China, Power Transition, and the Resilience of Pluralist International Society: Beyond Realism and Liberalism

What does the arrival of China as an unrepentant authoritarian great power mean for the future international order? This chapter sets out to challenge both the new realist faith in the return of traditional great power politics and the residual liberal optimism about the longevity of liberal international order expected to move states in a progressive direction defined in terms of liberal democracy. It seeks to argue, from an explicit English School perspective, that China’s rise has demonstrated the resilience and abiding nature of pluralist international society, arguably one of the most enduring institutional features of international order in history. It is in this normative framing of the future international order that the agency of rising China is made most manifest. It further argues that the ongoing strategic rivalry between China and the United States, increasingly framed as a global contest between autocracy and democracy and played out in a historically consequential power transition, recommends a world safe for diversity and prosperity. Such a vision articulates well the aspiration of pluralist international society as a normatively sensible, morally defensible, and politically viable common order in the 21st century.