The Long Game: Chinese Grand Strategy After the Cold War

Abstract

Does China have a grand strategy? If it has one, what is it, what shapes it, and how does it influence Chinese behavior? This dissertation defines grand strategy as the integration of political, military, and economic instruments to achieve security. It uses authoritative Mandarin-language texts and competitive theory testing across all three of these instruments to argue that China has had a grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. In the process, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, it reviews the two-hundred-year history of the term grand strategy and offers a unifying definition and social-scientific approach to studying it. Second, it describes how rising powers create regional hegemony and why they adjust their grand strategies. Third, it explains several important puzzles in China’s military, political, and economic behavior. Among these are why China delayed investment in the capabilities needed to retake Taiwan; why it joined and stalled institutions before creating its own redundant organizations; and why it pursued trade, investment, and financial policies that contradicted its economic interests. The dissertation’s core argument is that after the Cold War, China sought to “blunt” American power and subsequently to “build” a constraining regional order. Which strategy it emphasized has depended on its (1) perceptions of American threat, and (2) perceptions of relative American power.