Dynamics of the

st
21 Century
Chinese Strategic Culture and Statecraft in Southeast Asia
Lesson 5
 Chinese Strategic Culture and
Statecraft

Hold out baits to entice the

opponents

Taking the Indirect Approach

Since 1997, the U.S. Congress has obliged the
Department of Defense to study China's strategic
and operational concepts. The 2005 Pentagon report
painted an alarmist view of the Chinese military
noting that the People's Liberation Army's (PLA)
modernization looks too big for China's regional
interests and that the U.S. should further improve its
own military capability so that the balance (of
power) in East Asia could be maintained.
The Bush Administration maintains that as the
Chinese economy continues to expand,
Beijing will likely increase its military spending.
This trend will enable the PLA to either
produce or purchase military equipment that
can change the status in the Taiwan Strait and
challenge America's military preponderance
in Southeast Asia.
In 2005, then U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
claimed that Beijing's military spending was
threatening the delicate security balance in Asia.
Addressing a conference in Singapore, he
contended that China's investment in missile and up-
to- date military technology endangered the
interests not only of the U.S. and Taiwan, but also of
those nations that consider themselves as China's
trading partners, not rivals.
China has the greatest potential to compete
militarily with the United States and field
disruptive military technologies that could
over time offset the traditional military
advantages absent U.S. counterstrategies.
The expanding military capabilities of China's armed forces
are a major factor in changing East Asian military balances;
improvements in China's strategic capabilities have
ramifications far beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Then
Secretary Rumsfeld's 2005 pronouncement and the two
subsequent Pentagon reports reflect an existing view of
American defense analysts and officials who see China as the
principal conventional military threat to Pax Americana.
 Chinese Strategic Culture and
Statecraft

Hold out baits to entice the

opponents

Taking the Indirect Approach

 FIRST:
Chinese Strategic Culture and Statecraft
 As a term in Strategic
Studies, strategic culture
refers to the deeply
embedded concepts
which affect policy and
decision-making
processes relative to
national security.
Strategic culture involves images and
symbols reflective on how a polity
understands it relationship with other
states, its position in the international
pecking order, and the nature and
scope of its national external ambition.
1
The first includes basic assumptions on
the orderliness of the strategic
environment in terms of the role of
conflict in human affairs, the nature of
the adversary and the threat, and the
efficacy of the use of force.
The second operational level
especially on the most efficacious
carries assumptions at a more
strategic options in dealing with the
threat environment.
Far from being a dominant set of national
beliefs determining choices throughout the
history of a certain society, strategic culture
establishes pervasive and long-lasting
preferences by providing concepts on the role
of military force in international politics and
clothing them in an aura of factuality, reality
and efficacy.
Strategic culture molds public attitude
and becomes institutionalized in the
structure and process of decision-making
as how political leaders, bureaucrats,
and even military services define central
roles and missions in the area of national
security.
Strategic culture shapes military policies in
peacetime, as well as in times of conflict , thereby
producing definite national styles, differentiated by
their propensities to the use of force in international
affairs. It does not emerge from the permanent
conditions of the state, and certainly not from any
fixed ethnic or social characteristics. Rather, it
reflects self-images of relative material strength or
weakness; and it changes with the specific enemy
with which the comparison is made.
Chinese civilization has produced
one of the first important military
philosophers who tried to establish
the principles in the proper conduct
of statecraft and war— Sun Tzu. He
derived his precepts from
experience or the study of past
experiences, transmitted through
historical records, accounts of
practitioners, and general principles
on the proper conduct of war in an
agriculture-based ancient China.
Sun Tzu was a Chinese general,
military strategist, writer, and
philosopher who lived in the
Eastern Zhou period of ancient
China. Sun Tzu is traditionally
credited as the author of The Art of
War, an influential work of military
strategy that has affected both
Western and East Asian philosophy
and military thinking.
Sun Tzu's work reflects the assumption that
underlies the Chinese cultural approach to
war. War is neither a means in the hands of
policy nor, and much less, an end in itself. It is
regarded as a necessary evil , a phenomenon
that a state has to confront and address in an
imperfect world.
War is seen as the disturbance of the Tao
(or the way), thus, its conduct should be
kept to the indispensable minimum. The
military instrument is viewed as an ill
omen or a tool by which a state can ruin
or strain its resources.
To Sun Tzu, no state benefits from a long war and
maintaining a big military. Whereas the West
emphasized the maintenance of a huge military and
the application of maximum force against the
enemy, Sun Tzu called for the use of diplomacy, dirty
tricks, and battle maneuvers. If the military instrument
is to be used, it should be applied in a carefully
measured way, which is neither more nor less than
what is necessary.
In short, it should appear as sharp and
calculated bursts. Sun Tzu's military
stratagem eventually became part and
parcel of Chinese strategic culture. But
Sun Tzu merely formalized his philosophy
on warfare from the then existing corpus
of ideas and practices.
In a way, The Art of War integrated
Chinese traditional military
precepts and political theory into
an intellectually coherent strategic
discourse. It provides Chinese
society with a "strategic cultural
artifact” that embodies these
ranked strategic preferences.
His exhortations such as
overcoming the enemy without
actually fighting, the preference of
foiling the enemy's plots and
alliances rather than directly
attacking the enemy head-on
and conducting a siege, reflect
China's cultural approach to
conflict
Let’s watch “The Art of War!”
 Chinese Strategic Culture and
Statecraft

Hold out baits to entice the

opponents

Taking the Indirect Approach

 second:
Hold out baits to entice the opponents
A key strategy China uses to undermine U.S.
strategic/political preponderance is its
attempt to co-opt Southeast Asian countries
through its provision of side-payments to and
fostering consultative relations with U.S. friends
and allies in the region. However, this could
only be possible if China's develops its
economy.
A major development in the global political
economy is China's emergence as a regional
economic power. In a matter of less than two
decades, China was able transform its command
and slow-growing economy into a dynamic market-
driven one that has become the world's most
formidable exporting juggernaut China's economic
strategy is simple: it processes vast quantities of raw
materials and exports them as manufactured goods
such as office machines, telecom equipment, and
electronic machineries.
Neighboring states are feeding the East Asian trade
boom by exporting components and machine parts
to China for final assembly. To date, the PRC has
attracted nearly US$500 billion in foreign direct
investment (FDI). This has fueled an eightfold growth
in Chinese exports amounting to US$380 billion from
1990 to 2003. China's economy is expected to be
double the size of German economy by 2110 and to
surpass the Japanese economy, the second largest
economy.
 Chinese Strategic Culture and
Statecraft

Hold out baits to entice the

opponents

Taking the Indirect Approach

 third:
Taking the Indirect Approach
China's main diplomatic gambit since the
mid-'90s is to not to directly challenge
America's strategic preponderance based on
the latter's well- established system of alliances
and forward-deployed forces .
Beijing's offer of a new regional order and direction
became apparent when it announced and began
implementing its “New Security Concept (NSC) in
1998. The NSC is premised on cooperative and
coordinated security that proposes a pattern of
diplomatic-defense relationship to countries that are
neither allies nor adversaries of China. According to
Beijing, the new concept is well-suited to what it
claimed to be a new post-Cold War environment
characterized by peace and development but
threatened by non-traditional (non-state) security
challenges, e.g., transnational crimes, international
terrorism, etc.
1
Firstly, it offers an alternative security blueprint
to the U.S.-dominated bilateral system of
alliances that has become a landmark in the
regional security terrain since the '50s. The
concept envisages a new multilateral regional
security framework devoid of any alliance
structure.
1
It indirectly criticizes U.S. alliances' thinking,
encourages Asian states to pursue policies
independent of U.S. hegemony, and
emphasizes China's new approaches to its
Southeast Asian neighbors with rhetoric and
actions designed to undermine American
influence.
Secondly, the NSC has paved the way for an
unprecedented wave of Chinese diplomatic activism
through economic, political, security, and cultural
initiatives in Southeast Asia. Since the mid-'90s, China
has expanded the number and extent of its bilateral
relations, organized and joined various economic and
security arrangements, deepened its participation in
key multilateral organizations, and helped address a
number of global security issues.
Asian states has generated the good-will of officials from these
countries. China has also invoked the concept of a partnership to
describe its dealings with the ASEAN states. The use of the
concept of partnership to be designed to signal that the
Association and its members do matter to Beijing, even if ASEAN is
seen and regarded as the weaker partner in the international
politics of East Asia." This consequently led ASEAN member states
to appreciate China's regional significance and to accept Beijing
as a fully established good citizen in regional international society.
Thirdly, to foster a new form of relationship
devoid of in Southeast Asia, China has
doubted and questioned the importance of
military power in international relations.
Chinese officials and scholars argue that with
the end of the Cold War, security concerns
should no longer focus on military defense.
Rather, states must tackle a much wider range of
security challenges, such as drug trafficking, terrorism,
organized transnational crimes, environmental
degradation, civil and ethnic conflicts, and resource
scarcity. The policy concept also calls for a
broadening of security parameters to include non-
military issues, (e.g., economic and environmental
concerns) and social problems (e.g., poverty, natural
disasters, crimes, social discrimination and
unemployment).
Thank you
F O R L I S T E N I N G !