Author: Taylor Fravel

China’s New Military Strategy

In a new article in the China Brief, I show that terminology in the 2015 defense white paper indicates that China has officially changed its national military strategy.  The goal of the new strategy is “winning informationized local wars,” with an emphasis on the maritime domain.

This marks only the ninth military strategy that China has adopted since the founding of the PRC in 1949 and will guide the PLA’s approach to modernization in the coming decade.

To read the article, point your browsers here

 

 

Conflict and Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region

Last week, the Carnegie Endowment issued a strategic net assessment of the Asia-Pacific region that I and many others contributed to writing.

The report takes a long view, looking out over the next 5-25 years, and outlines five possible futures that range for more cooperative to more conflictual outcomes as well as recommendations for avoiding the most dangerous outcomes.

Read the Executive Summary here or the full report here.

The Myth of China’s Counter-intervention Strategy

Chris Twomey and I have just published an article in The Washington Quarterly on Chinese military strategy.

Increasingly, journalists, policy analysts and scholars as well as selected U.S. government documents describe China as pursuing a ”counter-intervention” strategy to forestall the U.S. ability to operate in a regional conflict.  Moreover, the concept of counter-intervention (fan ganyu) is attributed to the writings of Chinese strategits, as a China’s own version of an anti-access / area denial strategy

Nevertheless, as we show in the article, China does not actually use the term counter-intervention to describe its own military strategy, much less a broader grand strategic goal to oppose the role of the United States in regional affairs.  When Chinese sources do refer to related concepts such as “resisting” or “guarding against” intervention, they are describing as one of the many subsidiary components of campaigns and contingencies that have more narrow and specific goals, especially a conflict over Taiwan.

This misunderstanding or misreading of China’s military strategy is consequential for several reasons: it overstates the U.S. role in Chinese military planning, it can divert analysis from other aspects of China’s military modernization and it exacerbates the growing security dilemma between the United States and China.

The article can be downloaded here

Territorial and Maritime Boundary Disputes in Asia

My contribution to newly published The Oxford Handbook of the International Relations of Asia is a chapter on territorial and maritime boundary disputes in the region.

The main findings from the chapter are:

  • Since 1945, Asia has been more prone to conflict over territory than other regions in the world.
  • Asia accounts for the greatest number of disputes over territory that have become militarized and that have escalated into interstate wars.
  • Disputes in Asia have been less likely to be settled, accounting for the lowest rate of settlement when compared with other regions.
  • Asia today has more territorial disputes than any other part of the world, accounting for 38 percent of all active disputes.
  • When combined with the rise of new powers, which are involved in multiple territorial disputes, territorial and maritime boundary disputes are poised to become an increasing source of tension and instability in Asia.

For those with access to the online series of Oxford handbooks, the chapter can be found here.  An earlier draft of the chapter is available here.