Asymmetry of Power, Attention, and Reciprocity: Determinants of ROK-China Partnership Diplomacy Failure

“Partnership diplomacy” in the study of Chinese foreign affairs has weak theoretical underpinnings and has been defined in a manner insufficiently systematic for middle-range theorizing. Whilst sufficient attention has been paid to determinants of partnership formation, its failure has hitherto received scant attention. To understand this failure, this paper identifies asymmetry of power, attention, and reciprocity as the three major determinants of China’s partnership diplomacy failure, generating distorted expectations and prediction uncertainty. Using the ROK–China partnership as a case study, we adopt a conceptual frame from the literature on asymmetric alliances to increase theoretical precision, conceptual clarity, and contextual similarity. We argue that South Korea’s naivety about the asymmetries in play and China’s overestimation of the ease with which it could leverage the framework to its advantage, ultimately led to collective action dilemmas and mutually exclusive expectations. In conclusion, we incorporate diverse theoretical perspectives more attuned to the actual realities in predicting the future of the bilateral partnership.