Power Shifts and Escalation: Explaining China’s Use of Force in Territorial Disputes

Although China has been involved in twenty-three territorial disputes with its neighors since 1949, it has used force in only six of them. The strength of a state's territorial claim, defined as its barganing power in a dispute, offers one explanation for why and when states escalate territorial disputes to high levels of violence. This barganing power depends on the amount of contested land that each side controls and on the military power that can be projected over the entire area under dispute. When a state's barganing power declines relative to that of its adversary, its leaders become more pessimistic about achieving their territorial goals and face strong preventative motivations to seize disputed land or signal resolve through the use of force. Cross-sectional analysis and longitudinal case studies demonstrate that such negative shifts in barganing power explain the majority of China's uses of force in its territorial disputes.