Cato Institute Event: "China's Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion"

Event Title:
"China’s Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion"

Registering for the Online Event:
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Event Description:
The rise of China has led to concerns about its use of military threats to coerce other nations. Emerging from an award‐​winning article in the journal International Security, the new book China’s Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. Author Ketian Zhang demonstrates that while China has used coercion for territorial disputes and issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, it is curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion.

Zhang's book offers a new and generalizable cost-balancing theory to explain states' coercion decisions. It demonstrates that China does not coerce frequently and uses military coercion less when it becomes stronger, resorting primarily to non-militarized tools. Leveraging rich empirical evidence, including primary Chinese documents and interviews with Chinese and foreign officials, China’s Gambit explains how contemporary rising powers translate their power into influence and offers a new framework for explaining states' coercion decisions in an era of economic interdependence, particularly how contemporary global economic interdependence affects rising powers' foreign security policies.

About the Panel:
* Ketian Zhang - Assistant Professor of International Security at George Mason University; author of China’s Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion (2023); PhD in political science from MIT.
* Jude Blanchette - Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; author of China's New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong (2019); M.A. in modern Chinese studies from Oxford.
* Eric Gomez - Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute with research focusing on the U.S. military budget and force posture, as well as arms control and nuclear stability issues in East Asia; M.A. in International Relations & Affairs from Texas A&M.

About the Cato Institute:
Founded in 1976, the Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. The institute advocates for free market economic policies, protection of civil liberties, criminal justice reform, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. It publishes the annual "Human Freedom Index" that ranks countries based on their levels of personal & economic freedoms, and it hosts cross-partisan discussions monthly at "Cato Unbound". To learn more, go to https://www.cato.org/about

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