Complexity in China’s current role in multilateral orders

Rather than the prescribed scenario of a Thucydides Trap or a Kindleberger Trap, the global system will see a Transitional Reformation process of contestation and cooperation as power transitions from North America and Europe towards Asia and other regions. While acknowledging that power increasingly diffuses from state actors to transnational civil societies and private sectors, this article contends that, in a state-centric global system, it remains significant that US–China competition, and the wider competition, contestation and renegotiation of power relations between established and rising powers, takes place within United Nations multilateral frameworks. In addressing China’s role, potential, and limits in the dynamics of renegotiation, this article identifies three layers, or subprocesses, of complexity in the current role China plays in multilateral orders in flux.