Clear domestic hierarchies in China produce bandwagoning, while uncertainty produces balancing.

Evidence

Within China bandwagoning appears to have been far more important compared with balancing than was the case in Europe. During the 1920s, Lucian Pye notes, “the warlords first sought to learn what they could gain by identifying with strength, and only then would they explore the payoffs of allying with the weak. … for the Chinese warlords, autonomy was not the ultimate value, as it was in the traditional European balance-of-power calculations; rather they based their decisions upon associating with power.” In a similar vein, Avery Goldstein argues that bandwagoning characterized politics in communist China while the authority structure was relatively clear from 1949 to 1966. When the Cultural Revolution then created conditions of near anarchy and uncertainty concerning authority and threatened the survival of political actors, balancing behavior began to prevail. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 639

Categorization

• QUESTION: Testable against other systems: does clarity of domestic authority structure correlate with bandwagoning in non-Chinese cases, or is this China-specific?
• DEEPTHINKING: The domestic-authority-structure driver of alignment choice is a genuinely counterintuitive mechanism: it converts a realism variable into a domestic-structural one.