Escalated Policy Space Conflict: Tracing Institutional Contestations Between China and the United States

This article tracks the dynamic changes in institutional contestations between China and the United States and provides a new explanation based on the English School’s perception of primary and secondary international institutions. According to the power transition theory, the rise of China will inevitably bring about a divided international economic order. In fact, institutional contestations among great powers includes contested access, multilateralism, and legitimacy, which represent dynamic changes rather than linear evolutions. Taking two key factors—power and legitimacy—as variables, this article constructs the Institutional Contestations Framework (ICF) to describe the conditions underlying shifts between different types of institutional contestations. The article posits that the driving factor behind the increasingly intense China–US institutional contestations since 2016 has been a rising China prompting the US to alter its secondary institutions, in turn squeezing the policy space for China. The liberal international order at the level of primary institutions remains attractive. Contested legitimacy between China and the US is optional, rather than inevitable.