For the past three millennia, the Chinese have looked
inward, presumed and cherished their moral superiority, and disdained but
feared outside marauders and invaders. Here, of course, one has to distinguish
ethnic Han emperors from the Khitan, Mongol, and Manchu rulers who imposed
their dominion on the Middle Kingdom for many centuries. Yet even non-Han
emperors embraced the Middle Kingdom’s security assumptions and fear of
collapse wrought by “inside disorder and outside calamity.” They saw no need to
conquer “barbarian” territories beyond the empire but only to manage nearby
neighbors as subservient vassals against more powerful, distant foes. Except
when directly menaced by non-Han “barbarians,” Chinese rulers regarded these
neighbors as a part of the nation’s security belt. In exchange for exacting
loyalty and tribute from vassal states, the emperors pledged to protect them.
Over many centuries, Chinese emperors typically regarded the use of force as
the last resort.
At the strategic level, the dominant Chinese philosophy
created a culture characterized by “strong secularism, weak religiousness,”
“strong inclusiveness, weak exclusiveness,” and “strong conservativeness, weak
aggressiveness.” These features wax and wane in a twentieth-century China
wracked by war, revolution, and globalization, but the Chinese now appear to
believe they are in the ascendancy and in the recent past have given primacy to
diplomacy in resolving disputes. In today’s China, leaders draw on the
traditional code of conduct that “peace claims precedence” (he wei gui). From
Mao to Deng, Jiang Zemin, and now Hu Jintao, he wei gui is invoked to justify
diplomatic negotiations and the avoidance of war. In the tradition, peace and
stability ensured progress and heaven’s blessing, while war could unleash
decades of strife and usher in centuries of foreign rule. That tradition finds
an echo in modern Beijing’s political and military councils, and we shall
encounter it again at the end of our inquiry.
The dangers of war and the opportunities wrought by enduring
tranquility required skilled statesmen and prudent policies, and the Chinese
held that the writings of ancient, revered sages were must-read texts for all
aspiring leaders and youthful cadets in training. Those steeped in the wisdom
of treasured ancestors would be best equipped to guide the ship of state away
from impending disasters and toward a common ideal.5 Whether one speaks of the
Mandate of Heaven or the authority of Party cadres, the subject always begins
with learning from the past and heeding its supposed lessons.
For those charged with guarding the nation against foreign
incursions and internal strife, the place to begin was Sun Tzu, the Middle
Kingdom’s renowned military strategist. His Art of War, written about 500 B.C.,
during the Spring and Autumn years of the Zhou dynasty, summarizes the
classical notion that the best prepared for war either will win without
fighting or will fight and win. War must be studied. Its basic rules and
principles are universal and, taken together, are an art that can and must be
learned. Sun Tzu urges leaders to think boldly but to act with extreme caution
because war is “a matter of life and death, a road to safety or ruin.” As
Confucius later declared, “The cautious seldom err.”
In essence, the art of war is a battle of wits, and those
who master the art have the best hope of winning without fighting. That
mind-against-mind struggle is characterized by brilliant stratagems, active
diplomacy and deception, and judicious intimidation. Yet, armed struggle
sometimes cannot be prevented, and Sun Tzu’s guidance for generations of
generals stipulated the priorities for achieving victory or avoiding defeat
when war occurs: “What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s
strategy. Next best is to disrupt his alliances by diplomacy. The next best is
to attack his army. And the worst policy is to attack cities. . . . Those
skilled in war subdue the enemy’s army without battle. . . . Therefore, I say:
Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be
defeated.”
The art of war blends the skills of statesmanship and
generalship, though Sun Tzu warned, “He whose generals are able and not
interfered with by the sovereign will be victorious.” Historians also record
stories of the ruthless side of Sun Tzu that transcend this warning. One story
illustrates his fierce insistence on submission to command. When challenged by
the king of the state of Wu to demonstrate his skills by drilling the palace
concubines, Sun Tzu divided the women into two groups and explained his demand
for absolute obedience and the penalties for failure. When his new recruits
merely giggled and ignored him, Sun Tzu selected the king’s two favorites and
had them beheaded. The giggling ended. “In the tumult and uproar, the battle
seems chaotic, but there must be no disorder in one’s own troops,” Sun Tzu
wrote. From empire to revolution to the Korean War, Chinese soldiers have
fought in the certain knowledge that iron obedience is their only option.
Sun Tzu’s dictums are echoed in the texts of Confucius. Wise
leaders, Confucius held, must constantly reflect on war and prepare for it. The
most consequential national security decision comes when selecting a military
commander. A nation’s leader must pick as his generals or members of his
national security team, as Washington would put it, those who understand the right
mix of political and military preparations for war, approach the coming battles
prudently, and act with caution. Overconfident generals or ineffectual security
advisors can bring ruin to the strongest state. For Confucius, a qualified
commander “must be afraid of the assignment he is going to undertake” and must
be able to win by prudently planned strategies that outmaneuver and outthink an
adversary.
Chinese traditionally deemed the symbols of force—swords,
guns, trophies, and war medals—inauspicious. A Chinese maxim says, “Those good
at war do not speak about war” (shan zhan zhe bu yan zhan). For generations,
the best generals shunned boasting about their military skills and did their
utmost to avoid an armed struggle. Should war break out, they would pursue and
bring victory because they had so diligently made ready for it politically,
psychologically, and militarily. In modern times, they typically denigrated the
West’s “stress on military force” (shangwu) and adopted a “force avoidance”
(rouwu or “soft military”) or low-posture stance. Veiled threats and
brief-strike military “lessons” reflect this classical legacy in modern-day
China. The culture disparaged the race to war and lauded its avoidance as marks
of wisdom and moral strength.
The Contrast of
American and Chinese Military Philosophies
Chinese strategists draw on these classical perspectives to
study and assess potential adversaries, extrapolating military philosophies
from their conduct on the battlefield. The didactic process of comparison and
assessment of perceived differences has helped chart the equation of
liabilities and assets underlying each side’s doctrines and set the stage for
pitting strategy against strategy. This constitutes an exercise in the great
tradition of Sun Tzu and a prelude to directing the complex process from
national command decision to battlefield tactics.
Lodged in military academies and command-and-staff colleges,
these comparative studies start with the basics, sometimes exhibiting
considerable insight and often simplistic and biased distillations. They begin
with assertions about concepts of basic human nature, and though they speak
somewhat grandly of the “West,” they most often mean the United States or their
characterization of its beliefs and biases. For the West, so these uniformed
academics say, human nature is deemed to be evil, causing its citizens to
exaggerate the importance of the law and to rely on courts for punishments and
redress of wrongs to individuals. Chinese in the mainstream Confucian
tradition, by contrast, hold that human nature is good or perhaps just neutral
and can profit from education and the collective wisdom of the past. For
Chinese, court-imposed enforcement, except to protect the state, is a last
resort or a foreign artifact to be scorned. Translated to the level of
strategic culture, Western strategists rely on power politics, stress
individual as opposed to social misbehavior, and threaten forceful retaliation
to back up negotiating demands. Chinese, generally speaking, prefer recurring
rounds of diplomacy, insist on consensus building especially on matters of
general principle, and consider harmony reached through negotiations and
compromise to be the epitome of diplomatic skill.
This presumed or alleged contrast in worldviews applies to
the exercise of military power as a means to accomplish political and economic
aims. Compared to leaders in the West, the Chinese profess to place a higher
strategic, even moral value on tranquility and peace, a condition long absent in
their own modern history. This difference, however, could help explain why the
Chinese often yield to pressures from the outside world, especially in the
early stages of a crisis, and only suddenly and unexpectedly resort to force as
a crisis unfolds and a head-on conflict appears inevitable. According to
Chinese military scholars, Westerners often prematurely terminate talks in
favor of military action and, comparatively speaking, more often refuse to
patiently explore promising areas of potential agreement.
Holding the view that “offense is the best defense,”
Westerners, so the Chinese argument goes, too readily have adopted an
aggressive stance in order to seize the initiative, while Chinese traditionally
“forsake offensive actions in favor of defensive postures” (fei gong), an
approach underlying one of their basic strategic doctrines, “active defense”
(jiji fangyu). An oft-used Chinese character for “force” (wu) reflects the
culture’s ambivalence toward its use: the defining component or “radical” part
of the character is zhi, meaning “stop,” while the second component, ge, is the
name for an ancient dagger-axe. Such contradictions flourish in the Chinese
language and speak in subtle ways to what is sometimes interpreted as
“inscrutable” Chinese behavior. As this study proceeds, however, we shall
encounter signs of that behavior changing under the demands of military
modernization and the complexities of the Taiwan and American challenges.
In the language of the war room, the Chinese stress
intentions, while Westerners focus on capabilities. Sometimes this Chinese
emphasis is phrased as a strategy of looking for an adversary’s weaknesses as
opposed to the West’s fixation on an adversary’s strengths.
In recent decades, Westerners trumpet their prowess in
science and technology—their hardware—though any disparities in this respect
would seem to be rapidly eroding as the Chinese scramble to achieve scientific
and technological excellence and seem to rely less on the wisdom of the ages.
Still the distinction between a “hardware” orientation and one proclaiming the
virtues of the intellect or “software” does reflect variations in national
culture, not just in the stage of development. The tradition of Chinese
intellectuals to “attach importance to self-cultivation but neglect technology”
(zhong dao qing qi) may be waning, but the signs of its influence are far from
disappearing.
Indeed, zhong dao qing qi figures in many current internal
critiques of Chinese military thinking. Military leaders and planners tend to
criticize the influence of the concept for their failures to forge the People’s
Liberation Army into a more capable fighting force and for the persistence of a
bias that inhibits an uninterrupted concentration on advances in technology.
Although technological inferiority purportedly causes PLA planners to adopt
more creative strategies than their adversaries, that inferiority also reduces
strategic options and magnifies the importance of strategic failures.
Finally, the two cultures face in unlike directions. China
looks inward, exhibiting a certain smugness, while the West looks outward and
seems restless to expand and control. It would be hard to find an American whom
the Chinese have not called impatient or worse. In strategic terms, this also reflects
a land-sea dichotomy, at least in modern times. For generations, Western
strategists called for dominance of the seas and more recently of the air and
outer space. Chinese strategists from Sun Tzu to Beijing’s generals, by
contrast, have been guardians of the land. They have paid closer attention to
domestic political challenges than to international crises. Foreign conflicts
and crises seldom take precedence over internal stability and the political
power of the established rulers.
China’s sea, air, and strategic missile units belong to the
People’s Liberation Army and have never achieved genuine equality with their
brothers and sisters in the ground forces. Even in the age of long-range
aircraft and missiles, China’s large landmass is still thought to provide a
strategic advantage even though the PLA abandoned the doctrine of “luring an
enemy in deep” in the 1980s. China is essentially a continental economy, its
soldiers mostly hail from landlocked villages, and alien regimes one after the
other have been swallowed up in China’s vast territory. These become
significant data points when explaining the Chinese military’s strategies from
People’s War to “active defense under modern conditions.”
Old Ideas Versus New
Concepts
Today’s Chinese strategists acknowledge and seek to modify a
number of behaviors that accompany the traditional outlook. Three such unwanted
behaviors stand out. First, these strategists have begun to reconsider the
long-held article of faith that China has always been the innocent victim, the
passive target of foreign aggression. Indeed, Mao Zedong interpreted all modern
Chinese history in this light and called for the people to “stand up.”
Moreover, he perpetuated both the leadership’s proclivity toward preparing for
the worst when making policies in crises and its allergy to taking the
initiative. In 1955, he admonished his associates, “[We] will not suffer losses
if we always take into account the worst scenario,” and subsequent generations
were taught to take his admonition to heart. Driven by repeated setbacks of the
revolutionary years, worst-case planning carried over to the People’s Republic
and only in the Jiang Zemin era in the 1990s and beyond seemed to be dying out.
From their stronger, more self-confident positions at least
for the moment, Western leaders are said to be more inclined to consider a
wider range of options and regard the worst case as only one of several
possibilities. Where once the PLA belittled the West in this regard, it now
privately admires it and increasingly strives to emulate it.
A second behavior is implicit in the first: extreme
“cautiousness toward the first battle” (shenzhong chuzhan). Tradition teaches
Chinese to fear that round one of the fighting could decisively influence the
war’s final outcome. From their perspective, Western strategists by contrast
are inclined to believe that a nation’s military superiority can compensate for
any initial strategic mistakes and that by seizing the initiative they can
define the battlefield and determine the nature of the battles to come. This
implies that the Chinese, comparatively speaking, may be less inclined to take
risks before launching major undertakings or an armed conflict and could be
less flexible after the outbreak of a war. Throughout China’s nuclear test
program, for example, getting it right the first time translated into far fewer
tests. Some explain this by pointing to China’s poverty, but the attitude, as
we shall see in our later discussion of the Vietnam border war of 1979, reflects
culture as well as money. As the Chinese come face to face with modern warfare,
risk taking and seizing the initiative, we shall also suggest, may become
mandatory, and rising domestic prosperity may well ease the change to a more
“Western style” of military conduct.
The final unwanted behavior that we should note is one of
methodology more than style. PLA strategists attach importance to
macroanalysis, and believe that their counterparts in the West pay closer
attention to microanalysis. The variations in approach to science and
technology are deemed part of this behavioral disparity, as are outlooks toward
human nature, matters of principle, and negotiating techniques. Nevertheless,
Chinese hold that this methodological bias is based as much on necessity as on
choice. Neither quantitative nor qualitative methods alone, they acknowledge,
can yield a complete and adequate strategic picture, and achieving a balance
between the two methodologies in today’s world is not easy.
For the moment, the Chinese military lacks sufficient
sophisticated technical means for the real-time surveillance and reconnaissance
needed for accurate quantitative judgments or the nuanced human intelligence
for complete qualitative assessments. China’s technological inferiority, military
leaders have concluded, has crippled or delayed their plans for the nation’s
security. The PLA urgently seeks to acquire those means.
In the traditional and revolutionary-era military cultures,
the Chinese formulated strategic doctrines first and then determined the type,
scope, and pace of weapons programs. Their lack of resources then narrowed the
range of choices and the margins for error. To this day, antecedent strategic
guidelines, always controversial and painful to formulate, tend to dictate the
direction and scope of most arms programs and place a premium on weapons
procured to match specific priorities. This approach limits the procurement of
weapons optimized not only for immediate needs but also capable of flexible
modification to deal with unexpected contingencies over the full lifespan of
the weapon. It makes it more difficult to consider interrelated weapons systems
and makes R&D on them depend principally on analyses of past Chinese and
foreign conflicts, much less so on future unknowns.
While “fighting the last war” and adopting technologies
developed elsewhere are not unique to China, the People’s Liberation Army only
recently has begun to recognize that the profound post-Vietnam change in the
U.S. military, which seeks to leapfrog over next-generation weapons and
tactics, is made possible by an active synergy between imaginative battlefield
theories and innovative technologies. Neither doctrines nor weapons programs
necessarily comes first. Each can drive the other, a reality that has only
recently been understood and embraced in the People’s Republic.
What we are seeing is that the cultural differences, so
important in earlier years, have begun to narrow and their continued influence
often disgusts younger, better-trained PLA officers. The reasons for this
continuity, to be sure, may stem in some degree from shortages of resources as
much as of vision, though examples such as the air force rejecting cheaper,
more advanced satellite-based air traffic control systems in favor of outmoded
radars in the 1990s suggest that the problem is one of mind-set as much as
money.
The evolution that is occurring in China’s military hardware
and doctrines has resulted largely from the direct application of military
experience from Korea to Vietnam, from planning for a conflict in the Taiwan
Strait, and from the dramatic lessons provided by the wars fought by the United
States since the debacle of Vietnam. The worst-case planning, aversion to risk,
and preference for qualitative or macroanalysis persist as do the artificial
boundaries between military doctrine and weapons procurements, but as the
chapters that follow will show, the Chinese are rectifying the problems born of
rigid thinking and are steadily modifying their approach to war, making it more
refined and flexible.
In the course of these changes, the critique of outmoded
concepts has become more direct and open. In 2001, a senior PLA general echoed
Sun Tzu’s declaration that national strategy is a matter of “life and death”
and a road to “safety or ruin.” He castigated the nation’s think tanks for
their failure to devise that strategy for the new century.
In response, senior military strategists began a systematic
review of the “six domains” of strategy: politics, military affairs, economy,
science and technology, culture, and society. They argued that China faces
severe challenges in all six areas and outlined five strategic goals in the
decades ahead: safeguard territorial sovereignty and “rights”; maintain
domestic stability and a stable environment in the Asian-Pacific region;
promote economic growth; oppose hegemony and power politics; and build a new
international political and economic order.
