China has emerged as a key driver of global governance reform. Yet existing scholarship on China’s reform-oriented practices tends to fall into two opposing camps: one overstates the disruptive and revisionist nature of China’s actions, while the other emphasizes their diversity and fragmentation to the point of suggesting that China lacks a coherent strategy. Both positions find empirical support, exposing a tension that calls for a new analytical framework capable of reconciling these competing interpretations.

Bowen Yu is an Associate Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University. He is also an associate editor of Chinese Political Science Review and an affiliated researcher with the Environmental Governance Lab of the University of Toronto. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. His research focuses on international organizations, global development, global environmental governance, and international relations theory, with a particular interest in the logic of change in global governance. He is the author of Power, Discourse, Practice: Understanding the Deep Transformation of Global Governance (in Chinese), published by Shanghai Renmin Press in 2023.