I. Decolonization as an Ideal and in Practice

The volumes by Getachew and Thomas afford the opportunity to reconsider decolonization and its historical legacy for international law. Both authors take aim at what they regard as the mainstream account of, and assumptions about, decolonization, by which decolonization concerns the global spread of the European states system, a “moment of nation-building in which the anticolonial demand for self-determination culminated in the rejection of alien rule and the formation of nation-states” (Getachew, p. 2). According to Getachew, “[t]wentieth-century decolonization is thus viewed [by the mainstream] as the culmination of a long history in which the nation-state is progressively globalized and becomes the counterpoint to empire” (Getachew, p. 16). The authors align with historiography that critiques accounts of anti-colonial movements that “focus on the struggle for self-determination to the exclusion of other aspects of anticolonial visions.”Footnote ³

Getachew invites us to recast anti-colonial nationalism as being not only a (narrow) project of nation-building but (a broader) one of world order-making. By this he means that those involved were not only seeking political independence from their respective colonizer, but to reshape the international system to one that was more equitable and that would ultimately move beyond colonialism. It perhaps goes without saying that of particular note was the statement by India and China in April 1954 of five principles by which their relations were to be conducted: respect for territorial integrity; noninterference in each other’s internal affairs; nonaggression; equity; and peaceful coexistence.Footnote ⁴

A chapter that is likely to be of particular interest to international lawyers is that by Thomas on “conference cultures.”Footnote ⁵ Here, Thomas considers a series of conferences through which world order collaborations took shape and which were particularly important for “defining a distinctly anticolonialist worldview” (Thomas, pp. 282–83). Such conferences included the 1947 Asian Relations Conference; the second summit of the five Colombo Powers in 1954; the Bandung conference of April, 18–24 1955; the 1955 Conference of Asian Countries on the Relaxation of International Tension; the several conferences of the Non-Aligned movement; the 1958 All-African People’s Conference in Accra; and the 1961 Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, National Emancipation, and Peace.

Although Bandung did not yield a “schematic plan,” it “echoed through consolidation of the [non-aligned movement] in 1961, the foundation of the Organization of African Unity in 1963, the launch of the United Nations Conference of Trade and Development (UNCTAD) the following year and, later, the creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (1967)” (Thomas, p. 289). According to Getachew, the project for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which began in 1964 and a decade later was formulated through a charter and declaration, was the most ambitious project of anti-colonial world-making. The NIEO recognized that political independence was insufficient if economic inequities remained and was an attempt to rebalance economic power between the industrial consumers of the Global North and the commodity producers of the Global South. Thomas refers to the NIEO as “the biggest ideational challenge to the capitalist world order since the Chinese Revolution of 1949” (Thomas, p. 348).

Thomas encourages us not to replace one simplistic narrative of the ineluctable spread of the states system with another of a unified global movement for decolonization that eschewed all aspects of colonialism. Thomas emphasizes that sovereign statehood was retained; he furthermore notes the importance of recognizing the role of contingency and the fact that it was necessarily the elites who participated in the various conferences. Getachew observes a similar degree of complexity in relation to the NIEO: while it was Marxist and drew on dependency and world systems theory in diagnosing economic dependence, “its prescriptions were articulated within the terms of a liberal political economy” (Getachew, p. 145).

Getachew regards the NIEO campaign as having constituted the final phase of anti-colonial worldmaking in the age of decolonization (Getachew, p. 146). Such visions challenged white supremacy and if accepted, “a different path would have opened up in global politics—away from state sovereignty and racial domination.”Footnote ⁶ And yet the state system prevailed and UN Resolution 1514 (1960) incorporated an understanding of colonialism as overseas domination (only);Footnote ⁷ “many of the systemically rights-violating legal and institutional structures of former colonial regimes … were preserved.”Footnote ⁸

The distinction between a decolonization narrow and a decolonization broad thereby reflects an equivalent distinction between a colonialism/imperialism narrow in the sense of overseas settler colonies, and a colonialism/imperialism broad in the sense that no matter the formal legal status of the entities involved they are in an international system of structural inequality. Thomas considers colonialism (broad) to have continued even until today:

The views of Thomas and of Getachew resonate with various schools of scholarship that emphasize ongoing structural inequality despite decolonization. Within international law, many TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) scholars consider that imperialism simply took new forms following decolonization;Footnote ⁹ B.S. Chimni, for example, in 2017 referred to the United States as having promoted an “unjust neoliberal globalization process accompanied by the use of force against weak nations.”Footnote ¹⁰

We can, therefore, take from the volumes by Getachew and Thomas an appreciation of the way in which the ideal of decolonization served as an essential precursor to the manifestation of decolonization narrow in the sense of independence as well as a quest for decolonization broad in the sense of true global equality. From an international law perspective and contrary to the suggestion of Getachew, this broader project of decolonization did not end with the NIEO. The quest continued, including through a number of multilateral treaty negotiations, beginning with the Vienna Conference on the Law of Treaties,Footnote ¹¹ and including the Kyoto Protocol negotiations and the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations.

II. Situating Decolonization Within an Inter-epochal History of International Law

Grewe’s Epochs of International law was completed in 1944 at a time of rapid change in the international legal order; the second edition in 1984, and the third edition—translated into English and partially updated by Michael Byers, appeared in 2000. Grewe divided the history of international law between 1494 and 1919 into a series of back-to-back epochs on the basis of the predominant power of the era and its influence in the international legal system: the Spanish age from 1494 to 1648, the French age of 1648 to 1815, and the British age of 1815 to 1919.Footnote ¹² The most recent edition treats the period between 1919 and 1944 as a transition period of the Anglo-American condominium, followed by an age of American-Soviet rivalry and the rise of the Third World between 1945 and 1989.

Grewe did not refer directly to a U.S. epoch but there is little doubt that the United States was the predominant power that followed the UK. If we continue Grewe’s depiction of the history of international law as a series of back-to-back epochs, we are left with the question as to from when we can date the U.S. epoch in international law. It is widely accepted that the United States led in the creation of core post-World War II institutions, including the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade but I would suggest that any assumption that the U.S. epoch began in 1945 warrants closer scrutiny.

Contrary to the assumption that viewing the history of international law in terms of a series of epochs on the basis of the predominant power of that epoch ineluctably means also assuming that international law constituted whatever the hegemon demanded,Footnote ¹³ I would submit that one of Grewe’s most important contributions was his insights into the role of the dominant or hegemonic power.Footnote ¹⁴ Grewe had a more sophisticated understanding of the role of the predominant power within international law than a simplistic equation of hegemony with getting-what-you-want-through-international law. Grewe taught us that the predominant power does not necessarily determine everything that happens during its epoch but is distinguishable by the fact that it is necessarily included in all international legal debates of the day. It is the essential go-to without which no legal question can be resolved.Footnote ¹⁵

On this basis, I propose that the U.S. epoch in international law can most appropriately be viewed as having begun in 1919. The classic depiction of the inter-war period may be of Wilson’s foray into international institution-building followed by the United States retreating into isolationism, never joining the League, and never becoming a party to the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), but, building on Grewe’s insights into the role of the legal hegemon, it can also be considered that there was always a U.S. judge on the bench of the PCIJ,Footnote ¹⁶ that the United States participated in inter-war codification efforts, and of course, that the U.S. Department of State took the lead in designing the United Nations. Grewe regarded the British epoch as having ended in 1919 and the United States emerged from World War I as the most powerful state in economic terms.Footnote ¹⁷

A fundamental way in which the United States distinguished itself from the previous epoch was through its rhetorical rejection of European-style colonialism. Whereas in negotiating the Atlantic Charter in 1941 Churchill focused on the defeat of Nazism and the restoration of sovereignty to those states under Nazi control, Roosevelt saw it more broadly “as an opportunity to put an end to the colonial project.”Footnote ¹⁸ In the Anglo-American Atlantic Treaty, the United States and Britain agreed to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”Footnote ¹⁹ The United States thereby “created for itself … a more or less coherent identity associated with the champion of decolonization.”Footnote ²⁰

It is worth recalling that the 1776 Declaration of Independence by the thirteen colonies of the United States of America stated that “all political connection between [these United Colonies] and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”Footnote ²¹ President Monroe’s message of December 2, 1823, originally intended for a domestic audience and which became known as the Monroe doctrine, included “that the American continents, … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.”Footnote ²² Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1918 sought a “free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,”Footnote ²³ and Wilson promoted self-determination, a “logical corollary of the prohibition of colonialism.”Footnote ²⁴ The Monroe doctrine was referred to in Article 21 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

With this observation that rejection of European-style colonialism was a core distinction between the United States as rising power and Great Britain as the previous predominant power, I believe we have identified the most direct relevance of the volumes by Thomas and Getachew for our understanding of the present. Viewed within the inter-epochal perspective of Grewe, the period of decolonization narrow of about 1959 to 1974 represented an inflection point in a period of U.S. dominance in international law.Footnote ²⁵

The particular legal form that decolonization took and the practical outcomes of post-war decolonization were very much shaped by its having taken place within the U.S. epoch. This does not mean that we should rush to view U.S. support for decolonization as having been pure and consistent. For, despite its strong rhetorical support for decolonization, the United States has always had a rather complicated relationship with colonialism. “Expansion was a constant in US history”;Footnote ²⁶ keeping European colonialism out of the Western hemisphere left space for American expansionism.Footnote ²⁷ The United States engaged in some “traditional” territorial acquisition forms of imperial activity, most obviously in The Philippines, but even then, “the United States … never officially admitted the existence of any protectorates” on the basis that it recognized “their equal rights under the law of nations.”Footnote ²⁸

The United States can be understood as having engaged in “informal” … “empire-building,”Footnote ²⁹ enveloping the world in its policy embrace via a system of formally equal sovereign states in bilateral and multilateral governance arrangements negotiated with the United States. And the post-World War II period of decolonization took place during the Cold War, meaning that U.S. support for realizing decolonization was in practice tempered by its determination to contain the spread of communism. According to Jason Parker, Bandung presented the United States with a dilemma: “side with the rising Third World tide, or side with the shaky imperial structures damming it.”Footnote ³⁰ Not having been invited to the conference, and for all its professed anti-colonialism, the United States did not want to side against its European allies and responded rather timorously; it was not until Suez that the United States fully broke with European colonialism.Footnote ³¹

Decolonization in the narrow sense of achieving formal independence and statehood was through considerable struggle, achieved, and there were some changes to the core institutional structures of global power as a consequence of the post-war quest for decolonization broad. Membership of the United Nations General Assembly expanded considerably, for example, and the UN Security Council was in 1965 enlarged from eleven to fifteen members.Footnote ³² But there was no fundamental remaking of world order. The broader vision of decolonization as a fair and just world order of equals as explored by Getachew was not realized.

III. The Role of International Law in Facilitating Peaceful Power Transitions

Without wishing to be in any way deterministic about the future, on present indications the next predominant power is most likely to be China. As of the time of writing, the United States and China are of roughly equivalent economic parity, but the most obvious interpretation of their respective positions is that they are heading in different directions insofar as China is on the ascent and the United States in relative decline.Footnote ³³ Some analysts consider that we are edging ever closer to the United States’ dollar no longer being the world’s reserve currency,Footnote ³⁴ and the United States has lost its last remaining triple A credit rating,Footnote ³⁵ both of which may further hasten the economic shifts underway.Footnote ³⁶

How then can the insights afforded by these books on decolonization assist in making sense of the significance for international law of current world order turbulence inclusive of the “politics of desperation” under Trump,Footnote ³⁷ when policies that had for so many years seemed to assure U.S. preponderance—including its promotion of international law, free trade, and human rights—no longer appear to U.S. leaders to operate to the benefit of the United States? In particular, if we situate decolonization in the context of the history of international law as a series of epochs, how can these insights into decolonization help us to understand the role international law can play in world order transitions?

The transition from the British to the United States did not involve a direct military confrontation between the rising power and the status quo power. The United States had fought a war of independence in 1775–1783, but after becoming a world power in the 1870s, the United States had no need to fight an all-out war with Great Britain. A landmark in this process was the 1872 Alabama arbitration; although still a significant power, Great Britain agreed to pay some $15,500,000 to the United States.Footnote ³⁸ Great Britain and the United States were on the same side in the two world wars of the twentieth century. The United States did not eschew international law but embraced it and used it strategically to incrementally assume global leadership.Footnote ³⁹

Notably, this is just what Power Transition Theory (PTT) has long suggested. PTT, generally associated with the realist school of international relations, was first articulated in 1958 in A.F.K. Organski’s book World Politics.Footnote ⁴⁰ Organski identified the period during which a “rising power” approaches, but has not yet reached, parity with the dominant nation as the most dangerous period for the outbreak of war and whether or not the rising power is dissatisfied as the key determinant of peace or conflict.Footnote ⁴¹

Scholars have selected a range of proxies by which to measure the dissatisfaction of a country as a whole or its leadership. Douglas Lemke and William Reed, for example, considered the extent to which rising states’ domestic institutions compared with those of the dominant state as a likely indicator of dissatisfaction.Footnote ⁴² Lemke and Werner used growth in military expenditure as their proxy.Footnote ⁴³ Woosang Kim considered the degree of similarity between the respective powers’ alliances.Footnote ⁴⁴

A close reading of the theory as originally expounded reveals, however, that Organski clarified that it was not general dissatisfaction but dissatisfaction with the “international order” to which he referred;Footnote ⁴⁵ he furthermore went on to explain that at the heart of an international order lies wealth, power, and rules:

In the contemporary era, rules regarding the conduct of trade, diplomacy, and war have been institutionalized into the system of public international law. Organski and subsequent PTT theorists have not delved into the specifics of international law when applying the theory,Footnote ⁴⁷ and international lawyers have paid little if any attention to the work of Organski. This begs the question as to how we will be able to tell whether a China approaching parity with the United States is satisfied or dissatisfied with the international law rules at the heart of the international order?

There is a politics to expressions of dissatisfaction and resentment. Organski himself noted that dissatisfaction may be fostered by national leaders to distract the attention of their population from internal troubles and to increase unity.Footnote ⁴⁸ The second Trump administration, for example, has attributed the need for tariffs to the United States having been the victim of international trade inequities. We need a more objective measure of China’s degree of “satisfaction” with the international law at the heart of the international order than professed sentiments.

It is uncontroversial to assert that China was poorly treated by the unequal treaties to which it was subjected from 1842 to 1943.Footnote ⁴⁹ These treaties provided, inter alia, for the opening of ports to trade and the cession or leasing of territories including Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula to facilitate European and U.S. trade.Footnote ⁵⁰ China’s treatment via international law during that period of its history was understandably a source of dissatisfaction and resentment.Footnote ⁵¹ There has, however, been less analysis as to how well China has fared in the international legal system during the period since the end of the century of unequal treaties. This is a more complex analysis to undertake due to the rapidly expanding and more sophisticated nature of the international legal system since World War II.

If we consider the substantive provisions of certain key “constitution-like” treaty regimes foundational to the Charter era world order, we can see that China has done remarkably well out of those regimes. Key regimes constitutive of Charter era international law include the legal regime addressing first use of force centered on the Charter of the United Nations, the nuclear non-proliferation regime addressing who can legitimately possess nuclear weapons, the law of the sea regime, and the World Trade Organization (WTO).Footnote ⁵² Such treaties have been foundational not only in a legal sense but central to the international order insofar as they pertain directly to aspects of a state’s relative military and economic standing, and to its security.

Each of these treaty regimes embedded a power structure by which the substantive provisions favored one group more so than others, but the assumption on which PTT was premised—that the key rules of the international order would have discriminated against China in favor of the United States and served to perpetuate the United States’ advantage, has not been true. In respect of the UN Charter, the prohibition on first use of force is equally applicable to all states but, if complied with, could in relative terms be said to facilitate the rise of a new military power by preventing the hitherto military hegemon from acting offensively to prevent the rise of the challenger. As regards the use of force as an enforcement measure, or the amendment of the Charter, China is situated within the inner circle of powerful states, for it is one of the P5 along with the United States. Within the NPT, China is treated as a legitimate nuclear weapon state alongside the United States. The P5 have what is effectively a veto over amendments to either of these treaties.

The favorable experience of China within these treaty regimes may be more readily appreciated if compared with the experience of, say, India, which is not a permanent member of the UN Security Council nor a nuclear weapon state for the purposes of the NPT. India had also opposed the NPT but in 1998 openly undertook a nuclear weapon test for the first time. Article IX(3) means that no matter what it does, India can never be eligible for nuclear weapon status under the NPT. India has therefore traveled a far more tortured road to being accepted as a great power or legitimate member of the nuclear club.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) is slightly more complicated insofar as both China and the United States benefit from specific provisions and do not like others; the United States has never ratified the Convention and China opposes the implications of the Convention for its position in relation to the South China Sea. Although UNCLOS provisions do not support China’s interests in the South China Sea, its weak enforcement provisions mean that even with an unfavorable arbitral ruling, the treaty has not in practice blocked China. Similarly, while it is true that China was required to negotiate the terms of its entry to the WTO resulting in particularly stringent requirements, China has been able to implement its WTO obligations with a degree of selectivity and has been an active and successful participant in WTO dispute resolution. Entry to the WTO helped China to become one of the world’s major economic actors and to lift millions of Chinese out of poverty; it is not surprising that China has in recent years presented itself as a primary defender of the WTO.

The climate change regime built on the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is not usually referred to in constitutive terms but is another global treaty regime of key economic significance insofar as any arrangement for the sharing of costs and benefits associated with responding to climate change could be of sufficient magnitude to significantly alter the economic destinies of individual countries.Footnote ⁵³ Within this regime, China is not only treated as an equal to the United States but due to its classification as a developing country and the centrality within the regime of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, China has enjoyed positive discrimination vis-à-vis developed countries. The Paris Treaty removed the categorization of states into developed and developing but still left China free of any externally imposed binding emission reductions targets.

The fact that China has been positioned for success within a number of foundational regimes of international law points to the distinctive nature of international law during the U.S. epoch insofar as, while the United States did arrogate certain privileges to itself, it did not do so in a zero-sum way. China has not needed to overturn a system that had been fundamentally rigged against it. Rather, China has since 1949 “consistently cited international law as a necessary feature of its foreign policy.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The 2016 Declaration of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the Promotion of International Law “reiterate[d] their full commitment to the principles of international law as they are reflected in the United Nations Charter ….”Footnote ⁵⁵ As a rising power approaching parity with the dominant power, China has not in PTT terms been dissatisfied with the international law at the heart of the international order.

Indeed, China has called on other states to assist it in protecting that international legal order. In 2018 Zhang Xiangchen, China’s Ambassador to the WTO, argued that in response to unilateral tariffs/sanctions imposed by the United States, China was expecting “all members to join hands together and to collectively safeguard the rules-based multilateral trading system.”Footnote ⁵⁶ China has since at least 2019 been developing the concept of “foreign-related rule of law,” which has been used to strengthen the legal basis of the Belt and Road Initiative.Footnote ⁵⁷ More recently, China has shown displeasure with the West watering down the ideal of international law into a mere “rules-based international order,” indicating a preference for an international law-based international order.Footnote ⁵⁸

The United States, on the other hand, has in recent years done less than it had earlier to align itself with the ideal of a politically neutral system of law applicable to all countries.Footnote ⁵⁹ President Trump in 2025 signed an executive order reviewing U.S. participation in intergovernmental organizations and all conventions and treaties to which the United States is a party, in order “to determine which organizations, conventions, and treaties are contrary to the interests of the United States and whether such organizations, conventions, or treaties can be reformed.”Footnote ⁶⁰ U.S. retreat from key international institutions minimizes its opportunities for influence in those institutions and may well prove self-defeating. David Sloss has written of an unravelling of the international legal order,Footnote ⁶¹ and in 2018 I wrote of a decline of international law as a normative ideal.Footnote ⁶² From today’s perspective, however, it appears less that the ideal is in decline than that the United States has intentionally sought to decouple from it, effectively handing an ideal that had underpinned its own rise, to its rival.

In the same way that international law facilitated the peaceful transition from Great Britain to the United States, so does this suggest that, at least from China’s perspective, international law could also facilitate a peaceful transition from the United States to China. Complementary to PTT are references to a “Thucydides trap,” which views war between the challenger and the status quo states as all but inevitable due to the attitude of the status quo power. This is, according to Andrew Latham, not a true representation of Thucydides; it was not that Thucydides regarded war as pre-ordained but rather, that what matters at times of power transition is whether the hitherto dominant power chooses to act out of fear and pride or to engage in reflection and restraint.Footnote ⁶³ International lawyers may have a vital, albeit nuanced, contribution to make in modelling such restraint.Footnote ⁶⁴

That Beijing appears happy to accept “ownership” of the ideal of international law and has long endorsed many international law concepts,Footnote ⁶⁵ does not mean that Beijing could not be expected to change the content of specific legal regimes,Footnote ⁶⁶ and to choose its own normative priorities. To take one simple example, China’s 2016 Joint Declaration with Russia reiterated commitment not only to the Charter of the United Nations but also to the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, and to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. It might furthermore be expected that China will fill a U.S. institutional leadership vacuum only when it suits Beijing to do so.Footnote ⁶⁷

IV. What Might Characterize a China-Led Epoch in International Law?

The discussion has so far been premised on an understanding of the history of international law inspired by Grewe, in which that history is viewed as a series of back-to-back epochs on the basis of the predominant power of the day. Situating the scholarship of Thomas and Getachew on decolonization within that inter-epochal framing has yielded the observation that how an ascending power distinguishes itself from the existing predominant power could reasonably be expected to foreshadow certain contours of what plays out during its own epoch in international law. In this instance what was at stake was the relationship between the international law hegemon and states of what we now refer to as the Global South; decolonization as an ideal and as a practice was central to that relationship.

In conversation with PTT as developed by Organski, an inter-epochal perspective has furthermore suggested that international law may be able to serve an important role in fostering a peaceful transition between a rising power and the hitherto hegemon. This does not preclude there being a context of turbulence, competition and even conflict during the period of transition, but to underscore that the conflict need not be between the state poised to ascend to predominant power status and the state that had hitherto held that status.Footnote ⁶⁸ This final substantive section of the essay will return to the exploration of decolonization with which we began in order to consider whether there has so far been any indication of China promoting a functionally equivalent ideal to that of decolonization and hence, by analogy, what this might portend for the nature of a China-led epoch in international law.

In considering what might correspond to decolonization we do not necessarily need to look within international law because, interestingly, the ideal of decolonization remained to a considerable extent external to international law. There is, to be sure, an international law of decolonization, inclusive of the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,Footnote ⁶⁹ the 1970 Declaration on the Principles of International Law,Footnote ⁷⁰ the 1974 Charter of the Economic Rights and Duties of States,Footnote ⁷¹ and the 1995 ICJ statement that self-determination is “one of the essential principles of contemporary international law.”Footnote ⁷² But General Assembly resolutions are soft law legal instruments and international judicial decisions are subsidiary sources of international law; there is not, for example, an “International Convention for Global Decolonization.”

Let us return to Bandung as a portend of an epoch possibly destined to follow. Bandung’s significance has always been recognized but it has been far more difficult to determine “the what, why and how of this ostensibly monumental event.”Footnote ⁷³ Bandung inaugurated an independent Chinese diplomacy.Footnote ⁷⁴ Integral to China’s diplomacy was its embrace of “anti-hegemonism.” China understood hegemony to mean the “expansion of power politically and economically, and exercise of control.”Footnote ⁷⁵

In opposing “big-nation hegemony,” China maintained that it would never seek a big-power position and that all nations are equal.Footnote ⁷⁶ The 1972 China-U.S. Shanghai Communiqué included an anti-hegemonism clause by which “neither should seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The 1975 Chinese constitution committed China to “oppose the hegemonism of the superpowers,”Footnote ⁷⁸ and anti-hegemonism clauses were included in communiqués released after subsequent state visits. Some took the form of a simple statement that many countries oppose hegemony and that the world situation is not developing in favor of hegemony; others expressed support for the struggle against hegemony; and a third formula rejected the striving for hegemony by other countries or groups of countries and/or supported opposition to the struggle against such aspirations.Footnote ⁷⁹ Deng Xiaoping told the UN General Assembly in 1974 of China’s commitment to “never seeking hegemony.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Anti-hegemonism was to remain part of China’s worldview.Footnote ⁸¹ Deng Xiaoping in the late 1980s advocated pursuing a “new international political and economic order” based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, in order to end the “politics of hegemony.”Footnote ⁸² The term took on special significance in the 1990s as China sought to be an “insider” in a unipolar world order while at the same time to oppose U.S. unilateralism.Footnote ⁸³ A document released prior to the PRC’s ratification of the UNCLOS described the Convention as “beneficial to breaking maritime hegemonism.”Footnote ⁸⁴ More recently, China’s 2015 Military Strategy emphasized that its foreign policy opposed hegemonism “in all forms.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In 2025, Xiao Qian, China’s Ambassador to Australia, noted that a “vast majority of countries have expressed strong dissatisfaction and clear opposition to the US’s unilateralism and hegemony.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Just as U.S. opposition to European-style colonialism influenced the relationship of the United States with the Global South, so has anti-hegemonism infused the relationship of China with the developing world. China has viewed itself as a member of the Third World, albeit one able to revive its status as a great power.Footnote ⁸⁷ China increased its economic ties with African and Asian countries as from the Bandung conference,Footnote ⁸⁸ and sought broader acceptance among Afro-Asian countries of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.Footnote ⁸⁹ China has more recently pledged to side with other developing states forever.Footnote ⁹⁰ China has presented itself as an alternative to U.S. hegemonism, opposing the Washington consensus and critiquing Western models of development as hindering the potential of the Global South.Footnote ⁹¹

China has overtaken the United States to become the African continent’s largest lender and a major infrastructure partner.Footnote ⁹² In June 2025, China announced its willingness to extend zero-tariff treatment to imports from all fifty-three African states with which it has diplomatic relations. According to Arnaud Bertrand, it is “impossible to overstate the sheer scale and ambition of what’s being attempted here: never before has a rising power managed to secure the coordinated support of an entire continent in a comprehensive plan to reshape global governance.”Footnote ⁹³

In a concept note for a UN Security Council Arria-formula meeting on April 23, 2025, China asserted that all countries, “particularly developing nations, are victims of unilateralism and bullying practices.”Footnote ⁹⁴ China’s note linked economic hardship to risks of social disorder and conflict, calling on the international community “to help developing countries enhance their resilience, thereby strengthening the foundation for lasting peace.”Footnote ⁹⁵ China’s statement that “[f]or too long, developing countries—especially vulnerable states—have suffered from the lack of sufficient voice in international affairs and weaker positions in global trade and supply chains” and its proposal for a Global Governance Initiative to achieve a more just and equitable global governance system,Footnote ⁹⁶ sound remarkably like a continuation of the decolonizers’ quest to remake world order as explored by Getachew and Thomas.

And yet, in the same way that the United States enjoyed a complicated relationship with colonialism and decolonization, so would it seem to be virtually inevitable that, if China does continue to increase in relative power, its relationship with the ideal of anti-hegemonism cannot but be complex. As far back as 1976, Joachim Glaubitz concluded that the “possibility cannot be excluded that China, while openly and emphatically opposing hegemony, will continue to use subtle means of indirect influence and subversion with the aim of dominating the other countries in the region in its own peculiar fashion.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Those critical of China’s Belt and Road Initiative point to the way in which certain developing countries have become unsustainably indebted to China through the loans it has given them while building ports, railways or other infrastructure.Footnote ⁹⁸

In the same way that the ideal of decolonization writ large would extend beyond independence to an equitable global order, so would the logical end point of implementing pure anti-hegemonism be China’s self-denying creation of equitable global economic relations, an order in which China chose to not use its power to determine the policy choices of any other state.Footnote ⁹⁹ And yet, while China may be partnering with the Pacific, Africa and Asia in the name of anti-hegemonism, those countries cannot be other than in an asymmetrical relationship with the world’s second largest economy. Chen Yifeng noted that when in 2006 Wang Yi, China’s ambassador to Japan, presented a Chinese vision of Asianism, his reflections were not based on China being a nonhegemonic power.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Deng Xiamang and Jie Pan warned in 2022 that “while opposing Western Hegemonism, we should consciously guard against the pursuit of hegemony in the name of anti-hegemonism.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Anti-hegemonism rhetoric nevertheless supports China presenting itself as leader of the developing world,Footnote ¹⁰² united in a struggle against the U.S.-led West.Footnote ¹⁰³ The idea of anti-hegemonism can help to uphold the benefits of a state-centric international legal system reinforced through U.S. epoch decolonization while actively working to shape the future content of international legal regimes and re-interpreting existing norms and concepts.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The idea of anti-hegemonism lends support to endeavors by the Global South to harness international law to hold Israel, a key U.S. ally, to account in respect of its actions in Gaza,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and supports their launching a campaign portrayed as intending to defend the international legal order.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Unfortunately for the United States, signature moves of President Trump, such as threatening BRICS+ members with tariffs or with sanctions,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ play right into an “anti-hegemonic” worldview, risking an accelerating spiraling toward a new economic order.