Contesting Hegemonic Order China in East Asia

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Contesting Hegemonic Order: China in East Asia
Evelyn Goh
To cite this article: Evelyn Goh (2019) Contesting Hegemonic Order: China in East Asia, Security
Studies, 28:3, 614-644, DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2019.1604989
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SECURITY STUDIES
2019, VOL. 28, NO. 3, 614–644
https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2019.1604989
Contesting Hegemonic Order: China in East Asia

Evelyn Goh
ABSTRACT
This paper develops an English School–informed approach to
theorize hegemonic order using an explicitly social lens. It
conceptualizes the architecture of hegemonic order as consist-
ing of three social elements—compact, structure, and proc-
esses—and emphasizes social exchange, power relationships,
and negotiation as the bridges linking hegemony and order.
Using the most significant contemporary case of hegemonic
contestation, it employs this hegemonic order framework to
analyze how, and with what effects on systemic change,
China is contesting the US-led hegemonic order in East Asia.
It finds that variation in the forms and effects of Chinese con-
testation in the security, institutional, and economic domains
is explained by differences in the robustness of the US hege-
monic social compact, and the complexity of the regional
social structure.
The third wave of international-hegemony studies centers on unpacking

the interplay between hegemony and international order. In doing so, it
seeks to better explain the dynamics of hegemonic orders. In this article, I
argue that third-wave hegemony studies requires disaggregating the social
dynamics particular to hegemonic orders. I perform both these tasks by
analyzing contemporary East Asia, the site of one of the most contentious
post-Cold War great power relationships. I investigate the ways in which a
rising China contests the American-led hegemonic order created over the
past twenty-five years in East Asia.
The first section argues that this contestation differs from how realists
conceptualize hegemonic rivalry. China has not pushed its own hegemonic
vision as an outright alternative to the American one. Indeed, given the
hegemonic nature1 of the existing US-led order, this type of challenge
would prove extremely difficult to mount. Hegemony can structure inter-
national order in ways that create social demand for leadership by the
dominant power, thus constraining potential challengers. But the politics of
hegemonic ordering also limits the hegemon itself, therefore opening
Evelyn Goh is the Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at
The Australian National University.
Here I understand “hegemony” in the classical sense of extremely unequal power backed by a greater portion
1
of consent than coercion.

ß 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
CONTESTING HEGEMONIC ORDER: CHINA IN EAST ASIA 615
opportunities for subordinate states to oppose or support the incum-

bent power.
To capture these interactive dynamics, I employ a hegemonic-order
framework derived from English School theory. I elaborate this framework
in the article’s second section, in which I identity three key elements of the
architecture of hegemonic order: the social compact or core bargains that
underpin it; its social distributive structure; and the key social processes
that distinguish it from other types of order.
In the third section, I deploy my hegemonic-order framework to high-
light the differing imperatives that the United States faces as the incumbent
hegemon and that China faces as a resurgent power within East Asia. I
then analyze how these different imperatives interact when China contests
the existing hegemonic order. Disaggregating the regional security and the
institutional and political economy domains, my analysis asks the following
questions: What it is about the hegemonic order that China is contesting?
How does China present these challenges? And with what effects on poten-
tial systemic change?
This article addresses two of the key questions that animate the next
generation of hegemony studies, namely, how to understand the inter-
play of hegemony and order, and how the architectures of hegemonic
orders function. It showcases the rich potential of contemporary English
School theorizing, parts of which engaged with the second wave of
hegemony studies and contributed to more recent hierarchy studies. The
English School’s traditional understanding of order—as both rationalist
and normative, but above all fundamentally social—translates readily
when tackling questions about the relational attributes of hierarchies and
hegemony, the interactions between powerful states and the orders they
have a disproportionate role in creating, and how hegemonic orders are
maintained, sustained, or altered. Applying this explicitly social formula-
tion of international order to the politics of hegemonic ordering pro-
vides greater analytical leverage than exclusively realist or liberal-
inflected approaches.
At a time when the international system appears to be going back to the
future of rising challengers and power transitions, I provide an alternative
analysis of China’s selective and varied contestation of the US-led hege-
monic order in the region where we expect to feel the sharpest edge of its
revisionist challenge. I demonstrate that China’s contestation may be anti-
hegemonic insofar as it challenges the United States’ sole leadership and
hyperpreponderance in East Asia, while seeking to pluralize both the social
distribution and values base of regional order. However, China’s contest-
ation can also be pro-order: it often seeks to expand the scope of regional
consensus on key strategic issues, and leverages values or norms that other
616 E. GOH
regional states actually share. What accounts for this variation? The differ-
ences in the robustness of the US hegemonic social compact and the com-
plexity of social structure in each of these domains. Overall, I offer a richer
understanding of the complex effects that rising powers—through social
processes of negotiation and contestation—can have on both the form and
content of hegemonic orders.
East Asia’s Post–Cold War Order

East Asia is undergoing a remarkable transition rooted in two systemic
changes. First, the Cold War’s demise gave way to a US-centric regional
security order, alongside a Western-centric global economic order. The
United States recovered the strategic initiative previously undermined by
its defeat in Vietnam and, later in the century, by the conclusion of the
Cold War. While favorable for US allies and security partners, the
regional security order enabled China (and to a lesser extent, India) to
develop rapidly and reemerge as a great power. Thus, post–Cold War
East Asia has witnessed the “parallel resurgence” of both the United
States and China.2
The other deep strategic transformation is the creation of a distinct East
Asian political economy resulting from China’s rapid economic develop-
ment. From the 1990s, regional production networks reconfigured to con-
nect component manufacturers in many East Asian countries with final
assembly points in China. In a region heavily defined by a shared develop-
mental imperative, the ensuing political-economic interdependence creates
significant political impact. More recently, the Chinese government’s drive
for a domestic consumer market and its efforts to export surplus capital
and means of production have generated a more ambitious, infrastructure-
driven strategy toward China’s periphery, embodied in President Xi
Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) and supported by new institu-
tions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
East Asia is crowded by one global power with a position of regional
dominance that was established over the last twenty-five years, and one
resurgent regional power that is reshaping its neighborhood in expanding
arcs of influence. Yet they seem to be playing different games in terms of
strategic domains, instruments, and style. Despite growing comprehensive
power, China has yet to mount a direct challenge to the United States that
could replace US preponderance or overturn the existing rules of the game.
Even with tensions over maritime disputes, currency manipulation, spying,
2
Evelyn Goh, The Struggle for Order: Hegemony, Hierarchy, and Transition in Post–Cold War East Asia (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 10.
and new institutions, Beijing has thus far proved more cautious than many
would expect from a rapidly rising power.3
Continued US primacy, coupled with China’s rise, generates a variegated
East Asian order. While China is rising within a region comprehensively
dominated by the United States, Washington must also reconsolidate this
dominance in the face of Beijing’s resurgence as the region’s indigenous
great power. This is not a Cold War–style face-off between two adversaries
possessing discrete economic and political systems, spheres of influence,
and allies. Rather, East Asia faces “a specific form of concentration of
power”4: the United States has not only gained primacy since the end of
the Cold War, but has managed to establish hegemony in the region. This
finds reflection in its military preponderance, alliance system, and near-
monopolistic role as security public goods provider—but more importantly
in the disproportionate American ability to determine regional order. East
Asian states employ liberal US operating principles, including an open eco-
nomic system and the rule of law; these principles undergird US alliances
as well as broader regional cooperative enterprises. Crucially, US leadership
has enjoyed significant support and demand from every Northeast and
Southeast Asian state with the (partial) exception of China and North
Korea. This support is what makes American hegemony one of “unequal
power backed by a greater portion of consent than coercion.”5
The question becomes whether, how, and to what effect China is contest-
ing—or responding in other ways to—this US-led hegemonic order. China
is challenging American leadership more, and in different ways, than liber-
als would expect given that China has profited so much from this hege-
monic order. But China is also challenging it less, and with less
determinate outcomes, than what realists would expect from a power tran-
sition. The regional demand for US hegemony provides a key reason for
this pattern, as it raises the costs for China if Beijing mounts a direct chal-
lenge to American hegemony.
This regional support does not result from internalization of US values
per se. Rather, it stems from a potent mix of America’s preponderant
power and the lack of attractive alternatives, resulting in a situation in
which “regional states consent to support or tolerate US hegemony because
3
See esp. Ann Kent, Beyond Compliance: China, International Organizations, and Global Security (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2007); Alastair Iain Johnston, Social States: China in International Institutions,
1980–2000 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter, China, the
United States, and Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Nicola Horsburgh, China and
Global Nuclear Order: From Estrangement to Active Engagement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
4
Ian Clark, “China and the United States: A Succession of Hegemonies?” International Affairs 87, no. 1 (January
2011): 13–28, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2011.00957.x.
5
Goh, Struggle for Order, 6
618 E. GOH
of their belief that the distribution of benefits, while not ideal, is preferable
in this pluralist order to any alternatives they can devise.”6 Most East Asian
states see the United States as a security provider and lender of first resort
because those Asian states still trust the United States’ benign character, as
well as US willingness to take Asian strategic interests seriously. But this
conservatism also reflects China’s inability thus far to convince the region
that China can offer public goods, does not threaten their interests, shares
common social goals, and can play the hegemonic ordering role. Thus,
most region leaders do not want to swap out the hegemon if the current
one ain’t broke (yet).
The Hegemonic-Order Framework

Unpacking the interplay between hegemony and international order
requires moving away from material structuralist notions of power and
stability and toward an explicitly social understanding of both. The inter-
national system is constituted by thicker social orders than that allowed
for in a realist states-under-anarchy framework. This conceptualization
was pioneered by English School scholars, especially Hedley Bull, who
theorized an international “society of states” formed through ascription to
a political order constituted by goals, norms and practices shared by
this community.7
The International Society Perspective

International order is not about the distribution of power or the prospects
of stability versus conflict. Rather, international order is the pattern or
arrangement that sustains the primary goals of the society of states in ques-
tion.8 Broadly, order in social terms must involve limits on behavior, the
management of conflict, and the accommodation of change without under-
mining the common goals and values of this society. The two key take-
aways for our purposes are: (1) international order must be underpinned
by an intersubjective consensus regarding the basic goals and means of
conducting international affairs;9 and (2) creating these shared
6
Goh, Struggle for Order, 206.
7
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977); Andrew
Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
8
Bull, Anarchical Society, 8.Bull’s common goals of international society are the preservation of the state system
and the society of states; maintenance of the external sovereignty of individual states; international peace;
limitation of violence in international interactions; honoring of agreements; and mutual recognition of
territorial jurisdiction of states.
9
Muthiah Alagappa, ed., Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 33–69; James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds., Governance without
Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10–18.
understandings involves contestation and negotiation, with consensus nei-

ther easily achieved nor automatically sustained.10
Other approaches, especially the liberal institutionalist and constructivist
traditions,11 also emphasize that agreed-upon rules and norms define inter-
national orders. By comparison, the English School is more explicitly inter-
ested in how these shared understandings come about, stressing negotiation
and contestation as constitutive of the rulemaking process, even in the
most hierarchic of orders. This dovetails with our project’s questions about
who gets to make the rules (authority), and how rules are made (proced-
ure). However, English School scholars regard the authority and procedural
elements as intertwined; for instance, a hegemon is often associated with a
particular set of authoritative rules because the process of negotiating these
rules was specific to the legitimization of its power. This approach high-
lights the innate sociality of power that is especially marked in hege-
monic orders.
First, as recently re-emphasized in the hierarchy studies literature,
hegemony fundamentally stems from a gross inequality of power. However,
for the international society approach, the element of consent is key;
hegemony is “an institutionalized practice of special rights and responsibil-
ities, conferred by international society … on a state … with the resour-
ces to lead.”12 Hegemony is marked not only by superior capability, but
more importantly by the support of followers.13 Legitimacy is what distin-
guishes hegemony from primacy, for “without a successful strategy of legit-
imation the social relation of hegemony … is not created.”14 Second,
legitimacy derives largely from the willingness of the hegemon itself to be
constrained by norms and rules, which are derived through negotiation
with others rather than by imposition. Recognizing this interactive process,
English School approaches eschew focusing solely on the distribution or
deployment of power, stressing instead “the justification of power,” or how
powerful states turn coercive ability into legitimate authority.15 For their
part, weaker states are preoccupied with how to tame powerful states, to
maximize gains in terms of public goods but minimize the risks great
10
Alagappa, Asian Security Order, 39.
11
See, respectively, G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of
International Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Christian Reus-Smit,
The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Relational Rationality in International Relations
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
12
Ian Clark, Hegemony in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
13
The less benign classical understanding is the Gramscian notion of “consensual hegemony,” in which a
particular universalized power structure manifests itself insidiously as the “necessary order of things.” Antonio
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).
14
Ian Hurd, “Breaking and Making Norms: American Revisionism and Crises of Legitimacy,” International Politics
44, nos. 2–3 (March 2007): 194–213, 204, https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800184. Emphasis added.
15
Martin Wight, International Relations: The Three Traditions (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1991), 99.
620 E. GOH
powers disrupting the rules and institutions that grant protection to

the weak.16
Third, English School scholars have already contributed to existing hier-
archy studies by prioritizing the social dimensions of differentiated author-
ity relations. Most notable is Clark’s model of hegemony as a social
institution centered on an imperative that legitimizes preponderant power.
By understanding hegemony as a social relationship his model ranges sin-
gle-power preponderance to conceive of “collective hegemony,” shared
among multiple great powers (such as the Concert of Europe), and
“coalitional hegemony,” whereby the hegemonic actor is only able to legit-
imize its social order vis-a-vis a restricted constituency.17 In other words,
not only can we have primacy without hegemony, we can also have hegem-
ony without primacy.
Such international society approaches that stress the social underpinnings
of power relations and international order help significantly to draw a dir-
ect and mutually constitutive relationship between hegemony and order.
The Architecture of Hegemonic Order

A social reading of international order moves beyond acknowledging hier-
archy; it is a web of norms and rules underpinned by agreement about val-
ues among member states, consisting of a social structure that is not easily
subverted or overthrown, and through which systemic changes must be
mediated. This conception facilitates a similarly social understanding of the
architecture of hegemonic order, with three key elements: compact, struc-
ture, and processes. These elements are drawn in contrast to the core fea-
tures of dominant rationalist and realist IR approaches (see Table 1).
The cornerstone of the hegemonic order’s architecture is its social com-
pact, the core reciprocal bargains that underpin the acceptable distribution
of differentiated authority. Realists and liberals are accustomed to thinking
in terms of relative or absolute gains in explaining state choices such as the
decision to acquiesce to superior power. But like most social interactions,
international relations turn on subjective exchanges of values and goods,
rather than utilitarian evaluations of gains or losses. An explicitly social
conception of hegemonic order should center on the negotiation of shared
understandings about values, rights and duties between the hegemon and
other states. To capture the idea that these negotiated understandings
underpin the legitimacy of an existing order, we conceive of a social com-
pact. A compact denotes the reciprocal and conditional exchange of prom-
ises: a hegemon’s privileged position is conceded by others in return for,
16
See esp. Hurrell, On Global Order.
17
Clark, Hegemony in International Society.
Table 1. The social architecture of hegemonic order.

Architecture of hegemonic order Social dimensions (in contrast to) Realist/
(English School approach) emphasized rationalist emphasis on
SOCIAL COMPACT Social exchange Motivations for state choices: relative
Reciprocal and conditional and absolute gains
exchange of rights and duties
SOCIAL STRUCTURE Power relationships Independent variable: power
Membership composition, position distribution
and status; distribution and bases
of authority; and constituencies
SOCIAL PROCESSES Contestation and Types of state behavior in response
Balance of tensions between negotiation to power shifts: balancing, band-
complicity and resistance wagoning, etc.
and only if, that hegemon agrees to certain constraints on its power and
performs special duties or provides public goods that uphold the order.
This concept of a social compact encapsulates earlier hegemonic studies’
focus on the hegemon’s public goods provision, institutionalized restraint,
and special responsibilities.18 Leading states gain subordinate states’ acqui-
escence by providing “social goods” that are “sufficient to offset the latter’s
loss of freedom.”19 However, even within a hegemonic order, the details of
the social compact are fairly dynamic, and the specific details of the
exchange of special rights and duties can be adjusted and updated.
Moreover, the hegemonic compact may not necessarily consist of one
grand bargain; there may be a few core bargains regarding the distribution
of differentiated authority according to key wielders, constituencies, scope,
or domains. Furthermore, the hegemonic compact is subject to renegoti-
ation in the event of significant systemic change. The hegemon risks
decline if these negotiations are unsuccessful; conversely, its authority is
reified if these negotiations succeed.
Thus, in investigating China’s challenge to the United States’ hegemonic
order in East Asia, we ask the following questions. Is China already party
to the core bargains that underpin the current order? Is China trying to
change the overarching nature of these bargains, or to adjust the specific
terms of the exchange—with the former having a bigger potential impact
on the existing order? Is China trying to negotiate its own bargains with
the hegemonic constituencies?
The second element is the social structure. What is the hierarchical for-
mation of the hegemonic order? When considering structure, realist
approaches tend to start from power distribution, but because hegemony
rests on legitimate authority, not capability per se, our interest is grounded
18
Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Ikenberry, After
Victory; Mlada Bukovansky et al., Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
19
David A. Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 54.
622 E. GOH
in power relationships. The social structure of an international society

refers to its membership composition (what constitutes a relevant actor in
the international system; who belongs and who does not), and collective
understandings about differentiated positions and status (and thus their
associated rights and responsibilities). In studying hegemonic orders, we
ask which states occupy the accepted hegemonic position, which other
international actors are accorded special strategic significance, and what
social relationships connect these groups to each other. Our concern is
with the distribution of differentiated authority, the bases of this authority,
and the authority’s subjects —constituencies that the hegemon and compet-
ing great powers seek to cultivate.
There is a tendency to assume a singular hegemon exercising authority
in a two-layered system of hegemon versus the rest. But as discussed above,
if we privilege the social foundations of hegemony as legitimate superordin-
ate authority, there is a range of hegemonic configurations that involve
pooled authority or partial constituencies. Additionally, a hegemonic order
can have subhierarchical characteristics; this formation is particularly rele-
vant in East Asia.20 International orders are seldom simply two-layered;
even if there is one predominant power, there are usually other states less
powerful than the most dominant, but still authoritative over others.
Historically, the Sinocentric order vividly express such layered hegemonic
political relations.21 In the contemporary East Asian order, there are three
key levels of unequal power: the overarching position of the United States
as hegemon vis-a-vis all the other states; the special position of the
hegemon and other great powers above the rest; and within the superordin-
ate powers club, the differential position among the United States as the
incumbent hegemon, China as the rising challenger, and other subregional
powers like Japan and India.
How does this particular social structure affect the character of the hege-
monic order in East Asia, and the imperatives of justifying, taming or chal-
lenging these differentials of power and authority? In examining China’s
actions, we question China’s status or positional aim, whether it is to chal-
lenge and replace the United States as hegemon, to obtain recognition in
the regional great power club, or to elevate and secure China’s rank within
this club. What type of and how much support or opposition does China
get from other states? What other constraints does such a hegemony-with-
hierarchy regional order impose on China?
20
Goh, Struggle for Order, 208–12.
21
Seo-Hyun Park, Sovereignty and Status in East Asian International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017); Ji-Young Lee, China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2017).
We confront that last question through the hegemonic architecture’s

third element, the social processes that create, maintain, and alter the
order. Focusing on order-related social processes contrasts with the realist
tendency to identify state behavior in response to changing power distribu-
tions by categorizing them as balancing, bandwagoning, buckpassing, hedg-
ing, etc. These sets of choices obscure the multiple and sometimes
conflicting social motivations for state behavior, and miss significant in-
between choices geared toward order-related goals rather than dyadic aims
vis-a-vis one great power or another.22
The core social processes of contestation and negotiation take on a par-
ticular character within hegemonic orders. As a form of hierarchy, hegem-
ony entails a two-way relationship of complicity and resistance. On the one
hand, it requires assurance from the hegemon, and deference from subor-
dinate actors.23 These dynamics of complicity reflect how acquiescence
from other states underpins hegemonic authority. Assurance by the
hegemon takes material and normative forms including the stable provision
of public goods, credible demonstration of benignity, institutionalized self-
restraint, normative leadership (a socio-economic model or an ideology),
and a mechanism for maintaining order. In return, deference from subor-
dinate actors entails refusal to challenge the hegemon, prioritization of their
relationship with the hegemon above others, accommodation of the hegem-
on’s imperatives, reinforcement of the hegemon’s primary position, ideo-
logical affinity and socio-cultural emulation, and support for maintaining
the existing order.
Thinking more broadly about social processes also helps to mediate the
tendency toward linearity in existing rationalist-contractarian approaches to
authority and hierarchy.24 Because a hegemonic order depends upon the
consent of the subordinates, deference is a choice rather than simple path-
dependency. Yet, precisely because hegemony entails extreme inequality of
power, it encounters resistance. Milder forms of resistance occur as means to
constrain the powerful, such as foot-dragging, normative censure, or “soft
balancing” aimed at complicating and delegitimizing the hegemon’s exercise
of power.25 The aim is to persuade the hegemon to change its policy.26
22
For example, see the discussion on Japan’s efforts to constrain China by boosting US authority and the
normative content of the existing US-hegemonic regional order, rather than Japan’s own position, in Evelyn
Goh, “Hierarchy and Great Power Competition in the East Asian Security Order”; in Jochen Prantl, ed., Effective
Multilateralism: Through the Looking Glass of East Asia (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 177–95.
23
This framing is drawn from Goh, Struggle for Order, 210–22.
24
Most prominently, Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations.
25
Robert Pape, “Soft Balancing against the United States,” International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 10,
https://doi.org/10.1162/0162288054894607.
26
See related discussions of “de-legitimation” as a strategy of opposition in Stephen Walt, Taming American
Power (New York: Norton, 2005), 160–78; and soft balancing as reminders about acceptable limits on
hegemonic behavior in Ian Clark, “How Hierarchical Can International Society Be?” International Relations 23,
no. 3 (October 2009): 464–80, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117809340472.
624 E. GOH
In contrast, when subordinate states use revolt to resist superordinate

powers, they aim to alter the existing social order by militarily defeating the
hegemon, changing the nature and purpose of major institutions, or intro-
ducing a new shared subjective framework.
Thus, the rationalist assumption that hegemonic authority is exercised in
a straightforward manner on the back of a static contract does not bear
out; rather, hegemony’s social dynamics point us toward a balance of ten-
sions between complicity and resistance that reflect the dual imperatives to
tame and legitimize unequal power. The hegemon, and other great powers,
are obliged to spend resources on legitimizing their power asymmetry.
Subordinate states often move between acceptance and resistance while not
revolting outright. Hegemony is thus rarely purely consensual or unques-
tioningly accepted. It is continually probed and tested, and the details of
the social compact are adjusted, but this process is essential to reiterating
and renewing the legitimate basis for the existing hierarchy.
The social compact, structure, and processes form the architecture of
hegemonic orders. To further explore their interaction, the rest of this
paper unpacks the case of China’s dynamics within the contemporary East
Asian hegemonic order. We first ask, what are the relative social impera-
tives of the United States and China in terms of regional order? How do
they differ in terms of the social compact, and regarding their positions
and ambitions in the regional social structure? Then we question, what is
the balance between complicity and resistance in China’s behavior within
this order? How much and over what does China contest US hegemony?
Apart from resistance, what other social processes are important for China
as a rising power?
China and the US-led Hegemonic Order in East Asia

Comparing Social Imperatives
As incumbent offshore hegemon and resurgent indigenous great power,
respectively, US and Chinese social imperatives regarding regional order
differ accordingly (see Table 2). Washington has an existing social compact
with allies and partners in East Asia. While the foundations of this compact
lie in the post–World War II treaties and market arrangements negotiated
with Japan, South Korea, and non-Communist Southeast Asian countries,
its detailed terms were subsequently renegotiated after 1990. We return to
this point in the next section, but note that Washington’s incumbent
regional social compact facilitates US offers to China of responsible stake-
holdership within this preexisting order, often seemingly on a take-it or
leave-it basis.
Table 2. Comparison of US and Chinese social imperatives within the hegemonic order in
East Asia.
Architecture of hegemonic order
Social compact Social structure Social processes
United States Conservative attitude: secur- Primacy & hegemony: own pre- Hegemonic assurance
ity & economic bargains ponderance & values through commitment;
with allies & partners Main constituency: allies Resistance against
Hegemonic challenger: China challengers
China Reticent attitude: not pre- Heterarchy: US superpower over- Assurance through restraint;
sent at the creation, lay, but also layered hierarchy Deference towards
evolving, wait & see Multiple constituencies: vertical hegemon;
relationship with US and non- Resistance to core inter-
great powers & horizontal rela- est intrusions
tionships with other great
powers
Diverse ecology
US policy-makers also tend to define the regional social structure by its

sole preponderance and its particular form of liberal hegemony, expressed
though open markets, democratic values in domestic politics, and legal regu-
lation of international relations. Within this social structure, Washington’s
key regional constituency is its treaty allies and security partners, who sup-
port US leadership of the regional hierarchy and share collective understand-
ings about the rights and responsibilities associated with US hegemony. In
contrast, Washington’s allies and security partners regard China as an
ambivalent constituency for the United States—note labels like “frenemy” or
“peaceful competitor”—and oftentimes as the de facto adversary.
The US imperative of hegemonic maintenance focuses on two sets of social
processes, the more important being hierarchical assurance through demonstra-
tion of its benignity and commitment to underwrite the existing order. Toward
other major powers like China, this assurance includes recognition of those
countries’ status in the great power club through selective cooperation or power
sharing, for example in public goods provision. Secondly, the United States as
hegemon also exercises vigilance to resist, by containment, potential rank chal-
lenges or revolt from others. As incumbent hegemon, Washington’s purpose is
necessarily conservative and emphasizes maintenance of the status quo.
In contrast, China as resurgent great power is relatively reticent about sys-
tem-wide social compacts and adopts a wait-and-see attitude. The limits of
Chinese aspirations to shape international order are captured by eminent
historian Gungwu Wang, who writes that “what China sees today is not an
international order at all, least of all the international order, but merely the
product of the struggles among the great powers of half a century ago.”27
Beijing expects the existing international order to evolve, and works to pro-
tect the elements most useful to itself (such as the United Nations Security
27
Gungwu Wang, “China and International Order: Some Historical Perspectives,” in China and the New
International Order, ed. Gungwu Wang and Yongnian Zheng (London: Routledge, 2008), 24.
626 E. GOH
Council) and to ensure that China benefits from any reforms. However,
China has not proposed concrete new bargains, but instead ambiguously
suggests a “new type of major power relations,” or a “community of com-
mon destiny.” Chinese policy-makers eschew institutionalized social com-
pacts, and instead seem more comfortable with traditional spheres of
influence when thinking about exclusive geopolitical spaces,28 or with debat-
ing microbargains such as other parties’ revocation of previous agreements
about sovereignty disputes.29
Many Chinese analysts see the international social structure as a heter-
archy, with “one superpower, several strong powers” (yichao duoqiang).
Some Chinese views emphasize the element of US dominance more than
the multiple great powers in lower ranks of the international hierarchy.30
After the 2008–2009 global financial crisis and since China overtook Japan
as the second-largest economy in 2010, Chinese views shifted toward a
hierarchical formation with China and the United States forming a “two
superpowers, several strong powers” (erchao duoqiang) structure.31 For our
purposes, Chinese perspectives explicitly recognize US preponderance in
the regional and international order, even if they regard US primacy to be
in decline. They also recognize the many layers of the international hier-
archy: within the great power realm, Beijing must contend with horizontal
relationships with other major powers, including those in its own region
that are US supporter states.32 Third, several key international constituen-
cies—including the United States as superpower, China’s large neighbors,
smaller developing countries in China’s peripheries, major international
markets, and emerging economies such as the BRICS—form different audi-
ences for Beijing’s foreign strategic endeavors.33 Overall, because of its dual
self-perception as great power and developing country, China’s regional-
global social ecology is more diverse than the United States’.
With the imperative of consolidating its great power position, China focuses
on three social processes. The most important social process for a resurgent
power is assurance in the form of restraint toward weaker states; this includes
28
For example, Yinhong Shi, “The United States, East Asia, and Chinese ‘Triumphalism,’” in China’s Rise and
Regional Integration in East Asia, ed. Yong Wook Lee and Key-young San (Abingdon, UK: Routledge,
2014), 40–53.
29
For example, Chinese commentators blame Japan for reneging on their 1972 normalization agreement to set
aside the East China Sea territorial dispute, when the Noda government bought the Senkaku Islands in 2012.
(The Japanese see Beijing as having reneged earlier in the 2000s by significantly increasing paramilitary and
military operations in the area.)
30
Yongjin Zhang, “Understanding Chinese Views of the Emerging Global Order,” in China and the New
International Order, ed. Wang and Zheng, 151.
31
David Shambaugh, “Chinese Thinking about World Order,” in China and the International System: Becoming a
World Power, ed. Xiaoming Huang and Robert Patman (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 21–31.
32
A related realist analysis is William C. Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security 24,
no. 1 (Summer 1999): 5–41, https://doi.org/10.1162/016228899560031.
33
For example, President Xi Jinping’s multidimensional foreign policy focus: “relations with surrounding countries
are primary; great powers are the key; developing countries the foundation; and multilateral relations are
arenas” (zhoubian shi shouyao, daguo shi guanjian, fazhanzhong guojia shi jichu, duobain shi wutai).
a willingness to be constrained by institutionalized limits to its power.

Assurance also takes the form of responsibility for upholding the existing
order by providing public goods and performing special duties in exchange for
rights. Second, China must claim status as a great power. But to obtain US
support or tolerance, Beijing must demonstrate some degree of deference to
the United States as hegemon. At the same time, Beijing also needs to resist
encroachments by the hegemon and others on its core interests. Thus China
must play two simultaneous games, complying with the overall existing order
to legitimize its rise, while resisting aspects it sees as especially illegitimate.
Overall, assurance should be of more immediate importance for China, and
this generally facilitates its co-optation into the hegemonic order. But resist-
ance and complicity are potentially zero-sum choices, and Beijing must work
to balance between these contending demands in different ways across the
three main domains of the East Asian order.
Security
The traditional obligation of superordinate powers to provide security pub-
lic goods and manage conflicts remains urgently required in East Asia,
where the US-centric hegemonic order is most evident in the security
realm. China most directly resists and tries to change the authority struc-
ture and hierarchy of norms in this realm, but without success thus far.
The main reason is the region’s near-consensus preference for the United
States as security public goods provider, reinforced by China’s escalating
contestation of the hegemonic social compact.
In security terms, the region’s post–Cold War hegemonic social compact
is well captured by Ikenberry’s model of institutionalized restraint.34 The
United States has credibly assured others about its benignity, lack of terri-
torial ambitions and willingness to participate in multilateral institutions.
But long-term US security commitment to its supporter states is more
important than the self-restraint that liberal accounts, centered on postwar
Europe, emphasize. In East Asia, Washington is a hegemon responsive to
threats against its allies’ security. Despite often-fractious negotiations, sig-
nificant updates were made to bargains surrounding key US bilateral alli-
ances and security partnerships with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines,
and Singapore. The terms of these bargains were adjusted (burden-sharing,
operational command, and technology transfers), and rejustified in light of
new post–Cold War threats (terrorism, North Korea, and China).35 Complicity
34
Ikenberry, After Victory.
35
William Tow, Asia-Pacific Strategic Relations: Seeking Convergent Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001); Evelyn Goh, “How Japan Matters in the Evolving East Asian Security Order,” International Affairs
87, no. 4 (July 2011): 887–902, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2011.01009.x; Evelyn Goh, “Great Powers
and Hierarchical Order in Southeast Asia: Analyzing Regional Security Strategies,” International Security 32, no.
3 (Winter 2007/2008), 113–57, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.2008.32.3.113.
628 E. GOH
from the vast majority of East Asian states with sustaining US security hegem-
ony presents clear behavioral evidence undermining Beijing’s claim that
Washington unilaterally persists with outdated Cold War strategic practices.
This invigorated regional complicity is also driven by China’s actions.
From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the region’s hegemonic social
structure seemed to accommodate China as a resurgent power. Despite
opposing US hegemony, during the mid-1990s Chinese leaders witnessed
the superiority of US military power in post–Cold War campaigns, and
also realized that the “China threat” discourse undermined China’s national
development interests.36 During the early 2000s, Beijing demonstrated def-
erence by reassuring Washington that China did not directly challenge its
regional security position. The Vice Premier publicly stated that “China
respects the American presence and interests in the Asia-Pacific region …
we welcome the United States playing a positive and constructive
role … .”37 In exchange, the George W. Bush administration included
Beijing in the great power club by sharing some responsibility for conflict
management on the Korean peninsula. In facilitating the Six Party Talks
(6PT) in 2003, China conducted classic great power management. Beijing
threatened and bribed Pyongyang to the negotiating table, engaged in shut-
tle diplomacy, and initiated the 2005 package denuclearization deal. After
North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test, Beijing supported two rounds of UN
Security Council sanctions, and coerced Pyongyang into allowing IAEA
inspections. But China also mobilized other states to resist the toughest ele-
ments of US policy, pre-emptive strikes and regime change.38
This attempted co-optation failed because of vital differences in
Washington and Beijing’s ultimate goals. US leaders’ sole aim had been to
make sanctions work by harnessing China’s influence to pressure North
Korea into giving up its nuclear program. Beijing, in contrast, sought wider
goals linking nuclear nonproliferation with United States–North Korea nor-
malization and a peace settlement.39 Ultimately, US co-optation of China
as regional great power partner was ambivalent because stakeholdership
meant China’s accession into the hegemonic order as it stood. China
resisted some specific details, but was unable to challenge Washington’s
36
Hebert Yee and Feng Zhu, “Chinese Perspectives on the China Threat,” in The China Threat: Perceptions, Myths
and Reality, ed. Herbert Yee and Ian Storey (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 21–42; Yong Deng, “Reputation
and the Security Dilemma: China Reacts to the China Threat Theory,” in New Directions in the Study of China’s
Foreign Policy, ed. Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2006), 186–214.
37
Qian Qichen, November 21, 2005, quoted in Deng, China’s Struggle for Status, 284.
38
Ashton Carter and William Perry, “If necessary, strike and destroy,” Washington Post, 22 June 2006; “Bolton:
Sanctions ‘help regime change,’” Financial Times, 24 October 2006.
39
Gavan McCormack, “North Korea and the Birth Pangs of a New Northeast Asian Order,” Asia-Pacific Journal, 24
October 2007, https://apjjf.org/-Gavan-McCormack/2555/article.html; Dingli Shen, “Cooperative Denuclearization
toward North Korea,” Washington Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2009): 175–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/
0163660090.3232251.
hegemonic right to define the nature and hierarchy of the security public
goods at stake. Thus, the North Korea problem remains defined as nuclear
proliferation, which must be dealt with multilaterally before addressing the
Korean War settlement or Korean reunification.
Over time, the balance of tensions in China’s hegemonic order engage-
ment gradually shifted toward resistance, and regional social processes were
marked by mutually reinforcing escalatory dynamics. From around 2009,
China seemed to backtrack on previous commitments to multilateral man-
agement of territorial disputes in the South China Sea (SCS), referred to as
one of China’s “core national sovereignty interests.”40 US threat perceptions
rose after Chinese ships harassed a US navy surveillance vessel in the SCS
in March 2009, and a new Chinese underground nuclear submarine base
was built on Hainan Island. The following year the Korean crisis escalated
with North Korea sinking a South Korean naval ship and shelling
Yeonpyeong island. As regional allies and partners simultaneously turned
to Washington for strategic reassurance, the Obama administration
responded in 2011 with the rebalance to Asia, invigorating military rela-
tionships with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam,
and Australia.41
Subsequently, China’s emphasis on resistance to assert its core interests
clearly outweighed the imperatives of assurance. In contrast to Beijing’s
earlier procedural resistance to US sanctions in the 6PT, this resistance is
escalatory because it contests two key norms undergirding the existing
hegemonic social compact: the principle of great power restraint, and inter-
national rules governing maritime sovereignty and exploitation. Most not-
able was the mid-2012 standoff at Scarborough Shoal between Chinese and
Filipino maritime security forces, which ended with Chinese control of the
disputed feature and Manila initiating legal arbitration proceedings in The
Hague. When tensions escalated between China and Japan over the
Senkaku Islands, China declared an Air Defense Identification Zone over
parts of the East China Sea in November 2013. In mid-2014, a Chinese
state-owned company placed a giant oil rig close to the Paracel Islands dis-
puted by Vietnam, accompanied by the largest of China’s Coast Guard
ships. Most significant has been China’s construction of artificial islands in
the disputed area since 2015, evidently for military purposes.
Beijing’s willingness to show force, and the speed and scale of staking its
claims, appears to be a rank elevation challenge in structural terms because
it aims to change the terms of the great power bargain. China’s lack of the
40
Michael Swaine and Taylor Fravel, “China’s Assertive Behavior Part Two: The Maritime Periphery,” China
Leadership Monitor 35 (2011): 1-29, http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71259.
41
Hillary Rodham Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy 189 (November 2011): 56–63, https://
foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century/.
630 E. GOH
restraint that other states expect from a regional great power generates the
greatest regional resistance. Beijing also challenges the US interpretation of
the right to innocent passage by military vessels in others’ territorial waters
and EEZ. Despite being a signatory to UNCLOS, China has officially pre-
sented an alternative framework of historic claims to justify its actions. The
July 2016 ruling by the arbitral tribunal in the Philippines’ UNCLOS case
against China comprehensively undermined the basis of China’s alternative
framework,42 highlighting China’s rejection of established international
maritime rules.
China’s escalation of East China Sea territorial disputes also intensifies
horizontal great power resistance from Japan, the region’s most important
supporter of the US-hegemonic order. The China threat has enabled Prime
Minister Abe to mobilize domestic support for constitutional reforms to
ease restrictions on Japan’s foreign arms transfers, conflict engagement, and
expanded guidelines for the US alliance.43 Japan is also upgrading its mili-
tary-to-military exchanges and provision of coast guard and development
assistance to key maritime Southeast Asian partners.
By this social account, the most significant result of China’s contestation
in the security domain is its stimulation of regional preference for the
United States as security guarantor. Over the past decade, China’s escala-
tory resistance against great power restraint and international maritime
rules has outweighed the imperative of assuring regional states about
Chinese restraint. This causes the existing hegemonic social compact with
the United States to remain robust and highly relevant. High regional
demand for Washington to guarantee the status quo creates social processes
heavily weighted in favor of complicity with US hegemony; this occurs at
the expense of accommodation with China. These processes generate a
hegemonic social structure that is rigid in its US centrism. Thus far, these
conditions facilitate Washington’s entrenchment of its preferred hegemonic
social structure centered on allies and security partners, and downplay
efforts at co-opting China as a satisfied rising power. Moreover, China’s
lack of success either in being co-opted or in resisting also reifies US
hegemony in the security realm. China has neither bought into the existing
hegemonic social compact, nor offered an attractive alternative compact.
Beijing has demonstrated neither a clear ability to deliver on special
responsibilities, nor a commitment to self-restraint, key prerequisites for
other states to grant it status somewhere on par with the United States.
42
See Donald Rothwell, “South China Sea Verdict Explained,” Australian National University College of Law, 13
July 2016, https://law.anu.edu.au/news-and-events/news/south-china-sea-verdict-explained. All internet sources
in this article were accessed on August 10, 2018.
43
For example, Alexandra Sakaki, “Japan’s Security Policy: A Shift in Direction Under Abe?” SWP Berlin Research
Paper, March 2015, at https://www.swpberlin.org/fileadmin/contents/products/research_papers/2015_RP02_
skk.pdf.
The downside of a rigid hegemonic social structure is that the structure is

prone to sudden and dramatic change. Regional uncertainty and nervous-
ness about US hegemonic reassurance and resolve under President Trump
potentially exacerbates the brittleness of East Asia’s security order, and
increases the risks of a dramatic systemic failure and change.
Institutional
The region has seen three decades of institutional profligacy. As sites of
codified norms for regional interaction and governance, regional institu-
tions are vital for negotiating and contesting hegemonic social compacts.
This East Asian domain has demonstrated a high degree of malleability
and accommodation, compared to the security realm. For example, after
the Cold War, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and
ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) emerged to deal with the perceived disinte-
gration of the economic and security bargains that the non-Communist
countries had previously struck with Washington. APEC’s purpose was to
help manage United States–Japan trade frictions and promote regional eco-
nomic cooperation as a bulwark against protectionism in Europe and
North America.44 The ARF was meant to help bind the United States to
the region after the Cold War raison d’^etre had largely evaporated. This
multilateral institution lent legitimacy to regional supporter states’ desire to
extend US military preponderance to hedge against strategic uncertainty.
The continued US security guarantee in turn underwrote the secondary
aim of socializing rising China into the existing regional compact.45
China has most actively contested the US-led hegemonic order in the
institutional domain, which is important for its efforts to reassure neigh-
bors about its peaceful rise as a responsible great power. This contestation
evolved from attempted exclusion in the 1990s and supplementation in the
2000s to competitive pluralization after 2010. Initially, China leveraged the
ARF’s multilateral institutional setting to censure normatively American
alliances in Asia, stigmatizing them as reflecting an outdated Cold War
mentality and pushing multipolarity as an alternative.46 Regional disillu-
sionment with perceived Western neglect during the 1997 Asian Financial
Crisis generated self-help in the first exclusively East Asian institution, the
ASEAN Plus Three (APT). With annual summits of the thirteen Northeast
and Southeast Asian states and economic coordination programs, the APT
44
Yoichi Funabashi, Asia Pacific Fusion: Japan’s Role in APEC (Washington DC: Institute for International
Economics, 1995).
45
Evelyn Goh, “The ASEAN Regional Forum in United States East Asian Strategy,” Pacific Review 17, no. 1 (2004):
47–69, https://doi.org/10.1080/0951274042000182410.
46
Evelyn Goh and Amitav Acharya, “The ASEAN Regional Forum and U.S.-China Relations: Comparing Chinese
and American Positions,” in Advancing East Asian Regionalism, ed. Melissa Curley and Nick Thomas (London:
Routledge 2006), 98.
632 E. GOH
provided a platform for China’s efforts to replace US-led Asia-Pacific insti-

tutions with East Asians–only institutions. Beijing could both assure
regional states by facilitating public goods’ provision and offer an alterna-
tive institution to resist US hegemony. In practice, the APT supple-
mented—but did not replace—the US-led global financial order. Working
with Japan, China created a regional network of crisis liquidity swap agree-
ments, but these retained IMF conditionality norms, and were used only as
a backup to international financial institutions.47 They helped to diversify
the supply of public goods, but did not challenge the fundamental terms of
the hegemonic social compact.
In the 2000s, contestation centered on “institution-racing” between Japan
and China at the regional social structure’s regional power level.48 Beijing’s
preference for exclusive East Asia–only institutions was pitted against
Tokyo’s promotion of institutions that included US partners such as
Australia, India, and New Zealand, if not the United States itself, to avoid
potential Chinese domination.49 Thus, China’s earlier contestation of
regional institutions supporting the US-hegemonic order faced two prob-
lems: (1) in procedural terms, it offered no clear alternative norms or rules,
reflecting in part Beijing’s rise within the existing hegemonic order; and (2)
in authority terms, China’s efforts at rank elevation within the regional
great power club faced horizontal resistance from Japan. However, regional
complicity with both inclusive and exclusive institutions did lend the East
Asian social structure the quality of a “multiplex cinema,” with a choice of
shows put on by different directors.50 In terms of social processes, the
accommodating nature of the institutional realm facilitated a relative bal-
ance of tensions between complicity and resistance for all regional states.
China has been most agile in exploiting this balance of tensions to mobilize
regional support for its putative role as the second superpower.
In the 2000s, Beijing quietly built the foundations for alternative regional
institutions; these included intergovernmental and semiofficial forums tar-
geted at Central Asia (such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and
the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia),
and wider Asian gatherings like the annual Bo’ao Forum (an alternative to
APEC and the World Economic Forum) and the Xiangshan Forum (the
alternative to the annual Shangri-La Dialogue on defence). These latent
47
William Grimes, Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of Financial Regionalism (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2009); Goh, Struggle for Order, 138–58.
48
Amitav Acharya and Evelyn Goh, Reassessing Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific: Competition, Congruence,
and Transformation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 7.
49
John Ravenhill, “East Asian Regionalism: Much Ado about Nothing?” Review of International Studies 35, no. 1
(February 2009): 215–35, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210509008493; Takashi Terada, “Forming an East Asian
Community: A Site for Japan-China Power Struggles,” Japanese Studies 26, no. 1 (May 2006): 5–17, https://doi.
org/10.1080/10371390600636034.
50
Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order (London: Polity, 2014).
institutions received little Western attention until momentum built around

President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), which was initiated
in 2013. An ambitious plan to link China with the Middle East and Europe
using continental and maritime routes through Asia, BRI suggests a new
phase of Chinese contestation of the institutionalized US hegemonic order.
This contestation is competitive pluralization, or the deliberate diversifica-
tion of the constituencies that are engaged in cooperative endeavors, and of
the shared interests and values that underlie these alternative communities
of cooperation. China may be laying the groundwork for a direct challenge
to the United States’ hegemonic position in the region because, unlike
earlier regional institutions that stayed within the parameters of the
US-hegemonic order, these new Sinocentric institutions have four alterna-
tive social-structure and compact characteristics.
First, they are pan-Asian, with a deliberate Westward slant that incorpo-
rates Central and South Asia and often includes the Middle East; this
reorientation helps Beijing to circumvent security dilemma with the United
States in the East Asian theater. Because of the dearth of US allies there is
“almost no risk” of military confrontation with the Westward super-
power.51 In my reading, this Westward march helps China to recast the
domain of the Asian order by moving away from the ASEAN-driven, US-
dominated, Japan-constrained institutional environment of East Asia, and
moving toward a more comprehensive embrace of the three Asian sub-
regional security complexes that China connects through its growing
capacities and interests.
Second, these Chinese initiatives promote heavily developmentalist order-
ing principles deeply shared among postcolonial, developing countries.
Beijing emphasizes how security is ultimately assured by economic growth
and the mutual benefits of regional development: for instance, in a 2014
explanation of his “new Asian security concept,” Xi held up development
as the “master key” to national and regional security, calling for “common
development and regional integration … [to] promote sustainable security
through sustainable development.”52 This developmentalism is distinct
from the security-derived principles prioritized by the United States and its
East Asian allies, which focuses primarily on the San Francisco system as
the core of regional order, and also differs from the trade liberalization and
financial and services regulation agendas of US-led economic institutions.
51
Wang Jisi, “Zhongguo de guoji dingwei wenti yu ‘taoguang yanghui, yousuo zuowei’ de zhanl€ue sixiang,”
[“China’s International Status and the Strategic Principle of ‘Keeping a Low Profile while Striving for
Achievement’”], Guoji wenti yanjiu [Journal of International Studies] 2 (2011): 4–9.
52
Xi Jinping, “New Asian Security Concept for New Progress in Security Cooperation,” (remarks at the fourth
summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, 21 May 2014) at http://
www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1159951.shtml.
634 E. GOH
It finds a deep and wide resonance across Asia, fueling Beijing’s regional
public goods provision with Chinese characteristics.
Third, China explicitly mobilizes a new constituency via these develop-
mentalist institutions: Asian developing countries and peripheral states
that have tended to be neglected, taken for granted, or treated as mere
arenas by other major powers. This sits in contrast to the US emphasis
on allies and developed country constituencies. The post-1945 US bargain
with regional allies and partners—exchanging security guarantees and
market access for political support and subordination—helped bring to
power domestic elites in favor of internationalist outlooks prioritizing
economic growth.53 China offers peripheral developing constituencies a
new hegemonic bargain that resonates with both their shared statist
ideology and their developmental imperative. Emphasizing political non-
interference, bilateralism, and statist forms of economic regulation, BRI
and other China-led trade and services agreements render regulatory
coordination non-political, “seemingly preserving government autonomy
and control of the economy in target states.”54 This reinforces the spe-
cific relations between economics and security found in developing parts
of Asia, where ruling regimes harness external economic opportunities
and development gains in order to ensure their own domestic sustain-
ability. Thus, China’s new institutions promise to extend the interlocking
domestic-international and economic-security bargains that underpin
regional order.
Fourth, China’s new institutions agenda privileges forms of develop-
ment specific to the needs of many of these ruling elites; relatively
cheap, quick, and conditions-light lending, which is infrastructure-led,
fulfill the latter’s need to show short-term results. To date, China’s most
significant new institution is the AIIB, launched in 2016 with fifty-seven
founding member states, and with itself as the largest shareholder (26%
voting share).55 Beijing also harnessed other institutional frameworks, the
Bo’ao Forum and the BRICS-led New Development Bank, to the infra-
structure agenda. China partly exploited the infrastructure investment
shortfall worldwide when IFIs moved out of commercial lending for
lower income countries.56 In its first year of operation, AIIB committed
the relatively small sum of $1.7 billion to nine projects, collaborating
53
Steve Chan, Looking for Balance: China, the United States, and Power Balancing in East Asia (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2012).
54
Priya Chacko and Kanishka Jayasuriya, “A Capitalising Foreign Policy: Regulatory Geographies and
Transnationalized State Projects,” European Journal of International Relations 24, no. 1 (21 March 2017): 15–16,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117694702.
55
India and Russia, the next largest shareholders, have 7.5% and 5.92% voting shares, respectively.
56
Raj M. Desai and James Raymond Vreeland, “How to stop worrying and love the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank,” Washington Post, 6 April 6 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/
2015/04/06/how-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-asian-infrastructure-investment-bank/?utm_term¼.bdf1b6473e1c.
with other funders like the World Bank.57 It remains too early to gauge
how AIIB practices challenge existing lending norms. Over the medium
term, BRI-related regulatory frameworks—including customs coordin-
ation, free trade agreements or zones, currency convertibility, legal
frameworks for ownership and investment, and interstate agencies to
oversee them—grant Beijing significant “connectivity power.”58 Even if
only partially implemented, BRI will pluralize regional rules and norms
of development financing and practices, impacting on procedural aspects
of the institutional order. Beijing’s 2018 creation of a BRI legal-dispute
settlement mechanism involving China-controlled international commer-
cial courts is a salient example.59
By its recent institutional activism, China has caused the hegemonic
social structure of the East Asian order, which was already diffused by
institutional proliferation, to melt further. Thus far, Beijing’s contestation
ranges beyond the “spoiler,” “supporter,” or “shirker” categories of rising
power behavior.60 China has sought neither exit from nor straightforward
replacement of US leadership in East Asian regional institutions. Instead,
Beijing has expanded the domain of its institutional contestation to encom-
pass subregions and political constituencies of Asia where it has better
comparative advantage. Beijing may have found a relatively promising basis
from which to create what Clark calls a “coalitional hegemony,”61 exercised
vis-a-vis a relatively circumscribed domain (Asian developmentalism) and
constituency (developing and peripheral Asian states). The developmental
imperative is a widely and deeply shared one in the region, and China
exercises influence through “preference multiplying,” by which it expands
the regional consensus favoring state-centric developmentalism.62 As it is
not cast in direct competition with the US-led order, other states have been
generally complicit, as evidenced by the key US allies from Asia and
Europe that have joined the AIIB.
The interim result is a disaggregating social structure, with China’s puta-
tive new bargains holding out the possibility of differentiated and overlap-
ping layers of authority alongside those of the United States. In the short
term, China has strengthened its voice options in regional and international
institutions. But Beijing also exercises structural power in expanding the
57
Issaku Harada, “AIIB hits its first year landing target,” Asian Nikkei Review, 26 January 26 2017, http://asia.
nikkei.com/magazine/20170126/Politics-Economy/AIIB-hits-its-first-year-lending-target?page¼1.
58
Evelyn Goh and James Reilly, “The Power of Connectivity: China’s Belt & Road Initiative,” East Asia Forum
Quarterly (October–December 2017): 33–34.
59
Yang Sheng, “China to set up international courts to settle Belt and Road disputes,” Global Times, 28 June
2018, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1108794.shtml.
60
For example, Randall Schweller and Xiaoyu Pu, “After Unipolarity: China’s Visions of International Order in an
Era of U.S. Decline,” International Security 36, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 41–72, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_
a_00044.
61
Clark, Hegemony in International Society, 123–46.
62
See Evelyn Goh, ed., Rising China’s Influence in Developing Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
636 E. GOH
range of options available to others and giving them opportunities that

they otherwise would not have had.63 By promoting diversity in the
regional institutions and their ordering principles, China is reshaping
regional frameworks for interaction and cooperation, and thus the evolu-
tion of social structures and compacts in the East Asian order. Over the
medium term, Beijing’s growing institutional web that underpins shared
developmentalist ordering principles may reinforce China’s older agenda of
excluding the United States and seeking to replace its hegemonic social
compact. For instance, China’s push for the Regional Comprehensive
Economic Partnership agreement now enjoys greater regional support.
Combined with rising uncertainties about US willingness to underwrite
East Asia’s economic institutional order in the wake of Trump’s abandon-
ment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, China may well be in a
stronger position to build exit options.64
Political economic
This domain is the most interesting because it is most confounding for theo-
rists of hegemony. Unlike earlier hegemonic stability theorists, we can no lon-
ger use the economy as our prime illustration. This section focuses on
finance, which has been central to HST. Here, it makes more sense to discuss
the global level, because the two key issues—imbalances and governance—are
not usefully reducible to regions. China’s rise has dramatically impacted the
global distribution of production and capital, as well as the relationships and
responsibilities that constitute global financial order. Yet, authority is so dif-
fused in the contemporary international economy that we cannot easily iden-
tify Chinese contestation as a US-hegemonic order per se.
In general, China’s economic rise has involved negotiated strategic integra-
tion, a decision to become part of the existing international economic order
despite the short-term costs of having relatively little say over the terms of
membership, in the expectation of material benefits and voice opportunities.
Beijing’s deliberate decision to open up to the international economy in order
to facilitate domestic reform and development was made understanding that
this would occur on terms set by the United States.65 The success of its inte-
gration was evident in China’s ascent up the hierarchy of the international
63
See Gregory Chin, “China’s Rising Monetary Power,” in The Great Wall of Money: Power and Politics in China’s
International Monetary Relations, ed. Eric Helleiner and Jonathan Kirshner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2014), 185–86.
64
For a more sanguine interpretation that “[t]he voice and authority conferred by institutional leadership will
help co-opt China” in favor of the existing liberal international order, “even if the formal authority of the
United States is somewhat diluted,” see G. John Ikenberry and Darren Lim, “China’s Emerging Institutional
Statecraft: The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Prospects for Counter-Hegemony,” Brookings
Institution Report, April 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/research/chinas-emerging-institutional-statecraft/.
65
Jiao Shixin, Liyi de quanheng: meiguo zai zhongguo jiaru guoji jizhi zhong de zuoyong [The balance of interests:
the role of the U.S. in China’s entry into international regimes] (Beijing: Shijie zhishi chubanshe, 2009), 151–289.
economic social structure: China overtook Japan as the world’s second largest
economy in 2010, and surpassed the United States as the largest trading
nation in 2013–2014. China’s rapid elevation into the exclusive great power
club came when the renminbi (RMB) was included in the IMF basket of cur-
rencies (Special Drawing Rights) in October 2016, marking its acceptance as
an official international reserve currency.66 Moreover, the terms of the RMB’s
inclusion reflect China’s relative significance among the “Big Four”; the RMB
now has a 10.92% weighting in the basket, third highest against the USD
(41.73%, reduced by -0.17), euro (30.93%, -6.47), Japanese yen (8.33%, -1.07)
and pound Sterling (8.09%, -3.21).67
Initially, China’s rise did not alter, but instead reinforced, the United
States’ hegemonic social compact with supporter states; this played out
whereby the latter gained access to the US market in exchange for their
undervalued currency, which in turn supported massive US state spending.
Indeed, China became the most conspicuous supporter-surplus country,
overtaking Germany and Japan to hold the largest foreign government
share of US debt—$1.24 trillion by 2016. This was about 10% of all pub-
licly-held US debt, putting China behind only the Social Security Trust
Fund’s $3 trillion and the Federal Reserve’s $2 trillion holdings, and ahead
of US citizens’ $959 billion and Japan’s $912 billion.68
But after the 2009 global financial crisis, this grand bargain unrav-
eled.69 Even as the United States draws down on domestic borrowing
and becomes less tolerant of China’s export-led growth strategy, China
has focused on developing its domestic consumer market and diversify-
ing its foreign reserves away from the USD. The BRI, for example, pro-
motes internationalization of the RMB. But this is not so much China
contesting US hegemony as it is China joining a more widespread turn
away from an increasingly unviable bargain that requires unsustainable
trade-offs between national stability and global balances. In December
2015 China sold off $18 billion of US Treasury debt, but that was part
of a worldwide record-annual US debt dump, as central banks tried to
prop up their own currencies while the global saving glut wound down.
Other major sellers included Japan (which sold $22 billion in December
66
“IMF approves reserve currency status for Chna’s yuan,” Bloomberg, 1 December 2015, http://www.bloomberg.
com/news/articles/2015-11-30/imf-backs-yuan-in-reserve-currency-club-after-rejection-in-2010.
67
Before October 2016, the US dollar accounted for 41.9% of the basket, the euro 37.4%, the pound 11.3%, and
the yen 9.4%.
68
Figures from the US Treasury: http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/moneymatters/ss/How-Much-US-Debt-Does-China-
Own.htm.
69
Michael Mastanduno, “Order and Change in World Politics: The Financial Crisis and the Breakdown of the US-
China Grand Bargain,” in Power, Order and Change in World Politics, ed., G. John Ikenberry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 162–91.
638 E. GOH
2015), Russia, Brazil, and Turkey.70 In this sense, 2009 may prove to be
an inflection point in the decline of the US hegemonic order, exacerbat-
ing the blow dealt to the US model of running the global economy after
the Asian crisis of 1997, and reinforcing the global redistribution of eco-
nomic power away from North America and Western Europe.71
Within this increasingly diffused social structure, the expanded club of
great economic powers including China has increased in importance. The
unraveling surplus-deficit bargain reflects the classic great power manage-
ment imperative that has existed since the Great Depression. This impera-
tive mandates that achieving global macroeconomic stability requires some
collective action to ensure sufficient policy consistency among the major
leading economies, to promote stability of exchange rates, and to prevent
large imbalances in international payments from developing and fatally
undermining systemic stability. From this shared imperative arises two
issues: identifying who should perform the vital surveillance function, and
determining what ought to be the distribution of responsibility for national
adjustments to achieve systemic stability. Both have come under more
intense contestation over the past two decades, especially given the more
multipolar distribution of global economic power. Ultimately, a new regime
for adjustment “will require articulation of mutual responsibilities and sym-
metrical obligations shared amongst surplus and deficit countries, in the
knowledge that the status of being either a surplus or deficit country can
hardly be permanent.”72 This fluidity of social status among the major
players generates significant contestation over relative responsibilities.
During the first twenty years of reforms, and in accordance with its over-
all emphasis on assurance and restraint, China’s record of accepting the
IMF’s bilateral surveillance process was “fairly normal.”73 From 2005, when
large Chinese current account surpluses became evident and external pres-
sure built for appreciation, China resisted what it saw as an unreasonably
large share of the burden of international adjustments. But it was not alone.
Like other surplus countries, including US allies Germany and Japan,
Chinese leaders believe that large-deficit countries like the United States
bear more responsibility for adjustment. China’s central bankers perceived
a US-led campaign to shift responsibility (and thus avoid politically costly
70
Patrick Gillespie, “China leads U.S. global debt dump,” CNN, 17 February 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/
17/news/economy/china-us-debt-dump-central-banks/; Min Zeng and Lingling Wei, “Once the biggest buyer,
China starts dumping U.S. government debt,” Wall Street Journal, 7 October 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/
once-the-biggest-buyer-china-starts-dumping-u-s-government-debt-1444196065.
71
See Jonathan Kirshner, American Power after the Global Financial Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2014).
72
Mlada Bukovansky et al., Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 207.
73
Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter, China, the United States, and Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 126.
fiscal cuts in the United States) and to undermine China’s domestic monet-
ary stability. Moreover they fear that China will be entrapped into financ-
ing US fiscal deficits and having to absorb extraordinary capital losses
down the line, generating domestic blowback for the CCP. Thus, China
withdrew from the bilateral surveillance mechanism in 2007–2008, after
having in fact accepted significant revaluation in 2005–2008. It returned in
2009 after the worst of the GFC, when the IMF became more conciliatory
toward China because it needed Chinese surpluses.
Therefore, the social processes in the global financial domain have been
marked by complex tensions between complicity and resistance among
China and other major economies. These tensions are exacerbated by the
fact that the great power club is only one of a number of nodes of author-
ity in this domain’s complicated social structure. For instance, the adjust-
ment problem is one that IFIs like the IMF and the G20 surveillance
processes may have little authority over, as much leverage can also be
exerted by private bond markets and credit rating agencies that can
threaten the US government with rising bond yields and thus pressure it
into lower fiscal spending. This interpretation fuels the claim that the
United States began retrenching from its special responsibility in the global
financial and monetary arena “far earlier” than in the security realm.74 This
interpretation sees the transition into a clearly post-hegemonic monetary
order as having occurred in the 1970s with the breakdown of the Bretton
Woods system and the steady three-way diffusion of authority toward a
larger club of large economies, the market, and regulatory networks.75 In
what has become a “highly fragmented and complex” authority structure
for governing global financial stability, disparate regulatory networks with
no direct enforcement authority are trying to coordinate national rules in
disaggregated sectors such as currency trading, banking, investment, and
accounting.76 These are networks of national and international regulators;
experts; and the private sector represented by financial firms, very large
institutional investors and ratings agencies. In addition, we see the rise of
transnational hybrid authority in standards-setting for a wide range of
industries and markets.77 To illustrate, when operating on broad market
principles, “regulatory neoliberalism” is exercised by private sector groups
like the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and International
74
Bukovansky et al., Special Responsibilities, 165.
75
See also Daniel Drezner, All Politics is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2008).
76
Bukovansky et al., Special Responsibilities, 188.
77
Jean-Christophe Graz, “Standardizing Services: Transnational Authority and Market Power,” in Handbook of the
Political Economy of Production, ed. Kees van der Pijl (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2015), 132–48; Helen
Nesadurai, “Contesting Private Sustainability Norms in Primary Commodity Production: Norm Hybridisation in
the Palm Oil Sector,” in Norm Antipreneurs and the Politics of Resistance to Global Normative Change, ed. Alan
Bloomfield and Shirley V. Scott (London: Routledge, 2017), 159–76.
640 E. GOH
Accounting Standards Board, both of which set standards using coordin-

ation and pressure on national regulators and private firms to adhere to
best practices.78 For example, there is an expectation that the RMB’s inclu-
sion in the SDR will cause China to relax some of its many capital controls
because of the social pressure to align with currency management norms
practiced by other SDR economies.79 This amounts to a complex network
form of governance rather than a hierarchical form, in which even super-
ordinate states are forced to interact with the other actors in ways that
make it difficult to evaluate whether and how much the former’s preferen-
ces determine regulatory outcomes.80
The United States–China dispute about global imbalance adjustment has
abated in recent years for three reasons: because China’s surplus has
declined due to its dramatic economic slowdown; because the RMB’s con-
tinued pegging to the dollar led to its continued real appreciation against
most currencies; and because the weak US recovery prevented its external
deficit from worsening more sharply.81 However, the unraveling postwar
bargain between the United States and other major economies is a systemic
problem that requires significant medium-term adjustments in the financial
social compact. In this sense, the social processes piece of the financial
domain is the fastest-evolving and the most open-ended. For those inter-
ested in major transitions of international order, an increasingly vital arena
of research will question how and with what effect China more broadly
interacts with, contests, and alters this diffused, networked global monetary
order. And yet if we accept that this domain is increasingly (or indeed
already) post-hegemonic, then it is questionable whether our analytical
frameworks for studying hegemonic orders are the most suitable for
this enterprise.
Conclusion
This article demonstrated how an English School–informed approach can
contribute to next-generation hegemonic order theorizing using an expli-
citly social lens. In conceptualizing the architecture of hegemonic order as
consisting of three social elements—compact, structure, and processes—it
emphasized social exchange, power relationships, and negotiation as the
bridges that link hegemony and order. In particular this analysis showed
78
Andrew Walter, Governing Finance: East Asia’s Adoption of International Standards (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2008).
79
“Maiden voyage: reserve currency status might make for a weaker yuan,” The Economist, 5 December 2015,
http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21679341-its-new-status-might-make-weaker-yuan-
chinese-renminbi-joins-imfs.
80
Miles Kahler and David A. Lake, “Economic Integration and Global Governance,” in The Politics of Global
Regulations, ed. Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
81
The author thanks Andrew Walter for his help with this point.
how hegemony is subject to broader processes of renegotiation during peri-

ods of transition, using the most significant contemporary case of hege-
monic contestation.
This deepens our understanding of hegemonic contestation in three
ways. First, it reiterates the importance of studying process; by definition,
contestation cannot be captured using snapshots of decisions taken or out-
comes observed at single points in time. Hegemonic orders are undergirded
by social compacts and power relationships that require legitimation and
justification; hence, processes of negotiation and contestation are central to
how these orders are sustained or changed. Contestation is not always an
all-out clash of the titans. Rather, the foregoing analysis highlights that a
rising power can try to reshape or replace (1) the form (or social structure)
and (2) the content (or social compact), of the hegemonic order. But
contestation is a nonlinear process and outcomes are contingent upon
interactions with other actors in the system. China’s contestation of the
US-hegemonic order in East Asia is in practice messy and seemingly hap-
hazard because it is opportunistic, creative, and interacts with the actions
and preferences of other states. Importantly, these processes themselves can
condition the nature of systemic change, by shaping and shifting social
identities, ordering principles, and the content of reciprocal exchanges. In
contemporary East Asia, this is illustrated in China’s multifaceted contest-
ation of the US hegemonic order and how that contestation has created
opposite effects in the security versus institutional domains, discussed in
further detail below.
Second, we need to stop thinking solely in terms of opposition and
revolt, and instead look for a shifting balance between complicity and
resistance. Realists generally expect that Beijing will resist, and perhaps
replace, US influence. Liberals believe that cost-benefit calculations will
lead China ultimately to uphold most elements of the status quo. But the
above analysis shows that even a rising hegemonic challenger like China
can choose to operate in that grey area between complicity and resistance,
while not revolting outright against the existing hegemonic order. China’s
ascendance has been embedded within the US-led liberal international
order. Thus, to a significant extent, Beijing has had to be complicit with
the existing order so as to render its rise both possible and legitimate.
More broadly, the politics of hegemonic ordering revolves around compli-
city as much as resistance. China’s major challenge now is to gain support
from other states. While Beijing’s developmentalist regional institutions
promise a political-economic bargain with regional elites, they have signifi-
cant downsides regarding sustainability. More problematic is the security
realm, where China needs to demonstrate credible self-restraint for
642 E. GOH
Table 3. Summary of China’s contestation in the three domains of the US-hegemonic order in
East Asia.
ARCHITECTURE OF HEGEMONIC ORDER CHINA’S
DOMAIN Social compact Social structure Social processes CONTESTATION
Security Robust and reinforced Rigid (but therefore Complicity with US From ambivalent
by China threat prone to crisis and hegemon co-optation,
sudden change) dominates to escalatory
resistance to core
interest intrusions
Institutional Malleable and accom- Disaggregated and Balance of complicity From attempted
modating of differentiated and resistance, exclusion and
power shifts with potential for supplementation,
revolt (exit options) to competitive
pluralization
Political Unravelling, capable Diffused, fragmented, Fluid and Negotiated strategic
economic of selective reform, networked; indeterminate integration to date,
but sustainabil- post-hegemonic? but open-ended
ity uncertain
reassurance, and to offer a social compact that trades public goods provi-
sion in return for others’ complicity.
Third, by studying the details of China’s interaction with the existing
hegemonic order, the paper demonstrates the multifaceted nature of hege-
monic contestation. As summarized in Table 3, China’s challenges to the
existing hegemonic order manifests differently in the three domains of
security, institutions, and political economy. The variation is related to two
factors: first, to the robustness and malleability of the existing social com-
pact; and second, to the complexity of the social structure. These factors in
turn condition the balance of tensions in how China and the United States
pursue their respective social imperatives.
In the security domain, Beijing has avidly contested the United States’
sole leadership and hyperpreponderance, but Chinese escalatory resistance
in maritime East Asia has redounded in pushing regional supporter states
into a greater embrace of the US security guarantee. Thus, Washington has
been best able to uphold its imperatives in this domain, preserving its
social compact with its selective constituency of allies and partners. Yet,
this strengthening of the hegemonic order did not result so much from the
United States exerting hegemonic control in a unilateral and linear fash-
ion—indeed, the United States and China explored accommodation for
some time—as from the interaction between China’s resistance to perceived
intrusions into its core interests, and other regional states flocking toward
the apparently still-relevant and robust social compact with the United
States in order to resist the China threat.
In contrast with the security domain’s rigid social structure that privi-
leges the distinction of the United States as hegemon above all others, the
institutional domain has a more permeable and less heavily US-centric
social structure. Because much of East Asia’s post–Cold War renegotiation

of the hegemonic social compact was conducted using multilateral institu-
tions, the institutional domain is especially malleable and accommodating
of power shifts. This has facilitated creativity in Chinese contestation using
competitive pluralization. China has leveraged its diverse and heterarchic
ecology by targeting a different constituency—the developing countries and
emerging economies in its periphery—than that of the United States. With
these developing constituencies, Beijing is mobilizing shared statist develop-
mentalist ordering principles in order to expand the domain of regional
consensus on key strategic issues. In so doing, China harnesses values or
norms that many other states in the region share with it, but not necessar-
ily with the United States or other developed western countries. By leverag-
ing the complex social structure in this domain, Beijing is making
significant the differentiated and disaggregated form of this order. Insofar
as China’s contestation aims to pluralize both its social compact and its
social structure, it is pro-order, because it expands the mobilized constitu-
ency and the bases of complicity with its potential coalitional hegemony.
The question is whether this pluralization of the existing order can be sus-
tained, or whether we are facing an inevitable, more revolutionary, contest-
ation from China to replace the key existing economic institutions.
This is especially true in the global political economic domain, where the
significant diffusion, fragmentation, and networking of authority is such
that we might argue a hegemonic order has long ceased to exist. Given the
weakness of the social compact, we might expect Chinese hegemonic con-
testation to be most intense in this domain. Yet the dynamic, fragmented,
and networked nature of the social structure impedes the ability of China
or other major economies clearly to resist or be complicit with one set of
ordering principles or bargains. In this context, China has presented a rela-
tively pro–status quo, integrationist record into IFIs, and participates, along
with other major economies, in the sporadic and piecemeal re-negotiations
that remain regarding global imbalances and financial policy interventions.
This domain is undergoing the most dynamic renegotiation of the social
compact, and if we accept that the financial compact has been at the heart
of the successive international hegemonic orders since the Sterling era,
then the process and outcome of these negotiations will have dispropor-
tionate effects on the evolution of the overall current hegemonic order. But
this story is still evolving, taking place at the global rather than regional
level, and necessarily bigger than the China-United States relation-
ship alone.
Thus, China’s leaders have selectively adapted and integrated, but also
resisted and tried to challenge, different aspects of the US-hegemonic order,
in a record that is marked by trial and error as well as cumulative domain
644 E. GOH
expansion. While the outcome is yet uncertain, studying the dynamic pro-
cess of contestation sheds important light on how hegemonic orders are
created, sustained, and altered. It also spurs important questions for further
research. The first group of questions relates to the outer boundaries of
what can be classed as hegemonic orders. In form, even if we accept that
hegemony does not have to be confined to single hegemons or closed-shop
constituencies, to what extent can a hegemonic order be sustainably plural?
Moreover, what is the content of a hegemonic order that keeps it together?
Is there one social compact or a set of interlocking compacts? If the latter,
might these different compacts have complementary or reinforcing effects?
The second group of questions pertains to whether there is necessarily one
international order, or multiple orders. For example, are there separate
security and economic orders, as some claim?82 What are the implications
for hegemonic orders? What happens if one domain is hegemonic and the
other post-hegemonic? Do hegemons have to enjoy full-spectrum hegem-
ony? Moreover, what does the domain differentiation entail for studying
how hegemonic orders change? We know from previous examples that
hegemonic decline can happen in different domains at different junctures.
Britain’s military decline was marked from the Suez crisis in the 1950s, but
its economic decline was not manifest until the oil crisis of the 1970s, and
its institutional decline arguably not until it loses its place on the UN
Security Council and the Council of Europe. How might we study inter-
active effects across the three domains? Where might the tipping points be,
at which a seemingly discrete event or shift could alter the form and con-
tent of the entire order? These questions highlight the richness of the
remaining agenda for the third wave of international hegemony research.
Acknowledgements
The author particularly thanks Dan Nexon, Rosemary Foot, Jim Rolfe, and the anonymous
referees at Security Studies for their helpful comments.
82
G. John Ikenberry, “Between the Eagle and the Dragon: America, China, and Middle State Strategies in East
Asia,” Political Science Quarterly 131, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 9–43, https://doi.org/10.1002/polq.12430.

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Contesting Hegemonic Order: China in East Asia

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Contesting Hegemonic Order: China in East Asia

The third wave of international-hegemony studies centers on unpacking

of consent than coercion.

opportunities for subordinate states to oppose or support the incum-

East Asia’s Post–Cold War Order

The Hegemonic-Order Framework

The International Society Perspective

understandings involves contestation and negotiation, with consensus nei-

powers disrupting the rules and institutions that grant protection to

The Architecture of Hegemonic Order

Table 1. The social architecture of hegemonic order.

in power relationships. The social structure of an international society

We confront that last question through the hegemonic architecture’s

In contrast, when subordinate states use revolt to resist superordinate

China and the US-led Hegemonic Order in East Asia

US policy-makers also tend to define the regional social structure by its

a willingness to be constrained by institutionalized limits to its power.

The downside of a rigid hegemonic social structure is that the structure is

provided a platform for China’s efforts to replace US-led Asia-Pacific insti-

institutions received little Western attention until momentum built around

range of options available to others and giving them opportunities that

Accounting Standards Board, both of which set standards using coordin-

how hegemony is subject to broader processes of renegotiation during peri-

social structure. Because much of East Asia’s post–Cold War renegotiation

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