Despite adverse implications for its image, when it comes to territorial disputes, China has been willing to employ coercion. But Beijing is selective regarding the timing, targets, and tools of coercion. Military coercion is rare and the forms and uses of coercion vary. In the face of what China sees as similar threats by different countries, for example, Beijing tends to tailor its responses, country by country, case by case. Dr. Zhang will focus on Chinese coercive behavior in the South China Sea. She will offer a new theory as to when, why, and how China coerces other states.  Leveraging a wealth of newly available primary documents and hundreds of hours of interviews with Chinese officials, she will trace the decision-making processes that result in coercion’s use or non-use.

Where others may view China as repetitively aggressive, Dr. Zhang sees a cautious bully that does not coerce frequently and has tended, as it has gained strength, to use non-kinetic kinds of coercion. She finds that protecting a reputation for resolve and calculating economic costs are critical elements in China’s decision-making regarding the (dis)advantages of coercing its neighbors. Nor is the intended target country necessarily clear. China often coerces one to deter another – “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.” Implications will also drawn from her research that can help in projecting China’s likely future foreign-policy behavior beyond Southeast Asia and in understanding the roles played by coercion in the strategies of states more generally.

To learn more about, watch a recent interview APARC filmed with Dr. Zhang.

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Abstract: My research investigates the formal institutionalization of inter-governmental cooperation among the three major Northeast Asian powers – China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea—in the face of a continued North Korean threat. How much of a shadow, if any, has North Korea’s nuclear weapons cast over the development of multilateralism in the region? Since 1999, the Northeast Asian region has seen intensifying institutionalization of cooperation among its major powers. In a region where the realist logic of state-centric nationalism, sovereignty, and balance of power still prevails, this new development of trilateral cooperation among the former and potential adversaries deserves serious scholarly investigation. What started as economic and functional cooperation, trilateral cooperation has since been substantially expanded to include political and security agendas at the highest level of government. What explains the emergence and endurance of trilateral cooperation and to what extent has containing the North Korean nuclear crisis shaped its institutional trajectory and outcomes? By examining the evolution of trilateral cooperation, I address some critical gaps in our understanding of formal institution building and the economic-security nexus in one of the most dynamic regions in the world.

Speaker's Biography: Yeajin Yoon is a 2018-2019 MacArthur Nuclear Security Pre-doctoral Fellow at CISAC and a doctoral candidate in the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. Her dissertation examines the evolution of trilateral cooperation among the most militarily and economically dominant states in Northeast Asia, namely, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea, and considers when and how their relations become implicated in the North Korean nuclear crisis.

Prior to entering academia, Yeajin travelled extensively across Asia and worked with national governments, international organisations, and NGOs in the region. She led the development of the inaugural issue of the 'Oxford Government Review’ and helped facilitate a Track II dialogue on wartime history issues in Asia at Stanford University. Previously, she worked as a founding member of the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat, the official intergovernmental organisation for China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea and managed a development fund focused on the ASEAN region at the Korean Foreign Ministry.

Yeajin received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with Honors from Stanford University and a Master of Public Policy degree from Oxford University.