Determining the Determinants: Factors of Change in China's South China Sea Strategy, 1995–2015*

Abstract

China's strategy in the South China Sea has gone through considerable changes over the last decades. While multiple oscillations have occurred over short periods of time, the three‐decade‐long “trend line” has been characterized by two major inflection points. China's provocations in the mid‐1990s were followed by a transition to cooperation at the turn of the millennium, itself followed by a shift toward heavy‐handed methods since the turn of the 2010s. While each of these two “transitions” has been studied in great detail, few studies have tried to apply explanatory models to both of the transitions to assess their strength. This article fills this void in the existing literature by examining how major explanatory frameworks are distributed into two main categories – domestic and systemic – and perform in explaining China's changing strategy in the two transitions.

Facing the Ravenous Sea Dragon: How Weaker Nations Confront Chinese Coercion in the South China Sea

“…C. Kuik, 2017), or in short, balancing between protecting rights and maintaining stability (F. . More specifically, five factors that have been commonly used to explain Chinese strategy in the SCS are leadership, nationalism, institutions (regional cooperation), security dilemma, and relative military capabilities (with regional nations and the US) -the first two of which at domestic level, the remaining systemic (or international) (Lim & Kim, 2020).…”

What Affects the Growth of Military Enterprises in China: Research and Development?

“…Profitability is an essential factor affecting the growth of military enterprises. Promoting the 'converting militaryoriented enterprises to civilian production' policy will help commercialize scientific and technological achievements in the military industry [23]. The transformation of some unclassified technologies is conducive to promoting the entry of military enterprises into the civil market, expanding profit channels, improving the industry's competitiveness, and facilitating the continuous renewal and iteration of cutting-edge technologies in the industry [24] [25].…”