Description
How does China manage its unsatisfied status ambitions by the smaller powers with lower social standings? Given the existing literature’s preoccupation with rising powers’ status management vis-à-vis the great powers, little ink has been spilled over the bottom half of the international status hierarchy. This article responds to this truncated view of international status hierarchy with a relational approach to status competition. It seeks to fill the gap by focusing on China’s status-management strategies vis-à-vis the Philippines during the South China Sea disputes. We build a theory of China’s downward status management inductively from our working database on China’s international status performance and discourses from 1978 to 2024. Our investigations combine the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis on our corpus with comparative case studies on the Sino-Philippine status dynamics during two temporal periods: (1) 2000-2010; (2) during and after the 2016 South China Sea Arbitration. As suggested by the finding, despite Beijing’s cautious avoidance of triggering the regional balancing coalitions against a rising China, the Philippines’ contestation undermines China’s international impression management and domestic self-conception, thereby pushing a status-sensitive China from a more conciliatory approach before 2010 to a more assertive stance since the 2016 South China Sea Arbitration. Theoretically, this article corrects the status scholarship’s obsession with great powers, and demonstrates why and how rising powers accommodate or deny the status-seeking of the smaller states. Empirically, our mixed-method approach offers a more comprehensive understanding of the evolution of China’s status pursuit in the past five decades.
Keywords:
Status; Relational Approach; China; the Philippines; Status Dissatisfaction; South China Sea
