Victor A. Ferguson, Viking Bohman, and Audrye Wong
Over the past two decades, economic sanctions have emerged as a central instrument in the foreign policy toolkit of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As the most valuable export destination for many countries and a central hub in global supply chains for critical materials and intermediate inputs, China’s economy provides policymakers with a versatile foundation for statecraft. By imposing sanctions and restricting the ability of foreign governments, firms, or individuals to access the Chinese market, Beijing can compel, deter, or otherwise signal dissatisfaction with actors that cross its red lines.
This essay focuses specifically on economic coercion in the PRC’s borderlands: the twenty countries with which it shares land or maritime borders.1 Using a unique dataset of over two hundred economic restrictions imposed globally between 2010 and August 2025,2 we trace Beijing’s sanctioning behavior in the borderlands and argue that the region served as an important testing ground for Beijing’s initial sanction experimentation, especially through “informal” methods. That borderland countries served as proverbial canaries in a coal mine may be hardly surprising, given that geographic proximity means they are inherently more closely connected to, and therefore more likely to affect, interests of immediate importance to China like territory and borders. However, we also find that sanctioning activity in the PRC’s immediate neighborhood sharply declined after peaking in 2017. We argue that this is because Beijing has been driven to shift its focus toward using economic restrictions to counter pressure from more distant actors like the United States and members of the European Union.
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