Writing a book is like embarking on a long journey; I cannot imagine arriving at the destination without the companionship of family, friends, teachers, and colleagues. Without them, the journey would have been a lonely one. First and foremost, I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee at the University of Michigan: Mary Gallagher, Ken Lieberthal, Bill Clark, Rob Franzese, and Nico Howson. Their consistent support, encouragement, and scrutiny have transformed a simple idea of mine into a dissertation, and now a book. I would not have started an academic career if I had not met Shen Mingming in my sophomore year at Peking University. Shen laoshi showed me how fun political science could be, and he taught me to use scientific methods to generate interesting observations about the real world. It would be shameful to claim that this is my work alone, as many people have contributed ideas. John Ferejohn, Susan Whiting, and Bruce Dickson read the whole manuscript and provided constructive comments. Avery Goldstein, Ed Mansfield, Jacques deLisle, Rogers Smith, Ian Lustick, Brendan O’Leary, Rudy Sil, Devesh Kapur, Julia Lynch, Tulia Falleti, Matt Levendusky, Jeff Green, Julia Gray, Alex Weisiger, Marc Meredith, Daniel Gillion, Guy Grossman, Eileen Doherty-Sil, Guobin Yang, Seung-Youn Oh, Neysun Mahboubi, Wang Xixin, Lin Yan, Tom Ginsburg, Randy Peerenboom, Susan Shirk, Kevin O’Brien, Pierre Landry, Melanie Manion, Andy Mertha, Carl Minzner, Danie Stockmann, Mayling Birney, and Yuen Yuen Ang offered helpful suggestions at various stages of the project.