Over the past four decades, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has transformed from a peripheral actor to a central pole of global power, reshaping the international system and challenging the United States’ long-standing primacy. This study examines China’s rise across three interlinked dimensions economic, military, and diplomatic and assesses the implications for US strategic, economic, and normative interests. Drawing on power-transition theory, great-power competition frameworks, and contemporary scholarship on US-China relations, the research adopts a qualitative and analytical approach, synthesising secondary data from official documents, scholarly publications, and empirical reports. Findings indicate that China’s sustained economic expansion, technological innovation, military modernisation, and assertive diplomacy have generated a multifaceted challenge to US dominance. The United States faces pressures to recalibrate its grand strategy, secure resilient supply chains, reinforce alliances, and maintain influence in critical regions, particularly the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, China’s rise is uneven and context-dependent, leaving space for selective engagement, hedging, and co-existence. The study concludes that US–China relations are defined by a complex mix of interdependence, strategic competition, and normative contestation, with profound consequences for global security, economic governance, and international order. It recommends that US policymakers adopt a nuanced strategy combining deterrence, engagement, and multilateral coordination while recognising the contingent nature of the rivalry, and that both powers pursue mechanisms for crisis management to avoid escalation.