Amidst the mounting anxiety over China's supposedly more aggressive foreign policy, Angela Poh's valuable new book explores an intriguing puzzle: what explains China's restraint in using unilateral economic sanctions up until March 2018? Her answer is both innovative and important: China's longstanding rhetorical opposition to Western sanctions has constrained Beijing's own use of economic sanctions.
Faced with Western sanctions ever since the PRC's inception, Chinese policymakers responded with what Poh labels a “counter-stigmatisation” strategy: denouncing the legitimacy of Western sanctions while insisting that sanctions should not be used to promote democracy or human rights and should only be imposed when agreed upon by the UN Security Council.
This rhetoric has trapped Beijing, Poh argues. Chinese leaders’ concerns with international audience costs limit their willingness to impose sanctions while enabling target countries to constrain China's use of sanctions by either “shaming” or “flattery,” namely, pointing out Beijing's hypocrisy in deploying the very sanctions it has denounced for decades.
Poh's book is structured around comparing this rhetorical argument against four competing explanations for China's apparent restraint: that China is not yet powerful enough, or is constrained by domestic actors, by its participation in international organizations (primarily, the WTO), or by its own strategic culture. She starts off by explaining the theory of international audience costs and then documents Beijing's “counter-stigmatisation” strategy through a detailed coding of 768 speeches by Chinese representatives to the UN from 1997 to 2016.
Her core empirical argument is delivered in three subsequent chapters. The first, covering 34 cases of UN Security Council sanctions, finds that Chinese rhetoric aligned with Beijing's votes in 18 cases, while China's “material interests” aligned with only ten cases. Counting this as a success for her claims, she then goes on to (favourably) compare her rhetorical argument against the four competing explanations in three brief case studies examining the logic behind Chinese support for UN sanctions against North Korea, Syria and Guinea-Bissau.
The final two empirical chapters re-examine eight “classic” cases of China's unilateral sanctions between 2008 and 2018: against France, the US, Japan, Norway, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan and South Korea. Poh highlights the unofficial, limited and ad-hoc nature of Chinese sanctions in these cases, while arguing that once “other parties used rhetorical action such as shaming or flattery to draw international attention to Chinese behaviour,” Beijing was compelled to withdraw or reduce its sanctions (p. 223). The concluding chapter reiterates her core claim, namely: compared to the four alternative explanations, China's “longstanding sanctions rhetoric has had the most influence on its sanctions behaviour” (p. 259).
Boldly, Poh concludes by predicting continuity. While noting China's recent use of economic pressure (such as toward Australia) and acknowledging the “increased willingness” of Chinese leaders to deploy “implicit and informal” economic sanctions, she predicts that Chinese sanctions will remain ambiguous, targeted, and limited in scope and duration (p. 272).
Poh's intensive and rigorous inquiry into Chinese official rhetoric and her creative exploration into the constraining effects of this rhetoric upon China's use of sanctions and its voting patterns in the UN are notable strengths. She also provides a useful index explaining her coding choices, enhancing the book's value for graduate students and scholars. However, what Poh describes as a significant level of correlation between China's rhetoric and its UN voting patterns (18 of 34 cases) might also be interpreted as a high level of hypocrisy. The surprising claim that China went against its own material interests in 24 of the 34 cases (p. 146) raises questions about the coding of these interests.
While Chinese sanctions are defined – correctly, in my estimation – as generally “ad hoc,” “limited in scope and duration” (p. 17) and “relatively restrained and reluctant” (p. 20), the absence of clear and consistent standards for measuring this restraint limits the potential for comparisons with other countries or for assessing potential changes going forward.
The core mechanism by which China's rhetoric actually constrains Beijing's actions also remains underspecified. It is unclear, for instance, whether the causal mechanism relies more upon a psychological argument about Chinese concerns with “status” or more upon a rationalist approach highlighting reputational concerns over making credible commitments. There are a number of unexplored, alternative reasons why Beijing relies upon an informal, ad-hoc, limited approach to sanctions (for instance, it limits domestic costs while reducing diplomatic tensions). Furthermore, as Poh concedes, the case studies offer limited evidence of her hypothesized mechanism actually affecting Chinese actions (p. 249).
Surprisingly, the concluding chapter only briefly mentions what may be the most important policy implication, namely “even small states that are economically dependent upon China” can use shaming or flattery to “either coerce or induce China to change its behaviour in a more favourable direction” (p. 267). Presumably, this technique would be even more effective if deployed more widely and by more powerful states, offering countries targeted by Chinese economic sanctions a low-cost, high-payoff tool for restraining China's use of economic coercion.
As anxiety over China's presumed assertiveness continues to surge around the world, Poh's book thus offers a compelling case that policymakers should explicitly call out Beijing's hypocrisy when it deploys sanctions. This innovative policy implication, augmented by the book's conceptual and methodological contributions, render this work a timely and important contribution to our understanding of China's economic statecraft.
