In recent years, China's military modernization and assertive actions have led to more frequent and dangerous encounters between the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the militaries of key regional players in the Indo-Pacific. Each encounter heightens the chance of a military conflict in the region. A new report published by the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) assesses the PLA’s strategic thinking on escalation control, analyzing the potential for conflict in the region and exploring regional responses and implications for deterrence.

Edited by Chinese military expert Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the report, "Encounters and Escalation in the Indo-Pacific: Perspectives on China’s Military and Implications for Regional Security," comprises six essays, each detailing an encounter with the PLA. These case studies include China’s maritime disputes with Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam and its increasingly aggressive military activities vis-à-vis Australia, India, and Taiwan.

The authors of the essays are current and former practitioners with insight into their government’s experiences and thinking. Their assessments emphasize the need for Asia-Pacific countries to reevaluate their defense capabilities and adopt clear and consistent policy approaches to navigate the complex geopolitical landscape in the region.

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Tactics, Intentions, and Shared Threat Perceptions

As the PLA adopts a more assertive approach beyond its maritime boundaries, nations across the Indo-Pacific region have increasingly experienced perilous encounters with the Chinese military. For example, the PLA's intensifying aggression around Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea led to several incidents of maritime tension with the Philippines. Likewise, a Chinese fighter aircraft intercepted an Australian surveillance aircraft during its routine activity in international airspace over the South China Sea, posing a safety risk to the Australian aircraft and its crew.

The authors of the six case studies in the NBR report agree "that China harbors problematic intentions and is using increasingly aggressive and risk-acceptant tactics to accomplish its goals." While they show that China uses different tactics in different situations and differ in their evaluations of the most troublesome tactics for their respective countries, their analyses share several common themes, which Mastro reviews in her introduction to the report, titled "Close Encounters with the PLA: Regional Experiences and Implications for Deterrence."

First, “China doctrinally does not take any responsibility for the deterioration in the strategic environment,” writes Mastro. “All six case studies mention China’s tendency to publicly blame the other country for whatever crisis unfolded.”

China also sees crises as opportunities, Mastro explains, and most case studies indicate that the crises at stake were deliberate acts of PLA escalation. All case studies also reflect Chinese strategic thinking on deterrence as serving dual purposes: firstly, to discourage adversaries from certain actions, and secondly, to influence their behavior in line with the deterrer's intentions, ultimately requiring them to comply with the deterrer's preferences.

Another common theme is that the PLA's assertive actions have prompted all six nations studied in the report to boost security cooperation with the United States and other regional powers, albeit to varying extents. For example, in addition to enhancing its strategic partnership with the United States, India has enhanced its defense ties with the two other Quad members (Japan and Australia) and regional partners such as Vietnam, Singapore, and the Philippines.

Moreover, based on their encounters with the PLA, almost all regional players have concluded that strengthening their military capabilities will discourage Chinese aggressive behavior in the future, Mastro says, noting that “changes in defense posture have perhaps been the most drastic in Japan.”

Policy Implications

The report's case studies offer policy recommendations for deterring China, emphasizing the importance of a consistent approach that includes strengthening deterrence capabilities through military modernization, firm stances on border disputes, and close security cooperation with the United States, its allies, and other like-minded nations. While there is consensus that military deterrence needs to be balanced with diplomatic engagements to reduce tensions, each regional player views the effectiveness of diplomacy and cooperation with China differently.

“Ultimately,” Mastro concludes, “the path forward for maintaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region requires a cohesive strategy that prioritizes long-term security interests, demonstrating the essential role of international cooperation and the strategic interplay between military readiness and diplomatic efforts in navigating China’s aggression.”

Learn more about the report and download Mastro’s introductory essay > 

During the first three years of the Vietnam War, the United States made over 2000 attempts to open negotiations with the North Vietnamese. North Vietnam ignored or denied all of these overtures to open talks. By April 1968, following repeated rebuffs, Hanoi changed its position after President Johnson announced that the U.S. would halt bombing above the 20th parallel. What explains Hanoi’s initial firm position against talks and the sudden policy change in 1968? What are the drivers behind a state’s willingness to talk with the enemy while fighting, what considerations do leaders account for when deciding when and how peace talks can begin, and why do some states reject or ignore overtures to come to the negotiating table?

In a new Journal of Theoretical Politics article, FSI Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro and Duke University’s political scientist David Siegel advance a new theory of wartime diplomacy to answer these questions. Using a formal model, they find that states are inclined to initiate negotiations when two conditions are met: firstly, when their adversaries perceive escalation as excessively costly, and secondly, when there is an indication of exceptional resilience that only those possessing high resilience value. To shed light on the dynamics of the second condition, Mastro and Siegel present an in-depth case study examining the evolving negotiation approach of North Vietnam throughout the Vietnam War.

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The second condition arises when the opponent does not view escalation as overly costly and when the likelihood of successful escalation is hard to assess, but there is a signal of high resilience that helps identify resilient entities. “States will choose typically open stances, potentially inviting escalation, only when they have demonstrated enough resilience to mitigate the escalation risk,” write Mastro and Siegel. This dynamics explains why North Vietnam’s diplomatic posture changed during the second phase of the Vietnam War.

Early on in the war, both the United States and North Vietnam believed that a willingness to talk would convey weakness. North Vietnam needed to sense hesitancy in U.S. confidence in the effectiveness of escalation before opening to negotiations. In 1968, the Tet Offensive allowed North Vietnam to demonstrate its resilience and constrain U.S. strategic capacity by inflicting casualties and steadily depleting its resources.

Even though North Vietnam was materially weaker and Tet failed by all operational measures, it represented a psychological shock to U.S. leadership and “finally convinced the U.S. of Hanoi’s resilience, reducing the likelihood that an open diplomatic posture would be interpreted as weakness.” North Vietnam had been reluctant to negotiate before it could adequately signal its resilience, maintaining a closed diplomatic posture for three years. But after Tet, having communicated its resilience to Washington, Hanoi “no longer viewed an open diplomatic posture as a liability in the war effort.”

The authors’ findings suggest that states are concerned about the negative material consequences that their diplomatic approach might have on the enemy. Thus, face-saving measures from the adversary are limited because the enemy would still perceive an open stance as a sign of weakness, potentially leading to further escalation. These findings are significant, as they demonstrate how counterproductive attempts to coerce opponents to negotiate can be.

At the same time, the study highlights new opportunities for external mediators “who can provide guarantees in ways that lessen the strategic costs of conversation,” Mastro and Siegel argue.

The results show that the pandemic’s broad social and economic impact has adversely affected population health well beyond those directly suffering from COVID-19. Study participants with chronic conditions faced significant challenges in managing their symptoms during the pandemic. They experienced a loss of income and difficulties in accessing healthcare or medications, with the resulting delayed and foregone care leading to uncertain longer-term effects. For a nontrivial portion of participants, these factors are associated with the worsening of diabetes symptoms. The threat is twofold among people living in rural populations with limited access, availability, and affordability of healthcare services.

A Global Health Priority

The unintended adverse consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on chronic disease care may also further aggravate inequality in health outcomes. “If the trend continues and no immediate actions are taken to mitigate pandemic impacts,” Eggleston and her colleagues caution, then “the Asia-Pacific region will struggle to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 3.4 to reduce premature mortality from non-communicable diseases by a third relative to 2015 levels and to promote mental health and wellbeing.”

Addressing the pandemic’s unintended negative social and economic impacts on chronic disease care is a global health priority, determine the researchers. They propose several measures to help provide timely care for people with chronic conditions in resource-constrained settings. These include implementing innovations in healthcare delivery models to improve the adoption of healthy lifestyle changes and self-management of chronic disease and mild COVID-19 symptoms, increasing investment in interventions to provide social and economic support to disadvantaged populations, and strengthening primary healthcare infrastructure and support of healthcare providers.

The study was supported in part by funding from Shorenstein APARC’s faculty research award, Stanford King Center for Global Development, and a seed grant from the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education.

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Hanoi on Tuesday, August 24, as part of a high-stakes visit to Southeast Asia this week that aims to bolster economic and security ties with U.S. partners in Singapore and Vietnam. Ms. Harris is the first U.S. Vice President to visit Vietnam.

Vietnamese online newspaper VnExpress spoke with APARC Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson about the significance of Harris’ visit. The following is an expanded version of the interview.  

VnExpress: What does the visit mean to the United States, to Vietnam, and to the U.S.-Vietnam relationship?

Emmerson: U.S.-Vietnam relations have steadily and markedly improved in recent years, especially in the security realm. A case in point is the recent visit of the U.S. secretary of defense. The first-ever visit to Hanoi by a sitting American vice-president, Kamala Harris, is meant to further strengthen U.S.-Vietnam relations. Their importance will be underscored by Kamala Harris’s status in the U.S. government, second only to President Biden’s. Their scope will be advanced by the prominence of nonmilitary topics on her agenda.

The two governments have agreed to call their relations “comprehensive.” By attending to economic and social cooperation as well as security matters, the visit will better illustrate that inclusive label. It is even possible that the United States and Vietnam could, in the not too distant future, upgrade their relationship by calling it not only “comprehensive” but “strategic” as well.

VnExpress: In Hanoi, Harris will launch the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regional office in Southeast Asia. Why did the United States choose Vietnam for the CDC regional office? And what is your assessment of the Vietnam-U.S. medical cooperation, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Emmerson: In the realm of health, Vietnam offers a record of achievement and challenge. Based on official statistics, Vietnam appears to have countered the virus more effectively than most Asian countries. Yet it still needs to deal more thoroughly with the consumption of wildlife sold in wet markets where future viruses can bridge the gap from animals to people. COVID-19, which began in neighboring China, has killed nearly 4.5 million people worldwide and worsened the lives of almost everyone on the planet. A regional office of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Vietnam could reduce the threat of future pandemics while helping to strengthen health systems and policies throughout Southeast Asia.  

VnExpress: What do you think about Vietnam's role in the region and in the world?

Emmerson: Nearly five decades have passed since the end of Vietnam’s successful “Resistance War against America” in 1975 and the failure of China’s invasion of Vietnam in 1979. The challenge for Vietnam going forward will be to maintain the resilience and autonomy that it has earned at such a high cost in lost lives. Kamala Harris’s visit can contribute to that goal. If and as inter-state peace continues to prevail in East Asia, one can also hope that Vietnam’s leaders will feel less threatened and thus possibly less obliged to curtail the rights and freedoms of their own people.  

As for Vietnam’s role in the region (and, indirectly, the world), one priority could be for Hanoi to coordinate its policies on the South China Sea with those of other Southeast Asian claimant states and possibly with other states who use the sea and also oppose China’s campaign to control its waters.