China's Use of Military Force: Beyond the Great Wall and the Long March

Parameters, Autumn, 2004 by Mel Gurtov

China's Use of Military Force: Beyond the Great Wall and the Long March. By Andrew Scobell. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 299 pages. $65.00 ($23.00 paper).

In this very solid book, Andrew Scobell seeks to apply insights from strategic culture and civil-military relations to explaining five instances of the use of force--two of them in domestic political crises--by the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). While one may quibble about the claim of theoretical novelty, there is no gainsaying the book's comprehensiveness and scholarly value. Scobell has done his homework in a number of ways, including deploying a variety of theoretical approaches, using the latest academic writings, and supplementing all this with Chinese materials and interviews.

China's Use of Military Force supports the findings of most specialists that Beijing has been prudent in responding forcefully to what its leaders--military and civilian--judge to be national-security crises. From whatever analytical angle one may approach the issue--civil-military relations, strategic culture, or military organizational culture--Scobell concludes that the PLA "tend[s] to be no more hawkish than Chinese statesmen," and sometimes less so. In all cases except Taiwan in 1995-96, the paramount PRC leader controlled decisionmaking, a finding consistent with other recent works on policymaking that involved domestic issues with international implications. Even over Taiwan, while the PLA was "out in front" on using force, the way it was employed--chiefly, to intimidate Taiwan--was apparently a consensus decision.

In broader perspective, this reviewer found particularly worthwhile Scobell's suggestion that today's PLA leaders may look at the world in ways not very different from, say, US military leaders. That is, both conceptually and behaviorally, the Chinese military (and the army most of all) is cautious when it comes to advocating force but, consistent with realist politics, is prepared to use it when perceived threats seriously challenge national interests. This is not the PLA of Mao's or even Deng's era, Scobell reminds us; it is likely to continue modernizing and becoming more assertive. But those trends should not be confused (as advocates of the "China threat" do) with uniformity of view and belligerent behavior.

In the end, Dr. Scobell hasn't really made a theoretical breakthrough either in explaining past PLA behavior or predicting how the PLA will behave in the next crisis. It would, however, be unreasonable to expect that he could, first, because of the paucity of information available on the inner circle of national-security decisionmaking and, second, because exactly what gets interpreted as a crisis is always a matter of politics, not science, in China or anywhere else. Furthermore, how the PLA leadership distinguishes between a domestic security crisis and an international one--and how the one may affect the other should they occur simultaneously--is another variable, one that (in light of the PLA's involvement in ethnic unrest and drug trafficking) probably will grow in importance.

That said, the author has demonstrated just how important it is to use all available tools to decipher China's conduct. He has produced the admirable, multidimensional study he set out to write. It probably will not persuade those who persist in believing that a rising China is (or will be) an aggressive, expansionist China. But for the rest of us, it is a welcome contribution to the dispassionate analysis of a subject that is going to stay controversial for a very long time.

Dr. Mel Gurtov, author of Pacific Asia? Prospects for Security and Cooperation in East Asia and Professor of Political Science and International Studies, Portland State University.