Peer-reviewed publications
“Divide to Conquer: Using Wedge Narratives to Influence Diaspora Communities,” Security Studies, forthcoming (w/ Patrick Chester)
Governments often seek to engage with diaspora communities to bolster loyalty to the homeland and promote strategic interests. How do home governments try to influence diaspora attitudes toward host countries? We develop a theory of diaspora-targeted propaganda that highlights the use of wedge narratives -- narratives designed to increase divisions between diaspora and host countries. Home governments frame issues of ethnic discrimination and racial violence as explicitly targeting the diaspora, and such narratives are strategically amplified during election periods. To test our theory, we examine the important case of contemporary China, a country with growing geopolitical importance, a large diaspora population, and an established propaganda apparatus. We scrape and analyze content from the dominant social media platform for the Chinese diaspora, WeChat, a relatively understudied platform due to tight political control. To measure propaganda framing, we apply an unsupervised machine learning methodology, word embeddings. Focusing on U.S.-based diaspora accounts, we find that, relative to privately-run accounts, the Chinese government amplifies coverage of anti-Asian discrimination and hate crimes, and this is further heightened during politically salient election periods. Unfortunately, political and social divisions within democracies may play into the hands of powerful authoritarian rivals.
“Mobilizing Patriotic Consumers: China’s New Strategy of Economic Coercion,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 2023 (w/ Leif-Eric Easley and Hsin-wei Tang)
This article develops the concept of ‘patriotic consumer mobilization’ to explain how China uses informal boycotts as economic coercion. Patriotic consumer mobilization employs citizens as the unit of action, facilitating manipulability, uncertainty, and plausible deniability. It manages public sentiment for domestic legitimacy and foreign policy goals. Citizens are mobilized via propaganda that underscores national humiliation, frames boycotts as grassroots patriotism, and signals resolve to foreign countries. After outlining conditions for use and a case comparison with Taiwan, we draw on Chinese-language sources to examine Beijing’s coercion of South Korea over a missile defense system.
“Peddling or Persuading: China’s Economic Statecraft in Australia,” Journal of East Asian Studies 21:2 (2021)
With the globalization of Chinese capital, economic statecraft has become an increasingly prominent component of China's foreign policy. In this article, I examine China's use of economic inducements in developed democracies, a topic of growing concern for policymakers, focusing on the case of Australia. I show how Beijing's attempts to coopt public voices and influence Australia's foreign policy using non-transparent political donations and academic funding generated a strong backlash. At the same time, economic interdependence has provided a buffering effect, with key domestic actors in Australia advocating for cooperative relations, although this effect can in turn be limited by Beijing's coercive economic tactics. My findings underline the reputational costs of certain approaches to economic statecraft, the value of building supportive coalitions, and the challenges faced by China's authoritarian state capitalist model. They also highlight the impacts of globalized Chinese capital in developed democracies, including the resilience and vulnerabilities inherent in democratic political processes.
“Authoritarian Energy Transitions Undermined? Environmental Governance Cycles in China’s Power Sector,” Energy Research & Social Science 68 (October 2020) (with Meir Alkon)
We develop a theory to explain the persistence of tensions between decentralized delegation and centralized control of environmental governance in authoritarian regimes. Economic benefits from decentralization – information, competition, and efficiency – conflict with environmental goals of centralized policy harmonization and management of inter-jurisdictional externalities. Decentralization to local government actors can facilitate economic growth but also empower them in ways that undermine environmental governance. Persistent tensions between decentralized and centralized imperatives generate cycles in environmental and energy systems governance. We test our theory of authoritarian environmental governance cycles using the case of China’s power sector, drawing on evidence from primary source documents, field interviews, and multiple data sources on the development and distribution of energy generating capacity. We focus on two policy areas – coal-fired power and wind energy – that are integral to central government efforts to improve the quality of environmental governance. This research explains the puzzling alternations in the locus of governance, and contributes to understanding inter-governmental relations and environmental politics in authoritarian regimes.
“Managing Small Allies Amidst Patron-Adversary Rapprochement: A Tale of Two Koreas,” Asian Security 16:1 (2020)
What explains variation in how a patron manages its existing alliance with a client state when improving relations with an adversary? I theorize that the patron’s alliance management strategy is influenced by the client’s degree of bargaining power over its patron. Bargaining power derives from the availability of an outside option. Using archival and interview evidence, I show variation in alliance bargaining dynamics during U.S.-China rapprochement. While the United States was dismissive toward South Korea, China was highly placating toward North Korea, making concessions and providing compensation. However, China became more dismissive during Sino-South Korean normalization, when North Korea’s bargaining power decreased. The findings have important policy implications for understanding how a patron could simultaneously manage alliance and adversary relationships.
“More than Peripheral: How Provinces Influence China’s Foreign Policy,” The China Quarterly 235 (September 2018)
Most analyses of China’s foreign and security policies treat China as a unitary actor, assuming a cohesive grand strategy articulated by Beijing. I challenge this conventional wisdom, showing how Chinese provinces can affect the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This contributes to existing research on the role of subnational actors in China, which has focused on how they shape domestic and economic policies. Using Hainan and Yunnan as case studies, I identify three mechanisms of provincial influence – trailblazing, carpetbagging, and resisting – and illustrate them with examples of key provincial policies. This analysis provides a more nuanced argument than is commonly found in international relations for the motivations behind evolving and increasingly activist Chinese foreign policy. It also has important policy implications for understanding and responding to Chinese behaviour, in the South China Sea and beyond.
“Comparing Japanese and South Korean Strategies toward China and the United States: All Politics is Local,” Asian Survey 55:6 (November/December 2015)
Japan and South Korea have had differing patterns of responding to China’s rise and aligning with the United States. This can be explained by shifting threat perceptions based on interactions between evolving systemic and local threats, from both China and North Korea, as well as their relative degrees of imminence.
Working Papers
While most existing literature has focused on coercion, inducements have become an increasingly common, albeit poorly understood, tool of economic statecraft. When are economic inducements effective at achieving geopolitical objectives? In this article, I introduce the concept of “subversive carrots,” which circumvent political processes and institutions in target countries. I argue that the effectiveness of economic inducements is conditional on the target's level of public accountability. Subversive carrots succeed in countries with low public accountability, but backfire in high accountability countries. I focus on China’s use of economic statecraft, which has raised increasing attention and concern from scholars and policymakers. Drawing on evidence from cross-country and within-country variation in public accountability, I examine three cases in Southeast Asia -- Cambodia, the Philippines, and Myanmar. My findings highlight the importance of domestic political institutions in target countries in constraining the effectiveness of economic statecraft, contribute to understanding the conditions under which economic capabilities can be translated into political influence, and provide a framework to evaluate the varied geopolitical impacts of China's overseas economic activities. While popular narratives suggest that China is easily able to buy over political leaders, this article shows that China has been less successful than commonly assumed.
“Political Demonstration Effects: Authoritarian Information Statecraft and Public Support for Democracy” (w/ Meir Alkon)
We develop and test the concept of “political demonstration effects”: the idea that information about a foreign country’s regime type and regime performance, whether positive or negative, may influence foreign publics’ attitudes towards democracy in general and support for democratic norms in their own country in particular. Authoritarian regimes increasingly use overseas propaganda and information campaigns to legitimize their model of governance, increase their political influence, reshape global narratives, and at times undermine democratic systems. Such information campaigns have the potential not just to affect great power competition but also to influence domestic political attitudes in target countries. In particular, we identify two different messaging strategies – Autocratic Advantage, which emphasizes the performance and procedural benefits of authoritarian governance, versus Democratic Disarray, which highlights the performance and procedural shortcomings of democratic governance – and compare their persuasiveness across four issue areas commonly discussed in authoritarian overseas propaganda. To test the effects on individual attitudes toward democracy, we conducted a survey experiment in three countries where democratic norms and institutions are present but contested: Brazil, India, and South Africa. We find that autocratic advantage messaging decreases public support for democracy across a number of indicators, including support for democracy as a concept, support for certain constituent processes of democracy, and support for democracy in their own countries. Conversely, democratic disarray messaging does not consistently shift respondents' attitudes. These findings show how authoritarian informational statecraft can affect democratic legitimacy and public opinion, with implications for geopolitical competition and global trends in democratic backsliding.