Abstract
China's strategy in the South China Sea has
gone through considerable changes over the last decades. While multiple
oscillations have occurred over short periods of time, the three‐decade‐long “trend line” has been characterized
by two major inflection points. China's provocations in the mid‐1990s were followed by a transition to cooperation at the turn of
the millennium, itself followed by a shift toward heavy‐handed methods since the turn of the 2010s. While each of these two
“transitions” has been studied in great detail, few studies have tried to apply
explanatory models to both of the transitions to assess their strength. This
article fills this void in the existing literature by examining how major
explanatory frameworks are distributed into two main categories – domestic and
systemic – and perform in explaining China's changing strategy in the two
transitions.