Description
China is involved in a multiplicity of maritime and territorial disputes with nations such as Japan, the United States, and India in the Asia-Pacific. Despite these underlying disputes and Chinese-orchestrated sporadic events of escalation, there exists a propensity towards de-escalation through diplomatic engagement and reassurance. Within this context then it is pertinent, to ask the question of what China’s intended effect from these sporadic escalatory events is if they result in a return to peaceful diplomatic engagement without transforming the status quo in these disputes in its favor. The paper proposes the appraisal of this pattern of behavior from the point of view of a ‘reassurance-crisis regress’ which involves an aggressor state putting an adversarial state in the condition of a controlled yet unpredictable, sporadic yet protracted oscillation between the condition of reassurance and crisis to assert or bolster its dominance. With massive retaliation being elusory in nature, China has been able to maintain the credibility of its threat by orchestrating these sporadic events (divisible bursts) of transgression.
