6) “A Plum for a Peach? Issue Linkage, Taiwan, and China’s Nonproliferation Policy toward North Korea,” Texas National Security Review, forthcoming.
This article offers a novel explanation for the variation in China’s policy toward North Korea’s nuclear program. It argues that Beijing’s willingness to constrain Pyongyang is shaped by the perceived level of U.S. assurance regarding Taiwan. Specifically, China’s cooperation on the North Korean nuclear issue is more forthcoming when Washington credibly reassures Beijing on its Taiwan interests, but Beijing tends to condone and even shield the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) when U.S. actions appear to erode the “One China” commitment. Drawing on Chinese-language sources, interviews with former U.S. and South Korean officials, as well as an original dataset, the study traces this variation from 1993 to 2024. On this basis, it proposes a middle path centered on affirmative linkage to manage both geopolitical flashpoints in East Asia.
5) “To Tolerate or to Pressure: Beijing’s Bifurcated Strategy toward Russia’s Role in China’s Territorial Disputes with India and Vietnam,” The Pacific Review, vol. 39, issue 2, 2026.
Is Russia becoming a Chinese “vassal”? Will Beijing leverage its growing influence over Moscow to gain stronger Russian backing in China’s territorial disputes? This study examines Beijing’s bifurcated approach towards Russia in China’s territorial disputes with India and Vietnam, challenging the prevailing view of an inevitable Sino-Russian “axis.” By introducing the concept of indirect wedging and the role of a collaborator in such a strategy, I elucidate China’s strategic differentiation: leveraging Russia’s ties with India to prevent a closer U.S.-India alignment, while pressuring Russia to limit its collaboration with Vietnam in the South China Sea. Drawing on a rich body of untapped primary sources, this article highlights the limits of the purported “no-limits” Sino-Russian partnership in an important but underexplored area of research.
4) “From ‘Joint Development’ to ‘Independent Development’: China’s Hydrocarbon Standoffs in the South China Sea,” Contemporary Southeast Asia, vol. 45, no. 3, 2023.
Some of Beijing’s recent assertive actions in the South China Sea can be understood as a manifestation of what Chinese analysts call “independent development.” The concept is conceived as a responsive measure to what Beijing views as other claimants’ unilateral hydrocarbon development activities in the South China Sea and as a means to pressure other claimants into engaging in joint development with China and to compensate for what Beijing perceives as the disadvantages it faces being a latecomer to the energy development race in the region. In attempting to conduct independent development, China has mostly targeted areas of the South China Sea that overlap with Vietnam’s designated oil and gas development blocks. By contrast, when dealing with the Philippines, especially during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte (2016-22), China has adopted the more loosely defined concept of “cooperative development” to minimize potential legal and political barriers that Philippine leaders may face domestically. With Malaysia, China has traditionally been ambivalent to the prospect of joint development but may increasingly utilize independent development to nudge Malaysia into starting a serious discussion on joint development. However, pursuing independent development does not portend China's abandonment of joint or cooperative development. Indeed, there remains hope for regional collaboration in hydrocarbon development in the South China Sea.
3) “Addressing Military AI Risks in U.S.-China Crisis Management Mechanisms,” China International Strategy Review, no. 4, 2022.
Both the U.S. and Chinese militaries have been committed to investing in emerging technologies, in particular artificial intelligence (AI), to increase effectiveness and efficiency in command and control, weapons systems, semiautonomous and autonomous vehicles, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), and logistics. Strategic communities in both countries have increasingly cautioned about the potential ramifications of military AI for future crisis dynamics. Building on existing scholarship, this article explores how the growing usage of military AI may impact U.S.-China crisis prevention and management against the backdrop of heightened geopolitical tensions in the Western Pacific.
2) “China-South Korea Disputes in the Yellow Sea: Why a More Conciliatory Chinese Posture,” Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 31, issue 138, 2022.
The China-ROK boundary disputes in the Yellow Sea and the associated fishing conflict are often neglected in the rich body of literature on China’s maritime disputes. This article examines the question of why and how China has persistently pursued a de-escalatory posture in the Yellow Sea in the past decade despite having considerably hardened its posture in the East and South China Seas. I argue that the high stakes China has in its bilateral ties with South Korea create strong incentives for Beijing to deescalate maritime controversies whereas the absence of broad-based hawkish pressure at home creates a permissive domestic political climate for Beijing to pursue de-escalation. This paper also evaluates conditions that may facilitate a hardening Chinese position.
1) “Rising Power’s Audiences and Cost Trade-offs: Explaining China’s Escalation and Deescalation in Maritime Disputes,” Asian Security, vol. 18, issue 2, 2022.
Observers characterize China’s behavior in the South China Sea in the recent decade as a continuity of assertiveness, coercion, or delay. Yet, even within a pattern of continuity, China’s way of handling interstate crises arising from its maritime territorial claims has varied from case to case, vacillating between escalation that prioritizes “safeguarding sovereign rights” (weiquan) and deescalation that puts an emphasis on “maintaining stability” on its periphery (weiwen). How can we explain this variation? In this article, I develop a framework, the audience cost trade-off hypothesis, to explain when and why China is likely to escalate or deescalate in maritime disputes. I argue that when deciding whether to escalate, Chinese decision makers usually weigh and make a trade-off between their anticipated domestic political costs should they back down and their potential international costs should they take an escalatory stance. I illustrate the framework with a case study of two major interstate crises in the South China Sea: the 2012 China-Philippine standoff in the Scarborough Shoal and the 2014 Sino-Vietnamese clash over the deployment of the oil drilling platform HYSY-981.