Bandwagoning with the elephant: Canada's grand strategy in response to China's rise in a shifting global power landscape (2008–2024)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rise of China poses significant challenges to the global projection of US power, particularly within the Indo-Pacific region. In this context, the role of US allies, notably middle powers such as Canada, has become increasingly important. Despite growing scholarly attention to this dynamic, there remains a need for more systematic and empirically grounded analysis of how middle powers formulate their strategic response. We identify and analyze five indicators of grand strategy, studying the case of Canada's approach toward China from 2008 to early 2024: threat perception, diplomatic signals, military acquisitions, deployments, and joint military exercises. We operationalize these indicators by developing clear, falsifiable, and measurable criteria, which we analyze through strategic documents, public statements by elected officials, and declarations from the executive branch. The findings indicate a marked Canadian tendency to bandwagon with the United States. The article further examines the underlying motivations for this alignment, with particular attention to strategic culture and status management practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".