China’s rise is a bargaining process between China and the outside world—especially with the United States. This article suggests two strategies, “socialization” and “legitimation,” which a rising power can use to seek “accommodation for identity” with the hegemon. Using China’s peaceful rise after the Cold War as a case study, the essay then examines how China employed these two strategies to reach bargaining deals on the arms control regimes and anti-separatist movements in Xinjiang with the outside world. It concludes that the United States needs to take China’s bargaining efforts seriously and consider possible peaceful accommodation with China.

China’s rise is a defining political event in world politics in the twenty-first century. As David Shambaugh, a leading China scholar, puts it, “the rise of China is the big story of our era.”¹ Scholars and pundits heatedly debate over the implications of China’s rise in international politics. Pessimists, mainly realists of different stripes, suggest an inevitable conflict between a rising China and the United States—the existing hegemon—in the international system. Optimists, largely from liberal and constructivist schools, argue that China can be either integrated into the existing liberal order or socialized by the prevailing universal norms.² Challenging these two arguments, this author suggests that China’s rise is in a bargaining process between China and the outside world. Neither the optimistic nor pessimistic view of China’s rise is warranted since the final episode in this drama is still unwritten. Depending on how China bargains with the outside world, and how the outside world reacts, China’s rise can lead to either a peaceful accommodation or a violent conflict.

Please click here to read the full “How could China bargain for a peaceful accommodation?” article in Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs by Griffith Asia Institute Associate Professor Kai He.