ISSN 1007-161X
CN 11-3706/C
主办：中国社会科学院亚太与全球战略研究院
中国亚洲太平洋学会
CN 11-3706/C
主办：中国社会科学院亚太与全球战略研究院
中国亚洲太平洋学会
International agenda setting refers to the process by which agenda-setters ensure that their preferred issues or solutions gain attention and acceptance from targeted actors.The approaches and strategies adopted by states in international agenda-setting shape the outcomes of such agenda-setting, which in turn influences the process of international institutional competition within specific issue areas.The political science of domestic agenda setting offers valuable insights for understanding international agenda-setting processes. In the international arena, the ability of agenda setters to effectively shape conflicts and establish their legitimacy emerges as the critical determinant of success or failure in agenda-setting. When agenda setters successfully capture international attention through strategic conflict shaping and effectively legitimize these constructed conflicts, their agenda-setting initiatives typically succeed. Conversely, when agenda setters fail to shape conflicts within existing issue structures or cannot legitimize their constructed conflicts, agenda-setting efforts tend toward failure. Russia’s Arctic development agenda, Japan’s “values-based alliance” initiative, and United States trade policy agenda setting provide empirical cases to substantiate this analytical framework. As international agenda setting furnishes essential foundations and resources for institutional competition, states should prioritize the enhancement of their international agenda-setting capabilities.
The successful ascendance of great powers depends not only on their national capabilities and rise strategies, but also fundamentally on their legitimacy construction. As a discursive instrument for implementing national strategy, strategic narratives perform functions of strategic communication, discursive persuasion and coercion, and identity construction, playing a pivotal role in legitimizing great power ascendance. Building upon a systematic examination of strategic narratives’ fundamental functions, this article proposes a mechanism for legitimacy construction in great power rise. The core mechanism through which strategic narratives influence legitimacy construction involves rising powers projecting their foreign policy and identity narratives onto potential balancing states’ perceptions regarding the nature of their ascendance. Decision-making elites of rising powers, grounded in their comprehension of existing international norms and order, embed selected narrative materials within specific narrative structures, craft narrative templates, and orchestrate narrative plots. Through the mutual reinforcement between foreign policy and identity narratives, they construct identity recognition, thereby securing legitimacy for their rise. Drawing on this framework, the article conducts a comparative analysis of the State of Chu during the Spring and Autumn period and Germany before World War I and after World War II. The divergent identity narratives adopted by the State of Chu and Germany during their ascendance yielded markedly different strategic outcomes: competitive identity narratives initially prevented both from securing rise legitimacy, resulting in setbacks or failure; conversely, recognition-based identity narratives subsequently enabled both to achieve legitimacy and accomplish successful ascendance. This narrative analysis of legitimacy construction in great power rise expands the research agenda on great power legitimacy while enhancing the explanatory power of strategic narrative theory.
In response to its eroding international primacy, the hegemonic power endeavors to leverage the alliance architecture under its dominance through bilateral and multilateral mechanisms for strategic communication, integrating non-traditional security issues across allied nations to generate comprehensive and systematic containment effects against rising powers. Within the contemporary international system, the United States, as the global hegemon, confronts transformative shifts in the international landscape precipitated by China’s ascendance. Through the strategic deployment of non-traditional security issues and its alliance system, the United States mobilizes allies and partners including Japan and India to collectively advance security issue generalization, imposing comprehensive pressure on China across economic, technological, and other domains, thereby constituting an expansion of pan-securitization. The alignment of Japan and India with the United States fundamentally represents an extension of American hegemonic maintenance into the pan-securitization domain. Against the backdrop of the United States and its allied nations progressively intensifying their strategic postures, China should steadfastly uphold and implement the Global Security Initiative, confronting challenges with resolute strategic determination.
Amid the intensification of strategic competition among great powers, international supply chain architecture increasingly exhibits characteristics of geopolitical dominance and security prioritization. Concerns regarding relative gains and economic security have rendered U.S. power projection behaviors in supply chain domains increasingly salient, though specific modalities and instruments vary temporally. While existing scholarship examines U.S. supply chain security strategy through functional and strategic lenses, it has yet to systematically explore the typology of specific strategies and their underlying determinants. This article argues that technological gradient determines the imperative for the United States to monopolize industrial advantages, while intra-industry heterogeneity under vertical specialization constrains the feasibility of implementing monopolistic strategies and shapes specific policy measures. The interaction of these two factors generates three distinct modalities of U.S. supply chain security strategy, namely suppression-based, encirclement-based, and unwinding-based approaches. The U.S. semiconductor industry strategy targeting Japan in the 1980s, its semiconductor strategy against China since 2018, and its photovoltaic industry strategy toward China from 2012 to present all substantiate this analytical framework.
In order to explain the differentiated paths of emergence and strategic effectiveness of land-sea composite powers, geopolitical position pressures and security perceptions can be incorporated into the analytical framework. Bipolar or multipolar patterns at the regional/global level, and the associated urgency of geopolitical threats, together constitute geopolitical position pressures that shape the paths of states towards balance or concentration. The perceptions and misperceptions of policymakers, and the level of political pressure from domestic elites, are then the main sources of security perceptions that shape states' preferences for restrained or aggressive choices. Case studies are empirically examined for India from 1947 to 1971, Germany from 1871 to 1890, the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, and China since 2008. Rationalising the geo-directional prioritisation of strategic resources is essential to land-sea composite powers.
