Taylor Fravel has written what will undoubtedly be the definitive work on China's military strategy from 1949 to the present, at least until Chinese party and military archives are open to researchers. Fravel sets out to explain when and why China's strategic guidelines (zhanlue fangzhen), or military strategy, has changed and in what ways. He identifies nine instances when strategy has changed, with three clear cases of major strategy change (1956, 1980, 1993) and five cases of relatively minor change (1960, 1977, 1998, 2004, and 2014). He argues that major change occurs when a major change in the nature of warfare has taken place and when the Chinese political elite is united. Minor change occurs when the elite is united, but when there has not been a major change in the ways wars have been fought. He notes one major exception to this pattern. That occurred in 1964 when Mao personally intervened to reset Chinese military strategy to lure the enemy in deep. In all the other cases, proposals for changes in military strategy were proposed and worked out by the military high command and approved by the party leadership. He contrasts conventional military strategy, dominated by the military leadership, with China's nuclear strategy, which he convincingly argues has been the sole purview of top political leaders.
Fravel is a political scientist at MIT, and he is concerned to situate his research in the context of relevant studies of civil–military relations, military innovation and diffusion, and aspects of the general qualitative literature in political science. Most of the book, however, is a deeply researched history of military strategy making and the attendant doctrinal changes in the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The scholarship is exhaustive. In particular, the coverage of the 1956 strategy is pathbreaking—few have paid much attention to 1950s era military strategy in decades. More controversially, Fravel argues that the 1964 strategy initiated by Mao, focusing on luring the enemy in deep, was not the product of fears of a US and/or USSR invasion, but part of Mao's strategy to lay the groundwork for the Cultural Revolution. His chapter on nuclear strategy amends the earlier standard account by John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai. More attention has been paid to military strategy in the reform period in Western writings, but here again, Fravel provides much more comprehensive discussions based on a wider range of sources than do earlier works. All in all, this book will be one of the benchmarks in the study of the military in the People's Republic of China for a very long time.
While this book is probably definitive about Chinese military strategy, it should not be read as a complete history of the PLA or of China's use of force since 1949. While, for example, active defense can characterize the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the formal military doctrine of the period was defending the motherland by preparing for an invasion in North China. The same could be said about the Zhenbao border clash, the seizure of the Paracels in 1974 and so on. This leaves open the question of what exactly China's military strategy actually explains in terms of the behavior of the PLA.
Related to this point about the limitations of military doctrine in explaining Chinese military behavior is the issue of the rationality of the strategies adopted. In 1956 the first formal strategy was adopted, to prepare for an invasion of North China. But the US had no intention of invading China at that time (official US doctrine relied on “massive” retaliation with nuclear weapons). Similarly, in 1980 when active defense became the formal strategy to defend against a Soviet invasion, there was much less likelihood of a Soviet invasion in 1980 than there was in 1969 (when the strategy was lure in deep).
Fravel is ambiguous in how he regards the 1964 lure in deep strategy authored by Mao. He makes a strong argument that Mao did this to prepare for the Cultural Revolution (and not a US or Soviet invasion of China). But while calling this a major change in strategy, he doesn't see it as such in a number of places in the book. On page 182 he sees the 1993 strategy as the third major change in strategy (along with 1956 and 1980). On page 147 he says “[a]lthough Mao had changed China's strategy to luring deep in 1964, it had never been adopted formally by the PLA.” So, was this a change in strategy or not? Was it implemented?
Major changes in military strategy, Fravel says, are identified by shifts in operational doctrine, in force structure, and in training. They are codified in various kinds of field manuals, announcements of force reductions and reorganizations, and discussions of training activities. Shifts in the nature of warfare are somewhat less clearly defined, but they involve new kinds of military operations, new equipment and transformative weapons systems, how existing equipment is used, and so on. On this basis, the 1964 strategy might not have been a major change—doctrine may have changed, but force structure and training don't appear to have. Conversely, the 2014 minor strategy change (for which there is the least documentation at the time of writing) with its fundamental redesign of the military establishment may be more than the incremental change it is portrayed as being.
Finally, in his conclusion, Fravel suggests that with the current deterioration in relations, and growing strategic rivalry, between the US and China, Chinese decision-makers could opt for a change of strategy, perhaps a major change of strategy, to account for the new state of US–China relations. This may be true, but it is not in keeping with the argument he made in the rest of the book. US–China tension does not reflect a change in the nature of warfare, one of his key explanatory variables for major military strategy change. It should not, by the logic of this study, lead to a major change in military doctrine.
Even with these questions, Taylor Fravel's Active Defense is an extraordinary work of scholarship. The research is rich, and the analysis deep. It will be a very long time for any work on China's military strategy will surpass Active Defense.
