Strategic Asymmetry: Rethinking China’s Diplomatic Paradigm Toward the Global South

China’s diplomacy toward the Global South is becoming increasingly embedded in multilateral mechanisms and normative frameworks. The country’s dual identity as both an emerging great power and self-identified member of the Global South has given rise to a distinctive mode of South–South cooperation that eludes conventional theoretical explanations. While the “win–win” paradigm remains a normative staple of discourse on international cooperation, it encounters structural constraints in practice that include divergent interests, institutional and resource asymmetries, and temporal misalignments in reciprocity. This paper addresses the central research question of how to account theoretically for China’s growing tendency toward a paradigm of a single winner in the form of unilateral concessions and a strategic tolerance for asymmetry within cooperation efforts. By adopting an integrated theoretical framework, this paper argues that the initial single-winner paradigm does not represent a negation of win–win but rather its enabling condition under asymmetric structures. It represents a strategy that is temporally embedded and norm-generating while prioritizing delayed returns, reputational capital, and moral legitimacy. By reframing mutual gains beyond static symmetry, the single-winner paradigm offers an alternative logic for understanding China’s value-based diplomacy and its implications for the global order.