Power shifts, third-party threats, and credible signals: explaining China’s successful reassurance of Russia

A central focus of China’s grand strategy has been to reassure other states that its rise is non-threatening. Yet a large theoretical literature indicates that rising states’ reassurance signals should not be credible. Rising powers with hostile intentions have a strong incentive to misrepresent by behaving cooperatively, in order to avoid a balancing response from other states. This paper presents a model of reassurance under shifting power in the shadow of a third-party threat. The results of the model suggest two ways in which the United States, by posing a threat to Russia, has facilitated China’s credible reassurance of Russia. First, the presence of the US has reduced China’s incentive to misrepresent any hostile intentions toward Russia it might hypothetically hold, making China’s cooperative actions toward Russia more credible signals of its long-term intentions. Second, the US places enduring constraints over China’s behavior, which incentivizes China’s continued cooperation with Russia. These results help account for both Russia’s increasingly optimistic beliefs about China’s intentions and increasing China–Russia cooperation in the post-Cold War era, which realist balance of power and threat mechanisms cannot.