This article examines China's behaviour in the South China Sea disputes through the lens of its strategy for managing its claims. Since the mid-1990s, China has pursued a strategy of delaying the resolution of the dispute. The goai of this strategy is to consolidate China's claims, especially to maritime rights or jurisdiction over these waters, and to deter other states from strengthening their own claims at China's expense, including resource development projects that exclude China. Since the mid-2000s, the pace of China's efforts to consolidate its claims and deter others has increased through diplomatic, administrative and military means. Although China's strategy seeks to consolidate its own claims, it threatens weaker states in the dispute and is inherently destabilizing. As a result, the delaying strategy includes efforts to prevent the escalation of tensions while nevertheless seeking to consolidate China's claims.

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Since the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, scholars and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about China's territorial ambitions. Yet China has also used peaceful means to manage conficts, settling seventeen of its twenty-three territorial disputes, often with substantial compromises. This article develops a counterintuitive argument about the effects of domestic confict on foreign policy to explain China's behavior. Contrary to the diversionary war hypothesis, this argument posits that state leaders are more likely to compromise in territorial disputes when confronting internal threats to regime security, including rebellions and legitimacy crises. Regime insecurity best explains China's pattern of compromise and delay in its territorial disputes. China's leaders have compromised when faced with internal threats to regime security, including the revolt in Tibet, the instability following the Great Leap Forward, the legitimacy crisis after the Tiananmen upheaval, and separatist violence in Xinjiang.

Although China has been involved in twenty-three territorial disputes with its neighbors since 1949, it has used force in only six of them. The strength of a state's territorial claim, defined as its bargaining power in a dispute, offers one explanation for why and when states escalate territorial disputes to high levels of violence. This bargaining power depends on the amount of contested land that each side controls and on the military power that can be projected over the entire area under dispute. When a state's bargaining power declines relative to that of its adversary, its leaders become more pessimistic about achieving their territorial goals and face strong preventive motivations to seize disputed land or signal resolve through the use of force. Cross-sectional analysis and longitudinal case studies demonstrate that such negative shifts in bargaining power explain the majority of China's uses of force in its territorial disputes.

China exploded its ªrst nuclear weapon at the Lop Nor test facility in Xinjiang. China's subsequent development of its nuclear strategy and force structure presents a puzzle for scholars and policymakers alike. Following its initial development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities, China built a small, unsophisticated, and, arguably, highly vulnerable nuclear force. In addition, for more than three decades, the pace of China's nuclear modernization efforts was slow and gradual despite the continued vulnerability of its force. In relative terms, China's nuclear forces were far smaller and less diverse than those of the United States or the Soviet Union both during and after the Cold War. At the same time, China did not develop detailed operational doctrine for overcoming its relative inferiority, let alone for the effective use of its arsenal. Such a nuclear posture called into question the credibility of China's ability to deter states with much larger arsenals, more reªned doctrines, and more powerful conventional military forces. 1 In retrospect, the degree of vulnerability that China was willing to accept after developing nuclear weapons is striking.Although China has sought to enhance its second-strike capability since the mid-1990s, the ªrst three decades of China's approach to nuclear modernization and doctrinal development raises several important questions that this article seeks to answer. First, why did China maintain such a small and vulnerable nuclear force structure for so long, given that it undermined China's ability to deter nuclear aggression? Second, why did China not develop a detailed ceptable damage through a retaliatory nuclear strike, offers a useful framework for understanding the evolution of China's nuclear strategy and force structure.In the literature on China's nuclear weapons, however, few scholars have explored the origins of Chinese beliefs about the roles and missions of nuclear weapons and, as a consequence, the drivers of nuclear force development. One line of inquiry examines China's decision to acquire nuclear weapons, including the seminal works by Alice Hsieh as well as John Lewis and Xue Litai on the history of China's strategic weapons programs. 7 Another line of inquiry probes how best to characterize China's nuclear strategy. Much of the debate revolves around whether China pursues either minimum deterrence or limited deterrence. 8 Minimum deterrence refers to "threatening the lowest level of damage necessary to prevent attack, with the fewest number of nuclear weapons possible." 9 Similarly, limited deterrence "requires a limited war-ªghting capability to inºict costly damage on the adversary at every rung on the escalation ladder, thus denying the adversary victory in a nuclear war." 10 The mainstream view remains that minimum deterrence best captures the essence of China's approach. 11 Finally, other scholars argue that China has adopted a International Security 35:2 50