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The People's Republic of China (PRC) has irrefutably reached ‘great power’ status. As a consequence, most studies argue that it has adopted a revisionist posture towards the US-led international order. However, this image tells us little about Beijing's revisionist strategy, particularly whether it is revolutionary or incremental and what this implies in terms of actual policies. The current article posits that the PRC is behaving as an incremental revisionist and aims at tracing its modes. To verify this hypothesis, the analysis focuses on Beijing's policies towards its regional security order. In this light, it diachronically compares post-Cold War China (1989–2019) with the paradigmatic case of a revolutionary revisionist in the Indo-Pacific region: Shōwa Japan in the Interwar period (1926–1941). The findings offer a helpful contribution to the literature, providing the foundation for a more nuanced theoretical definition of incremental revisionism.

The comments by Lawson and Legrenzi to our RISP/IPSR article ‘Tracing the modes of China's revisionism in the Indo-Pacific: a comparison with pre-1941 Shōwa Japan’ contribute to moving the debate on revisionism in international politics a step forward. Their notes on the several issues affecting the International Relations understanding of the phenomenon are on the same page as ours and we appear to share similar doubts and a like-minded curiosity on the subject. While grasping some key topics and shedding light on crucial shortcomings in the literature on international change, power transitions and international order, however, their observations do not come unproblematic. In this reply to their timely remarks, we highlight the perks of their argument but also stress how this falls through in providing a complete framework to understand revisionism in international politics.

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