Guest editorial

China's rise and power shifts in Asia From the escalating maritime sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea to Sino-Indian border conflicts, there seems to be a dramatic transition from a USA-led interdependent security order into a disintegrating world, filled with antagonistic powers ready to challenge each other over geopolitical, ideological, social and economic matters.China today projects political, military and economic strength to rival the USA.The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are the landmark initiatives in its drive to shape the global economic architecture.Combining the transformative power of state-controlled market economy and the resilience of authoritarian rule, China adapts certain tenets of neo-liberal capitalism such as welcoming foreign investment, deregulating its labour market and building infrastructure, while maintaining tight control over government, military, public security and information.As a state-controlled economy employing gradualist reforms in a post-communist era, China's one-party rule produces a durable type of autocracy, outlasting Soviet communism and makes itself a model of development for other developing nations to follow.Meanwhile, the failure of Washington to denuclearize North Korea and Iran destroyed the perception of the USA as being capable of controlling the global arms race.Detecting a shift in the balance of power in China's favour, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping has advocated a new global order built on multilateralism.This special issue brings together a team of researchers to investigate China's rise to geopolitical dominance, as well as its diplomatic entanglements with the USA, India, Japan, North and South Koreas.In particular, it investigates China's projection of its newfound powersoft, sharp, and smartalong its peripheries, and the strategic challenges that China poses to neighbouring states in the early twenty-first century.Many Western policy analysts are wondering whether a rising China is a "status quo" state or a revisionist state that attempts to challenge the existing world order.The lack of clarification from Beijing has prompted Washington to shift from a longstanding strategy of diplomatic engagement to that of geostrategic containment to balance against China.This publication argues that General Secretary Xi Jinping initially launched the BRI to respond to the former US President Barack Obama's policy of rebalancing Asia, and he has expanded these expansionary projects to counter President Donald Trump's "America First" doctrine, thereby asserting Chinese influence abroad and tightening control against discontented populations at home.The ambitious vision of Xi Jinping to rejuvenate the Han Chinese civilization reveals a growing sense of confidence among Communist rulers to access energy resources, to reshape international institutions and norms and to compete with the USA.Even though China does not possess the infrastructure to be a First World state, it has the political will and material resources to lead the global South.The last few years, however, witnessed a deterioration of the diplomatic goodwill that China had built on its peripheries for decades.This issue presents six studies that shed lights on the deteriorating relationship between China and the USA, and the escalating mountainous and maritime sovereignty disputes between China and neighbours.Over the past four years, the Trump administration departed from many long-standing diplomatic traditions and practices.Trump's go-it-alone attitude granted Washington new autonomy to deal with competitive rivals unilaterally.

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