China’s Challenge to the Institutions of Global Governance and US Soft Power

Abstract

China stands on the brink of surpassing the US in material capability and is pushing the world towards an increasingly multipolar order. This paper assesses the constraints on the growth of China's non-coercive influence in global politics. However, the constitutional groundings of global economic governance in US ideology and their institutional stickiness make China’s prospects of altering the mandates and structures of the IMF, WB, and WTO highly unlikely. Furthermore, by examining the outcomes of China's lending strategies in developing countries using Angola as a case study, this paper highlights China's inability to supplant growing IMF and WB agreements in developing countries and their failure to institutionalize their influence in partner countries. In sum, this paper concludes that liberal values, and by extension the non-coercive influence of the US, are likely to be upheld during China's rise by the institutions of global governance, namely the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organisation.