A Perceived Analysis Of The Differences Of American Military Perception (2010 - 2014)

Through the analysis and comparison of the two official documents: China’sNational Defense issued by China and the Military Power of the People’s Republic ofChina issued by the Ministry of the U.S., we can find that there are huge cognitivedifferences between China and the U.S. upon China’s military power. There are manyexplanations to illustrate this cognitive difference, most of them are from theperspective of military transparency, here the author will not make any comment onthis point of view. The main task of this paper is to analyze the cognitive differencesbetween China and the U.S. from the perspective of misperception,trying to reveal thecausality between mispeception and cognitive differences.Concretely, in the light ofperception and misperception theory of Robert Jervis analyze why there exists a hugedifference between China and the U.S. upon China’s military power development, andthe emphasis is on “how the misperception affects the America’s cognition on China’smilitary power”. Through the tests of some cognitive assumptions of Robert Jervis’theory, the author find that the U.S. was affected by misperception in itsunderstanding of China’s military power development. And influenced by themispeceptions of evoked set and unified planning, leads to America’smisunderstanding of China’s strategic intention and the imbalance judge of China’smilitary expenditure increase; and the U.S. was also affected by misperception ofcognitive dissonance upon the “Taiwan Question”. And due to the effects of thesemisperceptions, the U.S. indeed has a wrong cognition of China’s military, and thisexplains why there is a huge difference between China and the U.S. upon China’smilitary power development.