The consensus of academic literature agrees that China is a status quo power---the frame of revisionism is hypocritically deployed against non-Western states despite a lack of evidence

‘Rising’ China attracts notable attention within the relevant international relations (IR) literature today, and among those who directly examine whether it is a revisionist or status quo actor, most agree that it more closely resembles the latter (for example, Johnston 2003; Davidson 2006; Ding 2010; Ikenberry 2011; Xiao 2015; Wilson 2017). Zhao (2018, 2) rejects the ‘status quo’ designation, but still argues that ‘it is not a revolutionary power discontented with and ready to replace the order’. Some scholars also critique IR theory for being overly deterministic and materialistic, taking for granted that rising powers will challenge the status quo (Thies and Nieman 2017, 2; Ward 2017, 281; Gries and Jing 2019). Often overlooked, they argue, is how ‘ideational factors’, such as socialization (Thies and Nieman 2017, 3, 15) and perceptions of status (Ward 2017) affect behaviour. Despite this emerging critique, however, the spotlight of scholarly and popular attention continues to fall upon China—and other ‘rising powers’— as a real or potential source of international revisionism. China, in short, is regarded as guilty until proven innocent (Turner 2014, 154) regardless of stated evidence to the contrary by scholars such as those identified above. Meanwhile, attention to Western revisionism in particular remains more limited, despite scholars of the US and Europe outlining the actions and ambitions of these actors towards revising and reshaping the structures of global affairs. Consider for example the European Union (EU), a core strength of which is said to lie in its designs ‘to reshape the contours of the international system’ (Rosecrance 1998, 15). Ian Manners (2002, 239) notes Brussels’s ‘willingness to disregard Westphalian conventions’ in its efforts ‘to shape conceptions of “normal” in international relations’. Indeed, the EU fulfils most of the criteria for revisionism suggested by Davidson (2006), for example by significantly expanding its territorial reach from six member states in 1951 to 28 today;1 transforming Europe’s markets and acting as a global ‘market power’ that ‘actively and consequentially influences today’s international system’ (Damro 2012, 697); and exporting its ideology via particular understandings of democracy, human rights and so on, acting as a ‘normative power’ (Merlingen 2007) or a ‘norm entrepreneur’ (Vadura 2015). In line with earlier definitions of revisionist powers, which centred around power accumulation, the EU has also elevated itself to ‘the status of emerging global power’ (Piening 1997) or even ‘superpower’ (Moravcsik 2014). Despite all this the EU has rarely, if ever, been labelled revisionist. The US today is deemed revisionist by some, though primarily as resulting from the policies and worldviews of the administration of Donald Trump (for example, Ikenberry 2017). The same has been argued of the US under the administration of George W. Bush (see Xiang 2001; Hurd 2007). Such allowances for the role of isolated, ‘rogue’ administrations or individuals, as deviations from imagined national norms, are rarely, if ever, extended to China and other ‘rising powers’. The notion of a hegemon or ‘established power’ on its own terms representing a primary disruptive force within the system it dominates is far less frequently considered (for example, Bukovansky 2016; Schweller 2015; Chan et al. 2018).