China’s Use of Armed Coercion: To Win Without Fighting

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One of the most vexing foreign policy challenges for U.S. analysts, warfighters, and policymakers is how to deal with China’s gray zone activities. How does the United States—which is a major power wielding a big stick—counter China’s military activities that have a coercive effect on other countries but stop short of acts of war or even acts that trigger a kinetic response? China’s Use of Armed Coercion, an edited volume consisting of 10 chapters and a conclusion by James Siebens of the Stimson Center, aims to address this question by collecting documentation and analysis by several authors, all looking at the various methods by which and venues where China employs military and paramilitary forces as a means of signaling and coercing without crossing any military tripwires. As with any edited volume, there is a range of research depth and strategies employed throughout. That said, the jewel in this research crown is the statistical analysis of over 200 coercive military operations conducted by China between 2000 and 2021. This appears in the chapter “Assessing China’s Use of Armed Coercion.”

One challenge for edited multi-author volumes is establishing a common denominator in the analysis. The authors address a broad general question of how China employes subkinetic armed coercion to achieve its goals, but the authors sometimes employ different paths to present their analysis and answer that question. Consequently, there are different degrees of success. Along with the chapter “Assessing China’s Use of Armed Coercion,” “China and Japan: The Return of Rivalry” presents useful data and trend analysis of territorial incursions that could be useful for other studies of East China Sea tensions. However, there are times when the chapters focus a bit too heavily on historical events and too lightly on actionable patterns of behavior. There are portions where there is a plethora of background but a dearth of analysis.

Fortunately for the reader, the conclusion collects and synthesizes in a coherent fashion the lessons that are derived from all the preceding chapters. Among the lessons that best improve the reader’s understanding of this topic is that China relies on framing its coercion as defensive and occurring only in response to provocations from other states. That said, China’s regional ambitions are manifested through its growing power-projection capabilities and actions that are often coupled with intimidation of weaker neighbors.

Another lesson is how China uses its military as a political signaling tool, particularly in the context of deterrence. Understanding China’s approaches to deterrence is crucial, according to many authors. For China, “deterrence” (or weishe) is “an active response that targets the psychological, cognitive, and decisionmaking systems of the opponent, and its effect is to make the adversary aware, on the balance of probabilities, that taking a certain action will cost them more than they can afford and gain.” The authors explain how China operationalizes this concept through direct deterrence, rollback deterrence, and coercion. The most notable examples occur when China uses direct deterrence to coerce weaker neighbors over sovereignty disputes, such as deploying ship patrols around the Second Thomas Shoal to intimidate the Philippines or building up its military along the Sino-Indian border. Siebens concludes that China’s use of the military as a direct deterrent yields the best results for Beijing, but the use of political and economic coercion tends to result in political backlash from the target country. He also highlights that China usually backs down from a situation that could result in a direct military confrontation.

China’s Use of Armed Coercion avoids the trap of outlining a problem without offering any guidance on how to mitigate it. Siebens also offers policy recommendations, most notably that avoiding a hot war with China is imperative but that the United States must still bolster allies’ confidence in U.S. reliability. To do this, it should bolster the capabilities of countries most vulnerable to China’s abuses. Specifically, he calls for enhancing “deterrence by detection” through improved maritime domain awareness, along with improving maritime law enforcement and border forces.

This book is especially relevant to the joint force, as it deals with the challenge of using military tools in nonmilitary means. China’s use of its military to signal and coerce, generally in nonwar contexts, must be understood by analysts, planners, and policymakers to craft a viable counterpolicy. This book’s research and analysis is most enlightening when paired with analysis of China’s use of coercion via nonmilitary actors. In other words, China’s use of coercion for political ends must be examined across the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic (DIME) spectrum. While this book thoroughly explores the “M” element of this strategy, it is best when fused with D, I, and E analysis to form a holistic view. That would be the only way to isolate cause and effect variables in terms of policy goals, that is, how much policy success resulted from military coercion and how much from economic coercion, and so forth.

This book also passively weighs into the debate over the scope of China’s territorial ambitions and how much of a threat it is. It is hard to deduce an endstate for China’s overall territorial ambitions when reading these chapters. We may infer that China is confined to formally claimed territories such as the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea or the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. Yet we may also conclude that claims limited to East and South Asia does not mean that China can be easily managed, given that the authors describe a China that pushes the envelope and seeks territorial gains at others’ expense, usually in contravention of international law.

China’s Use of Armed Coercion will prove helpful for those wishing to understand China’s pattern of behavior in terms of its military and nonmilitary contexts. It is crucial for those concerned with crisis prevention and crisis management with China. In an era of gray zone tensions and fears of accidents escalating into full-blown conflict, this book is especially valuable for discerning China’s strategic and operational goals in such contexts. In other words, this book is a valuable resource for the U.S. national security community as competition with China continues to grow. JFQ