It’s status, stupid: explaining the underlying core problem in US–China relations

Abstract

This article explains growing tensions in US–China relations through the lens of an intensifying status competition between the two countries. On the one hand, the United States has not truly opened the existing international order to a rising China, thus disrespecting Beijing’s status claims out of fear of losing its own dominant status. On the other hand, China, in its increasingly frustrated status seeking, has meanwhile turned to building parallel structures of global and regional governance and has moreover displayed a gradually more assertive behaviour in its neighbourhood, thereby also confronting the United States, which has been disinclined to show any weakness in front of its regional allies and partners. While China needs to realize that gaining status is a slow endeavour, which cannot be enforced but has to be earned, the United States needs to understand that China’s status seeking is quite a natural process, which cannot be suppressed if conflict is to be avoided.

Keywords:

• US–China relations
• international status
• power transition
• conflict
• global governance
• South China Sea

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Reinhard Wolf for providing valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

The author is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Political Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt. His research interests include China’s foreign policy and US–China relations. He is co-editor of and contributor to a recently published special issue in European Foreign Affairs Review, titled “Eclipsed by Clashing Titans? Europe and the Risks of US-Chinese Confrontation.” His other major publications have appeared in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Contemporary China, Security Dialogue, and Third World Quarterly.