My first book project, titled Simmering Seas: Escalation and Deescalation in China’s Maritime Disputes, explains when, why, and how China escalates incidents at sea arising from its maritime territorial and boundary disputes. In the past two decades, China’s way of handling these disputes has varied widely – it has not always adopted an assertive, escalatory posture as its power continues to grow, nor has it invariably taken an accommodating, de-escalatory posture as its good neighborly diplomacy would suggest. Moreover, in incidents where China has chosen to escalate, its escalation strategies have varied widely in terms of their nature (nonmilitary or military) and intensity (low intensity or high intensity).
To address this question, I propose a two-step analytical framework. The first part of the framework, the audience cost trade-off thesis, explains the when and why question. I argue that when deciding on whether to escalate an incident, decision makers are facing a classical two-level game in which they need to simultaneously cope with two types of cost generated respectively by two sets of audiences with distinct and oftentimes competing expectations. The first type is the political cost that decision makers may incur at home if they choose to deescalate. The second type is the diplomatic and geo-strategic cost that a state may incur internationally should it choose to escalate. My framework predicts that when the potential domestic cost of deescalation outweighs the anticipated international cost of escalation, it would put pressure on decision makers to opt for escalation to avoid backlash at home. Conversely, if the anticipated international cost exceeds the potential domestic political cost, it incentivizes a state to deescalate conflict to avoid derailing relations with the adversary and/or precipitating counterbalancing coalitions.
The second part, the integrated coercion thesis, explains the how question. Building upon Thomas Schelling’s theory that coercion encompasses both deterrence and compellence and that deterrence is in general easier than compellence, I argue that how China calibrates its escalation measures is a function of whether China sees a need to deter the adversary from taking undesired actions or to compel the adversary to retract undesired actions that have already been taken.
To test my propositions, I adopt a case study approach by tracing the process of how China handles 23 incidents and interstate crises arising from its maritime disputes between 2000 and 2022 My research has drawn upon original and new data from a broad set of Chinese-language sources. To supplement the data, I use more than 150 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2017 and 2024 with former and current government and military officials, policy analysts, and scholars in China, the United States, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia. I also draw on English-language materials from other regional stakeholders as well as a smaller body of Japanese- and Korean-language sources.
Part of the project has been published in Asian Security and Journal of Contemporary China.
The manuscript has passed external peer review at Oxford University Press and is now waiting for final board approval for publication.