Chinese strategic culture and military innovation: From the nuclear to the information age

This dissertation applies strategic culture as a conceptual framework to explain patterns of Chinese military innovation. Strategic culture is defined as fundamental assumptions about the nature of war that influence predispositions toward the use of force and preparations for conflict, including preferences for military technologies. The strategic cultural approach aims to answer an enduring puzzle in Chinese military studies: why has China managed to produce world-class technologies amidst staggering obsolescence within its bloated military inventory?; While various analytical paradigms and theories---including realist, organizational, civil-military, and net assessment approaches---have been employed to explain China's Janus-faced military in terms of its technological asymmetries, the absence of strategic culture within the debate remains a glaring gap. As such, this thesis serves as an ideational alternative to explain the enduring sources of military innovation in a field crowded with rationalist-materialist theories.; To identify strategic culture's effect on China's technological choices, this thesis examines Chinese ancient texts, Mao Zedong's doctrinal writings, and historical patterns of use of force since 1949 to distill a "hierarchy of strategy," which is expressed as an interlinked set of preferences that flow from grand strategy to operations and tactics. These preferences are then tested against China's nuclear, information warfare, and space programs to trace and validate the persistence of these ranked preferences rooted in Chinese strategic culture.; The results of this study challenge the apparent scholarly aversion to the application of ideational analysis to technological developments. The findings suggest that while strategic culture may not be a decisive or even a dominant factor in determining technological choices, culture nevertheless shapes distinctive predispositions that in turn generate a discernible pattern of technological outcomes. Indeed, key doctrinal and structural aspects of China's pockets of military excellence resonate deeply with Chinese strategic culture. The thesis also reaffirms many of the largely unsupported or assumed propositions about Chinese views of force. In particular, Chinese preference for the politico-psychological dimensions of force and confidence in stratagems emerges consistently across the empirical evidence.