Academic and Peer-reviewed publications
“Wedge Narratives and Diaspora Communities,” Security Studies, 2025 (w/ Patrick Chester)
Authoritarian regimes are increasingly adapting domestic tools for outward-facing propaganda, often targeting diasporas. We develop a theory of diaspora-targeted propaganda in which autocratic governments use wedge narratives—identity-based and political—to divide diaspora from host countries. These wedge narratives frame racial discrimination and violence as targeting the diaspora and alternative political systems as inferior. We test our theory in the salient case of China. We measure propaganda framing with an unsupervised machine learning methodology called word embeddings and apply it to data scraped from a prominent social media platform, WeChat. Consistent with our expectations, Chinese government accounts amplify coverage of anti-Asian racism and hate crimes in the United States and portray democracies as chaotic and corrupt. These findings suggest that diaspora-targeted propaganda strategies can undermine the functioning of democratic and multicultural societies as part of an authoritarian foreign influence toolkit.
“China’s Economic Statecraft and the US Response,” in Lessons from the New Cold War: America Confronts the China Challenge, ed. Hal Brands, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025.
Economic interdependence has facilitated China’s use of economic statecraft—the manipulation of trade or investment ties for political purposes. Globalization and China’s integration in the world economy certainly brought about many material benefits and enabled more rapid growth for many countries, China included; at the same time, increasing strategic concerns and great-power competition have sharpened the policy dilemmas of managing China’s geoeconomic heft alongside continued economic openness. This chapter focuses on Beijing’s use of positive inducements, analyzing the choices and effectiveness of such tools, before turning to assess the scope and impacts of US policy responses.
While China’s economic statecraft has altered the strategic calculations for many countries and could have far-reaching implications for the trajectory of great-power competition, Chinese influence is not a foregone conclusion. Beijing has encountered considerable pushback and often shot itself in the foot. At the same time, the diffuse benefits of economic interdependence—that often arise quite naturally—remain a powerful draw that requires Washington to offer concrete alternative or complementary economic opportunities. US-led investment initiatives have ramped up in recent years, providing a promising multilateral basis to change the economic statecraft landscape, but the ability of the US to stay in the game effectively in the long term may well be constrained by recent changes in internal political leadership.
“Bringing Domestic Politics Back into Economic Statecraft,” in The Oxford Handbook of Geoeconomics and Economic Statecraft, eds. Vinod K. Aggarwal and Tai Ming Cheung, 2024.
While economic statecraft is often conceived of as a tool of geopolitical competition, its implementation and outcomes are very much intertwined with and complicated by domestic politics. This chapter examines how different patterns of domestic institutions, actors, and political economy incentives affect how sender countries use and implement economic statecraft, as well as how target countries respond to such coercion and inducement, which has corresponding implications for the success of economic statecraft. Additionally, this chapter highlights how different characteristics of new and emerging players have potentially reshaped our notions of economic statecraft and how it works. While much of the traditional literature on economic statecraft has drawn on Western and US-dominant experiences, the rise of China as a major player with a different economic and political system can shed further light on distinct approaches to economic statecraft. The chapter concludes with suggestions on future work to be done in this area, such as unpacking the microfoundations of economic statecraft within specific target countries.
“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: Autocratic Advantage Propaganda Decreases Public Support for Democracy”
Authoritarian regimes like China increasingly wield overseas propaganda as a tool of geopolitical competi- tion. I introduce the concept of “political demonstration effects”: when information about a foreign country’s regime performance influences public attitudes towards democracy. I examine two messaging strategies – Auto- cratic Advantage, which emphasizes the performance and procedural benefits of authoritarian governance, and Democratic Disarray, which highlights the corresponding shortcomings of democratic systems. I assess the real- world prevalence of these strategies in China’s overseas propaganda, using an unsupervised machine learning approach to analyze 8.7 million tweets. I then test whether such propaganda shifts attitudes toward democracy through a multi-country survey experiment. I find that Autocratic Advantage messaging is both more preva- lent and more effective at undermining public support for democracy. Despite a focus in academic and policy analysis on negative attacks, pro-regime propaganda matters, and further affects broader political attitudes, with implications for democratic backsliding and the playing field of U.S.-China strategic competition.