Hybrid balancing as classical realist statecraft: China's balancing behaviour in the Indo-Pacific

Abstract Hybrid warfare has recently attracted scholarly attention. Despite its importance, hybrid research remains underdeveloped, as it sometimes falls into the trap of ‘simplistic hypothesis testing’, which focuses on narrowly defined military factors while downplaying fundamentals international politics (e.g. balancing and diplomacy). This article fills this gap by constructing a new theoretical concept called ‘hybrid balancing’ introducing essence classical realism, based scientific realism in philosophy science meta-theoretical foundation. ‘Hybrid consists three ideal types beyond traditional hard one: political, economic informational balancing. As plausibility probe to show that argument is sufficiently grounded evidence justify further research, I illustrate examining China's Indo-Pacific, an arena geopolitical competition between China United States. The implications are (1) shows significance ‘agency’ over ‘structure’ solve agent–structure debate, (2) develops explaining non-military aspects balancing, (3) overcomes (4) sheds light had been overlooked previous around warfare.