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Correspondence: Is China a Cautious Bully?

Ketian Zhang’s article is an important contribution to the literature on Chinese foreign policy and coercive diplomacy. Her research design, however, is not best suited to demonstrate the key andings of her study: China is a cautious bully; it employs coercion only infrequently; and as it grows stronger, it uses military coercion less often.1 For reasons discussed below, it is premature to conclude that China’s “decisions about when to pursue coercion and which tools to use cannot be explained by focusing on material capabilities” (p. 119). First, Zhang’s decision to develop “a theory of coercion . . . in response to national security threats” means that every instance of coercion discussed in the article is a result of China’s failed deterrence against a challenge from another state (p. 119). Zhang mentions but does not analyze cases of proactive coercion; therefore, her andings about Chinese coercion apply only to China’s reactions to what Beijing considers to be provocations. A bully can get what it wants by using brute force or proactive coercion, but Zhang chooses to exclude these aspects from her analysis—for example, China’s land reclamation in the South China Sea (pp. 133–134). If, without provocation, China were to occupy disputed maritime features or to threaten a military attack to expel other disputants, Zhang’s operationalization would exclude this action from her analysis because it would be considered brute force or proactive coercion. Second, Zhang argues that “China has not used brute force in any of its territorial disputes in the South China Sea” since the 1990s, but I disagree with her use of the term “brute force” (p. 134). Indeed, China has refrained from using military violence since the 1990s in the South China Sea, whereas it fought against South Vietnam in 1974 and against Vietnam in 1988. Nevertheless, I argue that China has continued to use brute force, because scholars who study the use of coercion should distinguish brute force