Summary
China is pursuing a policy of tailored coercion in the East and South China Seas that is destabilizing the Asia-Pacific region and spurring maritime competition. Although several other countries in the region are also seeking to advance their maritime and territorial claims, China’s behavior has been uniquely escalatory and revisionist. This report assesses the motives behind China’s increased coercion, why it might lead to maritime insecurity, and how the United States and regional actors can enhance their current efforts to mitigate conflict and preserve and augment a rules-based order in Asia.
Chinese tailored coercion involves a pattern of dialing up and dialing down coercive diplomacy and blending it with diplomacy, trade and investment, and other forms of engagement. It seeks to pressure target nations and isolate them politically so as not to spook the wider region. China is refining coercive diplomatic instruments of power to assert its maritime reach and alter the administrative status quo in the Western Pacific. This behavior is being executed through a series of policy pronouncements, domestic laws and maritime operations in and around its “near seas.” This assertiveness is the product of several overlapping trends, including: Chinese triumphalism in the wake of the 2008 Olympics and the global financial crisis, growing Chinese nationalism, enhanced Chinese military and maritime capabilities, bureaucratic politics and competition, high dependence on energy imports and external responses to internal sources of instability. There is considerable debate about which of these factors are most dominant.
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