Negotiating roles under rivalry: Constructing conflict and cooperation in US–China economic relations

Why does intensifying great power competition produce durable rivalry even when states remain deeply interdependent? This article addresses this question by conceptualizing U.S.–China relations as a process of role negotiation. We argue that shifts in material power do not automatically translate into new positions within international order. Instead, established and rising powers must negotiate competing claims to authority, legitimacy, and appropriate conduct through reciprocal processes of role projection, contestation, and accommodation. We develop this argument through a process-tracing analysis of the Huawei dispute and the global 5G rivalry. The analysis shows how the United States sought to preserve its role as a technological rule-setter and secure technology provider , by restricting Huawei’s access to markets and critical technologies. China initially contested the role assigned to it by Washington and adapted to U.S. restrictions, but increasingly transformed these responses into a competing claim to technological autonomy and leadership. The result was not accommodation but a shift from an asymmetric claimant–challenger relationship toward a claimant–claimant . configuration in which each state’s assertion of authority simultaneously contested that of the other. We show that great power rivalry can thus become self-reinforcing when competing role claims remain mutually unrecognized. By theorizing role negotiation under conditions of contested hierarchy, the article offers a relational explanation of how strategic competition emerges and hardens within, rather than simply through the breakdown of, economic interdependence.