Abstract

Existing scholarship suggests that elites are sensitive to episodes in which their country loses international status, and that they can deal with these episodes by striving for achievement elsewhere, such as by arms racing or winning wars. I theorize and test an alternative strategy: elites can use deflection narratives to downplay the situation and externalize the blame to ameliorate the domestic public’s sense of status loss. Yet, the same narratives can lead international actors to believe that the deflecting actor has malign motives, creating escalation spirals. Through parallel survey experiments in China and the US, I find that Chinese respondents who are exposed to China’s deflection narratives are less likely to see diplomatic snubs as being harmful to China’s status. Yet, the same narratives trigger US respondents to think that China is more threatening and increase their support for enhancing US deterrence against China. I contextualize these findings by tracing the construction and consequences of China’s deflection narratives in the South China Sea from 2009-2019, through a combination of an original dataset of People’s Daily coverage of the disputes and personal interviews with senior US military and diplomatic officials. My argument provides the theoretical basis for an expanded security dilemma theory where misperception and spirals are driven by status concerns and misinformation – not necessarily by survival concerns and arming policy under anarchy. It also has implications for US grand strategy towards China and Russia, which tend to use deflection narratives to spin international events for domestic consumption, but in the process compromising their political relations with the US.

About the Speaker

Alex Yu-Ting Lin is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia.

He is also a nonresidential affiliated faculty at the University of Notre Dame’s International Security Center.

Alex studies the causes and strategies of revisionism, with a focus on US-China relations and Asian security. His book project, Contestation from Below, theorizes how smaller states shape when and why rising powers become dissatisfied with their status and seek to revise the international order. An article from the book project received the Patricia Weitsman award from the International Security Studies Section (ISSS), International Studies Association (ISA). His other research examines how states pursue their revisionist aims within international institutions or through information warfare.

His academic work has been published by European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, among others. His policy work has been published by The Diplomat and has received inquiries from the Parliament of Australia.

He received his PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Southern California. He has held research fellowships with the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the George Washington University and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.