Shing-hon Lam

Shing-hon Lam

PhD candidate at UCLA

Research

Endorsers, Venues, and Frames: China’s Promotion of the Global Security Initiative

With Courtney Fung. Why does accumulating endorsements of national programmes still produce multilateral legitimacy, even when not adopted as policy? We develop the concept of endorsement decoupling, when endorsement is separated from normative commitment by design to give the perception of institutional alignment by a manufactured consensus record. A state can use endorsement decoupling to secure performative multilateralism: a functioning record of broad multilateral support without commitments. A state needs only a form that is cheap to endorse, a discursive environment already hospitable to its vocabulary, and a broadcast architecture that reaches its intended audiences through structurally separate channels. Our research tests the concept using a hard case of China’s promotion of the Global Security Initiative, which is an alternative global security goods platform. We use structural embedding and accountability insulation to predict which state endorses GSI and to what depth. Testing these claims on 8,733 English-language articles across 96 countries, we find that project count — not dollar value — predicts endorsement incidence while regime type conditions depth. Our findings have implications for theories of legitimation — showing that the productive-power pathway bypasses the normative-substance requirement assumed by norm entrepreneurship accounts — and for understanding how rising powers accumulate multilateral standing, a general property of endorsement decoupling that is not China-specific.

Moving Out of Crisis: Third-Country Diplomacy and China’s Crisis Management

With Zenobia Chan, Noel Foster and Jackie Wong. Why do leaders in crisis sometimes meet their adversaries in a third country rather than in either side’s territory? This paper argues that venue choice is a strategic tool of crisis diplomacy. When bilateral visits are politically costly, third-country settings provide a spatial workaround: they allow leaders to communicate directly while reducing the symbolic costs of appearing conciliatory. We theorize that third-country diplomacy operates through political cover, attributional ambiguity, and responsibility diffusion. Using an original dataset of China’s senior leader diplomacy from 1998 to 2023, we examine China-counterpart encounters involving the Party General Secretary and the Premier and distinguish between bilateral-site and third-country venues. The results show that military disputes are associated with a greater likelihood of third-country encounters relative to bilateral-site encounters. Third-country encounters are also followed by higher levels of China-initiated cooperative behavior, particularly after periods of military friction. The findings contribute to research on crisis de-escalation, audience costs, and face-to-face diplomacy by showing that leaders do not only “talk their way out” of political constraints; they can also “move their way out” of them. SSRN

Rude Liberalization: Why Voters Reward Tough Talk but Punish Costly Tariffs

Under review. In a trade war, a leader can raise tariffs or quietly ease them, and frame either with a conservative or liberal message. Across two survey experiments varying that message, whether he retaliates, and whether the policy wins a concession, the public rewards the conservative talk but not the costly action: tough rhetoric lifts support, while raising tariffs is penalized. Even voters who say they want tariffs are no more eager once the bill arrives, and a win without retaliation satisfies them as much as one with it. Voters want the feeling of a trade war, not the fight—an appetite real but cheap, satisfied by talk and a rival’s concession. Economic coercion therefore finds no domestic audience to make the threat credible: where the public bears the cost, it brakes a leader’s follow-through rather than compelling it. The efficient strategy is rude liberalization: combative talk with quiet tariff easing.

Backtracking Under Scrutiny: Evidence and Regulation in the WTO

Regulatory trade barriers have proliferated, yet formal WTO dispute settlement is rarely used to contest them. How do governments discipline trade-restrictive regulations that claim legitimate objectives? I argue that the WTO constrains regulatory protectionism primarily through transparency and peer scrutiny rather than adjudication. In the notification process, governments choose how much justificatory evidence to disclose, and other members infer motives from this disclosure. Submitting little or no evidence makes protectionist intent salient and increases the likelihood of comments and early modification. Submitting extensive documentation can also backfire: under scientific uncertainty, large and heterogeneous evidence bundles may appear overinclusive or strategically constructed, creating additional points of contestation and raising doubts about sincerity. As a result, regulatory credibility follows a non-linear pattern in which intermediate levels of disclosure attract the least attention, while both minimal and excessive disclosure heighten scrutiny and the likelihood of revision, especially when protectionist incentives are strong. I test these claims using an original dataset of 50,599 WTO TBT and SPS notifications from 2010–2024 and a new dataset of regulatory comments from the European Union’s TBT comment portal. Consistent with the theory, governments are more likely to modify proposed regulations when they submit low or high levels of evidence and when protectionist pressure is stronger; medium-evidence measures receive the fewest comments; and receiving a comment substantially increases the likelihood of modification. Importantly, protectionist regulators retain incentives to submit high levels of evidence ex ante: over-disclosure can prima facie deter scrutiny by raising review costs and obscuring intent. Empirically, higher evidentiary volume reduces the incidence of comments for protectionist measures but, conditional on receiving a comment, makes high-evidence protectionist measures especially likely to be revised. These findings show how multilateral oversight can discipline regulatory protectionism even when legal enforcement is weakened. PEIO paper