This chapter synthesizes information about the key variables in our framework across all of the cases in our study. We begin with the cases that escalate to war. Here, the patterns among our variables suggest six prominent (nonexclusive) “paths to war”: the hard-liner path, the territorial path, the alliance path, the rivalry path, the bargaining failure path, and the democratic path. The cases that do not escalate to war reinforce the importance of these paths. Actors often avoid war by blocking one or more paths to war. Reining in hard-liners blocks the hard-liner path to war; alliances sometimes restrain actors, rather than emboldening them, thereby blocking the alliance path to war; and norms often provide a way for states to settle the disputed issue at hand. Finally, we discuss the relative importance of system structure. Prior to 1945, domestic politics – particularly, controlling hard-liners – was a more important factor than system structure in the decisions through which actors avoided war. After 1945, however, nuclear weapons reduce the probability of war among the superpowers, often by creating more accommodationists.

Abstract: Chapter 5 presents an untold tale of an older brother and his younger sister. While their mother was the protagonist in Wolf’s classic ethnography, "A Thrice-told-Tale," the story of these children was obscured. Childhood sibling relation in “the Chinese family” was rarely studied by anthropologists, yet it is an important relation that shapes children’s moral development and family dynamics. I present systematic patterns of this sibling dyad’s social network positioning, uncover their distinct personalities, and trace their nuanced dynamics of care, rivalry and coalitional maneuvers. I closely examine projective tests data to reveal children's own emotional experience in and perspectives about their family life. This chapter is a unique narrative: in addition to illuminating childhood sibling relation, it simultaneously rediscovers the voices of these two children from ethnographic omissions and silences. Therefore, this case study echoes the dual themes of the entire book, children learning morality and anthropologists reconstructing an ethnography.

Most US lawsuits involving Chinese companies are initiated by or against their customers, employees, or business counterparts. However, on occasion, Chinese investors may go to court against a US government entity to resolve a dispute. As US–China relations continue to deteriorate, Chinese companies are increasingly caught in the crossfire of the geopolitical rivalry. Being suspected as agents for the Chinese state, China-headquartered multinational companies, especially those with ties to the Chinese government, have expressed growing frustration over what they perceive as unfair treatment by the US government. This chapter examines the legal reactions of Chinese companies to perceived official bias in the United States in the context of intensifying geopolitical tensions.

Enslaved people commonly claimed they sought to protect the aged from the excesses of their abusers, and were raised to respect their elders. Most scholarship on the topic reinforces this position, with an emphasis on support based on shared oppression and as a form of collective cultural resistance. This chapter, however, considers the consequences when enslaved people appropriated, internalized, or simply shared a belief that old age equated with diminished value and declining powers in work. Respect predicated on agedness was not always meant seriously nor received positively, and the transition to elder could be taken instead as an enforced relegation from the people one had once imagined as peers. The aged party sometimes resented and even resisted the imposition of such a label and its associated narrative, with such tension reflecting broader complexities surrounding age as a chronological, functional, and relational category and identity. People seen as elderly, but who struggled with this categorization of themselves, were forced to make choices – to accept, adapt, or to resist – and this could come at no little cost.

China’s rise has precipitated a crisis within the multilateral trading system.W hile frequently attributed to China’s model of state-sponsored capitalism, this chapter shows why that framing of the problem is misleading.T he primary complaints that the US and others have about China’s trade policy are not, in fact, unique to China, but common features of the developmental state.I nstead, I argue, the more fundamental challenge to the trade regime arises from the China paradox – the fact that China is both a major economic heavyweight and a developing country.C onflict over how China should be classified and treated under global trade rules has paralyzed global trade governance and led to a breakdown in rule-making.I n addition, China’s rise has sharply constrained the US’s “institutional power” – its power over the institutions and rules governing trade – leading to an erosion of American support for the multilateral trading system it once created and led.

China’s rise has precipitated a crisis within the multilateral trading system.W hile frequently attributed to China’s model of state-sponsored capitalism, this chapter shows why that framing of the problem is misleading.T he primary complaints that the US and others have about China’s trade policy are not, in fact, unique to China, but common features of the developmental state.I nstead, I argue, the more fundamental challenge to the trade regime arises from the China paradox – the fact that China is both a major economic heavyweight and a developing country.C onflict over how China should be classified and treated under global trade rules has paralyzed global trade governance and led to a breakdown in rule-making.I n addition, China’s rise has sharply constrained the US’s “institutional power” – its power over the institutions and rules governing trade – leading to an erosion of American support for the multilateral trading system it once created and led.

In his work of 1844, Marx claims that human beings realize their nature through the joint activity of labor in a true communist society. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls calls the joint maintenance of a just society “the preeminent form of human flourishing. He says that “persons best express their nature” by maintaining just institutions. For both writers, what makes these joint activities central to the human good is the relationships they maintain among individuals who do not know of one another’s existence, relationships among distant unknowns. A necessary condition for these relationships to obtain is, in each case, a particular social ethos. If a standard left-wing critique of the market is cogent, and if the well-ordered society of Theory involves a widespread market, then the several elements in the desired social ethos of justice as fairness might be in tension with one another, might not be capable of being satisfied simultaneously. Rawls’s desired relationships might not obtain.

The 1962 Sino-Indian War was not just a border war over disputed territory (or the outcome of the Sino-Indian spatial rivalry alone) as is generally argued because issues related to their positional rivalry were also at stake. Sino-Indian positional rivalry in the Himalayan states and in Burma was linked with the Tibetan issue, and Tibet itself was at the nexus of Sino-Indian spatial and positional rivalries. Furthermore, the 1962 Sino-Indian War proceeded as wars between positional rivals tend to: with the near multilateralization of the war as India sought help from the United States (and that it was favorably considered). While China’s unilateral ceasefire that was accepted by India precluded overt American participation, India’s massive defeat also had positional consequences as it removed India as a contender for Asian leadership. Although this did not result in Chinese leadership in Asia, China continued to remain more important than India to the wider Asian strategic dynamic in the decades after 1962.

Given China and India’s claims to Asian leadership, the positional dimension of the Sino-Indian rivalry was central to their relationship in the 1940s and the 1950s. This positional contest played out in three venues: (i) in various Asian multilateral fora (such as the 1947 Asian Relations Conference and the 1955 Bandung Conference) and in India’s attempts to mediate in conflicts involving China and other players; (ii) in the Himalayan states (Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim) and in Southeast Asia; and (iii) in Tibet. The Tibet issue was particularly fraught with strategic consequences. As China sought India’s help to consolidate its own rule in Tibet, it gave India an exalted but much-resented position in China’s internal affairs (pertaining to Tibet). Matters related to Tibet also entangled the positional and spatial dimensions of the Sino-Indian rivalry because the territories in dispute between China and India had complex historical links with Tibet.

The simultaneous rise of China and India is exacerbating their strategic rivalry. The aim of this book is threefold. First, we describe and analyze the Sino-Indian strategic rivalry and its implications for rivalry escalation. We also pay attention to the spatial and positional contests that characterize their rivalry. Second, we examine how their material and cognitive asymmetries are shaping their conflict behavior. Third, we show that the Sino-Indian rivalry is consequential for the regional order in Asia and for the global order.

This chapter demonstrates how the genesis, growth, and evolution of the Sino-Pakistani nexus has impinged on India’s security interests since the early 1960s. Since then, the Sino-Pakistani strategic partnership has steadily deepened. By the late 1980s, for all practical purposes, Pakistan had emerged as a strategic surrogate for the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in South Asia. Given the PRC’s reliance on Pakistan to pursue its security interests in South Asia and Pakistan’s goal of balancing against India, the relationship is likely to persist in the foreseeable future.

Multiple asymmetries characterize the Sino-Indian rivalry. India’s slow and fitful (absolute) rise over the past three decades has happened in the context of relative decline vis-à-vis China because the latter has grown faster and more comprehensively. Despite this asymmetry, newer functional areas – economics, nuclear, and naval – have appeared in this contest. These areas are riddled with domain-specific asymmetries and domain-specific pathways to conflict escalation. While there is no reason to believe that war is inevitable, the Sino-Indian relationship has entered a troubled phase because further asymmetry as well as strategies to address these asymmetries are both conflict-prone. There are three specific pathways (which are not mutually exclusive) that cut across these different domains and point towards heightened conflict: any Chinese attempt to create a new status quo reflective of the power gap in its favor; any Indian endeavor to redress this power gap in order to be taken more seriously by China; and the United States’ promotion of the rise of India.

The China–India rivalry could be the key to global stability in the coming decades even though this may not be apparent at first. In Asia, the hotspots of Korea, Taiwan, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea tend to receive more attention, while the China–India militarized disputes are perceived as the backwaters of the regional theater. However, a Sino-Indian confrontation – whether on land in the Himalayas or in maritime realm in the Indian Ocean – may very well be the trigger that leads to a systemic war involving the United States. The China–India rivalry for power and influence at the regional level in Asia is in the process of fusing with the US–China rivalry in Asia and consequently at the global level. Given that the Sino-Indian spatial contest has intensified in recent years, the probability of escalation in the Himalayas is a distinct possibility. In fact, the presence of the more consequential positional dimension of the Sino-Indian rivalry suggests that there would still be a strong Sino-Indian rivalry even if the spatial dimension were to disappear. The Sino-Indian rivalry is now a part of the larger mosaic of regional and global power competition.

The way in which major power wars have escalated into general or systemic wars is less straightforward than one might think. They start for various reasons and then become something else when other major powers join the fray and turn them into systemic wars. The initial grievances in these systemic wars may seem like acorns that become mighty trees. How, for example, does a bungled assassination of an Austrian archduke or even an attack on Poland mushroom into war on multiple continents? One answer is in the ways rivalries are linked. While it is true that the specifics of each systemic war have unique components, there are also some general features as well. One is that decision-makers do not tend to see general wars coming. They make decisions based on short-term considerations without necessarily seeing the big picture. That bigger picture includes linked or fused rivalries that blow up relatively local concerns into global wars. This chapter uses the Seven Years and Crimean Wars as examples. Rivalries like the Sino-Indian rivalry can be conduits to widening the local concerns that have the capability to become transformed into something far greater and more damaging.

Since the 1962 war, in which India suffered a disastrous defeat, a series of crises have punctuated Sino-Indian relations. The most serious of these probably took place in 1967 and in 2020. Both of these crises led to actual clashes between the Indian Army and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exacting material and human costs on both sides. Within the past decade, the PLA has made several limited probes along the Sino-Indian border, largely to test Indian resolve. These actions are unlikely to end, especially as the PLA has improved its infrastructure along the disputed border and is also bolstering its military capabilities. Consequently, there is every likelihood that further crises are likely to ensue.

There are disagreements about when the Sino-Indian rivalry began, what it is about, what its potential for escalation might be, and how significant the rivalry might be for the course of world politics. It is argued that this rivalry began with the advent of Indian independence, given that the earliest time point at which a rivalry between two states can commence is when both states are independent. There is not surprisingly a great deal of emphasis on disputes along the Tibetan border. They are not insignificant, but they may prove to be the least important part of the Sino-Indian rivalry. The positional contest between the two Asian giants seems more central to the rivalry overall. We think the rivalry has considerable potential for escalation – perhaps even more than the Sino-American rivalry does. If that is indeed the case, the rivalry may hold one of the most critical keys to world peace and stability. It is not something that can be dismissed as a minor tempest in a frozen region.

This chapter looks at the two men, T. V. Soong and H. H. Kung, who dominated financial positions from 1928 until the collapse of the Nationalist regime on the mainland. Both had personal ties to Chiang through his wife Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Song Mei-ling). A bitter rivalry developed between them that impacted the entire coterie of financial and banking officials. On a related issue, it examines the prevalence of American education among financial officials and its impact on ties to America, particularly in the Soong family. This chapter uses the papers of Lauchlin Currie, a key aide to Roosevelt, who made several trips to China on his behalf. The chapter closes with an examination of the way in which the two men have been portrayed in writings about the Chiang Kai-shek era, suggesting some reevaluation is needed.

This chapter examines the scandal associated with the American Dollar Bond issue and the resignation of H. H. Kung