China’s Ideological Framework for Strategic Decision-Making, Differing American and Chinese Concepts of Deterrence and the Impact on Strategic Stability in the Taiwan Straits

 

 

HE The Hon. Dr. Kevin Rudd AC
26th Prime Minister of Australia
Address to the 2024 George F Kennan Lecture Series, National Defense University

4 September 2024
Washington, DC

 

I am honoured to be invited to speak in this Kennan Lecture Series here at the National War College.

I am equally honoured that George Kennan himself, as the first Deputy Commandant of this great institution in 1946-47, initiated the tradition we continue today when he delivered his remarkable lecture series entitled Measures Short of War.

It was here that he came after writing the Long Telegram from the US Embassy in Moscow in February 1946 before the beginning of the Cold War.

And it was here that he did much of the formative work for the X Article, which framed what would become the doctrine of containment, which governed US strategy throughout the Cold War, until the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Kennan was possessed of a clear, incisive and often iconoclastic mind.

He was also the product of what the academy now describes, somewhat unromantically, as the discipline of “Area Studies”, given Kennan’s formidable command of Russian language, literature and history.

Taken together, his capacity for strategic analysis, combined with his deep knowledge of the Soviet ideological worldview and the enduring realities of Russian history and culture, made him this country’s most formidable and impactful contributor to US grand strategy against Moscow.

We see that, for example, in his masterful analysis of the Soviet and previous Russian leadership’s absolute preoccupation with security from enemies, real or imagined, both at home and abroad. As Kennan wrote in the X Article in 1947:

Now the outstanding circumstance concerning the Soviet régime is that down to the present day … the men in the Kremlin have continued to be predominantly absorbed with the struggle to secure and make absolute the power which they seized in November 1917. They have endeavored to secure it primarily against forces at home, within Soviet society itself. But they have also endeavored to secure it against the outside world. For ideology, as we have seen, taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders. The powerful hands of Russian history and tradition reached up to sustain them in this feeling.

Why War over Taiwan would be Catastrophic for All

For an audience such as this, I do not need to elaborate on the catastrophic consequences of a military invasion of Taiwan.

Whichever way it turned out – with victory for Beijing, defeat or stalemate – the ensuing war would have tectonic impacts on the future of the Chinese Communist Party, the future of American power in the world, as well as innumerable deaths on Taiwan itself.

That is apart from the likelihood of a deep global recession, and probable depression, as the world’s two largest economies went to war.

As well as the profound impact any such war would have on the future of the global order itself, depending on the outcome.

That is why avoiding such a war is of the most fundamental importance to us all. And this is best done through the effective implementation of a strategy of integrated deterrence in relation to China over Taiwan to prevent war by design – combined with a policy of managed strategic competition and associated guardrails to reduce the risk of war by accident, escalation and miscalculation.

This debate on effective deterrence is not just a narrow technical debate for military analysts. It also requires us to understand: the wider framework of Xi Jinping’s Marxist-Leninist worldview; his ideological conclusions about China’s future in the region and the world; and how, in his view, the United States and its allies are obstructing these purposes for their own ideological reasons.

Purpose of the Lecture

The purpose of this lecture, therefore, is to bring these complex thematics together and to explore the following:

  • First, how do we best locate the Chinese strategy of deterrence within Xi’s overarching ideological worldview which permeates all policy domains;
  • Second, how do we best define US understandings of the concept of deterrence;
  • Third, how do we best interpret Chinese understandings of deterrence, usually translated as weishe; and
  • Finally, what are the main differences between these US and Chinese concepts, and what impact these differences in analysis and perception may have in the real world of policy and strategic stability.

I conclude the lecture with some reflections on what further work needs to be done by us all in identifying gaps in the overall fabric of deterrence for the US and its allies, including the critical and essential responsibilities of the Taiwanese themselves.

This is the third in a series of lectures on deterrence I have given since coming to work in Washington last year. In April, at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, I sought to define the various arms of integrated deterrence (military, economic, technological, foreign policy, and ideational) as they relate to the US, China and Taiwan. Then, in June, at the Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Honolulu, I discussed the impact of China’s accelerating “grey zone” campaign against Taiwan on the fabric and effectiveness of integrated deterrence. And now, in September, I’m seeking to examine how Beijing sees what we call deterrence, how the Chinese leadership seeks to apply its understanding of deterrence against the US and its allies over Taiwan, and, of course, how China is likely to interpret US deterrence efforts against itself.

I’m delivering this lecture, as with previous public lectures, in my personal capacity as a lifelong China scholar, rather than necessarily representing the formal analytical or policy conclusions of the Australian Government.

The policy of the Australian Government is to support a strategy of deterrence as the best means of maintaining a favourable balance in the Indo-Pacific, thus underpinning strategic equilibrium across the wider region and thereby securing long term peace and stability for the billions of people who live, work and have their being in the region we share.

Deterrence also needs to be accompanied by a commitment to maintaining the political status quo across the Taiwan Strait, including the posture of the Taiwanese Government on not unilaterally changing Taiwan’s international political status.

Deterrence raises hard questions – in conceptual terms, in policy terms, and in its effective communication and implementation. I don’t pretend to have answers to all these. But I believe we all need to apply our minds to these challenges in a disciplined way, just as the Chinese themselves – party, military and the intelligence apparatus – have done over the last decade.

When I was President of the Asia Society in New York, Henry Kissinger did me the great honour of launching our Asia Society Policy Institute, and later its Center for China Analysis. I asked Henry what our analytical mission should be. His answer was classically Kennanist. He said we should try to understand what was actually happening in the world and why. As opposed to drowning in the world in words that often camouflage or confuse a deeper understanding of underlying strategic forces, trends and realities. He also said we should then ask ourselves the even deeper question of what we are missing in our analysis.

Marxist Leninists ask themselves, within their own analytical paradigm, a similar set of questions:

  • what is the unfolding balance of “comprehensive national power”;
  • what is the “underlying trend” of the times;
  • where are the fundamental “contradictions” or fault lines within these trends; and
  • what is the current and desired terrain for “struggle” against the enemy, either at home or abroad?

This is how the Chinese system approaches, in disciplined analytical fashion, the deep questions of deterrence, the discretionary use of force, and how much they can rely on what they believe to be the underlying momentum of the great and irresistible historical forces driving change in the world today.

Understanding the concept of deterrence, as understood within both systems, can therefore provide us with some insight into the organising principles of Chinese policy behaviour on the ground. In doing so let us try to answer, beneath all the noise, Kissinger’s great question of what is really happening in the world today and why. And, as a result, how best to influence the course of events to preserve the peace.

Locating Deterrence within the Ideological Framework of Marxism-Leninism

Within the classical Chinese tradition, deterrence has a truly ancient pedigree. Sun Zi wrote The Art of War during China’s Warring States period. This was from 475-221BC when seven large independent kingdoms were competing for imperial hegemony in what would eventually become a unified Middle Kingdom. He famously defined a core distinction in military strategy between “war” and “non-war” measures: “To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

There have been generations of Chinese classical writings on what this meant in practice, including a formidable literature on the arts of political and military deception.

Such classical writings, however, only take us so far in understanding where deterrence is located within modern China’s ideological and strategic worldview.

We need to be modest, however, about what is knowable and what is unknowable within the highest echelons of the Chinese strategic world today.

Kennan faced similar challenges in interpreting the Soviet Union, advantaged however by the fact that Moscow and Washington were wartime allies, offering more intimate insights into the granularity of Soviet policy and behaviour in their combined efforts to defeat Nazi Germany.

The PRC, since its founding, has seen itself as an ideological and strategic adversary of the United States, with at best the partial exception of the period from 1971 to 1991, during which Beijing identified Moscow, rather than Washington, as its “principal contradiction” in the world.

What China and the Soviet Union had in common, however, was a similar Marxist-Leninist frame of analysis of their current and future place in the world and how to define the enemies of their respective revolutions, both from within and without. Indeed, Kennan’s diary entry for December 1945, when he was still working as Deputy Head of the embassy in Moscow, was clear on this point. He records a dinner-time conversation with his embassy colleague Chip Bohlen (who had served as Roosevelt’s interpreter at both the Tehran and Yalta conferences with Stalin) and their British colleague Isaiah Berlin. In this, Kennan quotes approvingly Berlin’s emphasis on “the continued vital importance of Marxist dogma in Soviet thought and action.”

Any comprehensive understanding of contemporary Chinese concepts of deterrence must be anchored within the CCP’s overarching Marxist-Leninist ideological and analytical framework of historical materialism and dialectical materialism. This may seem arcane to a modern American audience. But this is a problem of “projectionism”. We should not simply assume that Beijing is driven purely by hard-baked doctrines of strategic realism in which deterrence is just one of realism’s subsets.

It is true that realism occupies a central place within the modern Chinese strategic mindset, which is why John Mearsheimer, for example, has so many admirers in Beijing.

But in the CCP, both realism and deterrence are located within an even deeper ideological framework of Marxist-Leninist dialectics with which we also need to be familiar – not least because every single Chinese leader today, civilian or military, is schooled and drilled in dialectical analysis.

Furthermore, while ideological worldviews and analytical methodologies have always loomed large within the CCP political firmament, under Xi Jinping there has been an even deeper ideological revival. Marxist dialectics have been the subject of multiple politburo and other leadership study sessions. Indeed, Xi has become the most ideologically driven Chinese leader since Mao. This is reflected in the sheer volume of ideological corpus when compared with any of his post-Mao predecessors.

There is still a tendency in the US and the rest of the West to simply write off all this ideology as largely an exercise in political formalism – i.e. it’s what the CCP “needs to say” to justify its raison d’être, rather than providing a real-world guide to policy behaviour in the practical affairs of the Chinese state.

I have a different view. Over Xi’s decade in office, I argue he has deliberately set out to make the CCP and the country at large more Marxist, more Leninist and more nationalist. Furthermore, I argue there is a strong correlation over the same period of time between ideological change and real-world policy and behavioural change – both domestically and internationally. That is not to say that Marxism-Leninism is the only driver of change under Xi. There are of course many. But it is to say that ideology is a significant, albeit not exclusive, factor in Xi’s underlying belief systems. Both as an analytical device for understanding domestic and international reality, and as a shaping dynamic in the real world of policy.

Furthermore, if the Chinese system, for its own reasons, now places greater emphasis on ideology than at any time since the end of the Cultural Revolution, then so should we as we seek to understand current Chinese strategic perceptions.

Historical Materialism

Within Marxism-Leninism, historical materialism is seen as a system of so-called “scientific and objective truth” which locates contemporary China within a process of deep underlying structural change across the world.

This is driven in turn by what the Chinese system sees as a set of immutable and irresistible historical forces that drive the world forward from slave societies, to feudal societies, to capitalist societies, and then socialist and ultimately communist societies. The agent of change in this process is dialectical – i.e. the interaction of opposites as progressive forces struggle with, and then ultimately replace, conservative forces in an almost Darwinian political trajectory in which the strong always replace the weak.

It is this framework that causes Xi and the CCP to conclude that history is on China’s side, and that the capitalist West, led by the United States, will be swept aside, heralding, in turn, the birth of a new era in world history.

Indeed, this is the origin of many of the phrases often used in Xi’s contemporary political and foreign policy discourse, such as:

  • the “rise of the East and the decline of the West”;
  • “great changes not seen in a hundred years” referring to Xi’s China since the 19th Party Congress in 2017 as being of comparable historical significance to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917;
  • “China now moving to the centre of the world stage”;
  • continuing improvements in China’s “comprehensive national power”, its balance of power when measured against others, and the irresistible forces of change now driving the global order towards a greater sharing of power, rather than the old unipolar world dominated by the United States;
  • and, in reaction to all the above, Xi’s statement that there is now the “all-round containment and suppression of China” by “Western countries led by the United States”.

Whatever we may think of the logic and veracity of these conclusions, their importance lies in the level of ideological and national self-confidence that now characterises Xi Jinping’s analysis of the trajectory of China’s strategic competition with the United States.

Indeed, this worldview may well cause China to become over-confident in its analysis of the individual policy choices it has to make from time to time – from Taiwan, to the South China Sea and the East China Sea. While this worldview does not encourage reckless risk-taking, it does encourage more calculated risk taking. And this may result in the suspension of the sort of strategic caution we saw for decades under his predecessors, Deng, Jiang and Hu.

Dialectical Materialism

This brings us to the second main conceptual engine of the entire Marxist-Leninist enterprise – namely dialectical materialism.

If historical materialism locates China at a particular turning point in world history because of irresistible historical forces, its twin discipline of dialectical materialism is an analytical device to guide a Leninist vanguard party (i.e. the CCP) on how to accelerate these deep processes of historical change by intervening in history in the here and now.

It does so by defining more precisely the contending forces at work today that, in the party’s analysis, are either impeding or advancing the process of progressive change. This is what the party calls the “major contradictions” it must consciously confront. And based on this analysis, the party also analyses how to deal with these “contradictions” most effectively through the machinery of “struggle”, including whether that struggle should be violent or non-violent.

This, in turn, translates through to strategic policy choices. Domestically, for example, at the party’s 19th National Congress in 2017, Xi redefined the CCP’s major contradiction from Deng’s 1982 conclusion that the party should accelerate economic growth by all necessary means, to a new ideological orthodoxy that requires the party to now address the “imbalances” of growth generated as a result of the Deng era.

One practical policy manifestation of this conscious ideological shift in 2017 was the dramatic reining in of the Chinese private sector. A dominant private sector was seen as a major “imbalance” in the Chinese development model, not least because it would become a challenge to the political supremacy of the Leninist party. In other words, ideology matters in the real world of policy.

Internationally, the CCP is understandably opaque about how it publicly defines what it has concluded as being the “major contradictions” impeding China’s global advance. What we know from party history is that the CCP’s major external contradictions have changed over time:

  • From the American and British capitalist-imperialist powers as major backers of the KMT, as the “major contradiction” before Japan’s invasion in 1936;
  • Followed by the Japanese occupation where Tokyo supplanted these Western powers as the “major contradiction” until 1945;
  • Followed once again by the US as the “major contradiction” from the Korean War through until Nixon’s and Kissinger’s visits in 1972;
  • Through to the new definition of Soviet “social imperialism” as the “major contradiction” until the end of the Cold War.

There then followed a more complex period between the regime-threatening Tiananmen protest in 1989, through to 1992. The regime’s conclusion at the time was that US political support for China’s dissident movement made Washington again a “major contradiction” because it threatened the survival of the party itself. But the abolition of post-Tiananmen sanctions and the resumption of western economic engagement after 1992, followed by China’s WTO accession in 2001, caused the regime to conclude that, rather than facing any sustained major external threat, they could enjoy what the party formally went on to define as a new “period of strategic opportunity”.

This continued until the 20th Party Congress in 2022 when Xi Jinping excised this 20-year-old phrase (“a period of strategic opportunity”) from his formal report to the Congress altogether. China was signaling that it was entering into a new era with different and more confrontational strategic assumptions about its external environment.

The party is too cautious to publicly and explicitly redefine the US as its “principal external contradiction” for fear that would be seen at home, and by analysts abroad, as putting the country on a more formal war-footing. But, given the systemic deterioration of the US-China political, economic and strategic relationship after 2017, and given Xi’s remarkable public statement in 2023 that the US and Western countries were now containing, encircling and suppressing China, it is difficult to conclude that the party – given its normal analytical processes – has not based this declaration on a new, formal, classified redefinition of the US as the “major external contradiction” with which China is now engaged in large-scale “struggle”.

So, what do these arcane ideological taxonomies actually mean in the world of policy praxis, and what do they add to the real-world debate about deterrence over Taiwan, both in Beijing and Washington?

Because the Chinese system still believes in what they call “scientific socialism”, Beijing has concluded that US “containment, encirclement and suppression” not only happens to be China’s policy view; this conclusion is also objectively “correct”. Once a particular conclusion is seen in the Chinese system as scientifically, and therefore objectively correct, it makes the business of policy compromise with Beijing much more difficult. This is why Beijing regularly calls on the US and its allies, for example, to “change their thinking” and “adopt a correct analysis of the situation” and to “adjust their misguided policies”.

We may find such language curious. We would simply respond that we have a different view. But for the CCP, underlying ideological worldviews do not even permit the possibility of competing opinions.

Furthermore, if and when any compromise can be reached, it is much more likely that Beijing sees these as short-term tactical than long-term strategic changes – as, for example, the agreement in November 2023 to re-stabilise the US-China relationship. That is because, absent major changes in the Chinese leadership, long-term “struggle” with the US has now been well and truly ideologically baked in.

Integrating Xi’s Ideological Worldview

In other words, Beijing has concluded that US strategy in East Asia is not just about preventing the completion of the Chinese Revolution by thwarting the incorporation of Taiwan, it is also seen as thwarting China’s broader national rise to keep it from assuming its proper place in the world writ large.

Indeed, this is where historical and dialectical materialism come together. Within their so-called “scientific and objective” worldview, Xi Jinping’s CCP has concluded the following:

  • First, that China’s time has now come to play a dominant, progressive role in the world because that is where the processes of historical materialism have landed China after centuries of struggle;
  • Second, that China’s efforts today to exercise that role – both in relation to national unification with Taiwan, as well as its wider position in the world – are being actively thwarted by the last vestiges of the old, reactionary (and possibly counter-revolutionary) democratic-capitalist order led by the United States;
  • Third, this therefore mandates a long period of increasingly active “struggle” against the US;
  • Fourth, China in the CCP’s view should nonetheless have absolute confidence that it will prevail because Western countries will continue to decay internally, dialectical tensions between the US and its allies will intensify, and US global leadership resolve will begin to crack;
  • Fifth, China should, therefore, not engage in any strategic compromise with the US as it did under Deng and his successors before Xi, when the China-US relationship was seen as “the most important of all that was important” (or zhongzhong zhi zhong). Nonetheless, some tactical shifts may be tolerated, just as Mao compromised with the US during the Korean War armistice negotiations.

The Relationship between Ideology, Strategy and Deterrence

So what is the particular role of strategy and deterrence in the context of this heavy, ideological overlay?

Within the CCP system, ideology therefore actively shapes reality: both as a set of core Marxist-Leninist beliefs; as an analytical tool for interpreting and responding to political, economic and military reality; and as a shaper of policy.

It determines the difference between what is of strategic as opposed to purely tactical significance, as illustrated in Xi’s 2023 speech on “The Six Major Relationships”. That which is “strategic” is determined by what the party defines as its “major contradictions”. And this in turn directs where the party should direct its strategic resources in the pursuit of “struggle”.

Within this framework, as noted above the US has likely been defined as China’s “major external contradiction”. That is also the likely ideological prism through which Beijing now views Russia and Ukraine - ie. as tactical tools in its strategic mission against the United States. The same ideological logic is also likely to apply to the determination of China’s strategic posture and “struggle” in other political and policy domains and geographies.

Furthermore,  within PLA doctrine, deterrence is directly relevant to the actual machinery of “struggle” at an operational level.

The core point in all the above, however, is the underpinning political and ideological self confidence that China has in its ability to prosecute its strategy against the US with success. As well as an associated predisposition for more and more calculated risk-taking on China’s part, notwithstanding the normal cautionary disciplines of deterrence.

Under Xi Jinping, as under Mao, ideology therefore casts a long shadow over both strategy and deterrence, although never to the exclusion of the other, more conventional strategic and military disciplines with which we are more familiar in the West.

US Understandings of Deterrence

So what do we understand by deterrence within official US definitions of the term?

As our defence colleagues will be well aware, the US Department of Defense in Joint Doctrine Note 2-19 on Strategy defines coercion as the use of “threats of force to shape the behaviour of another actor”. It further defines coercion as an “umbrella term that encompasses two distinct forms: deterrence and compellence”. And further that “deterrence seeks to prevent an enemy [or other actor] from taking an action he has not yet taken”, whereas “compellence seeks to persuade an enemy to do something he would rather not do, or to cease an action he has begun”.

US DOD Joint Publication 3-0 goes on to say that deterrence should have three elements: capability based on the means to influence behaviour; credibility based on believability of the threat to deploy these means; and communication to ensure that the desired audience understands the message so that they can respond with changed behaviour.

On the latter point, JP 3-0 adds that “deterrence stems from an adversary’s belief that a credible threat of retaliation exists, that the contemplated action cannot succeed, or that the costs outweigh the perceived benefits of acting”.

This goes to the core question of how do Chinese political and military elites perceive US and allied actions that have been conceived and executed through the prism of deterrence? We cannot simply assume (or “project”) that these actions and the strategic purpose underpinning them are automatically understood in Beijing in the way that we would logically expect. In other words, how do we avoid the longstanding policy dilemma of “projectionism” – in Washington, in Beijing, in Taipei – as each side seeks to make sense of the language and actions of others by projecting onto them what “we” would do in the same circumstances.

Chinese Definitions of Deterrence

The core Chinese language translation of the word “deterrence” is the compound weishe.

As Marcrum and Mulvaney noted in their important 2021 Australian Strategic Policy Institute examination of US and Chinese concepts of deterrence, the PLA does not publicly release its military doctrine. Because of this, we have to rely on a range of other official and semi-official publications, including the Chinese Academy of Military Science and its periodic updates of its authoritative publication The Science of Military Strategy (Zhanluexue).

For these reasons, we need to accept that there will be a band of meaning around the deterrence concept in China which is both broader and less definitive than that offered by the US DOD. There are also modest levels of disagreement among Chinese officials and researchers across the Chinese literature.

On my reading, however, the Chinese concept of weishe embraces seven broad sets of meanings.

First, the 2020 edition of The Science of Military Strategy defines strategic deterrence as explicitly belonging to politics: it is a “kind of military struggle” but is implemented “to achieve a specific political goal”. Indeed, the previous edition in 2013 described deterrence as being:

  • “a continuation of politics” and “subordinate to politics”.
  • that “politics and deterrence are related to each other as ends to means”;
  • and that “there is no deterrence without politics”.

The new 2020 text states that deterrence requires:

  • building a “political foundation for the mobilisation and participation of the whole nation”.
  • a “strong, centralised and unified leadership” capable of such mobilisation; and
  • “close cooperation with political and diplomatic struggles”.

This is a remarkable set of explicit sub-definitions of deterrence. While the political nature of deterrence may seem self-evident to a Western audience, it is significant that deterrence in China is not delegated to the military as a routine set of mesures, actions and stratagems. It is driven from the top of the political command structure (presumably the Central Military Commission, which Xi Jinping chairs) and with “specific”, rather than generic, objectives clearly in mind.

Second, also according to The Science of Military Strategy, deterrence (weishe) is defined as being “aimed at the opponent’s psychology, cognition and decision-making system”. It is therefore both a military and psycho-political concept that requires “careful study of the psychological characteristics and behaviours of the opponent’s decision-makers”.

The 2013 edition of The Science of Military Strategy also states the “deterring side strives to induce the adversary to imagine or speculate on the potentially dreadful consequences of the threat, thereby triggering psychological fear in the adversary”.

This too is a remarkably explicit set of sub-definitions that should give pause to all states when they find themselves on the receiving end of Chinese deterrence, coercion or compellence activity.

Third, and equally clear, is the explicit embrace of violence as a necessary element of deterrence. The Science of Military Strategy states that:

  • a “basic element” of deterrence is “the determination to dare to use force, and to be good at using force”;
  • “deterrence must be backed by actual combat” to ensure that “any enemy, including a strong enemy, is convinced any encroachment or interference with China will be met with due retaliation”; and
  • “we should be ready to switch to actual combat at any time to ensure the deterrence effect”.

As the previous 2013 edition also put it: “Deterrence is not to express political will through the mode of friendly consultation, and mutual understanding and compromises, but to transmit the danger, urgency, and reality of possible violence.”

China is therefore not faintly squeamish in putting bluntly its primal proposition that it is the real and immediate promise of violence that provides the essential machinery for the deterrence equation to work – i.e. to achieve its desired psychological impact in order to then achieve the political objectives that have been set.

Fourth, The Science of Military Strategy renders the core components of effective deterrence in similar three-part terms of capacity, political will and effective communication that we also see in US doctrine. These are expressed as:

  • Strength as “the basis of deterrence, for deterrence without strength is only a bluff”;
  • Determination to “use force when necessary” since “the lack of determination makes adversaries doubt the validity of deterrence”; and
  • Transmission of this determination in a “timely, rapid and accurate manner so that the deterrence target can correctly understand the information and produce the desired effect”.

Of these three components, however, a number of Chinese writers point to the absolute priority of perceived political will. For example, Yang Yuan of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, albeit writing on nuclear deterrence in 2021, added that “whoever is willing to take the greater risk of loss of control can force the other party to make concessions”. More disturbingly, as the Center for Naval Analyses noted last year, Yang went on to observe that:

“generally speaking, in regional disputes involving the United States, US interests are often not really critical, so nuclear-armed states in the region often have [levels of] resolve more favourable to the situation”.

Properly decoded, this infers that China would have greater political resolve in its deterrence dealings with regional states because China was a nuclear weapons state with core regional interests, whereas the US did not have similarly core interests at stake in the region.

Fifth, what we see from the general Chinese deterrence literature is that deterrence capabilities extend across all the branches of state power.

As the US Center for Naval Analyses study succinctly put it: “At the lower end of the continuum of conflict, deterrence efforts tend to focus on economic, diplomatic and media activities that are less likely to escalate to full-blown crisis”, although most Chinese authors say “the capability to employ force against another country is the backstop to deterrence”.

Sixth, according to The Science of Military Strategy, the eight methods of military deterrence are:

  • Actions and rhetoric to create an "atmosphere” of imminent war;
  • Showing off advanced weaponry that could cause “tremendous damage to the enemy”;
  • Military exercises to both “demonstrate our combat abilities, but also cause the opponent to doubt our intentions, causing psychological panic”.
  • Adjusting military deployment to “make the opponent feel the pressure of coming war … based on both fiction and reality”;
  • Raising military readiness, including local mobilisation to “set off an upsurge of national defense education”;
  • Information attacks to jam an opponent’s command, early warning, air defense and anti-missile systems.
  • Restrictive military operations, such as exercises and weapons tests, that can “squeeze the opponent’s operating space and restrict their movement”; and
  • Cautionary military strikes against “a small number of military and political targets that have obvious deterrent effects”.

Seventh, as for the object of deterrence, The Science of Military Strategy in its 2013 version states that : “Military deterrence (weishe) is the strategic actions taken by a state or political group that threatens to use or actually use military power to influence its opponent’s strategic judgement to achieve certain political goals”. This is to be done by:

  • making the adversary feel that it’s difficult to achieve the expected goal, or that the gains are not worth the loss, and/or
  • making the adversary abandon hostile actions (fangqi didui xingdong), thereby achieving certain political goals.

The 2020 edition of the Military Strategy states even more baldly that: “Strategic deterrence is a method of military conflict to achieve a political goal based on military strength, a comprehensive use of various means, through clever display of strength and determination to use strength, making the other party face unbearable consequences, and force it to give in, compromise, or surrender.”

What is significant about these definitions is that they embrace both deterrence and compellence – i.e. they encompass both preventative military threats to stop an adversary from doing something, as well as using military force against an adversary to abandon a course of action they have already started.

The significance of this conceptual difference between US and Chinese understandings is that Beijing sees deterrence and compellence as part of a continuum – rather than seeing them as separate actions – or seeing deterrence as a “softer” option as Marcrum and Mulvaney note in their recent ASPI paper.

This distinction opens up a broader question of Chinese understandings of what they term as “offensive” and “defensive” deterrence. The former has been described in Chinese strategic literature as “using war to stop war” by using “small war to constrain large war” and the “unified dialectical relationship between attack and defence”.

According to The Science of Military Strategy: “When the outbreak of war is imminent, implementing strategic deterrence can either seize the last chance to avoid war, or gain the initiative in war, especially the first battle, and create a favourable military situation for entering a state of war.”

This preparedness to use low-intensity, real military force to achieve what the Chinese system still describes as “deterrence” is significant. It is consistent with the arguments above, which see deterrence and compellence within the same conceptual continuum.

Indeed, The Science of Military Strategy characterises such actions as ultimately “defensive” in nature since Chinese deterrence is supposedly provoked by Western “offensive” deterrence.

It is significant that China therefore appears prepared to escalate militarily in order to achieve its political objective of deterrence – without worrying too much that even a “small war” could lead to the much larger war it is seeking to deter in the first place. This is potentially dangerous.

To be clear, the Chinese system would not see an invasion of Taiwan as some sort of “small war”, deterring a much more “general war” against the United States.

From the Chinese literature, it could involve, however, showing strength through “surgical” military strikes, skirmishes, or success in “small battles”. Cautionary strikes in the name of deterrence are to be directed at targets that are “relatively isolated and easy to fight, and will not harm the people”.

This appears to suggest lower-grade skirmishes (but still involving the active use of armed force) to demonstrate resolve in a range of contingencies within, say the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.

Finally, China’s preparedness to contemplate the use of actual military force within a deterrence framework also bleeds into the wider concept within the Chinese system of what Beijing calls “strategic deterrence” (zhanlue weishe).

The updated Science of Military Strategy dedicates its deterrence chapter to “strategic deterrence” (as opposed to “military deterrence”) and describes it as “an alternative mode of military struggle” that has “lower intensity, lower cost, and greater room for manoeuvre” than actual combat.

A 2019 Chinese Academy of Military Science study was even more blunt in stating that China’s strategic deterrence capability could be assessed by the PLA’s ability to “deter any intentions, forces or actions of hostile powers that influence or impede China’s achievement of its strategic objectives”.

This is deterrence on a grand scale: i.e. long-term, broad-based and strategic deterrence,  as opposed to a narrower form of tactical deterrence, that seeks to prevent or stop a particular action by an adversary.

The Potential Impact of Differing Chinese and American Concepts of Deterrence in Shaping Beijing’s Taiwan Strategy

So how then do we best define the core doctrinal differences between US and Chinese understandings of deterrence?

And are these differences deepened further by the underlying ideological disciplines that Chinese leaders bring to bear in their response to current strategic realities.

As noted above, we cannot clinically separate deterrence from where it is located within the wider analytical framework of historical materialism and dialectical materialism if we are to have a realistic view of how Xi Jinping is likely to perceive US decisions and behaviour.

First, Xi is likely to see US actions over Taiwan within the overarching Marxist-Leninist historical frame that China’s time has now come – both to complete national unification and to assume a bigger global leadership role as the new torch-bearers of the Marxism of the 21st century.

Second, applying the disciplines of dialectical materialism, Xi now sees China locked into a profound struggle against the United States because, since around 2018-19 (and certainly since 2022), the US has been identified as China’s major external “contradiction”. The 20-year-long “period of strategic opportunity” when peace and economic development were seen as the “main trend” of the era is now over. And a new era of national self-reliance and the “securitisation” of all policy domains has begun to prepare the country for future contingencies.

Third, Xi’s sense of manifest destiny, underpinned by the analytical processes of historical and dialectical materialism, is likely to result in greater and greater degrees of national self confidence in dealing with the US across multiple domains. This is because of Xi’s belief that China is now an irresistible force with the strong winds of history at its back.

Fourth, this self-confidence will nonetheless be tempered by Xi’s deeply Leninist and deeply realist respect for US military capabilities, informed by his officials’ rolling analyses of the two countries’ “comprehensive national power”. We should always remember what a Leninist party never forgets: that all “political power proceeds from the barrel of a gun”. Although we should also remember that this same Leninist party, while respectful of American firepower, continues to conclude that the balance of power is moving in its favour.

Fifth, within this overall analytical framework, China’s view of deterrence differs from the US in one major respect: it sees deterrence and compellence as a single continuum rather than as separate strategic concepts. As a result, this is likely to encourage China to move more seamlessly up the escalation ladder in a manner that the US would see as incompatible with its own notion of deterrence. This risk may be compounded by Xi’s underlying sense of ideological self-confidence and secular missionary zeal.

Sixth, this conceptual difference on the definitional scope of deterrence is reinforced by the fact that Chinese doctrine sees both the threat and the actual use of some level of military force as a legitimate expression of deterrence. This problem is compounded by a further difference we find in China’s doctrinal acceptance of conscious military escalation as an equally legitimate form of deterrence. And this is made worse by China’s embrace of the idea of using “small war to constrain large war” as a further exercise in effective deterrence.

Finally, China’s analytical framework for understanding and executing a strategy of deterrence differs from that of the US at a much broader level again.

Consistent with US deterrence doctrine, Washington signals deterrence objectives through the passive deployment of military assets, the exercise patterns of those assets and in diplomatic messaging to the Chinese leadership on maintaining the status quo over Taiwan – all with the objective of dissuading the Chinese from launching an invasion. By contrast, China engages in active and aggressive deterrence through the deployment of military and paramilitary assets closer and closer to Taiwan.

This is not to simply convey to Taiwan what China would do if Taiwan declared independence in the future (i.e. to dissuade Taiwan from doing something, as in classical deterrence theory). Beijing is also using active, paramilitary measures in the here and now, through its grey-zone campaign, to change the status quo on the ground and on the seas in and around Taiwan – i.e. as a form of active compellence to cause Taiwan to stop doing what it is currently doing, and to force it to the negotiating table on Beijing’s terms.

We see this, for example, in relation to recent Chinese coastguard actions around Taiwan’s offshore islands, China’s repeated and increasing number of PLA Air Force over-flights of the median line in the Taiwan Strait, as well as Chinese vessels now violating the 24 nautical mile contiguous zone off the main island of Taiwan.

Chinese Perceptions of US Deterrence Strategy towards Taiwan

This brings us to the question of not just understanding how China sees its own doctrine of deterring Taiwan and the United States, but also how Beijing is likely to analyse and understand US deterrence strategy, policy and actions towards China.

As noted in my cautionary observation above, while it is important that we are mindful of differing Chinese and US understandings of the doctrine of deterrence, we should not, as noted above, lose sight of the underlying fact of China’s deep and abiding respect for the lethality of US military power. This core fact, in many respects, constitutes deterrence in and of itself.

China has actively studied major US amphibious landings in World War II both in Europe and the Pacific. They have done same with the Incheon landings in Korea. Just as they have seen the overwhelming use of US military force in two Gulf Wars.

A deep appreciation of both the power and the precedents for the real-world use of American military power remains the core and enduring reality that drives Chinese strategy towards the US and Taiwan. Were it not the case, China would have acted over past decades to take Taiwan by force.

CCP history has many accounts of how Mao, for example, in reaching core strategic decisions in 1947-48 on launching his final offensive against the Nationalists in the Second Civil War, was shaped by his conclusions about US military power and its political will to intervene. The same with Mao’s decisions on Chinese intervention in the Korean War. And, of most relevance in this lecture, the US decision to deploy the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait in 1950 had a massive deterrent effect on Mao’s calculus of his ability to take Taiwan while the KMT were still in the process of consolidating their hold on the island.

The Chinese leadership therefore have a brutally realist view of what the presence or absence of overwhelming US military force can mean. That is why the CCP continues to make detailed calculations of the changing regional and global balance of military power in shaping its base-line strategic decisions – both on Taiwan and beyond it.

Nonetheless, within this baseline analysis of these most fundamental elements of deterrence (i.e. the possession of US military power, and the political will to use it to achieve US policy objectives over Taiwan), it is nonetheless important to understand how China may interpret US deterrence strategy somewhat differently to the rest of us.

First, as noted previously, what we might perceive to be an unremarkable set of routine, predictable and transparent deployments to the region as merely an expression of our common deterrence mission, Beijing, looking through its own doctrinal prism, might see them as sitting at the compellence end of the coercion-deterrence-compellence continuum.

In other words, while we may see deterrence as embracing a softer set of options for responding to Chinese actions against Taiwan, and a long way removed from the hard use of any form of military coercion, Beijing is just as likely to see these actions within its own analytical frame as coercion.

Second, as illustrated by CNA’s examination of the wide range of possible meanings of weishe within the Chinese literature, other misinterpretations of US deterrence are also possible.

Apart from weishe meaning both “deterrence” and “compellence”, it can also be rendered as having additional overlapping meanings including “containment” (ezhi) and “suppression” (qiangpo).

The Western strategic mind has never equated deterrence with containment.

Any Western scholar with passing familiarity with Kennan’s actual doctrine of containment towards the Soviet Union would see nothing in common with US and allied strategy towards China for the last 45 years.

US policy on China under both Republicans and Democrats has not sought to cut off China economically, financially or technologically from the world. Individual restrictive measures may have been taken for national security reasons. But there is a massive practical and conceptual chasm between de-risking and decoupling, and de-risking and containment.

Furthermore, the US is not fighting China in proxy wars around the world as happened from time to time during the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Moreover, neither the US nor its allies have ever objected to China’s neighbours peacefully resolving outstanding border disputes in the absence of military force – whether in the South China Sea, on the Sino-Indian border or even over Taiwan.

So does Beijing, despite the logical flaws in its containment argument, actually believe that it is being contained? Or is this simply a declaratory ruse designed for domestic and certain international audiences in the Global South? This is impossible to know, but it is probably a combination of both.

That is because Xi’s new doctrine of national self-sufficiency, together with the overall “securitisation” of Chinese economic policy, appears to be anticipating the real-world possibility of future international sanctions in the event of a major Taiwan contingency.

Whatever the internal reality, we need to be mindful that when we innocently talk about deterrence as a reasonable policy posture towards China over Taiwan, it could well be being heard within a much broader and belligerent band of meaning than we in the West would necessarily assume.

That is not a prima-facie argument to change course. In fact, we should not. It is, however, an argument for using military communications “guardrails” to reduce the risk of fundamental misunderstanding.

Conclusion

The record demonstrates that deterrence, led by the United States, continues to hold across the Taiwan Strait. That is a tribute to successive US administrations. But it does leave open the question of the future.

The purpose of this lecture has been to try and shed some light on how China perceives the complex questions of deterrence, how this may differ from US and allied understandings, and how these may translate into their views of each other over Taiwan.

What this lecture has not done is go to the next set of logical questions, namely:

  • will current policy settings enable the US continue to successfully deter China in the future?
  • what gaps might exist within the overall fabric of integrated deterrence? and
  • how can they be filled?
  • does China believe it is increasingly deterring the US within its own perceptual framework?
  • and where could this take Chinese strategy in the future ?

These are core questions for future contributions to the national security debate here in the US, in Taiwan, among allies – and, yes, in Beijing itself – if together we are to preserve the peace. They are not just core questions. They are intrinsically hard questions, multi-dimensional in nature and now increasingly urgent.

The unfolding Chinese strategy in its grey-zone campaigns across the Taiwan Strait and the South and East China Seas brings all these questions into immediate and increasingly sharp focus.

These are all “measures short of war”, as Kennan would perhaps remind us, from the title of his original lecture series here in this storied building back in 1946. Just as these are the core questions that both Kissinger and Kennan, were they with us today, would likely have us address and then collectively resolve. And to do so as rapidly as possible, in the real world of strategic policy, if we are to continue to avoid what I, for one, still believe to be an eminently avoidable war.

4 September 2024