Guns and ships, but does the balance shift? The impact of naval balance of power on China's maritime disputes

Abstract

Previous research suggests that the makeup of a state’s naval power plays a significant role in the likelihood of states to enter into militarized disputes (Gartzke and Lindsay 2020, Mitchell 2020, Crisher 2017). Decisionmakers should likewise consider the perceived balance of military power in a crisis bargaining or dispute scenario (Slantchev 2005, Fearon 1995). In the context of maritime disputes, states must rely on capabilities that can project military means into the sea. Naval combat in turn privileges platforms (ships, aircraft, missiles, etc) by its defining characteristics relative to land combat (Hughes 2018, Vego 2020, Caverley and Dombrowski 2020). Even states with nominally weaker navies, in this capability-centric paradigm of military power, may be capable of inflicting significant damage on relatively strong opponents (Hughes 2018, Biddle 2004). To date, studies of the impact of navies on militarization of disputes and militarized episodes use total tonnage displacement and broad ship-type data from the Crisher and Souva (2014) dataset. In this study, I propose a different measure of naval capacity using the relative proportion of a state’s fleet that is equipped with missiles. I examine the utility of this more nuanced measure of naval capability in the context of China’s maritime Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) from the Correlates of War Dyadic MIDs dataset (Maoz et al. 2018) with Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan between 1987 and 2018. I find that using a technology-based capability measure such as the one used in this study offers at least the same degree of explanatory power - and in some cases additional insight - to the pattern of initiation and hostility of MIDs that occur between China and its dispute partners relative to using a tonnage or broad category ship classification method. My results support findings by Fravel (2007) that China tends to engage in higher levels of militarization when its dispute position is threatened by a rival whose military is increasing in capability, and Mitchell’s (2020) finding that disputes are more “stable” in militarization trend when the balance of naval power is lopsided versus when it is moving towards parity. My results suggest that a capability-based measure of naval power should be especially considered in a case of a relatively weak navy that is rising in capability relative to a stronger rival, such as the case between Vietnam and China over the last 20 years.