State Preferences and International Institutions: Boolean Analysis of China's Use of Force and South China Sea Territorial Disputes‪.‬

Thanks to supercharged economic growth, coupled with abundant physical and human capital, as well as political clout as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China is a rising great power, on the world stage. Whereas the former China under its closed, mysterious, and communist ideology was characterized as a threat to Asian and world peace during the Cold War years, today, ironically, a more open and internationally engaged China again triggers the "China threat" rhetoric. (1) Despite China's constant assurance of peaceable foreign policy intentions and claims that it will "never seek hegemony," (2) skeptics rebuke these as a mere smokescreen that covers an enormous forward thrust, (3) evidenced, for example, by the expansionist moves toward islets in the South China Sea. On the one hand, whether aggressive moves qualified China as a threat is still debated. (4) On the other hand, whether provocative actions would escalate into large-scale militarized conflicts that jeopardize regional stability constitutes the immediate concern. The key reasons for the unsettled debates over China as a threat are disagreements and speculations about China's strategic goals, capabilities, and intentions. (5) Unless these controversies are further clarified, the analysis and predictions about China's strategic ambitions and behaviors in the South China Sea could be, at worst, hazardous conjectures. But to be fair, this problem is not unique to studying Chinese foreign behaviors. Rather, uncertainty about, and identification of, a state's preferences have been posing challenges to international relations (IR) inquiries, which have shaped the debate between rationalism and constructivism since the 1990s. (6) While constructivists argue that all social realities--state preferences included--are socially constructed, rationalists have a solid methodological reason to have preferences fixed: "preferences are impossible to observe directly whereas constraints are usually more observable. Under these conditions, fixed preferences allow for a tight analysis of many issues in an empirically falsifiable way." (7) Despite this concern, most rationalists do not deny the merits of endogenizing state preferences as a potentially promising way to understand international dynamics--provided methodological justifications.