The Middle‐Income Kingdom: China and the Demands of International Distributive Justice

China's rise to global power status is set to be among the primary shapers of politics and life more broadly in the 21st century, upending established patterns of trade and economic activity, the global balance of political power, perhaps even the international prospects of democracy. Yet despite its immense significance and the ample commentary it has received from strategic and geopolitical perspectives, political philosophers have been surprisingly quiet on the normative implications of China's rise.1 This, I will argue, is a mistake. Not only does China's rise generate interesting normative questions in its own right concerning how China ought to wield its growing economic muscle and how geopolitical rivals are permitted to respond; it also upends some basic assumptions that many of us have hitherto adopted in our thinking about international distributive justice. Within the literature on distributive justice, states are often assigned differential duties and claims based, at least partly, on their level of advantage. Where this is done, states are commonly divided into two categories—developed and developing—with demanding positive duties2 being assigned to the former, and the latter being afforded expansive permissions to further their own development. China's status as both a genuine superpower and a middle-income country facing significant development challenges calls into question the continued functionality of such simplifying assumptions. In light of China's rise—and, to a lesser extent, that of other large emerging economies—this paper develops a more fine-grained account of how to conceive of states' differential levels of advantage, distinguishing between states that are incapable, precariously capable, and robustly capable of realizing a minimally decent standard of domestic justice. This account reaffirms the assignment of the most onerous duties to developed states, but also assigns duties and claims to developing states in a scalar fashion, with the upshot that better-off developing states in particular bear onerous positive duties of international justice, owed to least-developed countries (LDCs).