Like heavyweight boxers at the end of a round, the disputing sides in the debate over China's rise have retreated to their respective corners. In one corner are those who stress China's peaceful dispositions in development and consider the country a stable actor in regional security. In the other corner are those who claim that behind the façade of Chinese pacifism lies a strong desire for the fulfillment of “rich country and strong army” and “revolutionary political culture” embedded in the Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and who therefore perceive the country as a potential challenger to the current pecking order of power. These dichotomous views are partially rooted in the two divergent interpretations of China's strategic culture in its use of military force—a nonviolent, defensive, accommodationist, idealized Confucian-Mencian paradigm symbolized by the Great Wall, and a zero-sum, offense-oriented, violent “hard realpolitik” (“parabellum”) paradigm as illuminated particularly in Alastair Iain Johnston's (1995) Cultural Realism. While each side's position seems well entrenched, Andrew Scobell attempts to combine both strategic strains in a crafty synthesis—“Chinese Cult of Defense, in which realist behavior dominates but is justified as defensive on the basis of a pacifist self-perception” (p. 38).

Other than the concept of strategic culture, China's deliberation of the use of force is further conditioned by civil–military culture and military organizational culture. Substituting the commonly used relations with culture, Scobell intends to move beyond the usual focus on the linkage between civil and military spheres into an exploration of “patterns of behavior, shared values, norms, and beliefs” (p. 5) between the party and the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and to examine to what extent China's distinctive characteristics of the close interrelatedness of civil-military spheres went through transitions as the Long March generation of revolutionary leaders withered away. Meanwhile, a study of the “mindsets” of military leaders sheds light on how the military, as a group, perceived the use of force and how their views vary from their civilian counterparts. By adopting the metaphor of a multilayered cake, Scobell claims that China's decision to employ military forces abroad and on the domestic front is a consequence of the interplay of these three cultures, with strategic culture at the bottom, civil-military culture as the middle layer, and the military culture as the top layer.

Five cases were selected from three different eras of leadership: under Mao Zedong (the Korean War in 1950 and PLA Intervention during the Cultural Revolution), Deng Xiaoping (Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 and the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen in 1989), and Jiang Zemin (the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995–96). Three cases address situations involved with adversaries abroad, and two cases deal with domestic crises.

The general themes and analytical findings that emerge from the chapters are interesting and provocative. The case studies point out that the Cult of Defense is Janus-faced, allowing China to remain flexible in employing the realpolitik and Confucian pacifist strands against external and internal threats with claims of self-defense and the use of force as a last resort. Leadership transition through time, especially during the late Deng years, affected the civil-military culture. The PLA became more and more autonomous, especially when the military doctrine was reformulated from “People's War” to “Limited War under High Technology Conditions” in the post-Deng era, and when technical competency became needed to deal with the changing dynamics of warfare caused by the so-called revolution in military affairs. Finally, Chinese soldiers seem to be no more hawkish than their civilian counterparts. Except for the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis with military leaders' strong belief in core issues of national sovereignty and vital interests at risk, all other cases demonstrate that some top military leaders were cautious and reluctant to press for war and held different perceptions from civilian leaders about how and when to use military force. In the end, a Great Wall image of China's strategic culture is not completely in ruins, but we will witness more notable differentiation along civil-military lines with the eventual passing of the Long March generation. A cultural approach to the use of force requires operational definitions and working rules for the examination of empirical evidence. Scobell has demonstrated this best in his painstaking effort to sort out the complexity of civil-military culture and the shift of the PLA's organizational perspective away from the monolithic domain of the Chinese Communist Party.

Despite the quality of its arguments, its wealth of information, and the integration of theoretical frameworks and empirical cases, the book is still not entirely free of drawbacks. Coherence in analytical structure varies with the cases. Although informative and valuable to people interested in the Korean War and the PLA's involvement in the Cultural Revolution, chapters dealing with these cases are less comprehensive than other chapters in tying together the book's main themes with the development of historical events. In contrast, analyses from cases on the 1989 Tiananmen suppression and the Taiwan Strait Crisis are more convincing in showing gradual shifts of civil-military culture and the assertiveness of the PLA in policy deliberation.

This extraordinary scholarly attempt necessarily raises issues for debate. While the application of civil-military culture and military organizational culture to cases on internal use of force during the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen Movement fits nicely and neatly, one cannot resist wondering about the appropriateness of employing the concept of strategic culture in domestic cases. Should the concept of strategic culture be employed without any distinction between the internal domain and the external sphere? In other words, the structural variation between an anarchic international system and a hierarchic domestic system undoubtedly affects the choice of targets, the decision-making procedure, the rules of engagement, and the goal setting in deliberation. Hence, one intuitively expects a higher level of caution, reluctance, and resistance in the use of force in domestic cases than in those dealing with a foreign power. In a spectrum with realpolitik and Pacifist Confucian paradigms at its ends, will we see a clear discrepancy in “cultural” behavior among decision makers between international threats and internal crises? Perhaps, as Colin S. Gray commented in his Modern Strategy (1999), “If culture is everywhere, then, inescapably culture is nowhere” (Gray, p. 150). How to employ the concept of strategic culture in various contextual environments still requires additional reinforcement in theoretical construction.

The advocacy of the Cult of Defense seems to offer China the best of both worlds by including, on the one hand, high moral grounds to justify its behavior and, on the other hand, the resort to force when nonviolent means fail to achieve their intended goals. As the author correctly points out, whenever China acts militarily, it can be rationalized as purely self-defense. The answer surely offers comforting thoughts to all parties in the debate, but still it lacks clear policy guidance and prescription, or even a subtle hint regarding why and when China will use force. After all, it really depends on China's self-perception and self-serving justification. The Cult of Defense is, therefore, all-encompassing and convenient in analyzing China's use of force, but, at the same time, it becomes elusive and variable in theoretical examination. In the final sense, readers might come away with an impression that the Chinese Cult of Defense could be simply a body double of realpolitik.

China's Use of Military Force is an impressive, scholarly work with extensive incorporation of original sources. Readers would have benefited greatly if a list of names and terms in Chinese, with accompanying pinyin romanization, had been attached. The book is systematic in its treatment and is certainly a pleasure to read. It will appeal not only to scholars of security studies in general but also to all those interested in civil-military relations in China. Most importantly, the author should be commended for bringing culture back into the study of the Chinese military.