Rethinking Status and Chinese Foreign Policy in the Era of Great-Power Competition

How does status explain Chinese foreign policy in the era of great-power politics? This article addresses the question, focusing on the issues of status motive, attribution, and strategy. With the end of US engagement toward China, China’s status relations with the West have turned competitive. China’s status motive is to control its international environment in order to maintain a strategic opportunity for sustained growth and continued rise. In the face of a worsening external environment, Beijing has adjusted its status strategy, seeking to build legitimacy, control, and influence in key communities of states– namely the United States and the West, neighboring Asian countries, and the Global South. China’s status quest has remained highly domestically oriented and instrumental — the goal is opportunity, not hegemony. Contrary to the prevailing narratives that China has arrived as a great power poised to displace US hegemony, this research uncovers the duality in China’s status as both a rising and newly arrived great power. The status duality has driven Beijing’s strategic resolve and calculus.