Multilateralism à la carte: how China navigates global economic institutions

Eugénia C. Heldt, Henning Schmidtke and Omar Serrano Oswald

Review of International Political Economy, 2025, vol. 32, issue 4, 899-921

Abstract: China’s engagement with multilateral economic institutions is neither fully supportive nor outright revisionist. While it supports institutions like the World Trade Organization and contributes to multilateral development banks, it also challenges aspects of the global economic order by withholding lending data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and bypassing the Paris Club. To capture this complexity, we introduce a framework that categorises China’s multilateral strategies into four types: Deep cooperation, shallow support, deep challenge, and shallow resistance. We argue that China’s strategic choices are shaped by three key factors: Domestic preferences, domestic capabilities, and the broader international strategic environment. These factors not only influence China’s engagement individually but also interact with each other, shaping its evolving multilateral strategies. Drawing on case studies from this special issue, we illustrate how China selectively supports or resists multilateral institutions across multiple issue areas—including global finance, multilateral development finance, and trade—depending on issue-area dynamics, domestic bureaucratic competition, and global power shifts. Rather than adopting a fixed position as a status quo power or a revisionist challenger, China pursues an à la carte approach to multilateralism—embracing cooperation where it aligns with national interests, resisting constraints when necessary, and even creating alternative institutions when opportunities arise. By offering a structured way to analyse these varied strategies, this framework provides insights into China’s broader role in multilateral economic governance and its implications for the future of multilateralism.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2025.2495694

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