Strategic Substitution: China’s Search for Coercive Leverage in the Information Age

Summary

After the mistaken U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, China turned to information-age weapons such as cyberattacks to increase its coercive leverage over the United States. China calculated that it could use these weapons strategically to create a risk of escalation to nuclear war with the United States. China combines its information-age capabilities with a retaliatory nuclear posture to compensate for its conventional military inferiority. This shift is explained by a theory of strategic substitution.