Using Diplomacy to Shape China's Behavior: Coercion, Bargaining and Persuasion in U.S.-China Relations, 1971-2003

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to explain how a state can use diplomacy to shape a counterpart’s behavior when negotiations involve the target state’s “core values,” or its fundamental beliefs and ideals. In this study I examine the performance of three diplomatic tools, coercion, bargaining and persuasion, in value-based negotiations. I theorize that due to psychological, domestic and institutional constraints, the leaders of a target state are unlikely to alter their state’s policies in the face of extrinsic motivators such as military coercion, sanctions, or rewards that fall short of threatening the state’s survival. Instead, they are likely to express moral outrage and make principled rejections to avoid the appearance of trading off on the state’s core values. In contrast, I theorize persuasive diplomacy, or the use of advice to change leaders’ beliefs about how best to pursue their state’s interests, may successfully induce change in a state’s behavior by circumventing the moral outrage and the need for leaders to take a principled stance provoked by the use of extrinsic motivators. I test my hypotheses by examining the United States’ efforts to shape China’s behavior in negotiations from 1971-2003 that involve four of the latter’s core values that have been promoted and institutionalized by the Chinese regime: preserving the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly over state power, reunifying the Chinese nation, upholding the principle of non-interference in international relations, and spreading revolution (which has been abandoned since the end of Mao Zedong’s rule). I find the United States’ use of sanctions, rewards, and coercive threats have generally failed in negotiations that involved China’s core values. In the face of such overt diplomatic tools, Chinese leaders tend to set aside instrumental calculations to make principled rejections, unwilling to be seen as compromising on the regime’s fundamental beliefs and ideals. But I also find that not all negotiations that involve Beijing’s core values are doomed to fail, and that persuasion has succeeded in some cases. When U.S. leaders demonstrate they understand China’s values and concerns, and provide targeted advice on why Beijing should alter its behavior for the sake of its own interests, Chinese leaders have been receptive.