This week’s Midnight Oil guest is Ketian Zhang, an assistant professor of international security at the Schar School of Public Policy and Government at George Mason University. She studies rising powers, coercion, economic statecraft, and maritime disputes. Her dissertation — the basis for her recent article in International Security —  this year won an honorable mention from the international security section of the American Political Science Association.

My research agenda emphasizes how globalized production and supply chains affect rising powers' use of power, especially China's coercion. By coercion, I mean the use or threats of negative actions to force the target state to change behavior. Since 1990, China has used coercion for maritime territorial disputes, foreign weapons sales to Taiwan, and foreign leaders’ meetings with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, despite adverse implications for its international image. China is also curiously selective in the timing, target and tools of coercion: Most cases of Chinese coercion are not militarized, nor does China coerce all states that pose the same threats to its national security.

My book project, “Calculating Bully: Explaining Chinese Coercion,” asks two central questions: When and why does China coerce, and – if coercion is chosen – what tools does China use? Contrary to conventional wisdom and in contrast with historical rising powers, my book manuscript demonstrates that China is a cautious bully, does not coerce frequently, and uses military coercion less as it has become stronger, resorting mostly to non-militarized tools such as gray-zone coercion. I identify the centrality of the reputation for resolve and economic cost in driving whether states coerce or not. States coerce one target to deter others, treating coercion as a signaling tool. At the same time, states are constrained by the imperative of developing the domestic economy and the potential of losing the target state’s markets and supply.

For my book project, I examine three issue areas of Chinese coercion: China’s territorial disputes with states in East, South and Southeast Asia, its policy toward Taiwan, and its behavior toward states that received the Dalai Lama. For temporal variation, I examine cases in which — for the same country that is a potential target for coercion —  China coerces that country and when it refrains from coercion. For instance, I analyze why China coerced the Philippines over disputes in the South China Sea in the 1990s and late 2010s, but not the early 2000s. For cross-national variation, I analyze cases in which for the same period and among comparable countries, China coerces some but not others. One empirical chapter in my book manuscript explains why China prefers to coerce the Philippines but not Malaysia. I also conduct analysis to generalize beyond China.

In my two years of fieldwork in China, I leveraged my native-Chinese language capability by conducting over 150 interviews with Chinese government analysts and former civilian and military officials. I interviewed foreign diplomats, officials, and military officers during my nine-month fieldwork in DC to triangulate against Chinese sources. This qualitative research allows me to use intra- and inter-case variation to test the hypotheses in my book manuscript. For example, it was through interviews that I heard former Chinese officials and policy analysts admit that China's rationale of coercion was to "kill the chicken to scare the monkey," coercing one state to deter others. This phrase is a direct evidence to one of the main arguments in my book project, but would never appear in publicly available Chinese documents.