Beyond the status quo and revisionism: an analysis of the role of China and the approaches of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to the global order

Abstract

ABSTRACT What are the roles China plays and what approaches does China take to the global order? This paper goes beyond the singular and static view on the roles of states as either status quo or revisionist and introduces more subtle roles of states with multi-approaches of Status Quo, Parallel Supplement, Nested Enhancement, Regime Shifting, Competitive Regime Creation and Ideological Confrontation. After coding 1889 events from the ‘Belt and Road Portal’ and then taking eight most frequent case clusters of the BRI as representative cases, the congruence analysis leads to the main argument that China plays multiple roles of rule taker, rule reformer, rule breaker and rule innovator. The contribution is both theoretical and practical. It improves the typology of states’ approaches to the global order and helps to interpret the roles of emerging powers for the global order. By designing the BRI Index and coding the case cluster, this paper provides a new way to identify the representative case of the BRI.