Abstract: What will be the future of international relations in Asia? What is the relation between Sino–US power transition and alliance politics? This study distinguishes two types of paths for great powers: lonely and popular. The lonely rise means attaining great power without winning strong allies (the United States and China provide examples), while the popular rise refers to the process of becoming a great power by attracting security partners (e.g., Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan). Because the United States is no longer a lonely power due to its creation of an alliance network since the Cold War, today the lonely rising power, China, faces the arguably declining but still popular great power. Asian states will take four different strategies – (i) internal and external balancing, (ii) binding and buck‐passing, (iii) internal balancing, or (iv) hesitant bandwagoning – according to the existence or absence of two factors: an alliance relationship with the United States and territorial conflict with China. In the competition to attract more Asian states as allies and friends, China has a disadvantage in comparison to the United States due to its geographic location, authoritarian system, and fast‐growing economy, which cause it to be regarded as an aggressive power.