China’s Retaliatory Measures in the Context of the Sanctions Confrontation

In recent years, China’s sanctions regime has been taking shape, which is expressed, first, in the growing intensity and diversity of retaliatory coercive measures in response to foreign unilateral sanctions since the 2010s. The differentiation of the counter-sanction instruments of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) depending on Beijing’s motivation and their object is becoming clear. The list of triggers provoking the PRC to take countermeasures is growing, and the goals pursued with their help are multiplying. Second, since 2018, the PRC has had regulatory and legal mechanisms for introducing counter-sanctions and countering foreign sanctions. This study aims to trace the evolution of China’s counter-sanctions based on the collected database “China’s Unilateral Sanctions, 1956-2023” and offer theoretical generalizations about them that quantitatively confirm or refute the results of previous studies. The study draws on both the analysis of previous works on China’s counter-sanctions in English and Russian, about which there is no scientific consensus and only some of the conclusions are quantitatively substantiated and supported by databases, and the collection of a database and descriptive statistics methods. The novelty of the study is due to the fact that it distinguishes between the stage of active formation of China’s sanctions regime over the past 10 years and a long prehistory, during which only individual unofficial countermeasures took place: China’s boycott of participation in the Olympic Games in the 1950s - 1970s; China’s partial refusal to import from those countries whose leaders hosted the 14th Dalai Lama on an official visit in the 2000s - 2010s; consumer boycotts of foreign goods in China; and bureaucratic blockades at customs since 2008. This article lists and describes the mechanisms of action of the main counter-sanction laws of the PRC, the adoption of which was provoked by the trade war with the United States. As a result, mirror counter-sanctions of the PRC have become prevalent, applied specifically against individuals and companies and implying barriers to entry and doing business in the PRC, restrictions on investment, cooperation, trade, and freezing of assets. The author concludes that there is a “division of labor” between hidden sanctions, which maximize damage to the targeted party, and formalized sanctions, which maximize the performative impact on a third party. The latter does not replace the former but complements it.