Dr. Man Fung YEUNG, Visiting Researcher at SNUAC, received the 2025 Best Dissertation Award from the Association of International Relations, ROC—the largest academic organization in Taiwan in the field of international relations—on November 15, 2025, for his doctoral dissertation titled “Abandonment Anxieties and Alliance Coercive Diplomacy: A Case Study of China–North Korea Relations (1992–2022).”

The dissertation investigates the evolution of China–North Korea relations from 1992 to 2022, focusing on how North Korea has managed its persistent abandonment anxieties toward China. Developing the concept of “alliance coercive diplomacy,” the study argues that North Korea has at times deliberately undermined or threatened China’s geopolitical interests in order to extract renewed commitments from its patron. By analyzing major diplomatic and strategic interactions between China and North Korea over a thirty-year period, the dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding asymmetric alliance politics and the strategies through which weaker allies attempt to influence stronger ones.