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Vo1. 37, No. 1, January/February 2019
Sino-US relations and the course of world peace and stability. Constructing a
Sino-US nuclear strategic stability framework is the cornerstone for achieving
Sino-US strategic stability. The traditional strategic stability theory, which is mainly
based on the hostile relationship between the two major symmetric camps led by the
United States and the Soviet Union respectively, can hardly offer theoretical
explanation and practical guidance for the stability of Sino-US nuclear strategy
under the background of asymmetry and dynamic power shift. Therefore, from the
perspective of asymmetric strategic balance, ensuring China’s second-strike
capability should be at the core of the Sino-US nuclear strategic stability framework.
At the institutional level, both sides should establish relevant mechanisms by
strengthening communication, consultation and negotiation, build consensus and
fulfill legal commitments via agreements and treaties in order to construct a political
framework that stabilizes Sino-US nuclear strategic dynamics. At the structural level,
it is not necessary for China to seek nuclear forces equivalent to those of the United
States. The key to Sino-US nuclear strategic stability lies in the overall consideration
of military utility and political effects, the formulation of an integrated nuclear
deterrence strategy, which includes enhancing the combat capability of China’s
nuclear forces, strengthening the determination to carry out deterrence operations
and facilitating information transmission regarding nuclear deterrence so that China
can be well equipped with the capacity to launch a nuclear counterattack against and
cause unbearable losses to the United States.
[Keywords] Sino-US relations, power transition, strategic stability, nuclear strategic
stability
[Authors] ZOU Zhibo, Senior Fellow, Deputy Director of Institute of World
Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Science; LIU Wei, Assistant
Research Fellow, Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of
Social Science (Beijing, 100732).

60 Capricious or Rule-based? Naive Bayesian Model and the Prediction
of North Korea’s Nuclear Behavior

CAO Wei, LIU Qian and LIU Ziye
[Abstract] It is generally believed in academia that North Korea’s foreign policy is
difficult to predict. Accordingly, a significant amount of research on its foreign
policy has been subject to ex post facto interpretations without any predictability.
This paper intends to challenge this preconception and thus establish a short-term
prediction model for North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests. By using international
news reports from North Korean media from 2006 to 2018 as a dataset and monthly
data as the data sample and by creating an optimal feature set and applying the naive
Bayesian method, a prediction model for North Korea’s nuclear behavior is able to
be constructed. The model’s prediction tests show that the overall accuracy exceeds
80%. With the desirable prediction effects, the model is proved to have robust
performance. Based on the statistical results, an early-warning index system for
predicting North Korea’s nuclear behavior can be established to conduct real-time
monitoring on North Korea’s nuclear trends on a short-term, medium-term or
long-term basis. In order to solve the problem of relative lag in the collection of
news reports, this paper attempts to adopt the SARIMA time series analysis to

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