Theoretical debates over international legal regimes, such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), have tended to revolve around the constraints international law may or may not place on confrontational state behaviour, leaving its constitutive aspects underexplored. This talk offers a counterintuitive explanation for why tensions in the South China Sea have risen, not declined, in the UNCLOS era. The new international regime reconstituted China and its neighbours’ interests in jurisdiction at sea to produce harder, yet also more ambiguous claim.

A common assertion is that Beijing undertakes deliberate, costly, and publicly visible efforts to punish actors that challenge or undermine its interests and policies with the intent of discouraging others from doing the same, to ‘kill chickens to scare monkeys’. Much of the scholarly and policy attention relating to this phenomenon focuses on the nature of PRC coercion. Less consideration is given to when, why and how much governments give in to PRC concerns preemptively when they see other states bearing costs imposed by Beijing for alleged infractions.

China sometimes seems to send contradictory and confusing signals in foreign policy. While China is often eager to promote its soft power, why do some Chinese officials spread messages that hurt rather than promote China’s international image? Why would the Chinese diplomatic narrative become more assertive in recent years? This talk will analyse China’s diplomatic signals in multiple domains. The empirical examples include China’s regional diplomacy as well as its ‘Twitter diplomacy’.

Commentators: Samuel Bagg and Jamie Ranger

Email sophie.smith@univ.ox.ac.uk to be put on the OPT mailing list to receive the Zoom link