Patterns of Military Coercion: China and Taiwan, 1949-1958
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2020
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Abstract
This dissertation analyzes a decade of conflict between the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and Kuomintang (KMT) forces, after the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War through the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis (1949 to 1958). It develops a new theory of military coercion, namely coercion by military forces against each other during armed conflict. A typology of the patterns of coercive acts armed forces engage in was developed to identify instances within the empirical evidence. The evidence gathered, primarily from Chinese language sources, was applied to test the hypothesis that argues military coercion succeeds or fails based on the interaction of a coercive threat’s cost imposition credibility and the target’s ability to counter. The theory successfully predicted the outcome of roughly 94 percent of the predictable instances of attempted coercion.