Sharp rise in Chinese coercive diplomacy in 2020, says new report

The Chinese Communist Party is increasingly resorting to the use of coercive diplomacy, taking advantage of the lack of a coordinated pushback from like-minded governments, according to a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The study analyses 152 cases of the CCP’s use of coercive diplomacy across 28 countries, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand and in East Asia over the past decade, and concludes that governments need to counter its “divide-and-conquer” tactics through a joint strategy via multilateral institutions. “Our dataset suggests the CCP has begun to use coercive diplomacy far more actively. We found a sharp increase from 2018 onwards,” said Fergus Hanson, Emilia Currey and Tracy Beattie, the ASPI authors, in a statement. “In the first eight months of 2020 we found 34 cases of coercive diplomacy, which equates to more than half of the number recorded in 2019. Unless states can come up with a better strategy to resist coercive diplomacy, we can expect this trend to continue.”

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