Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, China has gone through a series of phases marked by sharply differing conceptions of what its leaders believe the international order should look like. These changing views reflect an underlying ambivalence toward the existing order. China is currently undergoing a new phase, whose meaning can be understood more fully by understanding how China's leaders got to where they are today in their thinking about the global order. By examining the continuity and the changes of the last seven decades, what is genuinely new and different and what is familiar can be better distinguished.