Jackie S.H. Wong

Jackie S.H. Wong

PhD Candidate at USC

Research

“Leader Does Not Speak Lightly”: A 70-year Analysis on China’s Official Rhetoric and Costly Actions since 1949 (Under Review)

Is a state’s official rhetoric cheap? While realists and recent strategic interaction literature hold a pessimistic view of the credibility of official statements, recent literature on legitimation suggests that official rhetoric is a credible indicator of a state’s intentions. This research introduces a theory of escalation legitimation to resolve the debate. Drawing from elite interviews and China’s original policy documents, I argue that China’s escalations, including military deployments, drills, and attacks, are predictable from its official rhetoric. Prior to undertaking these costly actions, China elevates the levels of issue salience, defined by an actor’s interpretation of an incident that triggers its survival concerns and challenges its core interests, to legitimize its behaviors to neutral states. I test my hypothesis by creating an original Chinese-language lexicon and a dataset comprising 9,000 People’s Daily articles that cover 26 of China’s foreign disputes and crises. I find systematic evidence that the more salient China defines an incident, the more likely and costly its escalation becomes within a 30-day window. A case study of the China-Taiwan cross-strait relationship from 2010 to 2022 further supports the statistical results. This research provides fresh empirical evidence and perspective to contribute to the debate on the credibility of states’ official rhetoric. It also provides insights into the ongoing debate about U.S.-China power competition.

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.