1. This was the assessment of a number of foreign policy analysts with whom I spoke in Beijing and Shanghai during a research trip to China from January to July 1996. The official line was that the relative public silence from states in the region indicated basic agreement with China that Taiwanese “flexible diplomacy” had gone far enough and was threatening regional stability. Internally, however, many analysts concluded that the only positive outcome, from China's perspective, was that it had increased the credibility of future threats to use force.

2. This is not a unique world view among the major powers. China's version of sovereignty converges in many places with that espoused by Gaullists in France and Republicans and isolationists in the United States. The reason the U.S. has not ratified international treaties governing the rights of women and children, the reason why Jessie Helms opposed American ratification of the treaty on genocide and the Chemical Weapons Convention, the reason why Bob Dole once claimed that UN peacekeeping activities were “out of control,” and the reason the U.S. is in arrears in its financial obligations to the UN is precisely the fear in some quarters in the U.S. that international institutions and obligations impinge on its sovereignty and autonomy.

3. In one conversation I had with a highly placed strategic analyst in PLA in July 1996 he concluded that the concept of a security dilemma was probably not well understood at the top. Thus they are less sensitive to the interactive, and possibly counterproductive effects of China's military modernization programme. The same, of course, could be said about American and Soviet leaderships through most of the Cold War, with the exception perhaps of Gorbachev. The Clinton administration's drive to develop and deploy ballistic missile defences that might also undermine China's fragile deterrent is another example of inattention to unintended consequences (Chinese nuclear modernization) that could, in the end, reduce American security.

4. Chan, Steve, “Chinese conflict calculus and behavior: assessments from a perspective of conflict management,” World Politics, No. 2 (1978), p. 391.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Figure 1 provides a simplification of the major decision stages that foreign policy decision makers face in conflicts with other states. Once a conflict has emerged, it may develop to a level of acuteness where it constitutes a crisis. Once in a crisis, decision makers must decide whether or not to use force. Once they have decided to use force, they must then decide what level and spatial/temporal scope of force to use. A particular scope of force may then change the crisis situation such that escalation is required or termination of the crisis becomes possible.

6. Wilkenfeld, Jonathan, Brecher, Michael and Moser, Sheila, Crises in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2: Handbook of Foreign Policy Crises (New York, 1988)Google Scholar. Chinese definitions of conflict and crisis are somewhat more abstract than those used by Western scholars. Strategic analysts at the National Defence University define a conflict as a situation where interstate differences and disparities in interests are handled differently by different states such that these different roads to resolution do not lead to unanimity. Under these conditions a crisis is a situation of mutual resistance. See Jinxi, Gao and Dexin, Gu, Guoji zhanlue xue gailun (Introduction to International Strategic Studies) (Beijing: National Defence University Press, 1995), pp. 158–59.Google Scholar

7. Bremer, Stuart, Singer, J. David and Jones, Dan, “Militarized interstate disputes, 1816–1992: rationale, coding rules and statistical findings,” mimeo, 02 1996, p. 6.Google Scholar

8. See n. 31 for a detailed list of the categories in these two variables.

9. There is a certain arbitrariness in this kind of coding. Disputes almost invariably involve more than one issue and states often have a number of goals when entering a dispute. But, to the extent that the historical documentation is available, it is often fairly obvious how these goals are ranked by decision makers. Given the number of MIDs coded for all countries from 1815 to 1992 (N = 2042), and given the general credibility of Correlates of War data sets in the field of quantitative international relations, I think it is fair to assume that coding instructions were rigorous and coding errors were random across all cases and thus are random for the Chinese cases as well (e.g. that they cancel each other out on balance). The process of coding is described in Jones, Daniel, “Preliminary user's manual: militarized interstate disputes” (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, Correlates of War Project, 1 07 1991).Google Scholar

10. Fairbank, John K., “Varieties of the Chinese military experience,” in Kierman, Frank and Fairbank, John K. (eds.), Chinese Ways in Warfare (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 7Google Scholar; Cleary, Thomas (trans.), Mastering the Art of War: Zhu Celiang and Liu Ji's Commentaries on the Classic By Sun Tzu (Boston, 1989), p. 20.Google Scholar

11. Fairbank, , “Varieties,” pp. 6–7, 11, 25.Google Scholar

12. Pillsbury, Michael, “Strategic acupuncture,” Foreign Policy, No. 41 (1980/1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Cleary, Thomas (trans.), The Art of War: Sun Tzu (Boston: Shambhala, 1988), p. 19.Google Scholar

14. Rulin, Wei and Zhongpin, Liu, Zhongguo junshi sixiang shi (History of Chinese Military Thought) (Taipei: Liming Publishing House, 1985), p. 437.Google Scholar

15. Bok, Georges Tan Eng, “Strategic doctrine,” in Segal, Gerald and Tow, William (eds.), Chinese Defense Policy (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 4Google Scholar; Boylan, Edward S., “The Chinese cultural style of warfare,” Comparative Strategy, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1982), p. 345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Lin, Chong-pin, China's Nuclear Weapons Strategy: Tradition Within Evolution (Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1988), pp. 31–33.Google Scholar

17. Boodberg, Peter Alexis, “The art of war in Ancient China: a study based upon the ‘Dialogues of Li Duke of Wei’,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1930, pp. xii–xiv.Google Scholar

18. Cleary, , Mastering the Art of War, p. 20.Google Scholar

19. Lewis, Mark Edward, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 103.Google Scholar

20. Adelman, Jonathan and Chih-yu, Shih, Symbolic War: The Chinese Use of Force, 1840–1980 (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, 1993), p. 31.Google Scholar

21. Boorman, Howard L. and Boorman, Scott A., “Strategy and national psychology in China,” The Annals, No. 370 (1967), p. 152Google Scholar; Jiandong, Wang, Sunzi bingfa sixiang tixi jingjie (A Clarification of the Structure of Thinking in Sun Zi's Art of War) (Taipei, 1976), p. 77.Google Scholar

22. For details on the scholarship on traditions of Chinese strategic thought see Johnston, Alastair lain, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 63–65, 117–123.Google Scholar

23. See Chan, , “Chinese conflict calculus”; Whiting, Allen, The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Bobrow, Davis, “Peking's military calculus,” World Politics, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1964), pp. 287–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Godwin, Paul, “Soldiers and statesmen in conflict: Chinese defense and foreign policies in the 1980s,” in Kim, Samuel S. (ed.), China and the World: Chinese Foreign Policy in the Post-Mao Era (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 215–234Google Scholar; Bok, Georges Tan Eng, “Strategic doctrine,”Google Scholar in Segal, and Tow, , Chinese Defense Policy, pp. 3–17Google Scholar; Lin, Chong-pin, China's Nuclear Weapons StrategyGoogle Scholar; Boorman, and Boorman, , “Strategy and national psychology in China”, pp. 143–155Google Scholar; Boorman, Scott A., The Protracted Game: A Weich'i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar, and “Deception in Chinese strategy,” in Whitson, William (ed.), The Military and Political Power in China in the 1970s (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 313–337Google Scholar; and Adelman, and Chih-yu, Shih, Symbolic WarGoogle Scholar. They all, in various ways, point to the Chinese exercise of military force as an example of a strategic tradition capable of maintaining a rational balance between limited political ends and limited, and generally defensive, military means. Contemporary Chinese analysis of the PRC's strategic behaviour essentially stresses the same characteristics. Indeed, it embodies an intensely ethno-racialist stereotyping of the Chinese approaches to conflict. It is a political mantra in most open Chinese analyses that the Chinese people are a uniquely peace-loving people; that China has historically rarely invaded other states (the exceptions being when it was ruled by ethnically non-Chinese, such as the Mongol Yuan dynasty or the Manchu Qing dynasty); that the PRC has never occupied “one inch” of another state's territory; that the PRC has never invaded another state except to “teach it a lesson” as part of a just counterattack against prior aggression; and that the PRC prefers to use political rather than military means to resolve disputes.

24. For dissenting views on traditional China see Sariti, Anthony William, “A note on foreign policy decision-making in the Northern Sung,” Sung Research Newsletter, No. 8 (1973), p. 5Google Scholar; Seyschab, Carl-A., “The 36 strategems: orthodoxy against heterodoxy,” in Seyschab, C.-A., Sievers, A. and Synkewicz, S. (eds.), Society, Culture and Patterns of behavior (Bonn: Horlemann, 1990)Google Scholar; and Johnston, , Cultural RealismGoogle Scholar. For a dissenting view of PRC crisis behaviour see Segal, Gerald, Defending China (London: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Segal looks at nine cases of the Chinese use of force from 1949 to 1985 and argues that there were no obvious patterns, that China demonstrated strategic and tactical flexibility and a willingness to use whatever amount of force necessary to achieve a wide range of political ends. One problem with the study is that it “selects on the dependent variable”: that is, by focusing only on crises in which force was used it is hard to determine the kinds of conditions that led or didn't lead to the use efforce in the first place. This also makes it difficult to compare China's dispute behaviour with that of other states.

25. See Christensen, Thomas J., Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization and Sino-American Conflict 1947–1958 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Jian, Chen, China's Road to the Korean War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

26. I want to emphasize that dispute proneness says nothing in particular about intentions, that is, it does not equal “aggressiveness,” nor does it say anything about whether or not China initiated these disputes. It is simply a measure of the number of disputes that China has become involved in, regardless of which state started the dispute. Thus these data should not be interpreted as “China is the second most aggressive major power in the international system” or something such as that.

27. This datum refers to the number of MIDs that start in that particular year, not the total number that start and are ongoing from earlier years.

28. The vertical axis is the total number of disputes per country in each decade.

29. The average number of MIDs per year drops dramatically in the 1990s to 0.3 for the PRC, the lowest of all the major powers plus India. France replaces China as the second most dispute-prone major power from 1990 to 1993 after the U.S. with an average of 2 MIDs per year, compared to 2.6 for the U.S. Since there are only three disputes in this decade for China, however, these data should not be given too much weight as indicative of trends for the rest of the decade.

30. Most of those coded “regime” involved disputes with Taiwan in the mid–1960s. Thus one could plausibly recode these as territorial disputes, as the Taiwan issue was in some sense a dispute over sovereign control of the island. Moreover, Chinese uses offeree against Taiwan were not designed to overthrow the Kuomintang since the PLA was simply incapable of doing so. Finally, Chinese military conflicts with KMT forces would not have occurred had China not claimed Taiwan as Chinese territory. The number of disputes coded “regime” is small, however, and does not change the analysis dramatically.

31. The hostility levels are: no militarized response (1), threat offeree (2), display offerce (3), use of force (4), interstate war (5). The categories of actions are: threat to use force (1), to blockade (2), to occupy territory (3), to declare war (4), to use nuclear weapons (5), alert (6), mobilization (7), show of troops (8), show of ships (9), show of planes (10), fortification of border (11), nuclear alert (12), border violation (13), blockade (14), occupation of territory (15), seizure of material or personnel (16), clash (17), other use of military force (18), declaration of war (19), tactical use of nuclear weapons (20), interstate war (21).

32. Although these are categorical data and technically ought not to be averaged, since they do reflect an interval-like increase in violence I did not see much danger in averaging them.

33. A difference of means test was significant at the p = 0.012 level, meaning that China's higher-than-average hostility levels is unlikely to be random.

34. The difference of means test was significant at the p = 0.0 level, meaning that the United States' lower-than-average difference in average hostility levels is unlikely to be random.

35. Per cent refers to the percentage of China's MIDs in which China escalated to a level similar to, higher than, or less than its opponent.

36. The scale captures the vast difference between very low levels of threat to use force (e.g. a threat to blockade would have a violence score of 4 (action code 2 × hostility level 2)) versus the use of weapons of mass destruction in all-out interstate war (action code 21 × hostility level 5 = violence level 105). The actual numerical boundaries or values of this metric have no intrinsic meaning other than that they allow one to differentiate statistically and more accurately between very low levels and very high levels of violence. This allows more fine-tuned comparisons within and across states in their dispute behaviour.

37. For China, t value = 3.23 and is significant at the p = 0.002 level, meaning that China's score deviates upward from the mean in a way that is unlikely to be random. For the U.S., t value = −4.1 and is significant at the p = 0.000 level, meaning that the U.S. score deviates below the mean in a way that is unlikely to be random.

38. Levy, Jack S., “The diversionary theory of war: a critique,” in Midlarsky, Manus I. (ed.), The Handbook of War Studies (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).Google Scholar

39. Christensen, , Useful Adversaries, ch. 6.Google Scholar

40. Protest data were taken from World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators III, 1948–1982. The data in the graph stop in 1982 because this is where World Handbook data stop.

41. The independent variables are lagged by one year, as one might expect if conflict is being used to divert domestic attention. The data come from the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators.

42. The adjusted R² = 0.29. That is, almost 30% of the variance in the dependent variable is accounted for by the independent variables. All the independent variables are statistically significant below the standard 0.05 level.

43. For a helpful summary of various push and pull hypotheses linking revolutionary states to war proneness, see Walt, Stephen M., “Revolution and war,” World Politics, Vol. 23, No. 3 (04 1992), pp. 323–333Google Scholar. Walt adheres to the pull arguments.

44. See the arguments made by Jian, Chen, China's Road to the Korean War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Jian, Chen, “China's involvement in the Vietnam War, 1964–1969,” The China Quarterly, No. 142 (06 1995), pp. 356–387CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Walt's coding of Chinese intervention in the Korean War – as an instance where a revolutionary state was dragged reluctantly into a conflict started by others – is suspect in the light of the new data. Thus his dismissal of the revolutionary push argument is less convincing.

45. The data for share of world power come from the Correlates of War Capabilities Data Set (World Base). The indicators of militarization are “per cent of per cent” data. The Correlates of War data on a state's total share of power capabilities uses a basket of six indicators (military expenditures, military personnel, iron and steel production, energy consumption, urban population, and total population). Each indicator comprises a share of the total capabilities of a state. Per cent of per cent refers to the proportion that each indicator comprises of the total basket, with the total basket being a proportion of total world capabilities. Thus as the per cent of per cent figure for military expenditures or military personnel increases this simply means that these indicators comprise a larger portion of the total basket of capabilities. This changing portion shows the degree to which a state's power relies more or less on military expenditures and military personnel. use an increasing portion of power comprised of military expenditures as a surrogate for the militarization of the economy. I use an increasing portion of power comprised of military personnel as a surrogate for the militarization of society.

46. For military expenditures the adjusted R² = 0.24, p = 0.001; and for military personnel the adjusted R2 = 0.08, p = 0.05. The figures for the U.S. case are not statistically significant.

47. Neorealists are, unfortunately, unclear about how to measure power. But in order to be consistent with their materialist ontology, they should concede that for research purposes power can be measured using material capabilities, military expenditures for instance. Thus for the purposes of testing this balancing hypothesis, I use Soviet and American shares of world military expenditures as the independent variables. If one were to use some indicator for “perceptions” of power, then one would not be making a neorealist argument.

48. Vasquez, John, The War Puzzle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vasquez, John, “Why do neighbors fight: proximity, interaction, territoriality,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 32, No. 2 (08 1995), pp. 277–294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. The percentage of unresolved borders was determined by the year in which a formal border treaty with another state was signed. Thus as the percentage of borders determined by a treaty increased, the percentage of unresolved borders declined.

50. See Vertzberger, Yaacov, The World in Their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition and Perception in Foreign Policy Decisionmaking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 282–295.Google Scholar

51. “Minutes, conversation between Mao Zedong and Ambassador Yudin, 22 July 1958,” in Shuguang, Zhang and Jian, Chen, “The emerging disputes between Beijing and Moscow,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Nos. 6–7 (1995/1996), pp. 155–59Google Scholar. See also Christensen, , Useful Adversaries.Google Scholar

52. Here I used China's share of the total power of all major powers, rather than all states in the system. My reasoning was simple: China tended to compare itself with other major powers. In principle, therefore, its relative power position among major powers should matter more to its perception of status than its relative power position among all other states, large and small.

53. There is some work already emerging on patterns in China's diplomacy on territorial issues. See, for instance, Hyer, Eric, “The South China Sea disputes: implications of China's earlier territorial settlements,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 34–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Blanchard, Jean-Marc, “Borders and Borderlands: an institutional approach to territorial disputes in Asia,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Political Science Department, 1997Google Scholar. The sources of China's concern with international status and image, and the trade-offs Chinese leaders make between maximizing status and maximizing other goals such as development and security is, however, still a severely neglected topic.

54. This could change, of course, if there is a sense of rising expectations in China's quest for international status such that relative power share is no longer an accurate indicator of subjective assessments of China's status.

55. Interview with Academy of Military Science strategist, Beijing, April 1996. See also Jing, Zhang and Yanjin, Yao, Jiji fangyu zhanlue qianshuo (An Introduction to the Active Defence Strategy) (Beijing, Liberation Army Publishing House, 1985), p. 137Google Scholar; Jixian, Guan, Gao jishu jubu ihanzheng zhanyi (Campaigns in High Tech Limited Wars) (Beijing: National Defence University Press, 1993), pp. 141, 23–24Google Scholar; Xiaoping, Deng, “Women de zhanlue fanzhen shi jiji fangyu” (“Our strategic policy is active defence”), in Academy of Military Sciences and Central Documents Research Office (eds.), Deng Xiaoping lun guofang he jundui jianshe (Deng Xiaoping on National Defence and Army Building) (Beijing: Academy of Military Sciences, 1980), p. 98Google Scholar. See also Huiban, Chen's discussion of the flexible application of the second-strike principle, with specific emphasis on “exploiting the first opportunity to defeat the enemy”Google Scholar (xianji zhi ren), “Guanyu xin shiqi zhanlue fangzhen he zhidao yuanze wenti” (“Concerning questions relating to the guiding principles and strategic policies of the new period”), in Guofang daxue xuebao (National Defence University Journal)Google Scholar, in Fuyin baokan ziliao – junshi (Reproduced Periodical Materials – Military Affairs), No. 3 (1989), p. 28Google Scholar. The phrase is very close to the term for pre-emption – xian fa zhi ren – meaning, “setting out first to control/defeat the enemy.” See also Li, Nan, “The PLA's evolving warfighting doctrine, strategy, and tactics, 1985–1995: a Chinese perspective,” The China Quarterly, No. 146 (06 1996), pp. 443–464.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56. See Snyder, Jack, “Civil military relations and the cult of the offensive, 1914 and 1984,” International Security, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer 1984), pp. 108–146CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Van Evera, Stephen, “The cult of the offensive and the origins of the First World War,” International Security, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer 1984), pp. 58–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. In the paradoxical world of nuclear deterrence, the existence of survivable second strike offensive capabilities creates a defence-dominant environment because no side can strike first or move offensively without risking destruction in return. A world with asymmetric strategic defences, therefore, is not a defence-dominant one. It is, rather, the opposite because it creates the option for one side to strike first and defend against retaliation. There is no reason to assume that with the end of the American—Soviet rivalry the basic elements of nuclear deterrence believed to operate in the Cold War are inapplicable in the American—Chinese relationship. The U.S. ought to be assisting China to develop an assured second strike minimum deterrence capability, by providing, for instance, early warning technologies, safety mechanisms for command and control, and submarine launched ballistic missile technology in return for verifiable, bilateral and/or multilateral commitments to eschew MIRVing, ballistic missile defence, and anti-satellite weapons development and deployment. It was conceptually possible for the U.S. to have made various offers to the Russians to help in developing mutual BMD capabilities on the grounds this was strategically stabilizing. While the offers – made in both the Reagan and Clinton administrations – were probably disingenuous, it is not beyond the realm of the reasonable that the U.S. should consider offers to help develop a Sino—U.S. defence-dominant nuclear relationship.

58. Ping, Hu, Guoji chongtu fenxi yu weiji guanli yanjiu (Research in International Conflict Analysis and Crisis Management) (Beijing: Military Literature Publishing House, 1993)Google Scholar; Shiying, Pan, Xiandai zhanlue sikao (Thoughts on Modem Strategy) (Beijing: World Affairs Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Jinxi, Gao and Dexin, Gu, Introduction to International Strategic StudiesGoogle Scholar. In recent years China has put some of these principles into practice with a small number of bilateral and multilateral agreements on confidence-building measures with India, Russia, the Central Asian republics. These agreements include such steps as prior notification of military exercises and restrictions on the size of forces that can exercise near borders.