Contestation from Below: Status and Revisionism in Hierarchy

Abstract

Abstract Existing scholarship suggests that rising powers can become revisionist powers when they are dissatisfied with their status. What causes such dissatisfaction? Conventional wisdom holds that rising powers become dissatisfied when established powers refuse to recognize them as equals. However, if status informs patterns of superiority and inferiority, then rising powers can also become dissatisfied when smaller states do not defer to them. In fact, I argue that there is a life cycle as to how status dissatisfaction develops: status disputes between rising powers and smaller states can be especially frequent early in the power transition, before status disputes between rising powers and established powers become more prevalent. Through text analysis of an original dataset of statements from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1978 to 2018, supplemented by survey and archival evidence, I demonstrate that contestations from smaller states trigger the majority of China’s status grievances, and China-smaller states status disputes are especially prevalent early on. Thus, status-driven revisionism can emerge via bottom-up processes, and it can happen earlier than currently theorized. My analysis highlights the agency of smaller states in shaping power transitions and hierarchies, as well as how and when the US–China competition unfolds.