Chinese Strategic Culture – Part 2: Virtue and Power

by Dr Rosita Dellios*

 

Centre for East-West Cultural and Economic Studies Research Paper No. 2 November 1994

 

Bond University

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

 

Abstract

When the world’s most populous nation, commanding ample resources and a booming economy, begins to strengthen militarily, it cannot help but draw attention to itself. China has indeed done so through naval expansion in recent years and the upgrading of all aspects of its forces. While it has reassured the world of its peaceful intentions, speculation as to its motives is understandable. Intentions may, of course, be inferred from capability; but most strategic analysts recognise that capability alone is not enough. Rather than focusing on capability, this paper subscribes to the view that intentions are better understood if examined within the context of culture and philosophy. Moreover, as the central concern over China’s changing military profile is one of the implications of expanding national power, Chinese perceptions of power need to be addressed. The findings can be thought-provoking: If it is a truism that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, how does this rest with the traditional Chinese conception of power as virtue? Will the world, under the influence of stronger Chinese leadership conditions in the 21st Century, be assimilated into an alternative power system – a ‘power politics’ of virtue? This question issues from the discussion in Part One (previous paper) of the Daoist perspective of international relations.(1) It concludes with the weight of cultural-philosophical evidence in favour of responsible statecraft on the part of the world’s biggest and potentially most influential nation.

 

Chinese Strategic Culture: Virtue and Power (2)

Few people have difficulty recognising the greatness of Chinese antiquity even if they do find difficulty correlating this to the events of the last 150 years. Many are familiar with China’s contemporary dimensions – an enormous country with the world’s largest population and military establishment. More recently, attention has focused on the Chinese economy which is among the world’s fastest growing. By conventional indicators, China has the world’s tenth largest Gross Domestic Product; but by the methodology based on purchasing power parity it is hailed to be the world’s third largest economy (after the United States and Japan), and is expected to become the largest by the year 2010.(3)

It does not take an academic to predict the return of China as a leading world power. This is becoming abundantly clear to the casual observer. It behoves the analyst, however, to cast light upon this condition and to speculate upon the implications of China’s ‘greatness’ to contemporary international society. One way of approaching this daunting task is through the explanatory vehicle of China’s strategic culture. After all, if one is to understand strategic action, the means to global greatness, one needs to understand the strategic thought and ’style’ that underlie it. It may also be productive to infer action from strategic thought when speculating on possible futures.

Chinese Strategic Culture: Part 1 – The Heritage from the Past

By Rosita Dellios*

 

Centre for East-West Cultural and Economic Studies Research Paper No. 1 April 1994 

 

Bond University

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

ISBN 0 7331 00031

 

Abstract

This paper investigates contemporary Chinese defence thinking from the point of view of its strategic culture. Such an undertaking is timely in view of heightened threat perceptions about a militarily strengthening China. While this paper does not concern itself with addressing such suspicions directly, it hopes to contribute to informed discussion by refocussing the issue onto a larger historical and philosophical screen. An identification of the PRC’s traditional strategic thinking in the form of people’s war and its philosophical antecedents may not at first appear relevant to contemporary China’s security needs. It is the premise of this paper, however, that nothing can ever be attempted to be known about China’s intentions and actions without such a survey. Consequently, this paper endeavours to show how the past may still be seen to serve the current era in terms of cultural-philosophical orientation.

 

Chinese Strategic Culture: The Heritage from the Past⁽¹⁾ 

1.                  Introduction

Strategic culture pertains to a people’s distinctive style of dealing with an thinking about the problems of national security. The intellectual and ’spiritual’ modality of a living strategic culture may be found in its strategic philosophy. This is concerned as much with enduring principles as it is with distinctive approaches applied to the problem of a nation’s security. In Chinese strategic philosophy there are enduring elements, such as deterrence and psychological warfare, that are applicable across time and across cultures. The Chinese do not have a monopoly on these, but they have moulded them into a distinctive Chinese approach, just as the 19^th century European strategists – Clausewitz and Jomini – are distinguished for the skilful application of physical force. Hence, the underlying premise of this paper is that modern Chinese strategic philosophy owes more to its past than to the borrowings from the modern world or from other philosophical traditions. The conscious adoptions or coincidental presence of foreign strategic philosophies are not disputed. As Fung Yu-Lan has observed: ‘Every philosophy has that which is permanent and all philosophies have something in common.’ (2) Without disputing the presence of the foreign or universal, I will concentrate instead on advancing the view that there is a uniquely Chinese approach to strategy and that it remains even in an age when China has become a powerful nuclear-armed state.

By way of background, a brief statement on China’s current defence policy is in order. It is a policy which rests on the strategic doctrine of people’s war under modern conditions, and incorporates the specialist variant of local war doctrine, designed to deal with defence contingencies of limited scope on China’s peripheries. Adopted at the onset of the post-Mao era of reform under Deng Xiaoping, people’s war under modern conditions (abbreviated in this paper to modern people’s war) was a development from the people’s war doctrine (or traditional people’s war) of Communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong (Tse-tung). Modern people’s war was a development in that it continued to rely on a victory-denial strategy utilising China’s large land mass, population, and fighting forces – calculated to deter an invader by rendering any hope of conquest futile – but added to these traditional elements the need for meeting the ‘modern conditions’ of late 20^th century warfare (of which more will be said later).

Daoist Perspectives on Chinese and Global Environmental Management

by Rosita Dellios

 

The Culture Mandala, 4 no. 2, November 2001. Copyright © Rosita Dellios 2001 

 

The Yin Yang doctrine is very simple but its influence has been extensive. No aspect of Chinese civilization – whether metaphysics, medicine, government, or art – has escaped its imprint. In simple terms, the doctrine teaches that all things and events are products of two elements, forces or principles: yin, which is negative, passive, weak, and destructive, and yang, which is positive, active, strong, and constructive.

- Wing-Tsit Chan(2)

 

The Yin and Yang of Hardship and Hope

Asked about the conditions of life for farming women in China, a rural magazine editor, Xie Lihua, said: “It’s a life of hardship but they have hope. Real hardship would be having no hope.”(3) She could easily have been speaking of China and its prospects in the new century. In view of China’s size and scale of operations, simply assuring 1.3 billion people of the availability of food is an exercise of global consequence.(4) If the Chinese people cannot feed themselves, who can and at what cost – be it to China or other parts of the world? If China’s environment ceases to be habitable let alone cultivable, political upheaval is sure to follow. And while the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (5) shifts from one ruler to another, an inevitable refugee exodus risks destabilising surrounding societies and their resources. The effects an environmentally disabled China would have on climate change and cross-border pollution is as unthinkable to the current era of ecological awakening as nuclear war was in the age of the superpowers.

But there is hope in China’s predicament. Despite the inevitable turbulence in socio-economic transition from Maoism to market economics, the nation is the world’s most dynamic in terms of economic development, even in the current period of Asian recessions. Never in human history have so many people risen out of conditions of absolute poverty in so little time as in the past two decades of economic reforms. And, indeed, never in Chinese history has Chinese philosophy been so relevant to ‘all under Heaven’ (tianxia) – that is, the world (6) – in providing the ’spiritual technologies’ for living in the 21st century. The culture derived from Chinese philosophy, with its roots in Daoism (Taoism), Confucianism and Buddhism, encourages the aesthetic of strategic thinking. In the 21st century when the planet’s congestive problems come to a head, each has a distinctive quality to offer and all three combine in the common search for harmony. Indeed, the basic idea of Chinese civilisation is the quest for harmony on Earth. The yin-yang symbol represents this.

 

Fig. 1: Yin-Yang Symbol

Confucian Ethics and the Environment

by Li Tianchen*

 

From The Culture Mandala, 6 no. 1: Copyright © Li Tianchen 2003  

 

Confucianism is distinguished by its concern for the cultivation of human relations towards a harmonious society rather than one’s relations with the supernatural or natural. However, it would be a mistake to regard the civilisational legacy of Confucius as purely humanistic. Confucianism is a philosophy which also contains profound environmental ethics through its inclusiveness of Heaven, Earth and the Human order. These form the traditional Chinese trinity which configure the ultimate harmony. Relations between people and the natural world are therefore of intrinsic interest to those who profess Confucian ethics.

This unaccustomed extension of Confucianism to ecological considerations is timely in the present age. With the planet’s widespread industrial development and the rapid growth of population, ecosystems are in urgent need of ethical consideration. ‘Saving’ the environment requires that we understand it, our place within it, and our responsibilities toward it. The environment’s unprecedented exploitation, in the absence of practices of protection and renewal, now threatens future economic and social development. In other words, an impoverished natural environment impedes both the material standard of living and socio-cultural quality of life. To the Confucian mind, this problem originates in the misconstruing of relations between humankind and nature. The solution may therefore begin with people understanding how to conduct such relations.