Coercive Leverage

How do nuclear-armed adversaries use force to pursue their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? In the post-Cold War era, China has taken a distinctive approach to this dilemma. Rather follow in the footsteps of its nuclear-armed peers to rely on threats of a conventional military victory or nuclear weapons use, China has defied the expectations of scholars and practitioners by searching for other military means to gain coercive leverage against its enemies. Instead, it has pursued information-age weapons—accurate missiles carrying conventional payloads, counterspace weapons, and offensive cyber capabilities—which it plans to use strategically to manipulate the risk of escalation to nuclear war.

My book manuscript, China’s Search for Coercive Leverage, develops a theory of strategic substitution to explain Beijing’s unprecedented gamble on information-age weapons. China pursued these capabilities when it faced leverage deficits. China’s best option to address a leverage deficit was to search for substitutes because its leaders doubted the credibility of issuing nuclear threats and its military could not prevail in a conventional conflict in the near term. By contrast, information-age weapons emerged as attractive substitutes because they promised to provide quick and credible coercive leverage. Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese language sources and interviews from fieldwork in China, the book manuscript provides a rare and candid glimpse of the view from Beijing. It offers important insights for scholars and practitioners into China’s current military trajectory, and how other states might seize upon the promise of emerging technologies to fix weaknesses in their own military strategies.

I recently published an International Security article, “Strategic Substitution: China’s Search for Coercive Leverage in the Information Age,” which draws on my book manuscript. The article uses the theory of strategic substitution to explain China’s pursuit a coercive cyberattack capability to address a leverage deficit after the United States bombed China's embassy in Belgrade in 1999. It also documents the evolution of the People’s Liberation Army’s force posture for offensive cyber operations as China’s own vulnerability to cyber attacks increased over time.

Photo (above): posters promoting reforms of the Chinese military at the end of 2015.