Hcss report

Cross-Country Comparison
Our selection of articles 
yielded a richer diversity of results for China
than for 
Russia. In 2013, the academic field may have been focusing more on the existence of 
a Chinese assertiveness. It is still possible to deduct some similarities between both 
countries’ behaviors, particularly with respect to ‘negative’ diplomatic assertiveness. 
Both China and Russia resort mostly to 
diplomatic tools
, either with the verb or 
through actions. Both make use of vetoes to mark their positions and manifest their 

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STRATEGIC MONITOR 2014
opposition to the international community’s preferences. Instances of Russia’s military 
assertiveness seem to occur sporadically, and compared to China there is little to 
suggest (at least based on this literature review) that it has become more vociferous 
in the last few years. Chinese types of assertiveness are well-balanced across the 
different categories – military (from build-up to incidents), economic (from cooperation 
efforts to resource blockades) and, primarily, diplomatic ones (from cultural diplomacy, 
an involvement in institutions and the demand for change, to the denial of responsibility 
and vetoes).
What Do (Some) Statistical Indicators Tell Us? GeoRisQ
The third and final piece of evidence that HCSS looked at in order to establish whether 
the claims of increased assertiveness can be backed up by different types of evidence, 
are some quantitative datasets. For this, we were able to draw upon the existing 
HCSS GeoRisQ database, which contains various datasets that are relevant to 
international security. Based on our literature review in search of the main data points 
that are often cited to illustrate China’s and Russia’s assertive attitudes, a number of 
indicators were selected to capture the extent of Chinese and Russian assertiveness. 
These include the four most frequently covered domains of assertiveness: diplomatic, 
economic, military and informational. For each of these domains, we selected some 
‘proxies’ that are intended to capture some of the key dynamics at work in them. This 
collection of indicators is of course not exhaustive, but it does attempt to paint a 
picture that is illustrative of what is going on.

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