In This Story
It all started with bananas.
In a widely distributed review published in the Hindu, India’s former ambassador to China, Vijay Gokhale, said a new book by Schar School of Policy and Government assistant professor Ketian Zhang is “a book for the Indian strategic community as it ponders over how to deal with China in 2024.”
“Zhang’s book makes an important and valuable contribution to theorizing as to why China is selective in its timing, target and tools for coercing other states,” he writes of Zhang’s China’s Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion (Cambridge University Press).
“If there is one book that the Indian strategic community needs to ponder over as we grapple with how to deal with China in 2024, I would say that it is this book,” he concludes.
Zhang said the book originated from a paper that she wrote in graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about economic sanctions regarding China’s ban on Filipino banana exports over maritime disputes in the South China Sea.
“When revising the paper for my PhD dissertation I realized that states, including China, do not just utilize economic sanctions,” she said. “China has a full coercive toolkit, including diplomatic, economic, gray-zone, and military coercion.”
The new book explores “when, why, and how China uses coercion over national security issues, putting coercion on a full spectrum,” Zhang said. “Moving forward, I would like to like to further bridge the gap between policy and academia by making this book, or at least the main arguments, more accessible to academics, the public, and the policy community.”
See the full review of Zhang’s China’s Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion in The Hindu.