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I have recently started David Graff and Robin Higham’s A Military History of China. They note 4 large texts compiled by Chinese on either side of the Strait on the history of Chinese military affairs. I was wondering if anyone knows whether any of these texts have been translated wholly or partially into English and if so how valuable it would be for someone starting to learn about Chinese military history. Here are the names of the text in English and pinyin:
– History of the Nationalist Revolutionary Wars (Guomin geming zhanzheng shi), Taipei 1970-1982
– Battle History of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun zhanshi), Beijing 1987
– History of Warfare in China Through the Ages (Zhongguo lidai zhanzheng shi), Taipei 1967
– Comprehensive History of the Chinese Military Affairs (Zhongguo junshi tongshi), Beijing 1998@Vingilótë: This is a very interesting set of scenarios. I think US leadership could plausibly justify scenario A to the US public, though that’s of course contingent on many factors. (What is the state of US-China relations at the time? If this scenario occurs far enough into the future, has the US gotten into any more wars? Who is president of the US?) If we look to modern history, it seems that time is a big element in the US public souring on wars. When Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan got dragged out, public support dropped. The run-up to Xi dropping an NSNW is fairly short, so there likely wouldn’t be a chance for the American public to sour on the war. At that point, the Chinese are the ones who launch nukes first, and I think that’s sufficient to lock them in as the wrongdoers. The fact that the US ends the game with democratic Taiwan’s legislature declaring independence seems to me to lock in the war as worthwhile. Side-by-sides of the Constitutional Congress and the LY may abound, etc.
Scenarios B and C are trickier. Modern, superpower American has never felt the impotence of something like Honolulu being flattened. September 11th was the closest thing, but your description of what happens obviously dwarfs the damage Al-Qaeda did. So there may be substantial elements of the US population that react poorly to the US entering the cross-Strait war in the first place – they’ll say losing Honolulu and, in the third scenario, one of the world premier cities we were trusted to protect (Tokyo), was not worth it.
The element of guilt is also hard to predict here. From your descriptions, Pingtan comes across as unambiguously an ethically legitimate target. US leaders can easily say afterward that killing civilians there was legitimate collateral for stopping the landing campaign in its tracks. Sanya and Nanjing, however, seem to lack that justification because (re Sanya) China’s subs are already destroyed and (re Nanjing) flattening a megacity may be flat-out morally unacceptable to the US public no matter what. This is it’s especially unpredictable. Purely strategic nuclear weapons use post-Nagasaki may be hard to justify to one’s public *no matter what* — we really don’t know because there’s no history to go on. One could imagine that the US government is only able to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki to this day because a. They are seen as militarily necessary in the official narrative and b. Even if they are particularly nasty weapons, we can honestly say we really had no idea how bad they would be because they were first-of-their-kind. To bring it back to Taiwan, we must remember that in both scenarios B and C we are already in uncharted waters because the US has experienced unprecedented humiliation. Tough to say, then, how the US public would judge its own government for flattening Chinese cities when there is little tactical upside of doing so *and* this is coupled with humiliation from US losses.
I coincidentally was just talking to someone about the cross-Strait military balance and found it interesting that you made the scenarios start at the end of a failed, costly first stage of a PLA attack. In my mind, I usually think about NSNW pressures coming in later on in a war, once it’s become stretched out. But this introduced to me a new, totally valid contingency to think about.
I also think the knee-jerk reaction from nuclear optimists is that Scenarios B and C hopefully would not happen because such brazen moves by Xi would be overridden by those below him, who are absolutely necessary for the order to be carried out (a case of the principal-agent problem doing some real good in the world). But as they say, predicting stuff is hard, especially the future.
I thought of this thread when I saw a recent Washington Journal interview with Bridge Colby and Lyle Goldstein. Lyle explicitly said that he does not think Taiwan is worth defending, even if Japan and other US treaty allies in Asia are still worth defending. He seems to reject both the Colby argument that these allies’ faith in Washington will severely waver if the PRC is allowed to forcibly reunify with Taiwan and a constituent sub-argument of this larger argument: that Taiwan is a sound launching pad for power projection from mainland China. Not sure how many other DC folks would say this out loud, however. https://www.c-span.org/video/?526570-3/washington-journal-elbridge-colby-lyle-goldstein-chinas-military-capabilities
@Vingilótë: Very interesting and well-put contribution, though I sense we are a bit off-topic from the original thrust of this thread. I’m skeptical of a couple of your claims and would be interested in how you’d respond to these points:
While I agree that Beijing would not use a nuke to hit Taiwan, there are other imaginable applications of tactical nuclear weapons. I’ve recently been drafting a proposal for a piece on the incentives to use low-yield nuclear weapons against US surface ships in a conflict. If the PLA was taking substantial losses from US sea-based planes and missiles during a conflict, and it felt that eliminating these US assets were key to avoiding defeat, then it would be tempting to use tactical nuclear weapons. Of course, this would not transpire if war came to Taiwan tomorrow. China is just starting to expand its nuclear arsenal and, as of now, we still assume its conventional anti-ship missiles could do plenty of damage. But say those missiles don’t do as well as reaching their targets or sinking them in a real war. And say Beijing has learned from the Russia-Ukraine war that possessing credible nuclear options at multiple rungs of the ladder is helpful, and the PLA has built out its low-yield nuclear arsenal as a result. The pressure to use these weapons against US naval assets would grow significantly.
Would the US absolutely refuse to let China get away with this? I disagree with your confidence that it’s a certain yes, at least in the minds of US and Chinese leaders (which, in the end, is all that matters). We may retaliate with tactical nuclear weapons against Chinese forces at sea — like for like. But would we escalate to nuclear strikes on mainland military targets? That would be a substantial escalation; it may trigger China hitting Guam or Hawaii. In other words, as long as we are not past a crippling mutual strategic exchange, we are still on the escalation ladder, and incredible statements such as “we won’t let you get away with it” will spur the other side to say “okay, same to you!” Tactical nuclear exchange does not invariably equal global thermonuclear war, so statesmen can actually contemplate nuclear use.
I completely agree that the fallout from a Chinese first nuclear use would be substantial, and that this would push Beijing’s leaders away from any nuclear use unless they thought it absolutely necessary. But I’m not sure how confident this makes me that Beijing will be dissuaded from nuclear use because I’m not sure how easy this is for statesmen to grasp. After all, I think history shows that territorial aggression usually results in counterbalancing by surrounding states. Yet in a case like China’s, where the imperative for territorial integrity is a deeply baked, nationalistic, domestic political issue, it may be so hard to back down once a war is underway that anything — nuclear use, even — is on the table.
Hence, I don’t think “China would never dare” when it comes to nukes.
As a longtime listener of Van’s podcast, I think this is very well possible. Van has stated that he does not like it when people call themselves “realists,” which makes sense because in moral terms realism tends to be conservative and Van is a leftist. However, there is some realist in him, from what I can tell. So it’s possible that he thinks great-power war for Taiwan is not worth it, but saying so out loud would violate the notion of solidarity that him and others on the left have with Taiwan as a victim of Chinese imperialism, and thus he avoids doing so.
On the other hand, it’s possible that he really does believe it’s on military buildup advocates to prove why deterrence is failing or will fail (he said this in one of his tweets). I think it’s possible that Van and others similar to him just really think the reassurance part of the equation is more important than the dissuasion part, at this point, and that the debate is therefore not about whether it’s worth it to defend Taiwan but whether Beijing is invariably planning for war. In other words, it’s more important that we don’t trigger Beijing into invading because it thinks peaceful reunification is forever closed off than building up militarily to make an invasion infeasible. I know you take issue with this in your Kicking the Can Down the Road piece, but I think it’s a plausible explanation. Not least because, in a Duck of Minerva piece on Republican foreign policy variants last year, Van said realpolitik restrainers (I think his example was Patrick Porter) are far more sane than the neocons and Jacksonian Trumpists on foreign policy. Realpolitik restrainers often believe that attacking TWN is so costly that, unless pushed by the US, the PRC may actually just balk — in other words, reassurance matters more than dissuasion. And one of the comments I saw defending Van was an exact articulation of the reassurance > dissuasion view, from Paul Heer — whom I would describe as a realpolitik restrainer.
I’m not sure which one it is. I agree that it would be good to have people openly air the view that Taiwan isn’t worth it.
I’d be curious to hear others’ takes on the alternatives to an invasion. To me, it is hard to find serious arguments that Taiwan should prepare for contingencies other than a full-on invasion that do not get two key things wrong. The main argument that Taiwan should, in fact, keep its force posture largely the same (instead of doing “porcupine” reforms) requires thinking about Beijing as both super-powerful and super-cautious. But I don’t think it is either of these things.
“Super-powerful” in the sense that it can actually force a reunification satisfactory to China’s politics without invading. How, in the face of rising Taiwanese nationalism, would it do this? Maybe by repeated intimidation attempts with air and naval forces, perhaps accompanied by a blockade or the clear threat of one. This, to me, is what “gray-zone” operations means (if I’m getting this wrong, I’d welcome a correction). This is the basis of a recent argument for Taiwan keeping with symmetric defense instead of doing porcupine reforms: https://warontherocks.com/2021/12/the-counter-intuitive-sensibility-of-taiwans-new-defense-strategy/. But how would gray-zone actions actually coerce Taiwan? I think this is a good question that (wisely) leads advocates of porcupine defense to instead emphasize the invasion threat (I recently wrote a brief on that here: https://globalaffairs.org/research/report/us-arms-sales-reveal-discord-taiwans-defense-strategy).
The problem with gray-zone actions: If you can bomb a people to rubble and still not have them surrender (Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan…) then how can some flybys do the trick?
“Super-cautious” in the sense that Beijing would not invade Taiwan if it fully understood the economic, chips, human life, etc. costs. The counter to this is pretty obvious: humans, especially in large groups, and very especially when severe nationalism is involved, tend not to be very cautious.
Konstantin raises an interesting parallel with a UK in decline. Maybe this should drive us to look closely at the evidence of decline in America — this would answer Tanner’s question about why, even as we have increasing living standards, our “brains and bodies literally feel worse.” This brings me to two interesting questions that I hope someone reading this can help answer: is decline in every society inevitable? If so, what can America do to put it off as long as possible?
The evidence of decline in America seems clear to me no matter which way you approach it. From a spiritual angle, we have decreasing social cohesion (more “Bowling Alone” and more crazy fringe types who derive their sense of community from weird and sometimes awful political tribes). This has helped drive a resurgence of social conservatives, who can point to decreasing fertility rates, decreasing religiosity, and increases in loneliness (and related indicators like depression, suicide, ADHD, etc) as part of a story of decline.
The notion that America has gotten worse despite rising wealth also works for the left/materialists. Was recently listening to Van Jackson’s podcast (he’s an international relations scholar and social democrat) where he interviews a very NorCal Marxist activist. Both of them hammered on the lie millennials were told: you will be richer than your parents. Because Boomers are such a disproportionately large and long-living cohort, however, they have stayed in their positions at the top in academia, industry, and politics, crowding out millennials’ opportunities to move up. There is no easy capitalist fix for this that I can think of.
And the materialist argument doesn’t require that you be on the left economically. On the other side of the economic spectrum, libertarians know that all else equal, institutions siphon more and more resources to vested interests (ie, they become less efficient at their real purpose) over time. This is the whole literature on public choice theory. This explains why, even though I am two generations removed from the Boomers (and therefore in a much wealthier world), housing prices are more expensive for me, relatively speaking. Zoning laws only accumulate more over time, limiting housing supply more over time, increasing housing prices more over time. It works this way for everything that is regulated or affected by laws in some way, which is a lot of stuff (rising tuition prices for college; less job openings in government; etc.). And all else equal, this means MY kids will have to spend even more of their income on housing, spend more time and waste more effort on job-hunting, spend more on college, etc. (pretty grim thoughts).
This drives me to a general thought: if all else equal, America declines over time, then is this the case for every society? If so, what can be done to slow down this decline? Maybe America hasn’t always been in decline, but only recently started because we only recently ran out of new stuff to acquire (of our 246 years, only for the last 63 have we not been adding new territory). Adding new stuff puts off the question of how to reallocate everything better, because you can just make the whole pie way way bigger. We’re not going to be annexing new territory anytime soon because that era of history is largely behind us. Grimdark indicates real decline. So, what to do?
(I realize that if I had read Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and similar works I would probably have already been thinking through these questions, but I sadly have not yet gotten to that.)
I had not read Hoel’s piece but I’ve thought about this phenomenon a bit specifically regarding violence in media. You could make a purely materialist/technological argument for increasing violence in movies, TV, video games, etc.: as the graphics and tech and CGI gets better, we begin to portray fake violence more like the real thing, because people are entertained by realistic violence. Saving Private Ryan and Call of Duty are not unrealistically gory; that’s often how real war looks. It just looks over the top compared to violence in media through the 1970s that was unrealistically light (or clearly over-the-top satirical, like old spaghetti westerns).
But I don’t think this is the only argument at work. There is also a discursive element in that new discourses have opened up since movies, TV, and video games have made their entries into American culture. When movies were “pre-grimdark,” the media environment was very conformist — most people could only read mainstream media, news rarely showed pictures or video, and most all believed in a candy version of American exceptionalism. This is what I imagine when I imagine the 50s, and to my understanding it was also a big motivator for the counterculture movement. After this counterculture began, reality at home became a bit undeniably darker in the 1960s and 1970s. There was both domestic violence and violence abroad, as TVs and journalists started showing with unprecedented subversion the real, awful deeds our own soldiers did in war in Southeast Asia. Now, the old stuff wasn’t always going to do the trick — audiences would be jaded if you only show Abbott and Costello violence. So, things get darker. With some films, like FMJ, we even get to see a more honest depiction of war.
There are multiple stages to these discursive shifts, by the way. We still had Michael Keaton batman after Vietnam and the 1960s/1970s. But once we got 9/11 and the danger of real war crept closer in from the shoreline than ever before, Americans thirsted for a new, darker Batman (and Christoper Nolan gives it to us). There were multiple steps. So the point is not that everything shifts at once, but only that you cannot really go back once the environment becomes “grimmer” (you can’t go back to Connery James Bond once Austin Powers comes out). I’m less sure on the TV front because I don’t know it as well, but maybe you don’t get Breaking Bad (a white suburban dad shows us what drug dealing is really like is basically the pitch!) without having a step up in drug wars in the 1980s and 1990s. No longer would showing spiffy gangsters in nice suits with occasional codes of ethics do — AMC was betting its audiences in the 2000s wanted something grimmer and dirtier (i.e., Jessie Pinkman and meth, not Al Capone and booze).
I’ve largely been thinking about this as I recently finished season 3 of The Boys — for those of you who’ve watched it, you know that it’s gorier than basically any mainstream TV show or movie in America. But the gore is essential for the message of the show, which is that all power corrupts. Even when superheroes use their powers, all that means is they find it easier to break skin, crush bones, and draw blood. Though I don’t think there has been a constant rise from 95 years ago (the first US film) to now in terms of “being critical of power” in the US, I think there may have been a constant rise over that time in terms of “honesty about bloodshed.” In other words, even when the “good guy” — the US military, the superhero, the white suburban dad, Batman — does something violent, it’s dark and, if we’re being really subversive, bloody.
This argument only applies to visual media, but perhaps that explains part of the “grimdark” phenomenon. A lot or maybe even all of what I said has likely been said before by some media studies or film professor, but I’m not familiar with that field. The main prediction coming out of this is that, no, the 2030s will not be happier (things will not cycle), but instead we’ll get even grimmer/darker. Maybe the next Batman will be shown drawing blood or knocking out teeth, and future audiences will wonder how we congratulated Nolan on making a “dark” Batman who never does either while hitting bad guys with armor-covered knuckles.
I think two possible lessons the US military ought to learn from the war in Ukraine are that defense reforms by partner countries matter and that we should not take such reforms for granted. Ukraine’s military was woefully unable to resist the Russians in 2014. The progress of the military by 2022 can in part by attributed to increased Western equipment aid and training, but much of the progress was made by the Ukrainians themselves. Because they had just been invaded and humiliated by Russia and because they were actively fighting the Russians, it didn’t take much outside motivation and help to get them to increase spending on the military, increase conscription, improve training, and use valuable combat experience to improve practices and doctrine. Because of defense reforms by the partner country (in this case, Ukraine), Western aid in 2022 has gone a long way. Ammo and guns and Javelins and Stingers and artillery are being sent to units that are ready to put these things to good use. Meanwhile, many worry that Taiwan is not spending enough on its military, conscripting and training enough men, or procuring the right kinds of weapons to best deter a Chinese invasion and/or blockade. My second point — that we shouldn’t take for granted the kind of internal reforms that drove this kind of military transformation — also brings us to Taiwan. Taiwan knows that China may invade, but from what I know, there are still serious political divisions in Taiwan over how to best handle China. There are also divisions on going for a traditional military procurement strategy vs. fully adopting the “porcupine method”/Overall Defense Concept by Adm. Lee. If we are extrapolating from the Ukraine example, we may worry that these debates will not be resolved enough to get Taiwan ready until China actually moves on Taiwan — in other words, until it’s too late.
TLDR: Much of the Ukrainian military’s 2022 success has come because there was an enemy invasion in 2014. In Taiwan, it looks like there will be no “2014,” only a “2022,” and therefore the military reform that Ukraine underwent will not come.
This argument may depend on something I’m still unsure of: That Taiwan’s anti-porcupine strategy advocates (i.e., the traditionalists in the Ministry of National Defense) want to keep the conventional arms procurement model in part to make Taiwan appear WEAKER. In other words, by keeping Taiwan buying big-ticket, vulnerable items from the US (F-16s, Abrams tanks) instead of cheap, small, easily distributable Porcupine systems (truck-based anti-ship missiles, mines, etc.), they better ensure that the US will send help as soon as China moves on Taiwan, for fear that Taipei will not be able to hold out long by itself. This would make sense for the above argument, since a Ukraine-post-2014-style military reform would theoretically jolt Taiwanese military leaders out of this mindset and convince them to get the best possible military they could. However, I’m not sure if this logic is sound and I’m having trouble verifying it in any writings, so any readings/links related to it would be helpful.
I’m Ethan Kessler. Currently a research associate in foreign policy at a US think tank. I’ve been reading Scholar’s Stage for a year or two now. I grew up in California and have moved around a bit after college, where I studied political science and history. I think my first Tanner piece was the Taiwan invasion one in Foreign Policy, but I have found his writings on conservatism, US culture, and military strategy to also be interesting. Looking forward to learning more.