title: Rethinking Chinese Territorial Disputes: How The Value Of Contested Land Shapes Territorial Policies
abstract: What explains the timing of when states abandon a delaying strategy to change the status quo of one territorial dispute? And when this does happen, why do states ultimately use military force rather than concessions, or vice versa? This dissertation answers these questions by examining four major Chinese territorial disputes - Chinese-Russian and Chinese-Indian frontier disputes and Chinese-Vietnamese and Chinese-Japanese offshore island disputes. I propose a new theory which focuses on the chan