A growing body of literature has focused on an alleged “power shift” from the United States to China (and from the West to the East more generally). For all its complexities and nuances, much of this power-shift literature continues to unreflectively hold onto a conventional way of conceptualizing power as a type of quantita tively measurable and zero-sum property possessed by the state. Without critically engaging with the conceptual question of what power means, however, the power-shift debate is both inadequate and misleading. Drawing on some alternative ways of conceptual izing power, I aim to illustrate the contingent and socially con structed nature of “Chinese” economic power and, in doing so, problematize the widely held view of a US-China power shift. I con tend that insofar as power is socially constructed, how it is concep tualized matters for international relations. The need to rethink power is at the core of building a new type of major power rela tionship. KEYWORDS : power shift, concepts of power, Chinese eco nomic power, US-China relations. COMMONLY AGREED -UPON STATEMENTS IN THE ARGUMENTATIVE INTER na tional relations (IR) community are often hard to come by, but one exception is the view that the center of gravity in world poli tics is shifting away from where it used to be. The early twentyfirst century, the argument goes, is witnessing a dramatic power shift from the West to the East, and from the United States to China in particular (Hoge 2004; Prestowitz 2005; Shambaugh 2005; Mahbubani 2008; White 2010). Yet amid such burgeoning discourses on a power shift, the dominant way of conceptualizing power has remained largely unchanged. While scholars in the debate often disagree on how to measure the changing distribution of power, they rarely question their state-centric, resource-based concept of power itself. Without critically examining the concept