The consensus of material and discursive geopolitical codes to contain China in the Indo-Pacific

ABSTRACT

China’s rise as a non-liberal Asian power, with its peaceful representation and rapid development in the twenty-first century, has raised concerns among liberal powers, including the United States and its Asian democratic allies. Thus, US-led democracies in the Indian and Pacific Oceans seek to thwart the rise of China as a world power and the idea of change in the global geopolitical order by adopting a policy of containment against China in the new century. With this in mind, the purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between the geopolitical codes of the United States and its allies to contain China at the discursive and material levels in the Indo-Pacific region. The empirical review of the paper shows a trend in which the United States is using correlated local, regional, and global codes to extend global geopolitical order to its advantage by containing China in the Indo-Pacific arena.

KEYWORDS:

• Geopolitics
• geopolitical codes
• Indo-Pacific
• China’s rise
• containment of China

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Colin Flint for his valuable comments on geopolitical codes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).