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How does a status-sensitive China approach international order—the hierarchical institutional and/or normative orders that can either elevate or demote its positions? Conventional wisdom often accredits rising powers’ strategies to their treatment by established powers, whose (mis)recognition can swing these status-seekers between cooperation or revisionism. However, this simple dynamic between destabilizing rising powers and their superior status-quo-defenders risks truncating a status hierarchy—the vertical ordering of super- and subordination. This project thus theorizes the dynamic of multiple-audience status-seeking to comprehensively capture the diverse sources and consequences of China’s status (dis)satisfaction. Navigating recognitiongranting great powers and deference-paying smaller powers, China chooses its international order strategy according to four status scenarios with distinct socio-psychological and social forces: (1) cooperation vis-à-vis status satisfaction (high recognition and high deference); (2) order-consistent contestation vis-à-vis unaccommodating elite group (low recognition and high deference); (3) order-challenging contestation vis-à-vis contestation from below (high recognition and low deference); and (4) defiance vis-à-vis unaccommodating status quo (low recognition and low deference). Through multi-national archival research and elite interviews, I demonstrate my theory through case studies of China’s international order-making/shaping in humanitarian intervention, climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, and outer space governance from 1960 to 2025. My analysis highlights the (grand) strategic value of status concerns and diversifies a rising power’s international order strategies. Empirically, this 60-year history of China’s foreign policy and original diplomatic history of global governance emphasizes the agency of non-Western, nonliberal actors in international order-making and power transitions. 

Bio: Zikun Yang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program at Columbia University. She studies how rising powers shape and are shaped by the international order, with a focus on China, status politics, and global governance. Her other research investigates the sources of China’s techno-nationalism and its consequences for international orders in emerging technologies. She receives her Ph.D. in International Relations and Politics from University of Cambridge.

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