During the televised parade marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, expert and amateur viewers alike were struck by the images of massive columns of goose-stepping soldiers and the fearsome military hardware of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Yet despite the intense attention directed towards the PLA and its role in China's rise, the academic literature lacks a comprehensive book-length treatment of the origins, content and changes in Chinese military strategy over those seven decades. Taylor Fravel's new book, Active Defense: China's Military Strategy Since 1949, deftly tackles this shortfall head-on, marshalling authoritative primary sources, insights from military culture and organization theory, and a keen understanding of China's domestic and external challenges since the country's founding to categorize and explain the major and minor shifts in Chinese military strategy thinking. Methodologically, the author is meticulously careful to highlight his level of confidence in particular sources, never exaggerates their meaning, restricts his speculations within reasonable bounds, and is explicitly circumspect when critical data or documents are simply unavailable for review because of classification or archival shortfalls. Despite these caveats, the deep archival work in this book is a major contribution, and provides strong support for Fravel's bold analytic judgments, especially his primary conclusion that changes in military strategy, regardless of external or internal threats, are only possible during periods of elite leadership unity.

The book is expertly organized, setting the reader's table with a cogent but not obscurantist summary of the literature on the organizational and theoretical origins of changes in military strategy. This is followed by a half dozen rich but not overly dense chapters describing and analysing what the author believes are the major shifts in Chinese military strategy, beginning pre-1949 and tracking through changes in 1956 (“Defending the motherland”), 1964 (“Luring the enemy in deep”), 1980 (“Active defense”), 1993 (“Local wars under high tech conditions”), and the more recent push towards “Informatization.” All of these chapters are laid out in a manner that permits structured comparison, beginning with an overview of the strategy and its implications for PLA organization and doctrine, followed by analysis of the external and internal drivers of the change, outlines of the bureaucratic process of drafting and adoption, examination and rejection of alternate explanations, discussion of the implementation within the force, and a concluding bridge to the next major strategic disruption. The author even brings the reader an unexpected amuse-bouche, drawing on his significant expertise on Chinese nuclear weapons issues to explain the remarkable continuities in PRC nuclear strategy since 1964. The only regret is that publication timelines permitted only a cursory discussion of the PLA's massive reorganization since 2015, though one hopes that a future edition could include an excursion on the topic.

Overall, this book is an outstanding contribution to the canon on Chinese military and strategic affairs. Like his debut manuscript, Strong Borders, Secure Nation, which was the timely and authoritative “expert guide” that the China field desperately needed just when Beijing's aggressive territorial behaviour in the South and East China Seas was making international news, Fravel's new book is an instant classic and a mandatory reference source. I would recommend this volume to students of Chinese foreign policy, international relations and military affairs without reservation.