IS the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) separate and distinct, or is it indistinguishable from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Is the PLA completely dominated by the CCP, or is the PLA an autonomous actor in its own right? In other words, how accurate is the Long March conceptualization of Chinese communist civil-military culture identified in Chapter 1? The military's influence in modern China is frequently overlooked, and David Shambaugh has rightly called for “bringing the military back in” to the study of China. In this chapter, I “bring the military in” to the study of Chinese strategic culture.

This chapter analyzes the evolving nature of Chinese political culture and civil-military culture and then evaluates its impact on a state's disposition to use force. While China's strategic culture has remained constant for a hundred years or more, Chinese civil-military culture has been altered over the course of the twentieth century. The shift in political culture in 1978 from a preoccupation with revolution to an obsession with modernization and reform triggered a thoroughgoing transformation of military doctrine, format, identity, and function. The major shifts in these four dimensions of China's civil-military culture within the last half of the twentieth century have affected how and where China is most likely to use force. They have also altered the manner and milieu in which decisions about the use of force are made.