Domestic Motivation and the Case of the East China Sea ADIZ: Diversion or Mobilization?

Abstract

The Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands has intensified since 2012. In November 2013, China's Ministry of Defense declared an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea (ECS). An ADIZ refers to publicly defined area extending beyond national territory in which unidentified aircraft are liable to be interrogated and, if necessary, intercepted for identification before they cross into sovereign airspace (Welch 2013). While many states have set up their own ADIZs since 1948, the ECS ADIZ was considered a destabilizing move by East Asian states as well as other stakeholders because it includes the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and it applies generally to aircraft flying in the ECS ADIZ, regardless of whether the aircraft intends to enter the PRC's airspace (Rinehart and Bart 2015, 7). Since its announcement, many have sought to understand the motivation behind the ECS ADIZ. Some analysts have looked at it from a strategic perspective, while others have seen it as a result of Tokyo's provocative decision to nationalize the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in 2012 in the context of the hawkish foreign policy orientation of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. However, all of these explanations overlook the possibility that domestic factors also played an important role in deciding to implement an ADIZ. Noting this shortcoming, some contributors to a special issue of Asian Perspective on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands conflict presented analyses that took domestic factors into account. For instance, Togo (2014) and Hirano (2014) discussed how Japan's domestic have become entangled with international factors and how this has contributed to the dispute. Moore (2014, 238) looked at the role of politics at the domestic and international levels in China and Japan. Moore's argument is especially illuminating in that he establishes a two-level analytic framework to examine the interaction of ideational factors at different levels, in and across countries. In his conclusion, he suggests a face-to-face solution for the dispute, which would allow both sides [to] come away with enough face to proclaim victory to their constituents (238).However, although ideational factors are powerful in explaining the structure of conflict, they are insufficient to explain its timing. In this article, we argue that the issue cannot be fully understood without looking into the decisionmakers' political motivation. To offer another plausible explanation that may fill this gap, we consider two distinct theoretical frameworks: the diversionary foreign policy and the mobilization models. The first model is based on the idea that state leaders utilize external conflict to divert domestic attention away from their political, economic, or social problems in order to reconsolidate their power position. The second model deals with how state leaders manipulate international crises to mobilize patriotic sentiment among their citizens, making these citizens more willing to accept a radical policy agenda requiring the sacrifice of their individual rights. Both models focus on the linkage between domestic and foreign policy, but each has different theoret- ical and empirical implications. We assess which mechanism offers a better explanation of China's ADIZ decision by carefully reviewing available empirical evidence.Diversionary Incentive vs. Mobilization Effort: A Brief Theoretical ReviewScholars of Chinese foreign policy have made considerable efforts to understand the impact of domestic factors on China's decisions to take belligerent action. For example, Chen (1987) and Zhang (2010) argue that an important driver behind China's decision to fight a brief war with Vietnam in 1979 was Deng Xiaoping's domestic power struggle and his agenda of economic reform. In a broader examination of China's use of military force, Scobell (2003) also demonstrates that China's strategic culture, including the historical legacy of the cult of defense, the evolving civilmilitary culture, and military organizational culture, can be used to explain continuity and change in China's decisions to use military force abroad. …