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Interpreting China's Grand Strategy, Past, Present and Future. By Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2000. 283pp.
Has China a grand strategy for its national security? If yes, what is it? Does Chinese leadership from Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di to Mao and Jiang consciously follow such a grand strategy? These controversial questions are taken by Swaine and Tellis as the key starting point in their ground-breaking study of China's security behaviour over the tongue duree of over two millennia. For the authors, such a study contributes to "accurately understanding and effectively responding to the rise of China" (p. ix).
Like many others in the current debate on the rise of China, Swaine and Tellis start from the assumption that China is increasingly becoming a serious national security concern for the United States (Chapter 1). Unlike others, however, they argue that China's strategic behaviour can only be made comprehensible with an adequate understanding of fundamental problems in China's security environment, which transcend time and space (see Chapter 2). In Chapter 3, Swaine and Tellis make a brave attempt to offer a sweeping review of China's historical strategic behaviour to establish what they call "the historical context". The historically contextual hybrid of weak-strong state security strategy adopted by the Chinese state, the authors claim, informs our understanding of the contemporary security strategy pursued by the current Chinese Government.
If the characterization of current Chinese security strategy as "calculative" is less controversial, and full discussions of it in Chapter 4 are more conventional, the assessment of the longevity of such a strategy, believed to be between 2015-2020, is nevertheless provocative. In the authors' words, "Chinese-state initiated revisionism" of...