Since the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, scholars and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about China's territorial ambitions. Yet China has also used peaceful means to manage conficts, settling seventeen of its twenty-three territorial disputes, often with substantial compromises. This article develops a counterintuitive argument about the effects of domestic confict on foreign policy to explain China's behavior. Contrary to the diversionary war hypothesis, this argument posits that state leaders are more likely to compromise in territorial disputes when confronting internal threats to regime security, including rebellions and legitimacy crises. Regime insecurity best explains China's pattern of compromise and delay in its territorial disputes. China's leaders have compromised when faced with internal threats to regime security, including the revolt in Tibet, the instability following the Great Leap Forward, the legitimacy crisis after the Tiananmen upheaval, and separatist violence in Xinjiang.

What is likely to be the future character of the relationship between the United States and the People's Republic of China? Will it be marked by convergence toward deepening cooperation, stability, and peace or by deterioration that leads to increasingly open competition and perhaps even war? The answers to these questions are of enormous importance. They are also, at this point, unknown. Most analysts who write on U.S.-China relations deploy arguments derived from the three main camps in contemporary international relations theorizing: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Those whose basic analytical premises place them in one of these three schools, however, do not necessarily have similar views regarding the speciac question of the future of U.S.-China relations. It is possible to identify realists who believe that the relationship will basically be stable and peaceful, liberals who expect confrontation and confict, and constructivists who think that things could go either way. The six basic positions in this debate all rest on claims about the importance of particular causal mechanisms or sets of similarly aligned causal forces. In reality, one set of forces may turn out to be so powerful as to overwhelm the rest. But it is also conceivable that the future will be shaped by a confuence of different forces, some mutually reinforcing and others opposed.