Building Legitimacy in the Global Political Economic Order: China’s Efforts and Its Legitimacy Challenges

Abstract

This article conducts a discussion on the questions: how does global political economic order generate legitimacy?  Of which, this article wishes to shed some lights on the mechanism of legitimacy construction at the international level and provides theoretical explanation of how newly growing powers participate in the current construction of the global political economic order and establish legitimacy of the global order they advocate. This article uses "legitimacy" and "global order" or "world order" or "international order" as the keywords and conducts search on datasets of Google Scholar, Jstor, Tylor & Francis, Elsevier to researches since 2000 onward to gain as wide scope as possible. After screening, 17 articles are included to review the source of legitimacy. This literature review thus concludes that compellence, substantial interests, and value as three sources of legitimacy. Then this article investigates "Belt and Road Initiative" as the case and the English School of International Relations theory to provide a path of building legitimacy of the global political economic order via common interests and value shared. Furthermore, by utilising the English school's perspective, common interests and common values generate legitimacy of the order, this article also finds that China's participation in constructing and shaping global order through the "Belt and Road" Initiative encounters two major legitimacy challenges: performance challenge and value challenge. This article then argues that China needs to consider the interest convergence path and value convergence path of generating legitimacy for global order China advocates.