True self-help: Internal balancing and China's non-alliance behaviour since the 1990s

Why has post–Cold War China not formed an alliance, when it is the most likely candidate to balance against the US? This essay addresses a major criticism of balance-of-power theory—the absence of a counter-American alliance—by submitting a neorealist explanation to the question. It argues that while China has consistently pursued internal balancing, power distribution in the international system has made external balancing nonviable. As a non-pole in the early post–Cold War period, Beijing pursued internal balancing in unipolarity because it faced limited alliance candidates and considerable power disparity vis-à-vis the resident hegemon. As a superpower in today's bipolarity, China's alliance behaviour in the short to medium run is constrained by two structural intervening variables: continued alliance partner unavailability and fears of entrapment, both of which are determined by the power distribution in the previous unipolar system.