The rising power’s audiences and cost trade-offs: explaining China’s escalation and deescalation in maritime disputes

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.