Research

Jackie S.H. Wong, “Forecasting the Use of Force: A Word Embedding Analysis of China’s Rhetoric and Military Escalations” (Condictional Acceptence to Political Science Research and Methods)

Is an autocracy’s official rhetoric a reliable proxy to forecast its military escalations? While the conventional hands-tying mechanism asserts that a state’s official rhetoric binds it to a position, reducing its ability to back down, recent literature on bluster suggests that autocracies may also use hawkish rhetoric to justify inaction and deescalation ex post. This research evaluates these competing perspectives by analyzing China’s rhetoric and military escalations in the Taiwan Strait from 2016 to 2022. Through a word embedding approach, I introduce an original Chinese-language lexicon that captures China’s implicit threats based on over two million [People’s Daily] articles. I present systematic evidence that China’s implicit threats against Taiwan correlate with the likelihood of its military escalations. These findings offer new empirical insights to address the debate between bluster and hands-tying mechanisms.

“Tying-Hands Versus Bluster: Authoritativeness, Words, and Deeds in Crisis Communication” Coauthored with Zenobia T. Chan and Noel Foster

When do public statements reveal a state’s true intentions? While much of the international relations literature argues that states issue public threats during crises to tie their own hands, recent research suggests that public signals are often noisier than private ones and states bluster to de-escalate. We contend that a state can simultaneously tie its own hands and bluster during a crisis, albeit through communication channels of different authoritativeness. Less authoritative channels offer plausible deniability, making bluster more likely, whereas states are more inclined to tie their hands through more authoritative channels. Examining China’s public threats to Taiwan in 3,635 newspaper articles from 2016–2022, we find systematic evidence supporting our argument. We show that only military threats published in People’s Daily — the most authoritative newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party — forecast incursions by the People’s Liberation Army into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. In contrast, threats published in less authoritative outlets like the Global Times do not. Our findings reconcile the seemingly contradictory mechanisms of tying hands and bluster, and offer implications for crisis de-escalation.

“Unraveling China’s Military Diplomacy: China’s Military Engagement and Cooperation with ASEAN” Coauthored with Zenobia T. Chan and Noel Foster

Does China’s military engagement lead to heightened military cooperation in Southeast Asia? While recent International Relations research emphasizes the role of diplomacy in overcoming structural challenges such as relative gain and trust to form military coalitions, most focus on the case of the U.S. and its alliance formation. This paper uniquely explores Chinese military diplomacy, a crucial but often neglected aspect of China’s relationship with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Through developing an original dataset encompassing all senior-level Chinese military visits to ASEAN countries since 2000, we observe a consistent diplomatic emphasis by China’s high-ranking military leadership, especially under President Xi Jinping, following previous administrations’ trends. However, despite these efforts, China’s senior military diplomacy shows a discernible lag in evolving into robust security cooperation with ASEAN, including joint military exercises and arms sales. Notably, while ASEAN countries engage in multilateral joint military exercises with China, bilateral exercises remain infrequent. Moreover, high-level engagement doesn’t correlate with increased arms sales from China to ASEAN countries. This study challenges the prevailing optimistic narrative of diplomacy overcoming structural barriers between a rising power and its regional states in the existing literature, highlighting that China’s military diplomacy is still in the nascent stage of forming deeper security relations with Southeast Asian nations. This is particularly apparent when compared to its economic engagement in the region and the established U.S.-ASEAN military ties.

• Quoted in South China Morning Post
• Featured as policy talk at ISEAS