Balance of Power Politics and the Rise of China: Accommodation and Balancing in East Asia

Realists agree that great powers balance the military power of rising powers, but there is little agreement regarding secondary-state responses to rising powers. First, there are differences regarding whether secondary states balance or accommodate rising powers. Second, there are differences among realists regarding the distinct roles of economic and military factors in secondary-state alignment policies. Third, some scholars argue that state alignments are not necessarily determined by realist variables, but can reflect preferences shaped by intentions, historical experiences, or cultural influences. This paper addresses these issues in balance-of-power theory. Its empirical focus is the impact of the rise of China on secondary-state alignments in East Asia. After examining the complex mix of China's military and economic reach in East Asia, it concludes that secondary-state behavior is sensitive to local variation in the great power capabilities and that secondary states tend to accommodate rather than balance rising powers. It further concludes that economic capabilities alone are insufficient to generate accommodation, so that the political-economy literature should reexamine cases of apparent secondary-state accommodation to economic dependency, sensitive to the presence of military vulnerability on the part these secondary states to proximate great powers. These conclusions suggest that there is nothing sui generis or culturally-determined in East Asian international politics and that realism can explain alignment behavior among East Asian states as well as it does among European states. Research on East Asia's response to China's rise that is sensitive to intra-regional variations in U.S. and Chinese military and economic capabilities also challenges assumptions of an emerging Chinese regional hegemony or of a costly region-wide U.S.-China competition.