Empirical Verification

Abstract

As has become evident, the Taiwan issue and the North Korea issue have been among the central “hot spots”, “flashpoints” or “triggers for confrontation” in (also post-Cold War) Sino-U.S. (and Asia-Pacific) relations (Acharya/Goh 2007: 10; Tammen et al. 2000: 167; Foot 2007: 93f.; Goldstein 2007: 674f.; Lampton 2001: 46; Chase 2005: 162; Khalilzad et al. 1999: 86; Zhao 2007: 625; Wagener 2011b: 246; 249). Formulated more drastically, Kugler argues that “Taiwan and Korea have replaced the Cold War’s Berlin as focal points for potential Great Power conflict” (Kugler 2006: 40). Having developed, based on the (post-Cold War) structural frame of Sino-U.S. ties, an eclectic neoliberal and an eclectic neorealist picture of world politics and Sino-U.S. relations in particular, and having derived four neoliberal and four neorealist hypotheses on post-Cold War PRC and U.S. (relational) foreign policy behavior in the Taiwan issue and the North Korea issue, four respective case studies will in the following empirically verify these neoliberal and neorealist deductions – and thus answer if the ascent of the People’s Republic of China has evoked a post-Cold War relationship with the hegemonic United States characterized rather by economically based cooperation or by strategic power politics.