48 Building on this distinction, scholars have investigated the specific procedural modes through which futures are generated and stabilized. This scholarship has identified the distinct modes of ‘expectation’ (reliance on linear trends), ‘creation’ (active planning), ‘risk’ (prevention), and ‘conservation’ (preservation) as key tools for political actors to build order.Footnote 49 These modes coexist and create what Hartog and Brown term the ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’, in which different actors inhabit distinct temporal regimes.Footnote 50 Furthermore, literature on ‘future pasts’ highlights how political actors construct narratives that retrospectively validate current actions from the perspective of an imagined future, which effectively pre-writes history to make desired outcomes appear as a fait accompli. Footnote 51
While the ‘temporal turn’ in IR has problematized the linearity of power and order transitions, the field still lacks a theoretical and methodological framework to explain how contradictory futures are functionally sustained in practice. To transcend the descriptive observation that time matters, analysis in international relations must engage social theories that account for what Adam terms the ‘simultaneity’ of incompatible times within a single political moment.Footnote 52 The following section addresses this by bridging the discursive heuristic of ‘superposition’ with historiographical modes of future generations to describe the state in which conflicting potential future realities exist simultaneously prior to the realization into a single outcome.Footnote 53
Framework for analysing superposed present futures
The concept of superposed present futures is advanced to conceptualize how the GCSF sustains resilience amidst internal contradictions. Made famous by Schrödinger’s equation in quantum theory, superposition describes the state of a system that exists in multiple potential configurations simultaneously until a measurement collapses the wave function into a single outcome.Footnote 54 Drawing on recent work in quantum social theory in IR, ‘superposition’ serves as a discursive analogy for understanding the coexistence of incompatible present futures within a single political project such as the GCSF.Footnote 55 Superposition is not utilized to claim that the GCSF is a physical wave function, but as a ‘diffractive’ lens to analyse how political agency operates like overlapping waves.Footnote 56 It posits that the future of inevitability is ‘entangled’ with the future of fragility to manage the inherently simultaneous futures of world order projects. As Murphy specifies: ‘(…) the point about quantum social theory is the way that it challenges us to think differently, to question relationships, structures, and processes. Quantizing critique is more epistemological than ontological’.Footnote 57 Critical China Studies literature has already demonstrated that ideological contradictions often function as productive tensions in Chinese politics, which has been analysed through concepts like ‘pessoptimism’, ‘neo-socialism’, ‘composite ideology’, or ‘anti-hegemonic hegemonies’.Footnote 58 Building on that insight, the discursive analogy of superposition specifically conceptualizes how these tensions operate temporally by sustaining multiple future projections simultaneously. In this view, the GCSF is sustained by the discursive ‘indeterminacy’ of its future trajectory.Footnote 59 Crucially, unlike Wendt’s core insight that social phenomena exist as ‘pure potentialities’ until they are actualized; the discursive superposition of the GCSF cannot be resolved. Because the future remains structurally indeterminate under radical uncertainty, decisive political closure is impossible.Footnote 60 Instead, the proponent discourse actively constructs this superposition by generating two distinct temporal realities: Future A, defined by the modes of expectation and creation (inevitable success) and the function of inevitability (coordination), and Future B, defined by the modes of risk and conservation (imminent fragility) and the function of mobilization.
The discursive resistance to undermine the authority of the existing hegemon by a rising power by use of a world order project occurs under the condition of ‘radical uncertainty’, as future outcomes cannot be calculated as probabilistic risks because the future is ‘non-ergodic’ and determined by complex and interdependent choices in international politics.Footnote 61 If uncertainty is the structural condition of global politics, then the ability to structure and reconfigure time is a form of power. Political actors do not merely have expectations; they actively generate them to constrain the choices of rivals, manifesting a ‘will to time’ and exhibiting the ‘political power of timing’, which imposes a standard political interpretation of how to proceed into the future from the current present.Footnote 62 As such, the analytical inquiry must shift from ‘future present’, the eventual outcome that will materialize, to the ‘present future’, a future as it is currently imagined and projected.Footnote 63 Yet, precisely because the future is structurally indeterminate, political actors cannot know the trajectory or outcome of world order projects. Instead, they must generate ‘fictional expectations’ to coordinate action and mobilize resources in the present.Footnote 64 As a consequence, political power is wielded by those actors capable of stabilizing these expectations and making their specific narratives of the future count.Footnote 65 Within a theoretical framework useful to analyse the GCSF in this sense, the competing narratives surrounding the project must be treated as a ‘hybrid reality formation’, as these formations function as psychological facts that exert political power by structuring decisions today, irrespective of whether or not its visions materialize.Footnote 66 The stability and resilience of any world order project, then, depends less on objective material conditions than on the ‘active timing’ practices and ‘politics of expectations’, where proponents must simultaneously project an inevitable future to inspire confidence and a threatened future to mobilize urgency.Footnote 67
To operationalize the analysis on how the GCSF is constructed as a ‘superposed present future’, Graf and Herzog’s historiographical framework is adapted, which shifts the focus to the modes of their generation.Footnote 68 Rather than treating the future as a unitary ‘horizon of expectation’ (Erwartungshorizont),Footnote 69 this approach distinguishes four specific procedural modes through which political actors generate temporal trajectories of world order projects: expectation, creation, risk, and conservation. The future of expectation (Erwartungszukunft) refers to futures generated as inevitable trends or external forces that are awaited to arrive.Footnote 70 This chimes well with what Hom describes as ‘passive timing’, where the future is defined as a continuation of established standards that require little to no efforts or decision-making.Footnote 71 In direct contrast, the future of creation (Gestaltungszukunft) is generated through active planning, deadlines, and decisive intervention. It is a future that is ‘determined and set’.Footnote 72 This aligns with ‘active timing’, which requires conscious effort by political actors to create and influence actions, and where success or failure is not guaranteed but is fluid.Footnote 73 The future of risk (Risikozukunft) generates the future through the aim of prevention and security, often by constructing scary or fearful scenarios, primarily with the goal of avoiding them. Lastly, the future of conservation (Erhaltungszukunft) seeks to extend the present into the future and aims to ‘pass on, behind, and preserve’ against disruption or destruction. These modes do not replace each other, but ‘coexist and compete’ within the same political space.Footnote 74
Departing from traditional analysis that locates contestation between rival states (inter-actor contestation), this study employs an intra-actor research design. It investigates how Chinese state actors generate conflicting futures within their discursive field to manage the ‘politics of futurology’.Footnote 75 Methodologically, a bifurcated analytical strategy is applied to a unitary corpus. The dataset is subjected to two iterative cycles of discursive readings to map the superposed discursive realities. The first analytical pass aims to isolate the constellation of expectation and creation modes, reconstructing how the GCSF is stabilized as a historical necessity and inevitability (Future A). The second pass interrogates the same textual sites to trace the constellation of risk and conservation modes, revealing how the same political project is simultaneously stabilized as a fragile contingency (Future B). This design is conceptualized to demonstrate that the coexistence of these futures is not a sign of political incoherence, but a functional requirement of the ‘politics of expectations’. Here, political actors are required to balance confidence in a political project with urgency.Footnote 76
The GCSF is selected as the empirical case for this analysis because the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) centralized discursive production provides a unique dataset that describes a rising great power’s world order project. The corpus for empirical analysis comprises 20 primary documents produced between 2013 and 2025, and is selected for the explicit function in ‘world-building’.Footnote 77 The dataset includes official keynote speeches by core leadership in the original Chinese language as well as two English-language White Papers. The selected documents represent constitutive moments where the GCSF was either formally redefined, operationalized into new policy, or presented to a new global audience. Further, selection was restricted to the highest epistemic authority within Chinese politics, specifically General Secretary Xi Jinping, State Council White Papers, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, to capture the official rhetorical performance of the state. Relying exclusively on proponent-arena texts presents a recognized limitation, as a highly curated official discourse certainly projects unity and cannot be treated as a transparent insight into internal policy deliberations or actual state preferences. However, because this study investigates how temporal trajectories are governed discursively, we analyse these texts strictly as mechanisms of political communication and expectation management to avoid the risk of a ‘performative fallacy’ of mistaking rhetorical claims for material structural transformation.
The corpus is distributed to capture the evolution of the GCSF; from its inception (2013), to its integration into the UN (2017), to its post-pandemic operationalization via the BRI, GDI, GCI, and GSI (2022–2025). Document selection was determined by the point of theoretical saturation, ergo, when the analysis of texts did not yield any new information in the identified modes of future generation. Within these texts, the specific unit of analysis is the ‘timing indexical’ or the linguistic marker that locates political claims within a specific temporal sequence, which distinguishes past inheritances and future projections.Footnote 78 By isolating these indexicals, the inquiry treats documents as cognitive and relational mechanisms that actively configure the horizon of possibility for global audiences.Footnote 79 Specifically, the first pass involves a qualitative content analysis to identify linguistic markers corresponding to the four modes of future generation. Expectation is traced via passive temporal descriptors that indicate external momentum, such as ‘inevitable trend’ or ‘objective law’.Footnote 80 Creation is identified via volitional markers indicating agency and planning, such as ‘blueprint’ and deontic modals like ‘must’ or ‘shall’.Footnote 81 Risk is located via markers of temporal urgency or protection, such as ‘crossroads’, ‘abyss’, and ‘uphold’.Footnote 82 The second pass aggregates these linguistic markers into two dominant constellations to operationalize the superposition of the GCSF. Future A (the future of inevitability) is constructed by isolating the interplay of expectation and creation, revealing historical necessity. Future B (the future of fragility) is constructed by isolating the interplay of risk and conservation.
Future A: inevitability
China’s primary objective of the future of expectation mode is the alignment of the GCSF with objective time. A foundational claim of this mode is that history possesses a fixed and linear direction. Early articulations, such as Hu’s report to the 18th Party Congress, established the baseline by asserting that ‘peace and development are still the themes of the times’ (heping yu fazhan rengran shi shidai zhuti) and that ‘the law of the jungle is not the way’ for humanity.Footnote 83 This formulation positions China’s approach as aligned with the temporal zeitgeist of peace and coexistence. The clear and unmistakable aim is to sustain the GCSF as a manifestation of the ‘trend of the times’ (shidai chaoliu), and not a political preference of the CPC.Footnote 84 By discursively framing the GCSF as compliant with presupposed historical laws, the element of choice, coincidence, or uncertainty is removed. In doing so, the discourse engages in ‘de-futurization’.Footnote 85 This stabilizes the GCSF by using ‘passive timing’ to present the world order project as a continuation of established temporal standards that requires no active choice by states.Footnote 86 This effectively collapses the ‘superposition’ of numerous potential outcomes of the GCSF into an inescapable trajectory, forcing actors to align with the GCSF as an adaptation to historic reality.Footnote 87 Hence, political actors, both domestic and international, do not have to choose the GCSF; they only have to recognize its historic necessity and centrality.
Discourse in this mode is characterized by passive and high-momentum temporal descriptors. The future is depicted as a moving object, e.g., a ‘tide’ (chaoliu) or ‘wheels of history moving forward’ (lishi qianjin de chelun) that exists independently of human agency.Footnote 88 These metaphors operate as high-momentum ‘timing indexicals’Footnote 89 that generate a ‘future of expectation’ and position the GCSF as an external force, which must be passively awaited rather than being a political choice.Footnote 90 For instance, Xi argued that peace and development are the ‘trend of the times’ (shidai chaoliu) and a White Paper on the GCSF stated that ‘History tells us that for a country to develop and prosper, it must understand and follow the trend of global development’; otherwise it will be abandoned by history.Footnote 91 More critically, it warned that ‘those who turn their back on it [globalization] will have no place in it’.Footnote 92 This establishes a binary, where the GCSF represents a key milestone in the flow of history, while any opposition to it is framed as unnatural and an ahistoric resistance bound to fail. Inherent analogies to physics or nature only substantiate the claims. In 2015, Xi likened the GCSF and the movement of history to a mighty river, as the trend of historical development is unstoppable (buke zudang de shidai chaoliu).Footnote 93 By 2022, this metaphor had hardened into a deterministic claim regarding national unification and rejuvenation, since the wheels of history (lishi chelun) are constantly rolling on.Footnote 94 These dynamics are structured as ‘changes of the world, changes of the times, and changes of history’ (shijie zhi bian, shidai zhi bian, lishi zhi bian) that are unfolding regardless of Western political objectives.Footnote 95 The use of such terminology implies an inertial historical force that cannot be stopped by others. This exemplifies Hom’s ‘passive timing’, as the GCSF is generated as a continuation of established standards that ostensibly require no political decision.Footnote 96 Overall, this reveals the specific procedural function of the future of expectation mode. It detaches the GCSF from the content of China’s political preferences and reconstructs it as an objective and external temporal force. The discourse shifts from offering a vision to be debated to presenting a historical trend that can be passively awaited.
Besides the metaphors of momentum, the future of expectation mode relies on the frequent language of ‘laws’ (guilü) and ‘logic’ (luoji) to claim the scientific validity of the GCSF.Footnote 97 The discourse posits that the GCSF is the only right choice because it adheres to the underlying structure of historical development: ‘Whatever we may encounter on our journey ahead, the only right choice is to work together for the benefit of all.’Footnote 98 These claims serve a distinct delegitimization function. When Xi argues that globalization is the main historical direction and that unilateralism of individual countries,Footnote 99 likely hinting at the US, cannot be accepted, he frames the US-led LIO as a temporal anachronism.Footnote 100 Indeed, while the LIO is structurally multilateral, the objective of achieving a multipolar world (shijie duojihua) is of unparalleled importance in Chinese discourse, though it is sometimes termed as ‘true multilateralism’ (zhenzheng de duobianzhuyi).Footnote 101 Advancing these goals, the GCSF is presented as the natural and ‘great banner that leads the trend of the times and the direction of human progress’.Footnote 102 By asserting that the GCSF as a world order project ‘stand[s] on the right side of history’ (lishi zhengque), Chinese actors attempt to render alternative futures as less desirable and historically invalid.Footnote 103
Crucially, the future of expectation mode stabilizes the future by engaging in retroactive verification. Official state discourse validates the inevitability of the GCSF as a world order project by rewriting the immediate past as a teleological antecedent to the present. This narrative strategy constructs a ‘future past’, as the present is framed not as an open decision-making environment but as a constructed step in retrospective history that has, in effect, already occurred.Footnote 104 For instance, the past 70 years of development in China and associated national targets of the ‘two centenary goals’ (liangge yibainian) and the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ (Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing) are narrated as a linear temporal trajectory that logically necessitates the emergence of the GCSF.Footnote 105 This narrative strategy, in effect, denies political agency to other states in the temporal timeline by asserting that the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has entered an irreversible historical process’.Footnote 106 Hence, the CPC presents the GCSF as a historical vector that has already gathered unstoppable momentum.
While the future of expectation mode frames the GCSF as historically inevitable, the future of creation mode attempts to render it physically undeniable. Here, Chinese actors shift from passive narrators of historical trends to active architects of discursive reality. Creation functions as a verification method by highlighting detailed plans, institutional platforms, and material deliverables. Hence, official discourse utilizes infrastructure projects, e.g., the BRI, as rhetorical proof that the future projected by the GCSF is already arriving. By claiming these projects as manifestations of the GCSF, the narrative effectively deletes the mental distance between the blueprint in thought only and reality, which makes the GCSF appear as an operational fact and not what it actually is, a distant ideational aspiration. This is irrespective of the actual material success or failure of the initiatives, which is explicitly not the subject of this study. The primary discursive function of the future of creation mode is therefore to simulate the transformation of ideas and imagination into action in the present. The State Council Information Office of the PRC explicitly posits the BRI as the major operational pathway of the GCSF throughout this transformation: ‘It [The BRI] has also opened up a new path for all humanity to realize modernization, and ensured that the efforts of building a global community of shared future are delivering real results.’ The White Paper also asserts that the BRI has ‘evolved from ideas into actions, from a vision into reality, and from a general framework into concrete projects’.Footnote 107 Theoretically, these material interventions operate as creative ‘measurements’ that collapse the abstract potentialities of the GCSF into concrete actualities.Footnote 108 By establishing these physical ‘apparatuses’,Footnote 109 the state enacts an ‘ontological cut’ that determines the GCSF and resolves the ambiguity of the ‘present future’ into a tangible fact.Footnote 110 In the future of creation mode, the GCSF is no longer treated as an external historical trend (expectation), but as a site of ‘active timing’,Footnote 111 where the previously open horizon of the future is ‘determined and set’ through planning.Footnote 112
While the future of expectation mode relies on the physics of history, the future of creation mode stabilizes the future through bureaucratic saturation. Official state discourse actively ‘colonizes’ the temporal horizon by translating the abstract norms of the GCSF into specific lists of administrative deliverables as well as unavoidable tasks.Footnote 113 For instance, the ‘China-Africa Community with a Shared Future’ (Zhongfei mingyun gongtongti) was operationalized by Xi at the 2021 FOCAC conference through the ‘nine programs’ (jiuxiang gongcheng), which established a ‘green channel’ (lüse tongdao) for African agricultural exports to China (pledge to import $300 billion in goods) as well as precise quotas for vaccine donation (1 million doses), trade promotion (BRI enhancement), and poverty reduction projects in Africa as part of a ‘China-Africa Cooperation 2035 Vision’ (Zhongfei hezuo 2035 nian yuanjing).Footnote 114 By filling the future with such rigid ‘roadmaps’ and ‘blueprints’, China and its partners perform the GCSF as a dense schedule of political and economic commitments that are already underway and hence compress time.Footnote 115 Shifting from observation to action exemplifies ‘active timing’, where the proponent constructs a standardized temporal framework to synchronize the disparate timelines of international actors into a single defined schedule under the GCSF.Footnote 116 This development is further reinforced through bureaucratization and the construction of permanent institutions. In 2017, Xi has explicitly used the metaphor of a ‘Swiss army knife’ (ruishi jundao) to demand a functional and multi-purpose toolset in global governance, such as the GCSF.Footnote 117 Such functionalism is enacted through the establishment of bodies like the ‘China-Central Asia mechanism permanent secretariat’, which provides the political project with a physical address and a recurring diplomatic calendar.Footnote 118 Through these institutions, proponent actors aid China in transforming the radical uncertainty of international politics into manageable ‘mechanism building’ (jizhi jianshe) and ‘early harvests’ (zaoqi shouhuo), making the GCSF appear structurally difficult to reverse.Footnote 119
The future of creation mode also functions by layering and nesting new geopolitical initiatives within the GCSF to increase its density. When the international environment shifts, Beijing strategically launches specific sub-initiatives to fill the lack of leadership in global governance in specific domains. In 2022, Xi announced the ‘Global Development Initiative’ (GDI, quanqiu fazhan changyi) to stimulate globalization and economic cooperation with China’s partners through the BRI and GCSF.Footnote 120 Further, amidst Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Xi launched the ‘Global Security Initiative’ (GSI, quanqiu anquan changyi) to operationalize the security dimension of the GCSF.Footnote 121 Shortly after, to address increasing ideological friction between China and the West, Xi proposed the ‘Global Civilization Initiative’ (GCI, quanqiu wenming changyi).Footnote 122 This discursive layering technique suggests that the GCSF is an ‘organic integrated machine’ (youji yiti de jiqi) that can generate new components or sub-initiatives as needed by the changing geopolitical landscape.Footnote 123 Furthermore, the future of creation mode imposes concrete timelines onto the abstract future of the GCSF. In an address to the UN Summit on Biodiversity, Xi promised environmental protection, and, even more significantly, attached specific dates by pledging ‘carbon neutrality before 2060’ and ‘carbon peak’ by 2030 in China.Footnote 124 By assigning concrete calendar dates to these environmental protection goals, the discourse pulls the GCSF out of indefinite time and places it into a technocratic schedule.
The future of creation mode relies on a specific temporal logic and material objects as the proof of political success of the GCSF. Because the GCSF is fundamentally a normative and metaphysical claim or an abstract vision of a new international order, it risks appearing as mere rhetoric without tangible results. To bridge this gap between rhetoric and real-life effects, the discourse frequently points to physical infrastructure, often built as part of the BRI. Moreover, it validates the existence of the GCSF as a ‘present future’ or reality that is actively becoming in the present. For example, railways and bridges are not merely infrastructure with a function in the economy; they are physical evidence and validation that the GCSF exists. White Papers cite multiple examples as tangible manifestations of the GCSF, such as the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as notable examples of the BRI and, by extension, the GCSF.Footnote 125 In this context, physical infrastructure projects serve to collapse the mental distance between the abstract political vision and current physical reality of the GCSF. In fact, railways and bridges are temporal evidence of the substantive nature of the GCSF.
Consequently, the political efficacy of the GCSF as a world order project lies in the structural superposition of expectation and creation in the official discourse, which constructs a self-reinforcing loop of metaphysical claims of history and physical facts validating each other. Through the future of expectation mode, Chinese officials claim that the GCSF is guaranteed by the linear progression of history. Through the future of creation mode, institutional building (GSI, GCI, GDI) is progressed, and material deliverables through the BRI prove that the future promised by the GCSF is already under construction and partially realized, and constitutes material entrenchment. This duality of expectation-creation produces the GCSF as a ‘present future’ that is difficult to contest by other states. The result is a performance of the GCSF as inevitability that attempts to foreclose alternative futures. Crucially, this generates a deliberate ambiguity designed to manage the radical uncertainty of international order building. By projecting inevitable success, Beijing assures supporters without prematurely resolving the contested question of its hegemonic ambitions. However, this performance of inevitability also relies on the modes of risk and conservation, which the following section will explore.
Future B: fragility
The previous section demonstrated how Chinese state discourse constructs the GCSF as a historical inevitability (Future A). Through the future of expectation and creation modes, the GCSF is presented as the natural endpoint of political development. However, if this teleology was absolute, the GCSF would not require defence or urgency in the same discourse. Yet, the analysis of the same official texts reveals a parallel and contradictory horizon: a future of fragility defined by the imminent potential for failure, reversal, and systemic breakdown in the pathway of the GCSF.
The future of risk mode constitutes the main mechanism of fragility generation.Footnote 126 In this mode, official texts create a temporal counterbalance of the supposed inevitability of the GCSF and reframe the present as a moment of profound danger and uncertainty. Rather than an inevitable outcome, humanity’s future is concurrently depicted as being at a ‘historical crossroads’ (lishi de shizi lukou), where regression, chaos, and extinction are theoretically possible.Footnote 127 This precarity is accentuated in the discourse as ‘changes unseen in a century’ (bainian weiyou zhi da bianju).Footnote 128 Crucially, this phrase performs dual discursive work, as it signals a historic window of opportunity to reshape world order (supporting Future A), while concurrently warning of profound structural instability and potential danger (supporting Future B), transforming the GCSF into an existential necessity. Similar to Kirshner’s conclusion that ‘International Relations takes place in an environment of uncertainty’,Footnote 129 official discourse constructs the current era as a liquid and volatile space defined by structural instability. Xi frames the present as a dangerous interregnum defined by ‘instability and uncertainty’ (bu wendingxing bu quedingxing).Footnote 130 By weaponizing risk, the GCSF is stabilized as the only solution to global problems. This is achieved through metaphors of turbulence. For instance, Xi describes the international situation using the terms of ‘raging waves’ (jingtao hailang) and ‘mist’ (miwu), suggesting that humanity is operating in a chaotic maritime environment, where survival is not guaranteed.Footnote 131 Individual nation states can be understood as small ships that may overturn in the ‘raging waves’, whereas the GCSF is presented as a giant ship capable of braving the storm by ‘stand together through thick and thin’ and ‘join hands to meet challenges, and work together in cooperation to open up the future’.Footnote 132 Such rhetorical construction performs the crucial function of generating a security deficit that, supposedly, only the GCSF can fill. The risk is constructed as structural and historical. Other texts invoke the ‘Sword of Damocles’ (damokelisi zhi jian) in the form of nuclear weapons, which hang over humankind to signify an ever-present threat of annihilation.Footnote 133 By positioning the world and humankind at this precipice discursively, the texts argue that the natural flow of history can be disrupted by volatility and requires active intervention of the GCSF to prevent a collapse.
The adversarial framing also serves to explain why the inevitable triumph of the GCSF (Future A) has not yet occurred. The delay is attributed to the ‘law of the jungle’ (conglin faze) and ‘zero-sum games’ (linghe boyi) positions and behaviours by states that the GCSF is explicitly designed to transcend.Footnote 134 Moreover, by categorizing opposition to the GCSF and its norms of ‘openness, inclusiveness, mutual benefit, equity and justice’ as a regression to a ‘Cold War mentality’, the discourse constructs a future of risk where the GCSF could potentially be derailed by reactionary forces which deepen ‘division and antagonism and stokes confrontation between blocs’ of which ‘self-destruction will be the certain outcome’.Footnote 135 In extreme formulations, the stakes are raised to the level of biological survival of humankind. Xi warned that ‘global species extinction speed continuously accelerate[s]’ (quanqiu wuzhong miejue sudu buduan jiakuai), which fuses potential political failure with ecological collapse.Footnote 136 Here, it is crucial to observe that the future of risk mode does not predict failure; it uses the spectre of potentially catastrophic failure to delegitimize political alternatives to the GCSF and validate the GCSF as the only solution capable of preventing the world from falling into chaos. This aligns precisely with Graf and Herzog’s conceptualization of the future of risk mode, as the objective is not to predict a likely outcome, but to generate a scenario necessitating prevention.Footnote 137
In response to the existential threats outlined in the future of risk mode, the future of conservation mode constructs the GCSF as a protection. While observers often characterize China and its geopolitical projects and initiatives as revisionist to overturn the status quo of US hegemony, the internal discourse paradoxically frames the GCSF as an act of conservation.Footnote 138 Through the future of conservation mode, the GCSF is presented as the only world order project capable of saving the international system from the chaos of supposed Western hegemony and unilateralism.Footnote 139 The central object of this conservation is the sovereignty of the state and the diversity of civilizations. Against the perceived structural pressure of Western universal values, the GCSF promises to ‘respect each country’s independently chosen social system and development path’ (zunzhong geguo zizhu xuanze de shehui zhidu he fazhan daolu).Footnote 140 This rhetoric transforms the GCSF into a pluralistic world order project, where the ‘diversity of civilization’ (wenming duoyangxing)Footnote 141 is a heritage that must be preserved, as ‘mutual learning among civilizations provides important impetus to human progress’.Footnote 142 Further, conservation extends into the protection of the biosphere. Xi likens the political success of the GCSF directly to ecological survival because ‘humanity and nature form a community of shared destiny’ (ren yu ziran shi mingyun gongtongti). Hence, without unified action through the GCSF, the ‘home’ (jiayuan) of humanity is at risk of being lost.Footnote 143 This demonstrates the distinctive stabilizing function of the future of conservation mode. It promises to extend a valued present, specifically state sovereignty and civilizational diversity, into an uncertain future.Footnote 144 By framing the GCSF as a protection of these ‘future pasts’, the discourse attempts to ‘unburden the present situation from ambiguities’ and pertinent anxieties, and reframes the GCSF as the only world order project capable of preserving the status quo of the international order.Footnote 145
Consequently, the future of fragility functions as the darker yet complementary counterpart of the future of inevitability. While the first narrative assures domestic and international audiences that the triumph and success of the GCSF is historically determined, the second narrative warns that the path to that triumph, however, is perilous and non-linear. By constructing a world and political situation that is threatened by the abyss of bloc confrontation, ecological collapse, and hegemonic overreach by the US and its partners, the discourse generates an anxiety, which can only be resolved and eased by subscribing to the GCSF. This narrative strategy reflects the temporal regime of ‘presentism’, where the future appears as a source of imminent disaster instead of a horizon of expectation.Footnote 146 The discourse also operationalizes the ‘problem of time’ or the inherent fear of ‘disorder, dissolution, and death’Footnote 147 to position the GCSF as necessary ‘anxiety controlling mechanisms’ that stabilize the international system against radical uncertainty.Footnote 148 In the future of risk and conservation modes, the GCSF is a survival mechanism. The GCSF is positioned as the only viable form of ‘time binding’ and is capable of stabilizing international politics. The modes work in tandem to transform the GCSF from a diplomatic proposal to an urgent and necessary world order project. If humanity is indeed at a crossroads where one path leads to self-destruction and the other to a shared future, as the discourse suggests, then the GCSF becomes obligatory and unquestionable. In this sense, the discourse treats uncertainty not as a deficit of knowledge, but as a strategic ‘resource’ that compels political decision-making.Footnote 149 This reveals the strategic utility of ‘superposition’ as a discursive heuristic. By maintaining the discourse pertinent to the GCSF in a simultaneous state of inevitable success (Future A) and existential fragility (Future B), Beijing deploys a deliberate ambiguity designed to manage the radical uncertainty of the international system. This allows the state to mobilize confidence required for realizing a long-term vision and leadership ambition in the international system while inducing the necessary vigilance for immediate survival of the world order project.
Conclusion
World order projects by great powers in international politics operate under a structural contradiction. To function effectively, they must project a future of inevitable success to address coordination issues among states, yet simultaneously warn of existential fragility to enforce political discipline in the face of complacency. This article has argued that this tension is not, as often assumed in IR literature, a sign of incoherence, but a functional governance technique termed superposed present futures. By entangling contradictory and simultaneous temporalities within a single world order project, great powers aim to manage the radical uncertainty of international politics. The empirical analysis of China’s GCSF illuminates how this mechanism functionally works in a state of intra-actor paradox. This entails the performance of two coexisting present futures in the now: inevitability (Future A) and fragility (Future B). Crucially, while the content of the GCSF is distinct, the mechanism of superposing inevitability and fragility is a structural feature of hegemonic order-building. The liberal international order has historically operated through similar temporal arrangements. It projected a future of inevitability through a teleology of modernization theory and the ‘End of History’, framing liberal democracy as the final destination of political development.Footnote 150 Simultaneously, it sustained a future of fragility by narrating the existential threats of totalitarianism, communism, terrorism, and authoritarian revisionism. This suggests that superposed present futures are not an anomaly of authoritarian politics, but a necessary governance technique for any world order project seeking to govern the future of international politics.
Theoretically, this study contributes to the ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations by offering a functional account of how great powers govern radical uncertainty through world order projects. We advance that successful world order projects function by maintaining multiple temporalities at once. The discursive heuristic of superposition explains how incompatible expectations are intertwined within a single proponent arena without resolving into a linear temporal trajectory. It effectively captures the distinct mode of governance required under radical uncertainty in international politics, where political actors, such as China, must project confidence to attract supporters and followers, while cultivating anxiety to enforce discipline. Crucially, the employment of quantum social theory serves as a useful lens for understanding simultaneity in political discourse, rather than an ontological claim about the physical nature of social reality. The findings underscore three critical implications concerning discursive power and uncertainty. First, great powers govern uncertainty by distributing political tasks across different temporalities. The narrative of inevitability reduces coordination problems by aligning expectations, while the narrative of fragility generates the urgency required to sustain efforts. Together, these narratives keep a political project resilient when specific outcomes are not yet secured. Second, the influence of a strategic narrative lies in its capacity to maintain productive tension, and not in its logical coherence. Third, the integration of modes of future generation with timing indexicals offers a portable analytical toolkit for scholars to deconstruct how political actors and projects manage and politicize time. This reveals the intra-actor mechanics of temporal management often overlooked by studies focusing on inter-actor contestation.Footnote 151
In conclusion, world order projects, such as the GCSF, coordinate global actors and audiences by defining what is historically inevitable, imminently threatened, and requiring public debate. A superposed present future structure appears particularly useful for rising powers who navigate contested hegemonic ambitions. By projecting concurrent teleological confidence and existential anxiety, rising powers can act as temporal entrepreneurs and generate a deliberate ambiguity that maximizes diplomatic flexibility to assure the domestic and international audiences of inevitable success, while warning undecided fence-sitters abroad of the chaos that is supposedly implicit in any political alternative. The concept of superposed present futures, however, travels well beyond the Chinese case. Contradictions in order-building projects or narratives should be interrogated as potentially functional temporal arrangements. Examples worth researching include the rules-based international order, European strategic autonomy, and multipolarity. This highlights the significance of paying attention to temporal cues and shifts in language, which can serve as indicators of how proponents justify the allocation of resources or the imposition of political discipline. Ultimately, a temporally explicit approach can offer a nuanced way to understand the durability and vulnerability of world order projects by great powers, revealing them as dynamic regimes of expectation management that live in multiple temporalities at once and transform the ‘unwritten’ future into a site of governance and political struggle.
Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their insightful comments, constructive feedback, and guidance throughout the review process. We are also grateful to Han Zhaoying, Nele Noesselt, Christine Moll-Murata, Mateus Bilhar, and Han Ningning for their comments and feedback on previous drafts, which greatly helped improve the article.
Funding statement
This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant number 466884909) awarded to Igor Sevenard.
