The strategic competition between the United States and China has become a defining feature of international relations in the Indo Pacific. How China interacts with the United States and other major players in the Indo Pacific will shape the nature and process of the potential inter-national order transition, either peacefully or confrontationally, into the future. This special feature systematically explores China’s bilateral rela-tions with five key players in the Indo Pacific, the United States, Japan, India, Australia, and ASEAN. By both theoretically unpacking bilateral relations between states and empirically examining China’s strategic interactions with others in the region, this project aims to shed light on the complexity of China’s bilateral relationships in the region. Each bilateral relationship is studied from both sides of the coin, i.e., by scholars from inside and outside China. This project explores the diver-gent perspectives between Chinese scholars and non-Chinese specialists on the same bilateral relationship in a pairwise fashion. The insights provided by this study will enrich our understanding of strategic dynamics during the period of potential order transition in the Indo Pacific against the background of U.S.-China strategic competition.