State strategy in territorial conflict: a conceptual analysis of China's strategy in the South China Sea.

• Author: Taffer, Andrew

Although the study of territorial disputes is one of the most dynamic subfields within International Relations, remarkably little scholarship has been produced that deals explicitly with state strategy in such conflicts. (1) M. Taylor Fravel, however, an expert on the People's Republic of China's (PRC) territorial disputes, has offered an important conceptual framework on the subject and one that has gained traction within the subfield. (2) In his analysis of China's strategy towards its disputes in the South China Sea, Fravel summarizes his framework thus:

In any given territorial dispute, a state can pursue one of three general strategies for managing its claims. First, it can pursue a strategy of cooperation, which excludes threats or the use of force and involves an offer to either transfer control of contested land or drop claims to an existing piece of territory. Second, by contrast, a state can pursue a strategy of escalation, engaging in coercive diplomacy to achieve a favourable outcome at the negotiating table or using force to seize contested land. Finally, a state can adopt a delaying strategy, which involves maintaining a state's claim to a piece of land but neither offering concessions nor using force. (3) This typology, drawn from Fravel's path-breaking study of conflict and cooperation in China's territorial disputes, Strong Borders, Secure Nation, constitutes an ostensibly elegant and intuitive conceptual framework by which to categorize state strategies. (4)

While appropriate for certain tasks, e.g., theory building and theory testing, I argue that Fravel's conceptual framework is problematic for others, namely understanding state strategy towards a particular territorial dispute or set of disputes, including China's strategy in the South China Sea.

Although the framework's three general strategies are presented to be mutually exclusive, I argue that it is not clear that they should be regarded as such. Not only can a strategy of escalation be compatible with one of delay, but many uses of force can be employed instrumentally in service of delaying. Furthermore, I argue that while Fravel's strategies of escalation and delay are conceived expansively, the strategy of cooperation is rendered narrowly, raising questions about the degree of consistency with which the respective strategies are conceived. Fravel's typology, I contend, does not so much capture strategy as it does certain aspects--or, perhaps more accurately, certain outcomes--of strategy.

The argument proceeds in five parts. First, I examine the mutually exclusive nature of Fravel's candidate strategies and the means-ends relationships contained within them. The second section analyses each of the strategies themselves, highlighting problems of conceptual stretching and consistency across the typology. In the third section, I speculate that undergirding the framework is an interest less in strategy per se and more in certain aspects--or certain outcomes--of strategy. While for a study like Strong Borders this is understandable, for an analysis of China's strategy in the South China Sea, it is less so. Fourth, the 2012 incident at Scarborough Shoal is surveyed and China's strategy during the event is analysed with particular emphasis on its subtler, but nonetheless critical, elements. Despite occurring after the publication of Fravel's 2011 essay in Contemporary Southeast Asia, the incident is among the most significant events to occur in the South China Sea in the past few years and constitutes a useful episode by which to assess the utility of applying the framework to an analysis of narrower scope. I conclude by arguing that a framework for conceptualizing state strategy in territorial disputes should not be confined to three alternatives; it should be more broadly constructed, allowing for more nuance and taking seriously all the domains of statecraft.

Mutual Exclusivity

When Fravel writes, "in any given territorial dispute, a state can pursue one of three general strategies for managing its claims [emphasis added]", the implication is that these strategies are mutually exclusive. (5) Throughout his work, moreover, whatever strategy Beijing is assessed to have adopted in any given dispute at any time, it is to the exclusion of the other two. It is not clear, however, that the three are in fact incompatible, or ought to be conceived in such a way. A critical analysis of Fravel's general strategy of delay is a good place to begin an investigation into the underlying relationships between his candidate strategies.

Although his conception of a delaying strategy precludes engaging in coercive diplomacy or using force, in an introductory outline of his three general strategies in Strong Borders, he characterizes a strategy of delay as "do nothing and delay settlement". (6) Throughout the book he uses the term in exactly this way: referring straightforwardly to delaying a dispute's resolution. For example, he writes, "In the absence of either internal or external threats to its security, a state has little reason to pursue cooperation in a dispute and should delay settlement instead." (7) Elsewhere he writes, "throughout the 1950s, many neighbors on its land border sought to enter into boundary talks with China, but ... China preferred to delay the resolution of these disputes. In early 1960, China's approach shifted ... [and] regime insecurity best explains China's shift from delay to cooperation." (8)

So conceived, a strategy of delaying settlement is not equivalent to the definition offered above of "maintaining claims but neither offering concessions nor using force". (9) A strategy of maintaining claims while delaying resolution is not necessarily incompatible with threatening or using force. If, for example, a state perceives its claims to be under threat, it may well decide that using force is necessary simply to maintain its claims at their prior strength. A strategy of delaying resolution would be incompatible with engaging in coercive diplomacy or using force if all such efforts invariably aimed either to seize territory or achieve dispute resolution. (10) This is, however, not the case. While some uses of force are clearly designed to change the territorial status quo and/or impose a resolution of some kind on a rival claimant, very often force is threatened--e.g., in a political statement--or used in a way aimed at neither outcome--e.g., to signal resolve. (11) That Fravel's conceptual framework uses an "or" structure--i.e., at any given time "a state can pursue one of three general strategies"--is puzzling because his candidate strategy of escalation is explicitly conceived to subsume exactly such threats and uses of force. (12)

In his work, Fravel considers Chinese uses of force that seek neither to change the territorial status quo nor to impose resolution to constitute a strategy of escalation. For example, he discusses Beijing's decision to go to war with India in 1962 in response to New Delhi's positioning of forces in contested territory. Among the most notable aspects of the 1962 war, however, is that despite victory on the battlefield such that, as Fravel writes, "China was clearly able to occupy whatever areas it wanted", the People's Liberation Army (PLA) unilaterally withdrew, returning to what was essentially the line of actual control ex ante. (13) The conventional understanding, with which his account accords, is that Beijing went to war less to change the territorial status quo than to preserve it.

In the 1995-96 Taiwan Straits Crisis, Fravel notes that the Chinese leadership sought to put on a "show of force", consisting of live fire exercises and a series of missile tests. (14) Beijing's objectives, according to Fravel, were to "arrest Taiwan's continued drift toward independence and international legitimacy, while deterring the United States from encouraging and supporting Taiwan". (15) Here too, nothing in Beijing's strategic calculus suggests that the display of force--representative for Fravel of an escalatory strategy --was intended to seize any Taiwanese territory much less to impose some kind of resolution on the issue of the island's status. In these and other cases, as Thomas Christensen has demonstrated, China used force in a "therapeutic rather than curative" manner. (16)

Force can be threatened or used in a variety of ways that are compatible with delaying resolution. While a state employing coercive diplomacy might well be concurrently pursuing a strategy of delay, phrased differently, a state pursuing a strategy of delay may be instrumentally employing coercive diplomacy. That is, not only can using force and delaying resolution be compatible with one another, but it is also possible that the former may be used as a means to the latter. This is precisely the dynamic mentioned above--i.e., a state threatening or using force in order to maintain the strength of its claims--and one with which the PRC seems to have a robust track record.

If maintaining claims and delaying resolution can be plausibly conceived as a near- or medium-term strategic objective, this is at deviance with Fravel's understanding and the structure of his framework. For Fravel, delaying--like using force and offering concessions--is conceived as a means to certain ends. (17) While it makes sense, at some level, to organize alternative strategies principally according to their means, as they are observable in ways the ends of strategy are not, it does not make sense to conceive of "delaying" exclusively as a means. (18) Fravel recognizes that for states in territorial disputes it is imperative that they maintain their claims--indeed, this end is built into his definition of the strategy. (19) He also states that, consistent with a delaying strategy, states "can take actions to assert their claims, not just in terms of diplomatic statements, but also by using civilian or military actors to demonstrate and...