초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Despite Chinas repeated assurance of her peaceable foreign policy intentions and never seek hegemony claims, skeptics rebuke these as mere smoke screen that covers her ambitious forward thrust, as evidenced by, for example, Chinas aggressive moves in South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. Some China specialists, from both academic and policy-making circles, affirm that China is more prone to using force to settle territorial disputes, which implicitly assumes that it is Chinas inherent preference to resort to militarized confrontation in territorial conflicts. However, one wonders whether this is a true reflection of Chinas foreign policy preferences? Furthermore, if her preferences can be identified, are they invariant or are they subject to change under certain external and internal conditions? Trying to synthesize the rationalist and constructivist approaches, this study aims to identify Chinas preferences by employing a positive methodology, the Boolean algebraic approach, to determine the conditions under which China would be likely to resort to force in international disputes, and then extrapolates from the derived result to depict a probable scenario in the future of South China Sea territorial controversies. Based on the examination of Chinas past (1950-1996) international disputes, the current analysis finds that a conflict that involves territorial disputes would not easily escalate into militarized confrontation. Moreover, institutions matter to a large degree in conditioning Chinas proneness to using force to settle external disputes. These findings thus offer a more cautious but sophisticated reading of the China-threat rhetoric.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
China, use of force, state preferences, international institutions, Boolean algebra, threshold of risk tolerance, South China Sea
