Description: Emerging from an award-winning article in International Security, China's Gambit examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes and issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, yet China is curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion. This book offers a new and generalizable cost-balancing theory to explain states' coercion decisions. It demonstrates that China does not coerce frequently and uses military coercion less when it becomes stronger, resorting primarily to non-militarized tools. Leveraging rich empirical evidence, including primary Chinese documents and interviews with Chinese and foreign officials, this book explains how contemporary rising powers translate their power into influence and offers a new framework for explaining states' coercion decisions in an era of economic interdependence, particularly how contemporary global economic interdependence affects rising powers' foreign security policies.
Brief description: Ketian Zhang is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University. She studies rising powers' grand strategies, coercion, economic statecraft, and maritime disputes, with a focus on China. Her research has appeared in International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, Asia Policy, and Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs.
Review Quotes: 'Ketian Zhang draws attention to the need for a clearer understanding of when and how China resorts to coercion in its foreign policy. The result is a distinctive explanation that illuminates both the military and non-military aspects of the broad challenges a more capable China poses for international politics in the twenty-first century.' Avery Goldstein, University of Pennsylvania