Moral Talent and Security: Diachronic Perspectives on Chinese Strategic Culture
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Date
2016-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Emerging in the 1970s as a supplement to rationalist paradigms for understanding international relations, the study of strategic culture seeks to explain the relationship between culture and strategy. Numerous models for this interaction have been proposed, but each empirical study treats strategic culture as an essentially static phenomenon. Although some level of durability is central to the concept, this implied resistance to change has lead to the widespread assumption that China’s prevalent strategic culture is based in the same Confucian ideals that permeated China during the imperial era. However, this view ignores the apparent rupture in early twentieth century Chinese political consciousness that arose from the intense upheaval that came in the wake of the Qing dynasty’s collapse and resulted in a dramatically different political culture. Within the context of recent strategic cultural scholarship, I seek to highlight the need to examine strategic culture not only synchronically (cross-sectional at a given time) but also diachronically (longitudinal over time). To address this gap, I draw elements from several schools of strategic cultural thought to construct a new model, which conceptualizes strategic culture as a dynamic linguistic phenomenon. I then apply this model to the study of strategic culture in the People’s Republic of China. I control for synchronic variation by examining the same cross-section of society for both historical nodes, analyzing Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping’s public statements on military strategy and tracing the development of Chinese strategic culture through the 20th century. I focus particularly on the disappearance and subsequent reemergence of Confucian-inspired units of meaning in Chinese strategic rhetoric, especially the emphasis on socialization into a shared moral and ethical system. I end by exploring the impact that a robust diachronic perspective on strategic culture has on the study of modern Chinese foreign policy and strategic culture in general.
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China, strategic culture, discourse analysis, international relations, social theory