Three recent books on economic statecraft

Daniel W. Drezner is Professor of International Politics, a nonresident senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and the co-director of Fletcher's Russia and Eurasia Program. He has written seven books, including All Politics is Global and Theories of International Politics and Zombies, and edited three others, including The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence.

On his Substack Drezner tagged "three recent books on [economic statecraft] that merit a closer look from anyone interested in the topic." One title on the list:

Ketian Zhang’s China’s Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion

This book is a worthy addition to the rapidly expanding literature on Chinese coercion. Zhang examines the conditions under which China chose to coerce from the 1990s to the 2010s across multiple issue areas, including Taiwan, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Dalai Lama. Her core argument is that China usually “coerces to deter” — China’s goal in employing coercion is not just to pressure the target, but to send a message of resolve to other actors contemplating similar moves. Or, to paraphrase an old Chinese aphorism, China is killing the chicken to scare the monkeys.

Relying on an impressive array of Chinese-language sources, Zhang’s research is impeccable. Refreshingly, this is a book about non-events as well as events — to test her theory, Zhang compares incidents that triggered a coercive response with similar incidents that did not trigger the same response to test her arguments. Her findings challenge the conventional wisdom of China as a monotonically increasing bully on the global stage. Furthermore, by looking at both military and economic forms of coercion, Zhang demonstrates the value-added of theorizing about coercion more broadly.

Read about the other books on Drezner's list.

--Marshal Zeringue