China's Use of Military Force: Beyond the Great Wall and the Long March. By Andrew Scobell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 316p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

Like heavyweight boxers at the end of a round, the disputing sides in the debate over China's rise have retreated to their respective corners. In one corner are those who stress China's peaceful dispositions in development and consider the country a stable actor in regional security. In the other corner are those who claim that behind the façade of Chinese pacifism lies a strong desire for the fulfillment of “rich country and strong army” and “revolutionary political culture” embedded in the Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and who therefore perceive the country as a potential challenger to the current pecking order of power. These dichotomous views are partially rooted in the two divergent interpretations of China's strategic culture in its use of military force—a nonviolent, defensive, accommodationist, idealized Confucian-Mencian paradigm symbolized by the Great Wall, and a zero-sum, offense-oriented, violent “hard realpolitik” (“parabellum”) paradigm as illuminated particularly in Alastair Iain Johnston's (1995) Cultural Realism. While each side's position seems well entrenched, Andrew Scobell attempts to combine both strategic strains in a crafty synthesis—“Chinese Cult of Defense, in which realist behavior dominates but is justified as defensive on the basis of a pacifist self-perception” (p. 38).