This article looks at the influence of ancient military thinkers, especially Sunzi, in Chinese strategic culture today to shed light on a critical aspect of Alastair Iain Johnston's work on strategic culture: the relationship between the foreign policy elites and the cultural artefacts and symbols at the origin of strategic culture. The empirical analysis revolves around a large number of articles published by Chinese military scholars and officers between 1992 and early 2016 in the PLA Academy of Military Science's journal, China Military Science. The conclusion is that some elements of Chinese ancient military thought are readily apparent in China's military doctrine and operations today. These elements clearly call for a realist vision of the world, especially within the PLA. Yet, the analysis also prompts reflection on how to positively engage China on non-traditional security issues.

This article examines Chinese civil–military relations using a bottom-up analytical approach and hitherto untapped sources, including interviews with military personnel in active service. It argues that traditional approaches to political control, which generally interpret the changing political–military relationship through military professionalism and institutional autonomy, miss out on important aspects and may generate erroneous conclusions. Here, focus is instead on the professional autonomy of the Chinese officer corps. Through an empirical study of the organization of military work at two of China's top military education institutes, the article illustrates how professional autonomy and direct political control vary, both between hierarchical levels and issue areas. This highlights the multidimensionality of both control and professional manoeuvrability and underlines the fruitfulness of including an intra-organizational perspective in order to reach better informed conclusions about political control and civil–military relations in today's China.

Early literature on China's civil society focused on organizations’ autonomy from the state. However, the precise ways in which these organizations are dependent on the state – and on individual officials – are less well understood. I argue that NGOs depend on different types of officials whose career incentives vary, with significant implications for relationships with non-state actors. One set of officials, innovators, seeks rapid promotion and uses civil society partnerships to gain higher-level attention. Innovators’ career goals lead them to provide support for NGOs; however, excessive reliance on innovators can force organizations to stray from their mission and can weaken their long-term position in a given locality. A second set of officials, implementers, seeks stability and security. Cognizant of the risks of partnering with non-state actors, these officials are sometimes forced by their superiors to engage with NGOs but see little personal benefit in doing so. These findings suggest the importance of China's multilevel political structure for state–society relations.