Princeton Studies in International History and Politics

Cooperation and Conflict in China's Territorial Disputes

M. Taylor Fravel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781400828876
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As China emerges as an international economic and military power, the world waits to see how the nation will assert itself globally. Yet, as M. Taylor Fravel shows in Strong Borders, Secure Nation, concerns that China might be prone to violent conflict over territory are overstated. The first comprehensive study of China's territorial disputes, Strong Borders, Secure Nation contends that China over the past sixty years has been more likely to compromise in these conflicts with its Asian neighbors and less likely to use force than many scholars or analysts might expect.
By developing theories of cooperation and escalation in territorial disputes, Fravel explains China's willingness to either compromise or use force. When faced with internal threats to regime security, especially ethnic rebellion, China has been willing to offer concessions in exchange for assistance that strengthens the state's control over its territory and people. By contrast, China has used force to halt or reverse decline in its bargaining power in disputes with its militarily most powerful neighbors or in disputes where it has controlled none of the land being contested. Drawing on a rich array of previously unexamined Chinese language sources, Strong Borders, Secure Nation offers a compelling account of China's foreign policy on one of the most volatile issues in international relations.

CHAPTER ONE

Cooperation and Escalation in Territorial Disputes

TERRITORIAL DISPUTES BEAR ON a state’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity, its core interests. Historically, they have been the most common issue over which states collide and go to war.¹ Decisions to cooperate or escalate in pursuit of a state’s territorial claims have enormous consequences for peace and stability in international relations. Why and when do states offer concessions, resolving a conflict that might otherwise escalate to war? Why and when will they use force instead?

China’s dispute over Taiwan underscores the importance of answering these questions. Taiwan is China’s most important and volatile territorial conflict. At the height of the 1995–96 crisis, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fired short-range ballistic missiles into target areas abutting the island’s two key ports. Since then, scholars, policy analysts, and diplomats have endeavored to understand when the next crisis might erupt and how it might be anticipated, managed, or even prevented. As China’s use of force across the Taiwan Strait would likely involve the United States and could easily escalate to high levels of violence, settlement of this dispute would remove the most probable venue for great-power war in East Asia today.

Within the past two decades, a vibrant research program on territorial disputes has emerged. A territorial dispute is defined as a conflicting claim by two or more states over the ownership of the same piece of land. This definition includes offshore islands but excludes disputes over maritime rights, such as exclusive economic zones (EEZs).² Through mostly quantitative analysis, scholars have identified important empirical regularities in how states behave in these disputes. Although this research has yielded numerous insights, four factors linked with the settlement and escalation of territorial disputes feature prominently in many studies. Both democracies and alliance partners in a territorial conflict with each other are more likely to compromise and often settle their disputes, and less likely to initiate military confrontations, than nondemocratic or nonaligned states in such conflicts with each other. By contrast, all types of states are more likely to use force and less likely to cooperate in disputes over land highly valued for its strategic importance, economic resources, or symbolic significance. Militarily stronger states are also usually more likely to use force to achieve their territorial goals than weaker ones that lack the means to resist or coerce their opponents.³

Although this research has deepened general knowledge about territorial disputes, it lacks a complete theoretical account for how states choose to pursue their territorial objectives. These studies illuminate mostly cross-sectional variation in the outcome of disputes, identifying those conflicts that are more likely to be settled or experience the use of force. Nevertheless, although factors such as the value of contested land vary widely across disputes, they are often constant in particular conflicts, which limits their ability to explain how individual states behave over time. If such factors do change, they are likely to shift slowly and therefore unlikely to explain otherwise dramatic decisions to cooperate or escalate. Yet as concern over conflict in the Taiwan Strait highlights, it is precisely these dramatic decisions in specific disputes that animate scholars and policymakers alike.

To explain why and when states use peaceful or violent means in territorial disputes, I shift the analytical focus from dispute outcomes to individual state decisions. Past research has identified which conflicts are most likely to be amenable to settlement or erupt in violence, but why and when states employ such means in any particular dispute requires further investigation. Given an incentive to compromise or escalate, the variables that current research highlights suggest when either outcome may occur. These incentives themselves, however, remain underexamined but critical to explaining how states behave in territorial disputes.

The Taiwan dispute illustrates the limits of existing approaches. As past research would predict, Taiwan is primed for conflict. It is China’s most important territorial dispute, linked to modern Chinese nationalism and the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and is an area of material as well as symbolic importance. Since 1949, China has possessed the military capabilities to attack Taiwan or the territories it controls. Moreover, China’s authoritarian political regime has placed few internal constraints on the use of force. Nevertheless, China’s willingness to escalate this dispute has varied widely over time, as Beijing initiated major crises in September 1954, August 1958, and July 1995. The importance of the island, China’s coercive means, and its nondemocratic political institutions are clearly part of the story, but these constant features fail to explain why China resorted to force at certain moments but not at other times.

To explain such variation, this chapter outlines two general theories that explain how states manage territorial disputes. Although this book examines China’s many disputes, I frame the analysis in terms of general theory for several reasons. How states behave in territorial conflicts is a basic problem in international relations with clear relevance beyond China. Likewise, China is only one of many great powers involved in such disputes, which suggests that explanations of its behavior should be rooted in theories of cooperation and escalation. Finally, examining China’s disputes in terms of general theory facilitates comparisons with other countries, which can illuminate the dynamics of territorial conflict more broadly.

Building on previous studies, I examine three generic strategies that national leaders can adopt to achieve a state’s territorial goals. The selection of a strategy precedes the final outcome of a dispute, which depends on the response of the opposing side. A delaying strategy involves doing nothing, whereby states maintain their territorial claims through public declarations but neither offer concessions nor use force. Importantly, states can delay by participating in negotiations while refusing to compromise. A cooperation strategy excludes the threat or use of force and involves an offer either to transfer control of some or all of the contested land to the opposing side or to drop claims to land held by the other state. Such compromise almost always precedes the final settlement of a dispute in a bilateral treaty or agreement, even in those settlements where one state drops its entire claim. By contrast, an escalation strategy involves the threat or use of force to seize land or coerce an opponent in a territorial dispute.⁴

As China’s behavior in the Taiwan conflict demonstrates, states frequently delay and do nothing because the alternatives are costly. Cooperation is costly because concessions over national sovereignty and territory can carry a high domestic political price, which may result in social unrest or creation of a reputation abroad for weakness. Escalation contains many risks as well, including the uncertainty associated with spirals of hostility or domestic political punishment for military defeat in addition to the human and material costs of war. As a result, from a national leader’s perspective, continuing a territorial dispute with a delaying strategy is often better than offering concessions or failing to gain disputed land on the battlefield.⁵

Under certain conditions, however, strategies of cooperation or escalation become more attractive than delay. To explain why and when a state shifts from delaying to adopting either of these strategies, the central task is to identify those factors that increase the price a state pays for maintaining a claim when compared to the alternatives. Toward this end, the theories presented below adopt a state-centric approach that Stephen Krasner developed and other scholars have adopted and refined.⁶

Under a state-centric approach, the state is viewed as a unitary actor that exists apart from the society that it governs. The state seeks to maximize its autonomy to ensure both its survival abroad and its self-preservation at home.⁷ To achieve these goals, the state must manage varied challenges. They can be external, such as threats from other states in the international arena to its power or territory. They can also be internal, such as coups, revolts, revolutions, secessions, or the collapse of law and order—anything that threatens the authority and control of the state within its borders. In this approach, national leaders craft and implement policy to advance the interests of the state as a whole, not their personal power or private welfare. The survival of the state trumps individual concerns, as any one leader’s ability for private gain depends on the continued existence of the state. In the realm of foreign policy, then, national leaders and the executive branch embody the state and act on its behalf.⁸

At first glance, these assumptions may appear to be too constricting. After all, scholars have demonstrated that societal interest groups, elite factions, leaders’ private interests, and bureaucracies can influence foreign policy decisions. Nevertheless, a state-centric approach is well suited for the study of territorial disputes. First, as territorial disputes are conflicts between nations over the control and ownership of land, they involve the core interests of states: the scope of national sovereignty and degree of territorial integrity. Unlike other policy areas, these interests can be deduced from the goals of survival and self-preservation, which require a state’s exclusive control over its territory.

Second, by casting the state as an autonomous actor inhabiting both international and domestic arenas, a state-centric approach suggests that a wide range of factors can create incentives for cooperation or escalation in territorial disputes. As the state seeks simultaneously survival abroad and self-preservation at home, foreign policy can be used to advance its internal goals while domestic policy can be employed to enhance its security abroad. Potential explanations of state behavior are not restricted to either the domestic or the international level of analysis, but result from the challenges that the state encounters both at home and abroad. Even though the unit of analysis is the state, it is not a black box whose internal dynamics are assumed away or deemed irrelevant to national leaders’ decisions made on behalf of the state.

Third, the emphasis on the state’s domestic interests in addition to its foreign ones permits a more nuanced understanding of the sources and degree of state power in international relations. Scholars in the classical and neoclassical realist traditions have recognized the importance of the domestic components of state power that Hans Morgenthau described as the “the quality of government” and “national morale”...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Cooperation and Escalation in Territorial Disputes
• Chapter Two: Cooperation in Frontier Disputes in the 1960s
• Chapter Three: Cooperation in Frontier Disputes in the 1990s
• Chapter Four: Escalation in Frontier Disputes
• Chapter Five: Homeland Disputes
• Chapter Six: Offshore Island Disputes
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Overview of China’s Territorial Disputes
• Bibliography
• Index