| Sumario: | Minilateralism has recently attracted scholarly attention. Despite its importance, research on minilateralism remains underdeveloped. Existing studies sometimes fall into the trap of single attribution and focus narrowly on the reasons for the occurrence of minilateralism while downplaying its inherent function as a powerful strategic instrument for the United States to contain rivalry with the rise of China. This study fills this gap by constructing a new theoretical concept of 'hybrid minilateralism', which incorporates the essence of hybrid warfare into the research agenda of minilateralism. Hybrid minilateralism consists of five ideal types: security, ideological, diplomatic, economic and technological minilateralism. To examine the plausibility of this argument and to show that it is sufficiently grounded in evidence to justify further research, this article illustrates this new concept by examining Biden's hybrid minilateralism to contain China in Indo-Pacific. The theoretical implications of this research include (1) enlarging the scope of alliance politics; (2) promoting the analysis of hybrid warfare from the unit level to the structural level; (3) refining specific means of hybrid minilateralism; and (4) pointing out two future research agendas of minilateralism.
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