Information Sharing in Early Stage International Disputes: How China and Japan Communicate∗

Shoko Kohama, Atsushi Tago, and Kazunori Inamasu†

Abstract

This study explores the mechanism by which countries share information through international and domestic media in the early stages of international disputes. Despite the rich theoretical literature on crisis bargaining and widespread concerns over various sources of conflict in the Asia-Pacific re-gion, early stage disputes have not been fully modeled. We theorize them in a framework in which countries do not seek immediate redistribution of goods at stake and restrain themselves from escalating the dispute while pur-suing an advantageous standing. In the model, two countries simultaneously choose the amount of input in provocative actions with one-sided unknown cost of input and, in advance, a country possessing private information chooses the degree to which it reveals the private information to the coun-terpart and the domestic public. We demonstrate that exogenous agencies, such as domestic and international media, who are able to verify infor-mation, incentivize countries to share private information and provide even greater incentives when these agencies incur a favorable bias in information transmission. Conversely, countries surrounded by hostile international me-dia and relatively uncontrollable domestic media are likely to send noisy signals, which undermines the quality of information transmission. In early stage disputes, therefore, the international news environment and domestic freedom of the press greatly affect information sharing between disputants. To illustrate this mechanism, we analyze governmental statements and sub-sequent news articles publicized during the Sino-Japanese aircraft scram-bling incidents in 2014 using the quantitative text analysis (QTA) method.

Keywords: early stage disputes, information sharing, noisy signals, me-dia, quantitative text analysis (QTA)

Kohama, S., Inamasu, K., & Tago, A. (n.d.). Information sharing in early-stage international disputes: How china and japan communicate. In M. Suzuki & A. Okada (Eds.), Games of conflict and cooperation in asia. New York: Springer.

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Introduction Many international disputes fall short of the threshold of becoming seri-

ous crises or wars. Indeed, militarized conflicts themselves usually begin as less severe disputes in which the conflicting parties exchange harsh words. As such, an analysis of the early stages of international disputes constitutes an essential part of our understanding of international politics, and this is especially pronounced in the Asia-Pacific region. One of the most serious concerns in the region is that countries are involved in many intertwined early stage disputes that could potentially lead to bloody confrontation. China, Japan and South Korea have been involved in fierce disputes over various territorial and historical issues. China has also been involved in ter-ritorial disputes with Southeast Asian countries. North Korea has engaged in various types of provocations, including launching missiles, conducting nuclear tests, and making strong verbal accusations. The Taiwan Strait has also been one of the major sources of instability in East Asia.

However, few theoretical studies have been conducted on the early stages of international disputes. The rich theoretical literature on conflict predominantly focuses on crisis bargaining and deterrence and thus pays lit-tle attention to the process that does not involve actual threats or use of force. This is also the case with empirical research exploiting “united historical cases of conflict in which the threat, display or use of military force short of war by one member state is explicitly directed towards the government, of-ficial representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state” (Jones et al., 1996, p.163).

This omission is due to the lack of a framework to analyze inter-actions that seldom involve actual threats and are predominantly verbal. In-fluential theories characterize international disputes as bargaining of valua-ble goods and the process of costly signaling (Fearon, 1995, 1998; Schelling, 1980; Smith and Stam, 2004; Powell, 1996, 1999, 2006). Early stage dis-putes, therefore, do not fit neatly into such a framework. Another reason from the empirical perspective is the practical inconvenience of collecting and analyzing the substantive contents of verbal campaigns in diplomacy, although researchers have increasingly engaged in large-N and experimental studies focusing on verbal disputes (e.g., Kohama et al. n.d.; McManus 2014; Subramanian and Stoll 2006; Shellman 2008). Scholars have yet to agree on how to collect data on and analyze the contents of verbal actions during conflict.

This chapter identifies features of early disputes and formalizes them to fill this research gap, paying special attention to information sharing by the disputing parties. We present a model in which countries simultane-ously choose the amount of input they will give to a provocative action. In

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this model, one side does not know the cost of input: countries in possession of private information choose the degree to which they reveal this infor-mation to the counterpart and to the domestic public. Put in more technical terms, a country possessing private information chooses the size of disturb-ance involved in its signals, where less disturbance indicates more infor-mation sharing. The theory highlights the role of exogenous agencies, such as international and domestic media, which can verify information.

Implications drawn from the theory include that such outside agen-cies encourage disputants to share information and that countries under a favorable news environment convey less noisy signals while those facing a hostile international news environment and a relatively uncontrollable do-mestic information environment are likely to send noisy signals. Thus, the news environment and domestic levels of civil liberty greatly affect how states communicate in early stage disputes.

On the empirical side, these findings have implications regarding verbal communication among East Asian countries. In this chapter, we spe-cifically analyze the aircraft scrambling incidents that occurred between China and Japan over the East China Sea in 2014, using the quantitative text analysis (QTA) method. QTA is a method of measuring the commonality of the contents of multiple texts in the form of vectors. Therefore, we quantify how far and in what direction announcements by the Chinese and the Japa-nese governments go and how closely governmental announcements and media coverage are located.

Our analysis demonstrates that in the context of Sino-Japanese dis-putes over the East China Sea, international and domestic media are gener-ally favorable toward Japan, while the Chinese government and media are relatively isolated in the international media space. Moreover, statements of the Japanese government includes more terms denouncing China, whereas the Chinese government is inclined to place more emphasis on self-promot-ing or justifying words. This is consistent with the theoretical implications, considering that negative information conveys clearer and more convincing messages than positive information (Fridkin and Kenney, 2004; Jasperson and Fan, 2002; Kohama et al., n.d.; Lau and Pomper, 2004; Meernik et al., 2012; Soroka, 2014).

Our findings highlight a commonality and a dissimilarity between today’s Asia-Pacific region and the medieval tribunal system in Asia intro-duced in the introductory chapter. First of all, this model suggests a possible mechanism by which the hegemon maintained security within the empire. Our theory illuminates the importance of exogenous agencies who verify noisy information issued by disputants, which encourages disputants to share information to begin with. In the medieval era, a hegemon potentially

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might serve as an intermediary to information transmission between its vas-sal states to prevent dispute escalation among them. In today’s world, simi-lar dynamics might be present within the so-called “hub and spokes” system centered on the United States; however, we focus on news media in this particular paper.

We proceed as follows. The next section reviews the existing the-ories related to early stage international disputes. Then, we characterize dis-putes in early stages in non-technical terms, providing an in-depth descrip-tion of the aircraft scrambling incidents that occurred between China and Japan in 2014. The subsequent sections provide a formal model and present its implications. A brief examination of the mechanism against the actual incidents between China and Japan follows. We conclude by summarizing our findings and discussing issues for future research.

Theories on International Disputes Despite the rich theoretical literature on international crisis and war, early

stage disputes have been undertheorized. An influential group of studies the-orizes crisis as a bargaining process and war as a bargaining failure, i.e., an inefficient way of reallocating valuable goods. Scholars argue that bargain-ing failure is caused by informational asymmetry and the lack of commit-ment (Fearon, 1995, 1998; Schelling, 1980; Smith and Stam, 2004; Powell, 1996, 1999, 2006). Extending these insights, studies on endogenous war ter-mination also model war as part of a bargaining process (Leventŏglu and Slantchev, 2007; Slantchev, 2003a, 2004, 2010).

This naturally leads scholars to explore the means to moderate these fundamental barriers to peace that are deeply rooted in the anarchic nature of the international system. Therefore, scholars demonstrate that in-formational asymmetry can be modified through signaling in various forms, such as public threats issued by political leaders, mobilization of troops and arsenals, and fighting on the battleground (Fearon, 1994; Kurizaki, 2007; Schultz, 2001; Slantchev, 2003b, 2004, 2005, 2010; Smith, 1998a; Powell, 2004). The effect of third-party involvement is also extensively examined as a way of consolidating commitment to negotiated resolution (Kydd, 2003, 2006; Smith and Stam, 2003; Walter, 2002).

Another important line of research on war stems from the demo-cratic peace theory. Within this framework, political leaders’ desire for sur-vival in conjunction with domestic political institutions determines their commitment on war, which is modeled as the provision of public goods (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003; Ohtsuki, 2013).

Although crisis and war are often modeled as a bargaining process and public goods provision, the early stages of international disputes may

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involve dynamics that are dissimilar from them. Specifically, the assump-tion at the core of these approaches is that adversaries face actual threats of force and of revising the status quo; such deliberate demands may not be issued during the early stages of disputes.

In this regard, theories on deterrence, especially so-called general deterrence, are more closely related to early stage disputes that fall short of immediate threats. Deterrence is a type of strategic coercion, aiming to per-suade the opponent not to alter the status quo with the threat of punishment (Art, 1980). General deterrence is imposed against potential challenges, in contrast with immediate deterrence provoked against actual threats already made. Regarding general deterrence, researchers argue that it is a form of signaling accompanied with sunk costs or a hand-tying mechanism (Fearon, 1997, 2002; Schelling, 1980; Smith, 1998a,b). An example of the former includes an alliance, whereas the latter could involve stationed troops on foreign soil as a trip-wire.

Early stage disputes positively operate within the overarching dy-namics of general deterrence. However, it may not be the sole mechanism dictating the process. A notable feature of early stage dispute is that they often take the form of exchange of harsh words through diplomatic channels or public statements. However, such verbal fights have been insufficiently theorized. Considering that most bloody wars initially begin with less severe disputes, theories specifically on the early stages of disputes will be a valu-able contribution to the literature.

Theorizing early stage disputes is also essential from a practical perspective because it will help us better understand the current Asia-Pacific region, where countries engage in provocation and severe verbal fights over territorial, economic and historical issues. Although these disputes currently fall short of becoming an intensive struggle, they have the potential to esca-late to a more serious confrontation.

Before providing a formal description of early stage disputes, let us first present the actual incidents that recently occurred between China and Japan. These events will help us comprehend the characteristics of disputes in the early stages.

Grasping Early-Stage International Disputes A quintessential example of current early stage disputes is aircraft scram-

bling between China and Japan. The number of such incidents has increased as the territorial disputes between China and Japan in the East China Sea have intensified. According to the Japanese government, its jets were scram-bled more than 900 times between April 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015 (The Reuters, 2015).

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Let us first take a closer look at some of these incidents to grasp how early stage disputes operate, followed by a summary of their character-istics. One incident, described as “the first time ever for Chinese fighters to fly this close to SDF [Japan Self-Defense Forces] aircraft,” occurred on May 24, 2014 and was followed by antagonistic verbal fights that were closely covered by world news media. The Japanese Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally and publicly explained the near-miss event as a provocation by the Chinese military.

Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera gave an extra press conference on the morning of May 25, stating: “We already lodged a protest against the Chinese side through diplomatic channels before this announcement. I am concern[ed] that this is dangerous behavior as one small mistake could have led to an accident.” In the subsequent Q&A session, he clearly asserted that China had conducted a dangerous act by approaching a Japanese military surveillance airplane, stating that China should not act “dangerously,” and that the Japanese surveillance plane did not enter Chinese airspace and did not conduct any illegal act (Japanese Ministry of Defense, 2014a).

In the evening, China’s Defense Ministry responded, stating that “the China-Russia joint naval drill in the designated waters and airspace of the East China Sea was a routine drill held by Chinese and Russian navies and various no-sail and no-fly notices in the relevant waters and airspace have been issued by both navies in accordance with international practice before the drill.” It concluded by “demanding the Japanese side to respect the le-gitimate rights of Chinese and Russian navies, restrain the personnel con-cerned and stop all surveillance and interference activities. Otherwise, all the consequences that might be caused will be borne by the Japanese side” (Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China, 2014a).

On the next day, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs publi-cized Vice-Minister Saiki’s comment that “aircrafts of the Self-Defense Force were involved in monitoring activities which are usually carried out and that such activities are rightful actions which present no problems in terms of international law and international customary law, and that Japan did not conduct any dangerous acts or interfere with exercises as noted by China” (Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2014a).

At a regular press conference later that day, Chinese Foreign Min-istry Spokesperson Qin Gang countered Japan’s comment by repeating that China had issued “no sail” and “no fly” notices:

China’s Defense Ministry has released an announcement

detailing what really happened and China’s position. If the Japanese fighter jets did not enter the airspace as you just said, then what were they doing up there? What were their positions

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at that time? Are you suggesting that the Chinese aircrafts ap-proached the Japanese ones for provocation? I have to stress once again that the Japanese actions are very dangerous and also very provocative. The Japanese side needs to reflect ear-nestly on what they have done and keep their actions in check so as to avoid miscalculations which will lead to friction and conflicts. Otherwise, the Japanese side will bear any and all consequences from this. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 2014)

The second incident followed on June 11. Again, the Japanese gov-

ernment was the first to make a claim against China. Japanese Defense Min-ister Onodera claimed that “[t]his series of one-sided actions by Chinese military aircraft is extremely dangerous as it could have led to an unexpected accident. This kind of behavior is absolutely intolerable. In response to this incident, the Japanese government lodged a grave protest against the Chi-nese side again through diplomatic channels and made the incident public.” Again, it is clear that the Japanese government was trying to emphasize its strong denouncement of the Chinese military maneuver, while calling for “a maritime communication mechanism between the Japanese and Chinese de-fense authorities” (Japanese Ministry of Defense, 2014b).

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on behalf of Vice-Minister Saiki, acted in concert and claimed that “the reoccurrence of a similar incident is deeply deplorable, and lodged a strong protest and strongly demanded the prevention of reoccurrences, so that extremely dangerous activities that could lead to an unexpected accident in the sea or airspace in the vicinity of Japan should not repeated” (Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2014b).

In response, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense, showing a video clip, stated the following:

On June 11, Japan hyped up that the Chinese fighters were

extremely close to the reconnaissance aircraft of Japanese Self-Defense Forces and played up the fallacy of the so-called “China’s military threat.” This is another groundless accusa-tion of Japan to deceive the international community, smear the images of China and the Chinese military and create re-gional tensions after Japan claimed that China's fighter flew extremely close to Japan's military aircraft on May 24. The bad practices that Japan had done totally ignore the facts and call white black. Just as the Chinese saying goes that the vil-lain brings suit against his victim before he himself is prose-cuted.... The Chinese pilots’ operations are professional and

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standard with restraint. What Japanese pilots had done is dan-gerous and provocative.

For a long time, Japan tracks, monitors and interferes the

Chinese warships and military aircraft, which endangers the Chinese warships and military aircraft and it is the root of the China-Japan naval and air security issues. Rather than con-ducting soul-searching itself, Japan often deliberately claims irresponsible, deceptive and agitational [sic] remarks to attack China maliciously, which totally exposes its hypocrisy and dual character in relations with China. The Japanese side is requested to clarify it to China and the international commu-nity. The Chinese side reserves rights to take further steps. (Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China, 2014b)

Japanese Defense Minister Onodera immediately reacted to this Chi-

nese accusation against Japan in the extra press conference in the evening and categorically denied the Chinese case. He admitted, “I don’t know their true intention. However, from the perspective of international moral[s], I can be sure that their behavior toward SDF aircraft is totally unacceptable and unreasonable” (Japanese Ministry of Defense, 2014c).

Another incident occurred in August, according to the Chinese Min-istry of National Defense. This time, it was China’s turn to first claim that Japanese fighter jets had made a provocative move towards the Chinese air-planes (Chinese Ministry of National Defense 2014b). The National De-fense Ministry publicized a statement claiming that “[s]everal Japanese air-craft entered China’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea on Wednesday and carried out extensive reconnaissance” and that “Chinese planes conducted necessary tracking and monitoring of the foreign military planes.” The statement emphasized that “Chinese patrol planes that were conducting a routine patrol in the ADIZ, and the Chinese planes took reasonable, proper and restrained measures to cope with the threat in the airspace” (Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China, 2014c).

Initially, only the Reuters news agency picked up this statement, flagging it as a key news item in the Asia-Pacific section. However, the Jap-anese government made no immediate statement at the minister level. Alt-hough the Chief of Staff of Air Self Defense discussed this issue at a press

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conference, it did not attract wide attention from world media, garnering only conservative media interest in Japan.1

The above stories highlight four distinctive features of early stage disputes. First, it appears that China and Japan scramble military aircraft for the purpose of general deterrence. The incidents may not squarely fit in the logic of general deterrence, considering that the territorial sovereignty itself is the point in dispute. Yet, scrambling aircraft presumably served as a costly signaling to show that they will take hardline positions on the issue in the East China Sea.

However, other dynamics ostensibly operate during the disputes. Alt-hough both parties strongly criticized the other for its dangerous maneuver and checked further provocation, they refrained from issuing clear deter-rence threats against each other. Both sides repeatedly insisted that the other party “will bear any and all consequences” from further provocation. Yet, it remained unspecified what precise actions would be taken for punishment. Thus, their public announcements may have been issued for deterrence pur-poses, yet not in the exact way that the theories anticipate. It is apparent that adversaries intentionally left their statements vague for the purpose besides deterrence.

This illuminates another important feature of early stage disputes: although parties show their strong will to keep engaging in the dispute, they do not necessarily seek immediate reallocation, i.e., bargaining, of goods at stake. Therefore, adversaries face a dilemma of seeking advantage via in-timidation while also restraining themselves from escalating the dispute. China’s and Japan’s statements indicate that neither party seeks to immedi-ately alter the status quo and to escalate the disputes into crisis. In this light, their announcements are primarily to show grave concerns over the incident, rather than to convey threats that are directly linked with use of force.

This is intertwined with the third feature that adversaries conduct the dis-pute in a form of verbal fights through international and domestic media. In addition to the diplomatic channels though which China and Japan regularly communicate, branches in both countries also made their claims in public and in English along with their official languages. Their claims were exten-sively covered by international and domestic news media as we will show in a later section.

1 According to Sankei-Shimbun, Harukazu Saito, Chief of Staff of Air Self De-

fense, held a regular press conference categorically denying the Chinese accusa-tions. The important fact here is that the official record of this press conference has not been made available in English or even in Japanese (Sankei Shimbun, 2014).

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The phenomenon is not fully explained by the well-established logic of “audience costs” (Fearon, 1994; Schultz, 2001; Smith, 1998a), con-sidering that China issued similar statements;2 that secret diplomacy enables adversaries to convey credible information while avoiding the risks of un-wanted war (Kurizaki, 2007); and that they need not issue announcements in English if they are intended to speak primarily to their domestic public. Taken together, communication through international and domestic media appears to play an important role in early stage disputes.

The final point regards the substance of adversaries’ announce-ments. The excerpts from official statements cited above show that they adopted either negative or positive tones: they denounce the counterpart on some occasions, whereas they emphasize the legitimacy and legality of one’s own actions in others. The former negative type of message can be called denouncement and the latter positive one, self-promotion. Logically, governmental announcements can include both positive negative compo-nents, which is defined as a dual strategy.

A quantitative text analysis of the scrambling cases was conducted to confirm this point. We first extracted key terms from the official state-ments3 and created two dictionaries, sorting verbs, nouns, and adjectives into denouncement and self-promotion groups. Words such as “accuse,” “abnormal (abnormally),” and “dangerous (dangerously)” are attributed to denouncement. Words including “international law,” “normal (normally),” and “legal (legally)” are considered self-promotion.4 Then, we calculated how frequently Japanese and Chinese official statements use the two tones.

The three columns from the left in Figure 3.1 show the results for each government. The upper panel shows that both Japanese and Chinese governments employed the dual strategy in May. It is worth noting that China put more emphasis on self-promotion. The lower panel indicates that both parties adopted the denouncing strategy in June. We will elaborate on the rest of the results in a later section.

Keeping these points in mind, we now proceed to formalize early stage international disputes.

2 Weeks (2008) and Kurizaki and Whang (2015) provide empirical evidence for

audience costs under autocracy. 3 A more detailed explanation will be provided in a later section. 4 Four coders independently judged whether the words were used to criticize oth-

ers or to justify them- elves; inter-coder reliability was 0.82, using Fleiss’ Kappa.

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Figure 3.1: Proportion of denouncing and self-promoting keywords in

texts. A Model

This section offers a model in which two countries, Country 1 and 2, engage in early stage international disputes over a valuable good, such as territory, resources, and policies. In the model, Country 1 (hereafter, she) decides how much information to share with Country 2 (hereafter, he) and then they simultaneously choose how much resources to invest in the dis-pute.

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In the beginning of the game, Country 1 chooses the degree to which she shares information with Country 2. Specifically, she decides the size of disturbance involved in her message when she conveys information regarding her unit cost of input in the future. The disturbance is a random variable that is normally distributed with mean µ and variance s, which is denoted by ~ , , where ∈ .

Specifically, Country 1 chooses the value of variance s, while the value of µ is exogenously given. If she is reluctant to share information, she sends an imprecise message, i.e. information involving disturbance with high variance. If she is willing to share information, on the other hand, she issues an accurate message, in which case the variance of disturbance is low. Thus, the disturbance captures the precision of language that she strategi-cally chooses. For analytical simplicity, we assume that Country 1 chooses either large or small disturbance and that large disturbance has s approaches to infinity, while small disturbance has s approaches to zero, without loss of generality. µ, on the other hand, represents the bias involved in informa-tional transmission, which is the unique characteristic of the external envi-ronment.

Then, countries observe noisy signals as described below and sim-ultaneously choose how much to invest in the dispute. Their input is denoted by , 1, 2 and entails the unit cost , 1, 2. We assume that is un-known to both of them, while is common knowledge. The value of is a random variable such that ~ , , where 0. Although countries are unable to observe the exact value of , both of them know its distribu-tion (i.e., mean and variance). An intuitive understanding of this is that pol-icy makers of Country 1 are not fully informed of the true demand of their core constituents, whose support is essential to stay in power.

Information on the value of is revealed in two steps. First, Coun-try 1 observes a private signal about the unknown value of . This signal z is determined as follows:

where ~ 0, and , 0. That is, the signal is noisy in the

way that and the error are distributed independently. Because the signal is private, only Country 1 observes the value of z and makes an inference about the true value of her cost. For instance, a private signal may be ob-served when core supporters of policy makers (e.g., interest groups or mili-tary officers) whisper to them about the costs of making provocation.

Meanwhile, Country 2 observes a noisy signal defined as fol-lows:

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where ~ , as defined above and , , 0.

Country 2 infers the value of based on this information. Country 1 also observes .

Observing the signals, both countries simultaneously choose the amount of their input. The input may be used for a publicly observable pro-vocative action, such as sending a disguised fishing boat to disputed water for intrusion, building a structure in a disputed territory, and deploying air-craft for surveillance in debated airspace.

The input is positively rewarded with a unit gain a > 0. The gain may include an advantageous position in the dispute, loyalty from core do-mestic supporters, and favorable foreign public opinion. In this particular model, we assume that both parties have an identical unit gain, which is common knowledge, for convenience. It is important to note that the benefit of the disputant’s input is not directly contradictory. To put it differently, the benefit is characterized by a non-zero-sum feature. This represents one of the essential characteristics of early stage disputes. As we maintained in the previous section, countries do not rush to revise the allocation of goods at stake in early stages; rather, they take actions to exhibit their willingness to keep engaging in the dispute and to cultivate a favorable environment.

The input also leads to negative consequences, namely, escalation of the dispute. This setting is derived from another defining characteristic of early stage disputes that countries despise drastic escalation of the dispute. Considering that disputes intensify as they invest more resources, they have incentives to cooperate in avoiding escalation while pursuing their private benefit. Accordingly, we denote the unit price of escalation by , where b is equal to unity and common knowledge.

The model also incorporates domestic consequences of infor-mation transmission. Specifically, we assume that Country 1 suffers domes-tic negative consequences of informational revelation if she has a high value of . An intuition behind this is that citizens in Country 1 prefer competent policy makers and, hence, penalize those with higher costs of action. The domestic punishment, therefore, is denoted by . Because the exact value of is unknown to the citizens, they infer the value from the noisy signal, . The model omits domestic dynamics of Country 2 for simplicity, which is inconsequential.

Thus, the utility functions are defined as follows:

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To summarize, Country 1 first chooses the amount of distortion embedded in future signals. Then, Country 1 receives a private signal re-garding the unknown cost of her input. Country 2 also observes a noisy sig-nal. Inferring the value of unknown cost, both parties simultaneously choose the amount of input in the dispute. Thus, they condition their strategies on the information transmitted, z and , particularly µ and s.

Results This section formally derives the equilibrium and then, elaborates on the-

oretical implications. In the subgame of simultaneous input, the optimal amount of input for each country solves the following equations:

∗ max , ∗ max

Country 1’s choice depends on signals z and , while Country 2’s

decision is conditioned upon a noisy signal , because z is private to Country 1.

Lemma 1 Each player makes input with an amount as defined as follows:

∗3

| 6

|

2 3

∗3

| 3

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where, the posterior value of takes the following values, respectively.

|

|

.

Proof Country 2’s optimal choice solves the following equations.

∗ ∗ | 2

, ∗∗ 2

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Country 1’s optimal choice solves: ∗∗

.

Intuitively, the optimal amount of input increases in the unit gain, a, because a large unit gain means that input is rewarded more. Moreover, the amount of input increases in the (estimated) unit cost associated with the opponent’s input and decreases in the (estimated) unit cost of his or her own investment. That is, both countries become more aggressive if their cost of taking provocative actions is small and if they know that their opponent will make a reserved choice due to the high cost of making input.

We next consider Country 1’s choice on the garbling. Proposition 1 The unique SPNE of the game is constituted of the follow-

ing decision rule:

, 0

0 0

and ∗ and ∗ defined in Lemma 1.

Proof Given ∗ and s, the utility of Country 1 is

31|

61|

22

3

2

1| ,

where lim→

| lim→

|

by L’Hôpital’s rule. Therefore, lim

→ lim→

if µ > 0 and the

opposite if µ < 0.

Hence, Country 1’s choice on information sharing is dictated by the direction of bias embedded in informational transmission. The positive value of µ leads to a biased signal with which Country 2 infers that Country 1 has the higher cost of input, which encourages him to behave more ag-gressively. Therefore, Country 1 prefers to send a noisier signal to begin with. Conversely, if the bias favors her, she chooses to send more precise information. If no bias is incurred in the process of transmission, she is in-different about the quality of information.

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One possible interpretation of the bias is political partiality in me-dia coverage.5 Some countries enjoy favorable treatments in news while oth-ers are severely criticized. One intuitive example is that a government strictly oppresses freedom of press for the purpose of restricting the flow of information which is undesirable to the government. In such a case, infor-mation transmission involves a bias favorable to the government (i.e., µ is negative). Thus, the following remark summarizes the proposition in non-technical terms.

Remark 1 Countries’ willingness to share information in early stage dis-

putes depends on their domestic and international media environment. They are likely to issue clear signals, if domestic and international media are fa-vorable to them. Conversely, they are inclined to yield noisy signals, if both domestic and international media are hostile to them. If media coverage is unbiased, on the other hand, countries utilize both noisy and clear messages.

The remark implies that countries who are reported in a positive

light as well as those imposing strict information control are more willing to share information, albeit in a biased way. Conversely, countries are unwill-ing to share information in a situation where media environment is unfavor-able to them both at home and abroad, although such a situation might be quite rare in the real world.

The theory also suggests that countries losing control of domestic media become reluctant to share information. Here, we relax the assumption of the model that domestic and international media suffer the same distortion because countries in reality usually have more direct control over domestic media than over foreign or international media. Specifically, we highlight an environment which is relevant to the current situation in East Asia: inter-national media unfavorable to Country 1 and weakening control over do-mestic media.

Remark 2 Countries are inclined to make signals noisy if foreign and

international media are hostile to them while domestic information trans-mission is relatively uncontrollable.

5 Of course, countries do not solely rely on media to obtain information about

disputing countries. However, media serve as an important source of information concerning how much cost countries pay to escalate disputes, especially when the opposing party is extremely secretive (e.g., North Korea) or its political leaders are bound by public opinion (e.g., democracies). Considering that countries are equipped with their own information agencies, the bias could also emerge from their organizational culture or standard operating procedures (SOPs).

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This remark has implications for the current situation of the Chi-

nese government. Although the Chinese government has oppressed freedom of press, it is well known that governmental control of media has recently been weakened as an increasing number of people gather information from foreign media via the internet. Therefore, citizens have become exposed to less biased information nowadays. Meanwhile, foreign media have im-proved access to domestic information of China and often report it in a neg-ative light. In such a situation, the theory predicts that China is more likely to issue noisy signals. Taken together with Remark 1, it is suggested that China’s signals have become noisier as it loses firm close control of media.

Lastly, we discuss the general implication of media for infor-mation transmission between belligerents. In the theory introduced above, we have made an implicit assumption regarding the way countries com-municate. Specifically, the model does not allow Country 1 to misrepresent the information, whereas it allows Country 1 to make her message noisy. This implies that there is an exogenous agency that conducts information transmission and verifies the data provided by Country 1.

The assumption contrasts with a widely accepted notion that com-munication in international disputes is characterized by bluffing. What hap-pens if Country 1 could bluff? Although we do not provide formal analysis for the sake of space, Country 1 would fabricate the information and claim that she has the lowest cost of input to minimize Country 2’s input in the dispute. Country 2 knows that she is untrustworthy, and hence, no infor-mation is transmitted. This comparison offers an illuminating insight about the role of international media in cross-border communication.

Remark 3 Trustworthy external agents, even if biased, encourage dis-

putants to share information in early stage disputes.

Agents, such as international media, are trustworthy in the sense that they verify that the noisy signal is drawn from a given distribution. In non-technical terms, they confirm that Country 1 did not misrepresent infor-mation (regarding the mean value) and only added noise. It must be empha-sized that we do not assume that external agents know the true value of ; rather, they know the distribution from which the noisy signal should be drawn. That is, their expertise informs them of the range in which unknown value should fall into. Therefore, they can express alarm when countries lie to go beyond the range. Although the model implicitly assumes that external agencies are completely informed of the distribution, the implication re-mains unchanged as long as they can detect and hence deter Country 1’s misrepresentation to some extent. This suggests that media may restrain the

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extent to which belligerents bluff, which has a novel implication to the cur-rent literature assuming that they can disguise whatever they want.

Illustration This section provides an illustration of the mechanism demonstrated in

the previous section. To this end, we analyze governmental announcements and media coverage on the scrambling incidents between China and Japan in May and June of 2014. Specifically, we shed light on how news agencies mediated governmental announcements and how the media environment af-fected the quality of official statements.

As we mentioned previously, both China and Japan zealously made their case in public and in English. Things turned out as they wished, and the incidents were widely reported not only by Chinese and Japanese media but also by the international media. Therefore, these scrambling cases provide a nice illustration, albeit far from a complete examination, of how media intermediate communication in early stage disputes.

To compare governmental statements with news articles reporting the incidents, we collected articles from 20 major news agencies, including Xinhua, Japan Times, Washington Post, BBC, and Reuters. All sources of data are listed in Table 3.1. Only those articles written in English were in-cluded in the dataset to ensure comparability.6

On the incident in May, we collect texts of three governmental an-nouncements (two from Japan and one from China) and 20 news agencies reported on them.7 The text corpus is composed of 9,431 words. A brief ob-servation shows that, for instance, 15 of the 20 (75%) news agencies refer to Defense Minister Onodera, often with direct citations of his words. In contrast, names of Chinese officials appear in only two media. Regarding the incident occurred in June, three governmental statements were publi-cized (two from Japan and one from China) and 15 news agencies reported on them, which added up to 7,983 words in total. Seven (47%) of these news agencies referred to Japanese Defense Minister Onodera and Chinese Am-bassador Yonghua.

6 We acknowledge that articles in English often deviate from original versions. 7 To balance the number of the governmental agencies for the two countries, we

omitted the Cabinet Ministry (Press Secretary) of Japan from the analysis. However, inclusion of it would not change the results significantly, considering its announce-ments’ similarity to those of the other branches.

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News Agency (Source) Location

AFP (http://www.afp.com/en/home) France Australian (http://www.theaustralian.com.au) Australia Bangkok Post (http://www.bangkokpost.com) Thailand BBC News (http://www.bbc.com/news) UKBloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com) USChosun Ilbo (http://english.chosun.com) South Korea Japan Times (http://www.japantimes.co.jp) Japan Korean Herald (http://www.koreaherald.com) South Korea Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com) USManila Bulletin (http://www.mb.com.ph) Philippines New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com) USReuters (http://www.reuters.com) International South China Morning Post (http://www.scmp.com) Hong Kong Straits Times (http://www.straitstimes.com) Singapore The Financial Times (http://www.ft.com) International The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com) UKTimes of India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com) IndiaThe Globe and Mail (www.theglobeandmail.com) Canada Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com) USXinhua (http://www.chinaview.cn) China

Table 3.1: Sources of Data

We enumerate the text data within the quantitative text analysis (QTA) framework. We specifically conducted correspondence analysis, one of the QTA techniques specialized for the description and visualization of distance of texts (Abdi and Williams, 2010; Greenacre, 2007; Nenadic and Greenacre, 2007). It enables us to capture features of each governmental statement and media article, calculating the relative frequencies or propor-tion of particular words appearing within the text. The first step for corre-spondence analysis is to extract key terms in the text data. We identify key-words based on either of the following criteria: (1) those appearing more than ten times in total; (2) top 60 words of which frequencies are varied by media outlets measured by Chi squared values. This yields 89 keywords for the May incidents and 61 keywords for the June incidents.

In analyzing texts, we distinguish two elements in the text which presumably indicate the quality of information transmission. As we demon-strated in the previous sections, the theory shows that countries issue noisy and/or less noisy messages in conveying information, depending on their domestic and international media environment.

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Putting the concept into practice, we consider that countries alter the tones of official statements to add or remove noise from their messages. As described in the previous section, governmental messages can be sorted into denouncement with a negative tone and self-promotion with a positive tone. Statements with different tones are not necessarily different in their contents. In the case of scrambling, for instance, the message behind “the opposing country acted dangerously” and “our actions were legitimate” is essentially identical. Thus, the tones are added, within our theoretical frame-work, not to alter the message per se but rather to change the amount of noise involved in them.

Specifically, positive messages involve presumably more noise than negative ones. To put it differently, negative signals convey clearer in-formation than positive ones which leave room for interpretation. Indeed, experimental studies on public diplomacy show that denouncement greatly affects people’s opinion toward countries in early stage disputes, while the effects of self-promotion are more dependent on the context, such as the opponent strategy or value proximity between the government conducting public diplomacy and its audience (Kohama et al., nd). More generally, the rich literature on electoral campaigns shows that negative information has greater influence on people’s attitudes (Fridkin and Kenney, 2004; Jasper-son and Fan, 2002; Lau and Pomper, 2004; Meernik et al., 2012; Soroka, 2014).

Accordingly, we highlight denouncing and self-promoting compo-nents in texts on each incident and summarizes the results in Table 3.2 and Figure 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3. Table 3.2 provides a list of keywords and their fre-quencies.8 Figure 3.1 presents the proportion of denouncing and self-pro-moting keywords in texts of each government and new agency. Moreover, Figures 3.2 and 3.3 visually present the results of the correspondence anal-ysis that measures the distance between texts. The upper panel of the figures show the distance among agencies on a two dimensional field. The lower panels present which keywords cause the distance among them.

8 Our analysis was performed using KH Coder (http://khc.sourceforge.net/en/),

which relies on R for its statistical analysis.

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May (N=23)

Denouncement Self-Promotion Noun protest 9 international-law 10 routine 2 Adjective dangerous 21 legitimate 5 responsible 4 routine 1 abnormal 2 Verb accuse 12 intrude 9 interfere 8 escalate 6 protest 5 Adverb dangerously 2 normally 6 abnormally 1 routinely 1

June (N=18)

Denouncement Self-Promotion Noun protest

12 international-

law 1

Adjective dangerous 11 legal 3 responsible 1 routine 2 normal 2 Verb accuse 7 protest 7 interfere 5 intrude 1 escalate 1 criticize 1 Adverb dangerously 7 abnormally 4

Table 3.2: Frequencies of keywords.

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Figure 3.2: Visualizing the results of correspondence analysis–May

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Figure 3.3: Visualizing the results of correspondence analysis–June

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On governmental statements, Figure 3.1 shows that in May, China and Japan employed the dual strategy combining both denouncement and self-promotion. Texts by the Japanese Ministry of Defense placed more em-phasis on denouncement, which is not surprising considering that it was the first governmental reaction to the incident. On the other hand, China’s first reaction taken by Chinese Ministry of Defense appears to place an emphasis on self-promotion. The reaction of Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs two days after the incident involves more denouncing terms than self-promotion, yet was much reserved than that of Japanese MOD. In June, Tokyo clearly employed the denouncement strategy, while Beijing lowered the tones.

Figures 3.2 and 3.3 confirm that the texts from Chinese and Japa-nese agencies differ in their tone. According to the upper panel of Figure 3.2, the Chinese Ministry of Defense and Japanese Ministry of Defense took two extreme positions. The lower panel indicates that China is distinct in its use of “routine” (self-promotion) and the Japanese MOD stands out with its use of “abnormal(ly)” (denouncement). Figure 3.3 shows that China’s an-nouncement differs significantly from that of the Japanese agencies, specif-ically because of the word “routine.” Taken together, China’s statements are inclined toward self-promotion, whereas the Japanese statements have a ten-dency toward denouncement.

How did news agencies report the incidents? A brief look at Table 3.2 indicates that news agencies mediated governmental announcements in a systematic way. It shows considerably more similarity than difference in key terms across the texts on both occasions. It appears that news agencies have common tendencies to adopt negative and positive frames character-ized by certain words. The coincidence occurs in part because they cited the governmental statements. Moreover, Figure 3.1 demonstrates that de-nouncement and self-promotion are the key lines of argument in news cov-erage. In May, international media covered both denouncing and self-pro-moting elements. In contrast, they mainly reported denouncing words in June.

A striking finding of Figures 3.2 and 3.3 is that news articles of various international media involve surprisingly little variance. Specifically, their coverage centers on moderately negative information. This indicates that they purposefully focus on less noisy information within the govern-mental statements while ignoring others.

News media are almost uniformly inclined to eliminate outlying information of governmental statements when reporting them. For instance, the lower panel of Figure 3.2 indicates that the terms “abnormal” or “abnor-mally” used by Japanese MOD are remote from news articles. The term “routine” is also distant from news article. In June, “routine” is isolated.

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Although it is often assumed that news agencies emphasize provocative in-formation to attract people’s attention, the analysis indicates that this may not be the case; rather, it appears that media, especially international news agencies, are inclined to highlight more trustworthy components of govern-mental texts than provocative ones.

We also find that the coverage of international media is highly as-sociated with the position of the Japanese government. In Figures 3.2 and 3.3, the Japanese government is in the middle of international media, alt-hough the Japanese MOD is isolated due to the usage of “abnormal(ly)” in May. On the other hand, there is a curious difference between the Chinese media, Xinhua, and other media. Figure 3.1 shows that Xinhua places rela-tively greater emphasis on self-promotion (by the Chinese government), in contrast with other media providing greater coverage on denouncement. It is also obvious from Figures 3.2 and 3.3 that news reports of Xinhua are closely associated with the government. Other than Xinhua, the Chinese government is distant from major news agencies.

It should be noted that the proximity of texts does not directly equate to favorable or unfavorable coverage. However, it may be safe to maintain that the Japanese government is not isolated in the domestic and international news environments, while the Chinese government is rela-tively distant from the coverage of major news agencies.

Taken together, our findings are consistent with the theoretical im-plications: Japanese and international media are generally favorable toward Japan, while international media do not favor Chinese government. Alt-hough Xinhua closely follows the Chinese government, it is well-docu-mented that Chinese citizens nowadays have (limited) access to other infor-mational sources. These news environments lead the Japanese government to send clean signals, i.e., denouncement and the Chinese government to issue noisy signals, i.e., self-promotion.

Discussion

In Asia, as was discussed in the introductory chapter, conflict and coopera-tion have been embedded within informal or formal security regimes, such as the medieval Chinese empire or the U.S. centered hub-and-spokes system after World War II. Under such regimes, it is essential for the hegemons to prevent disputes among subordinates from escalating. Conflict management in the post-hegemonic world casts even more serious challenges because countries with conflicting interests must cooperate without the coercive power of a hegemon.

This chapter illuminated the mechanism through which interna-tional and free media in promote information sharing between belligerents

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in early stage disputes and how China and Japan communicate under the situation where news agencies mediate information transmission. The the-ory demonstrates that countries are likely to issue clean signals, if domestic and international media reports provide favorable information for them. Conversely, they tend to convey noisy signals, if they consider that interna-tional media are unfavorable to them while domestic media are relatively uncontrollable. In the case that media coverage is unbiased, therefore, they are indifferent between both types of signals. Thus, a favorable media envi-ronment encourages belligerents to share information. Under an unfavorable media environment, in contrast, they issue dubious messages to drown out undesirable information.

This has implications to understanding the circumstances in which countries issue denouncing and self-promoting statements. As we discussed, positive messages are generally perceived as noisy, while the connotation of negative information is relatively clear. Then, a more favorable media envi-ronment motivates belligerents to employ the denouncing strategy, that is, to behave assertively in verbal communication. Conversely, countries sur-rounded by unfavorable media at home and abroad rely on the self-promot-ing strategy.

Therefore, in the context of Sino-Japanese territorial disputes, the theory predicts that Japan has a tendency to rely on denouncement, while China is more inclined to self-promotion. This is because, on the territorial issue, Japanese and international media are generally positive toward the Japanese government and the Chinese government is losing its strict control over domestic information transmission. It must be emphasized that domes-tic and international environment may vary across disputes, depending on who the counterpart is and what is at stake.

Indeed, our contents-analysis of Sino-Japanese scrambling inci-dents demonstrated that major news agencies are proximate to the Japanese government, whereas the Chinese government and Xinhua were in a rela-tively isolated position. Therefore, the statements issued by the Japanese government leaned toward denouncement, comparing with China’s state-ments including a certain degree of self-promotion.

Moreover, we argued that the information transmission via inter-national media facilitates information sharing between belligerents by veri-fying information given by them. Our contents-analysis indicates that major news agencies selectively reported governmental statements, eliminating outlying information.

Besides these substantive implications, this chapter contributes to the field in several respects: First and foremost, we offered a model focusing on early stage disputes and elucidated the mechanism of escalation. This is

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a valuable contribution to the current literature which has paid insufficient attention to early stage disputes.

Second, our model theorizes communication between belligerents in a different way to the dominant framework (signaling games) of the cur-rent literature. Our framework focusing on distortion in communication en-ables us to address the quality of communication in the model, albeit in an abstract way. This leads us to provide a novel interpretation of the tone of governmental statements. Political observers often prefer positive state-ments to negative ones, as they are concerned that negative campaigns result in escalation. Yet our framework sheds light on a different aspect of positive messages, namely, their noise. From this perspective, positive messages are not favorable a priori. Thus, the desirability of positive messages should be the subject of theoretical and empirical question, rather than being assumed away.

Third, our analysis modifies the dominant assumption in the cur-rent literature that countries are able to fabricate information in whatever way they want. Rather, the theory shows that trustworthy external agents who can verify information can detect and deter bluffing among belliger-ents. Thus, such agents with expertise are able to promote information shar-ing, even if they are biased and they do not have access to full information.

Furthermore, our findings have implications for the relation be-tween governments and media. An important contribution of this study is to show oppressing freedom of the press has significant international conse-quences. Political observers in East Asia are increasingly concerned with implicit or explicit governmental regulation of domestic media, even in de-mocracies. Although most of the argument revolves around civil liberties, we argue that such oppression may affect the quality of diplomatic commu-nication. Another implication is that the theory provides underpinning for public diplomacy. Because a favorable news environment promotes infor-mation sharing, both parties in a dispute might benefit from public diplo-macy targeting foreign media and the creation of favorable foreign public opinion.

Lastly but not least importantly, the theory as well as the empirical analysis of this chapter pays serious attention to words in international dis-putes. Scholars tend to focus more on actions and do not necessarily put as much effort in understanding words and texts. Theories usually consider that words are “cheap” and data on verbal actions during disputes are sparse. However, theories and empirical analyses of disputes will be more fruitful if verbal behavior is integrated with existing understanding of actions (or incidents). Our study suggests one way of incorporating words and texts into an analytical framework. We believe that theorizing and collecting data on verbal activities would be one promising project to enrich the field.

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This study is a first step to better comprehend communication in early stage disputes. It will be possible to advance the theory in various ways. One promising avenue of future research is to incorporate a sequential rather than simultaneous analysis of the choices involved in making invest-ment in disputes. Such a setting is more realistic and may shed light on other dynamics than those presented in this paper.

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∗We thank Takaaki Asano, Ryosuke Kadoi, Yoshitaka Komiya, Mari

Miyagawa, Yui Nishimura, Kazuto Ohtsuki, Steve Pickering, Haru Utsumi, and Kentaro Wada. This research is supported by Japan Society for the Pro-motion of Science (Topic-Setting Program to Advance Cutting-Edge Hu-manities and Social Sciences Research.

†Shoko Kohama is Associate Professor, Public Policy School and Grad-

uate School of Law, Hokkaido University. Atsushi Tago is Professor, Grad-uate School of Law, Kobe University. Kazunori Inamasu is Associate Pro-fessor, School of Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University.