Associations Freely Chosen: New Geopolitics in the North Pacific

Great Power Competition in Non‐sovereign Entities: US–China Tug‐of‐War over Hong Kong, 1950–2020

“…Therefore, as US–China relations move toward a new paradigm of struggle between an existing hegemon and a potential hegemon, their security competition has escalated and extended to all corners of the globe, with the Indo‐Pacific region emerging as their principal geopolitical hot spot (see Smith 2018; Hu, 2020). Places such as Taiwan (see Denny 2017; Portada et al 2020), Pacific Islands (see Finin 2021; Morrow 2020), Southeast Asia (see Kraft 2017; Shambaugh 2020), South Asia (see Tehseen 2017), Central Asia (see Gul et al 2021), Africa (see Wang 2020), Latin America (see Pu and Myers 2021), and the Arctic (see Pincus 2020) all have been drawn, to different degrees, into the quagmire of US–China security competition, as offensive realism theory predicts. It is against this geopolitical context that the intense security competition between the US and China has subsequently been blown over to Hong Kong after the outbreak of the 2019–2020 Anti‐Extradition Bill Movement, with both powers having strong security incentives to confront each other in Hong Kong in a non‐compromising way, as the offensive realist logic goes.…”