Abstract

How and why did a great power (such as the U.S. or China) reduce its coercive capacity, while the targeted country (such as Russia or Australia) enhanced its ability to resist the great power’s coercion in the international politics of sanctions? This paper explains this primary question by developing and improving the capacity approach to economic sanctions and illustrating the concrete mechanisms. Theoretically, by developing an analytical framework of how states and businesses govern their capacities, it advances Albert Hirschman’s thesis that a dominant country that bends a “small country to its will” likely seeds “its own destruction”. Empirically, through the case of China’s economic sanctions against Australia, the paper demonstrates that although China has increased its economic power, its economic coercion capacity has surprisingly diminished, and the target country like Australia has enhanced its resilience and ability to escape from China’s domination

About the Speaker

Baogang He (Ph.D, ANU 1994) is Alfred Deakin Professor at Deakin University, and the Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Professor He is widely known for his work in Chinese politics, in particular the deliberative politics in China as well as in regionalism, international relations, federalism, and multiculturalism in Asia. His publications are found in top journals including Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Peace Research, Political Theory, Political Studies, and Perspectives on Politics. His two papers (“Authoritarian Deliberation: The Deliberative Turn in Chinese Political Development,” co-authored with Mark Warren, and “The Domestic Politics of the Belt and Road Initiative and its Implications”) are on the top 1% of the highly cited research papers in the Web of Sciences as of 11 Feb 2021. His published books include Rural Democracy in China, Governing Taiwan and Tibet, and Contested Ideas of Regionalism in Asia. His recent co-authored books include China’s Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War and Peace in the New Chinese Century, John Keane and Baogang He (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), Comparative Federalism in Asia (Baogang He, Michael Breen and Laura Reumann, Routledge, June 2023). His recent edited books include Australia in World Affairs, 2016–2020: A Return to Great-Power Rivalry, editors: Baogang He, David Hundt, and Danielle Chubb, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, Deliberative Democracy in Asia, (editors Baogang He, Michael Breen and James Fishkin), Routledge in 2021, and China and North Korea’s Human Rights (editors Baogang He, David Hundt, Chengxin Pan), Routledge, 2021. Professor He has co-translated John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice into Chinese (the Chinese translation published in 1988, with He Huanghong and Liao Shenbai).