Buying your way to periphery influence: Patronage politics at great powers' peripheries

For countries coveting benefits from competing major powers, the literature provides conflicting advice. The balance of interests theory suggests that states should bandwagon; on the contrary, the strategic triangle thesis argues that staying neutral and playing one power against the other is most advantageous to third-party states. This dissertation project clarifies the contradiction by examining how major regional countries distribute patronage to compete with extraregional powers and maximize their regional influence. The interactions between major power patrons and lesser state clients are theorized as a parallel to political parties' promises of benefits to attract voters. The theory-building work is complemented with insights acquired through in-depth interviews of Chinese and Taiwanese foreign policy elites during fieldwork. A comparative historical analysis of China's aid to North Vietnam in three periods of time---1964-66, 1967-70, 1971-73---showed that Beijing's patronage distribution to Hanoi varied in accordance with the combined effect of China's power rivalries with the United States and the Soviet Union and its perception of North Vietnam's alignment predispositions. The findings highlight the importance of the context of power rivalries and further the argument that lesser states can only move to a neutral position and reap benefits when power rivalries are short of being zero-sum.