The United States and the wider western world do not understand China. Two centuries of economic, political, and military domination of the globe, first by Europe and later the US, have left the West ill equipped to understand the thinking and behaviour of the People’s Republic. This has potentially huge implications for world order.
China, like the US, sees itself as the bearer of a universal civilizational concept – an approach to life applicable to all humans on the planet. Unlike the US, however, China has seen itself thus for several thousand years, rather than several hundred. This shared view of their own universality is one reason why the next two decades will be defined by competition between China and the US. But what is China’s strategy? And does the West understand it?
To understand these two questions, we must first look to how both the West (mostly maritime powers) and China (a land power) approach military strategy. Broadly speaking, America, and the wider western world, tends to seek decisive engagements and clear decision points in its politics, strategy and approach to warfare. On the battlefield, the enemy’s strong points and command nodes need to be destroyed conclusively. War, philosophically, is seen as binary – there is peace, or there is war – and linear, with front lines and zones of control.
China, on the other hand, places a much higher emphasis on deception, circumlocution and ambiguity to conceal the eventual goal.
These differing approaches to strategy can be encapsulated in two phrases from the greatest, or at least the most well-known, military thinkers on either side: Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz. Sun Tzu’s statement that “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill; to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill”, stands in stark contrast to von Clausewitz’s “pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination”.
These approaches represent completely different ways of utilising military force to achieve political aims. And there is a danger that each side views the other through its own behaviours and paradigms. This projection of one’s own mind-set, values and beliefs onto the actions of an opponent is the greatest sin, and the most common, in the analysis of foreign affairs.
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