In China’s Strategic Culture and Cross-Strait Relations, Neil Munro and Duanyi Yi propose a strategic culture framework to interpret the perilous relations between China, Taiwan and the United States in the Taiwan Strait. They have a clear mission in mind – to rid strategic culture analysis of the tautology charge – and their efforts are laudable.
The authors anchor their argument in an early quote from Jeannie Johnson: rationality is often culturally dependent, and actors’ cost/benefit analysis is weighed by ideational values (p. 4). From this constructivist approach, they place strategic culture, whose elements include ideas, beliefs, values and so forth, as intervening variables that impact how humans interpret material facts and determine their interests (p. 8). In their own words, strategic culture provides a perceptual lens or toolkit for the interpretation of the world, which then influences strategic outcomes (p. 17).
Munro and Yi’s framework starts from the subjective understanding of the self that creates identities. Narratives about identity and history call for action in any given situation populated by diverse actors and give rise to interests. The allocation of resources to pursue these interests reveals intentions. Then, intentions interact with and are circumscribed by a structure of interests among actors, which the authors call “dependencies”; these can be mutual, reciprocal, conflictual or concurrent, and they lead to strategic behaviour. Though not explicitly spelled out by the authors, such interactions, conditioned by dependencies, can recur over time, generating ideas that feed back into identities, completing the loop on which the framework is premised: agents’ behaviour and cultural structures are mutually constitutive. Munro and Yi painstakingly define each critical concept, including identity, interests, intentions and dependencies, making it easy to construct a “causal” (or more precisely, constitutive) mechanism to rid their strategic culture-based studies of the blame of tautology. Meanwhile, they also consciously limit strategic culture’s role to an interpretive lens and qualify their argument as only being “quasi-causal” (p. 130).
The authors then apply the framework to cross-Taiwan Strait relations in an attempt to demonstrate the replicability of their argument, as aspired to in positivist epistemology. However, their decision to separate each element of the book’s quasi-causal framework – from identities, interests, intentions, dependencies, to behaviour – into different chapters might obscure the mutually constitutive relationships between strategic culture and strategic action that they try to illustrate. As a result, the role of strategic culture – the collective mindsets, the enduring social structures of ideas of a national strategic community, and the interpretive lens constructing and being constructed by the dependencies-conditioned interactions – could have been more evident to help readers make a new sense of the littered trilateral relations in the Taiwan Strait. Unfortunately, without demonstrating the constitutive loop of their mechanism and the interpretive lens provided by strategic culture, the authors’ recount of cross-Strait relations, from China’s Republican era to the US second Trump administration, leaves readers wondering what has been gained through the strategic culture framework that adds to understandings based on the pervasive positivist epistemology.
The above limitation by no means diminishes the value of the authors’ effort. In addition, one must admit that it is an uphill battle to use culture, which by definition tends to endure rather than change, to explain or interpret strategic behaviour, which by definition changes amid interactions. Therefore, the authors look to providing a framework to understand better why agents sometimes fail to take actions that are seemingly rational in a positivist sense (p. 18). Likening strategic culture to the unobserved “dark matter” in physics, they want to “put a question mark over rationality” and show how strategic culture shapes preferences, just as dark matter shapes gravitational effects (pp. 26–27).
The goal is powerful and inspiring. The ambition brings to this reviewer’s thoughts two ostensibly “irrational” uses of military force by China: the first Taiwan Strait crisis in 1954–1955, which precipitated a mutual defence treaty between the US and the Republic of China (Taiwan), and the 1969 border clashes on the Zhenbao Island, which almost brought China and the Soviet Union to war. In both cases, China initiated the use of military force against much more powerful rivals and, arguably, led to outcomes that the use of force sought to prevent. Historical records showed that the seemingly irrational strategic behaviour was conceived in the first place to “teach the targets a lesson.” As the authors quote Andrew Scobell, war waged to educate, punish or “restore the correct order of things” is approved in Chinese strategic culture (p. 7). If the authors had made the interpretive lens of strategic culture more explicit in their discussion of cross-Strait relations, they could have helped us answer the question “what does this behaviour mean?” instead of “why did this behaviour occur?” (p. 27). From that, Munro and Yi’s framework could have helped us better understand Chinese interpretations of rationality, which might prioritize political aims over military victories, thereby revealing hidden insights for managing the perilous triangular relations in the Taiwan Strait.
Still, this book offers fascinating details on cross-Strait relations, from history and military capabilities to scenario development and weapons programmes, including missiles, submarines and amphibious vessels, that will awe even seasoned observers of the Taiwan Strait.
