Is China Building a Rival International Order and How Would We Know? Evidence from China’s Institution Building Since 1990

Is China building a rival institutional order to challenge and potentially replace the existing one? The United States played a leading role in creating the institutions of what became known as today’s liberal international order (LIO). Since then, China’s global profile has risen while the United States has reduced its commitment to global leadership. With growing evidence of a hegemonic transition, observers are increasingly debating whether Beijing is working to challenge the existing order by fostering rival institutional structures. To investigate this possibility, we identify observable implications of Chinese rival institution building and assess them using an original systematic dataset on Chinese international institution building culminating in 93 distinct entities over the post-Cold War era. We develop a typology to classify the emerging Chinese institutional edifice. Crucially, we document a growth of Chinese leadership in institutional creation, a shift from co-founding with the United States to going it alone, and increased development of competitive institutions. At the same time, China-founded institutions are primarily regional rather than global, and some complement rather than compete with the policy tasks of existing institutions. While there is yet lacking evidence of a fully-fledged rival international order, we identify the gradual rise of a China-built rival regional order that is emerging alongside the LIO.