Disrespect and Coercion: Unpacking Variations in China’s Sanctions Rhetoric

Abstract Under what conditions does China openly acknowledge the use of unilateral sanctions against other countries? China is notorious for maintaining an official position that it is against using unilateral sanctions on the international stage. Yet, as recent events have also indicated, China has grown more proactive and obvious in its reliance on these unilateral measures. By considering China’s changing approach to publicly acknowledging its use of sanctions, this paper recognizes that China’s sanctions practice appears to be more complicated. It also recognizes that the seemingly contradictory practices of relying on vagueness and explicitly acknowledging sanctions coexist, forming China’s complex sanctions behavior. This paper turns to the concept of disrespect to explain China’s complex sanctions acknowledgement rhetoric. When China feels that it has been gravely disrespected, China tends to be more explicit in publicly acknowledging the use of sanctions. To test this hypothesis, this paper looks at the cases of China’s use of sanctions towards targeted actors during (1) Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022, (2) Japan’s nationalization of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in 2012, and (3) the Standoff between the Philippines and China at the Huangyan Dao/Scarborough Shoal in 2012. In the first two cases where conditions for salient disrespect were met, China’s sanctions use was explicit and discernible. The Philippines’ case, on the other hand, shows that China’s vague rhetoric coincides with relatively moderate perceptions that it was disrespected. This paper highlights the importance of status, emotions, and constructed meanings in shaping China’s foreign policy by underscoring disrespect as a possible explanatory variable to China’s changing sanctions rhetoric.