Systemic Balancing and Regional Hedging: China-Russia Relations

There have been noticeable attempts in recent International Relations scholarship to introduce the concept of “hedging” as an alternative to “balancing” and “bandwagoning.” The analytical value of such conceptual innovation is not clear because adding a new term to the already rich mix may cause confusion. This paper argues that to be useful for the analysis of great power politics, hedging should be understood not as an alternative to balancing or bandwagoning, but as a phenomenon of a different order. In contrast to balancing or bandwagoning, which describe great powers’ behavior in response to system-level forces, hedging denotes interstate political matters unfolding at the unit and regional levels. The analysis of China-Russia relations supports this understanding. Both great powers are strategically on the same page with respect to resisting unipolarity and other issues of global politics, but their strategies often diverge with respect to purely bilateral relations or policies in their salient geographic environments. This two-level nature of China-Russia relations – balancing the Unipole while hedging toward one another – suggests that their global strategic behavior and regional bilateral interactions are subject to different causal forces that push in different directions. The former is a reaction to system-level pressure, whereas the latter is a result of multiple unit-level factors. Therefore, in the analysis of great power relations, hedging has a particular place on the ladder of levels of analysis.