True self-help: Internal balancing and China's non-alliance behaviour since the 1990s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".