By Michael Carl Haas
China’s focus on countering a U.S. military intervention along its periphery is alive and well.
In a recent article (PDF) in The Washington Quarterly, two well-respected scholars of Chinese military affairs seek to debunk the idea that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been designing its modernization drive and strategic planning around the concept of “counter-intervention,” which refers to the ability to force an outside power to stand off from the Chinese mainland and its immediate periphery during a conflict. Their assessment is based on a meticulous review of Chinese military texts, which the great majority of Western defense analysts will find difficult to dispute and which imbues their work with an air of scholarly authority, even where their judgments stray beyond what is warranted by their careful review of the language involved.
The article has made quite a splash, with The Diplomat’s Franz-Stefan Gady going so far as to call it “The One Article to Read on Chinese Naval Strategy in 2015.” I have to disagree with this assessment. This is not to say that those interested in China’s military modernization can afford to gloss over Fravel and Twomey’s article – they cannot, and should not. It is an important corrective provided by two leading scholars and, as such, should induce us to adapt the vocabulary we rely on in describing Chinese military planning vis-à-vis the United States. But don’t stop reading just yet, and don’t fall into the strange constructivist trap of believing that a strategy suddenly ceases to exist because the language we used to describe it is shown not to be in widespread use among its makers.
Read the full story at The Diplomat