09-18-2021, 04:13 PM
What’s the solution?
A coordinated and sustained international effort by foreign governments and companies is needed to counter this coercive diplomacy and uphold global stability. This can be achieved by the following means:
Increase global situational awareness about the widespread use of coercive diplomacy and the most effective strategies to counter it.
Respond via coordinated and joint pushback through multilateral forums and by building minilateral coalitions of states affected by the same coercive methods.
Five Eyes countries should consider adopting a collective economic security measure, analogous to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty establishing NATO. Using their collective intelligence arrangements and by pulling in other partners, authoritative joint attributions could be made of any coercive measures levied against any of the members with collective economic and diplomatic measures taken in response.
Factor in the heightened risk of doing business and building economic relations with China, particularly with regard to trade flows, supply chains and market share.
Develop economic, foreign and trade protocols in collaboration with the business community on how best to respond to coercive methods applied to business. In cases of coordinated action against companies, the dispute should be elevated to a state-level discussion to prevent individual companies being picked off and capitulating.
Introduction
First, as a responsible major country, China stands upright with honour. We never strong-arm others, never seek supremacy, never withdraw from commitments, never bully others, and never complain. The word ‘coercion’ has nothing to do with China.
— Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, October 2019.3
The past three years have seen an escalation in the CCP’s political and strategic use of coercive measures to defend what it defines as China’s ‘core’ national interests.4 Those interests include preserving domestic stability, stimulating economic development, upholding territorial integrity and securing great power status.5 The CCP has made it clear that these interests are ‘non-negotiable bottom lines of Chinese foreign policy’.6 Elizabeth Economy, the Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, explains that President Xi Jinping desires to ‘use China’s power to influence others and to establish the global rules of the game’ to protect and promote China’s national interests.7
Coercive diplomacy can be defined as ‘non-militarised coercion’ or ‘the use of threats of negative actions to force the target state to change behaviour’.8 This is in contrast with chequebook diplomacy, in which positive inducements and confidence-building measures in the forms of foreign assistance and promised investment are used by states, including the CCP, to reward countries.9 This carrot-and-stick approach reflects ‘a new level of assertiveness, confidence and ambition’ in the CCP’s foreign policy and economic diplomacy.10
Every country is concerned about protecting its interests and playing to its strengths. Larger states, such as the US and Russia, have applied pressure to smaller states to get what they want with varying levels of success.11 Nevertheless, the CCP’s approach is unique in that it rarely employs traditional methods of coercive diplomacy, which are regulated through the state’s official capacity.12 The CCP is instead arbitrarily imposing measures without officially acknowledging the link between the measures taken and the CCP’s interests, which allows for greater flexibility in escalating or de-escalating situations with less accountability and international oversight.13 This non-traditional type of coercive diplomacy therefore requires a very different set of policy tools and responses.
This research has documented 152 instances of CCP coercive diplomacy between 2010 and 2020 (Figure 1). Of those cases, 100 targeted foreign governments, while the remaining 52 cases targeted specific companies.
![[Image: pb36-fig1.jpg]](https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2020-08/pb36-fig1.jpg)
Figure 1 shows a sharp increase in the number of recorded cases from 2018 onwards. Although it isn’t possible to show the full dataset for 2020, within the first eight months there were 34 recorded cases, which equates to more than half of the number recorded in 2019.
Coercive diplomacy from the CCP’s perspective
The CCP has been persistent in maintaining the narrative that its actions are proportionate to its pursuit of protecting core national interests. Most Chinese-language sources examined for this report indicate that, from the CCP’s perspective, coercive diplomacy is an instrument that’s either exclusively used by the West and to which the CCP objects,14 or is carried out by the general Chinese public and has nothing to do with the government.15
However, Chinese state-run think tanks and media organisations have explicitly encouraged the use of coercive diplomatic tactics against offending actors.16 Jian Jisong, an international law expert at the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, writes that ‘China should liberate its thinking, and fully utilise the important tool of unilateral sanctions’.17 That sentiment is also reflected by the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations, a think tank closely associated with the Ministry of State Security, which states that ‘given the fact that our nation has increasing economic power, we should prudently use economic sanctions against those countries that … threaten our country’s national interests’.18
The CCP, particularly under the leadership of Xi Jinping, has made it increasingly clear that the party ‘leads everything’ and is in strict control of the country through its ‘ideology’ and ‘structural system’.19 This differs from liberal democracies in that China’s core national interests are closely centred on the CCP’s own self-defined political security. Any conduct by foreign states or companies perceived to breach these core national interests is therefore treated as a direct threat to the legitimacy and survival of the CCP (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Global Times tweet depicting Australia as a puppet of the US and issuing a warning against key Australian industries
![[Image: pb36-fig2.jpg]](https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2020-08/pb36-fig2.jpg)
Source: Global Times (@globaltimesnews), ‘Opinion: If #Australia provokes China more, China will fight it to the end to defend its core interests’, Twitter, 2:20 am, 9 July 2020, online.
A coordinated and sustained international effort by foreign governments and companies is needed to counter this coercive diplomacy and uphold global stability. This can be achieved by the following means:
Increase global situational awareness about the widespread use of coercive diplomacy and the most effective strategies to counter it.
Respond via coordinated and joint pushback through multilateral forums and by building minilateral coalitions of states affected by the same coercive methods.
Five Eyes countries should consider adopting a collective economic security measure, analogous to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty establishing NATO. Using their collective intelligence arrangements and by pulling in other partners, authoritative joint attributions could be made of any coercive measures levied against any of the members with collective economic and diplomatic measures taken in response.
Factor in the heightened risk of doing business and building economic relations with China, particularly with regard to trade flows, supply chains and market share.
Develop economic, foreign and trade protocols in collaboration with the business community on how best to respond to coercive methods applied to business. In cases of coordinated action against companies, the dispute should be elevated to a state-level discussion to prevent individual companies being picked off and capitulating.
Introduction
First, as a responsible major country, China stands upright with honour. We never strong-arm others, never seek supremacy, never withdraw from commitments, never bully others, and never complain. The word ‘coercion’ has nothing to do with China.
— Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, October 2019.3
The past three years have seen an escalation in the CCP’s political and strategic use of coercive measures to defend what it defines as China’s ‘core’ national interests.4 Those interests include preserving domestic stability, stimulating economic development, upholding territorial integrity and securing great power status.5 The CCP has made it clear that these interests are ‘non-negotiable bottom lines of Chinese foreign policy’.6 Elizabeth Economy, the Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, explains that President Xi Jinping desires to ‘use China’s power to influence others and to establish the global rules of the game’ to protect and promote China’s national interests.7
Coercive diplomacy can be defined as ‘non-militarised coercion’ or ‘the use of threats of negative actions to force the target state to change behaviour’.8 This is in contrast with chequebook diplomacy, in which positive inducements and confidence-building measures in the forms of foreign assistance and promised investment are used by states, including the CCP, to reward countries.9 This carrot-and-stick approach reflects ‘a new level of assertiveness, confidence and ambition’ in the CCP’s foreign policy and economic diplomacy.10
Every country is concerned about protecting its interests and playing to its strengths. Larger states, such as the US and Russia, have applied pressure to smaller states to get what they want with varying levels of success.11 Nevertheless, the CCP’s approach is unique in that it rarely employs traditional methods of coercive diplomacy, which are regulated through the state’s official capacity.12 The CCP is instead arbitrarily imposing measures without officially acknowledging the link between the measures taken and the CCP’s interests, which allows for greater flexibility in escalating or de-escalating situations with less accountability and international oversight.13 This non-traditional type of coercive diplomacy therefore requires a very different set of policy tools and responses.
This research has documented 152 instances of CCP coercive diplomacy between 2010 and 2020 (Figure 1). Of those cases, 100 targeted foreign governments, while the remaining 52 cases targeted specific companies.
Figure 1 shows a sharp increase in the number of recorded cases from 2018 onwards. Although it isn’t possible to show the full dataset for 2020, within the first eight months there were 34 recorded cases, which equates to more than half of the number recorded in 2019.
Coercive diplomacy from the CCP’s perspective
The CCP has been persistent in maintaining the narrative that its actions are proportionate to its pursuit of protecting core national interests. Most Chinese-language sources examined for this report indicate that, from the CCP’s perspective, coercive diplomacy is an instrument that’s either exclusively used by the West and to which the CCP objects,14 or is carried out by the general Chinese public and has nothing to do with the government.15
However, Chinese state-run think tanks and media organisations have explicitly encouraged the use of coercive diplomatic tactics against offending actors.16 Jian Jisong, an international law expert at the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, writes that ‘China should liberate its thinking, and fully utilise the important tool of unilateral sanctions’.17 That sentiment is also reflected by the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations, a think tank closely associated with the Ministry of State Security, which states that ‘given the fact that our nation has increasing economic power, we should prudently use economic sanctions against those countries that … threaten our country’s national interests’.18
The CCP, particularly under the leadership of Xi Jinping, has made it increasingly clear that the party ‘leads everything’ and is in strict control of the country through its ‘ideology’ and ‘structural system’.19 This differs from liberal democracies in that China’s core national interests are closely centred on the CCP’s own self-defined political security. Any conduct by foreign states or companies perceived to breach these core national interests is therefore treated as a direct threat to the legitimacy and survival of the CCP (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Global Times tweet depicting Australia as a puppet of the US and issuing a warning against key Australian industries
Source: Global Times (@globaltimesnews), ‘Opinion: If #Australia provokes China more, China will fight it to the end to defend its core interests’, Twitter, 2:20 am, 9 July 2020, online.