The Sino-Indian Rivalry and Balance-of-power Theory: Explaining India’s Underbalancing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Balance-of-power theory has been challenged as insufficient for explaining state behaviour. Powerful anomalies for the theory exist, especially among states confronting intense rivalry and war. One such anomaly is underbalancing in the Sino-Indian rivalry by the Indian side up until 2017. Today India is still engaged in limited hard balancing, relying on asymmetrical arms build-up and strategic partnership with the United States and Japan that are not equal to military alignment. This article argues that India has occasionally engaged in hard balancing, relying on arms build-up and limited alliance formation, but in general, there has been a serious effort not to resort to intense hard balancing by forming military alliances or symmetrical arms build-up. This calls for an explanation. The core argument I make is that the type of balancing is intimately related to the type of rivalry states have. The China– India rivalry has yet to become an intense existential variety compared to the India– Pakistan rivalry where existential security and protection of national identity are of major concern. Indian elite’s perceptions of the non-existential character of the Chinese threat and their reading of the Chinese strategy towards India have been the primary factors in explaining India’s balancing response. In the latter, active hard balancing has been occurring both internally and externally, whereas the former is characterised by a combination of limited hard balancing, soft-balancing and diplomatic engagement, components of a hedging strategy. The hard balancing has picked up momentum since 2017 in response to a more assertive strategy of the Xi Jinping regime as the Chinese government has ratcheted up military activity on the India–China border. The general implication is that rivals who do not fear existential threats need not engage in intense hard balancing. Perceptions of the threat level play a bigger role in what kind of balancing behaviour occurs in international politics than acknowledged in standard theories on balance of power, especially of the automatic balancing variety.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".