Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics by Yuan-kang Wang (review)

The proliferation of books, theses, articles, conference presentations, and study groups on the military in China all demonstrate that war has finally become a mainstream topic in the field of Chinese history. The Confucian-minded class of literati who governed China and shaped its historiography for most of the imperial era systematically downplayed war, promoting the image of a society dominated by civil over military values and modes of behavior. That perspective was long adopted by modern historians of China, who consistently minimized the role of war and the military in Chinese history and society. But recently, historians in China, Japan, and the West have worked to refute what one scholar calls the "undermilitarized" view of China's past, and to elucidate the impact on Chinese politics, institutions, culture, and the arts of a history "awash with military events."¹ But if the study of Chinese history is no longer resolutely undermilitarized, the military dimensions might still be seen as undertheorized, with few efforts undertaken to thematize the role of war in Chinese history overall.² Alastair Iain Johnston attempted to generalize about China's strategic culture in Cultural Realism, but while conceptually imaginative, that book is limited in practice to an application of Johnston's interpretation of the Seven Military Classics to the strategic decision-making of a single dynasty, the Ming.³ Now Yuan-kang Wang provides an even more ambitious attempt to capture the place of war in Chinese history and culture, in his reëxamination of strategic decision-making in the Song, Ming, and PRC through the theoretical lens of a branch of international relations theory known as structural realism. Wang's book ought to be of special interest to readers of this journal, since he mines the work of Song and Ming historians to marshal evidence for his larger theoretical conclusions about the relationship between culture and war. But Wang's marriage of history and IR theory is ultimately discordant, for reasons I will explain below.

Harmony and War constitutes a revision of Wang's 2001 Ph.D. thesis in political science at the University of Chicago.⁴ At the broadest level, the thesis and ensuing book seek to achieve three objectives. The first goal is to subvert the lessons about Chinese history and the Confucian classics that Wang learned while growing up in Taiwan and that he associates with "conventional wisdom": that is, that China's "peaceful Confucian culture had produced a state that was defensive-minded and avoided outward expansion," except where territorial expansion occurred through the peaceful spread of Confucian culture (p. xiv). The second is to apply a theory about international relations derived from empirical roots in the West--structural realism--to a major case in Asia, in order to "[refute] the assertion that IR theory is ill-suited for the non-Western world" (p. 6), by showing that China in the past acted like any other Great Power. That is, China adopted "an offensive grand strategy when its power was relatively strong, and a defensive one when its power was relatively weak" (p. viii). And the third objective is to draw on this insight to warn current policymakers that despite the insistence of contemporary Chinese leaders that their international aims are peaceful, "the PRC has made the pursuit of power the core element of its security policy" (p. 208).

The more immediate catalyst to Wang's research appears to be the publication of Johnston's Cultural Realism, which launched a culturalist challenge to the kind of structural realist theories of interstate relations represented by Wang's mentor at Chicago, John J. Mearsheimer. In Mearsheimer's view, the two main theoretical approaches to international relations can be divided into liberalism and realism. Liberalist theory assumes that the internal characteristics and political culture of states matter, and that some internal arrangements, like democracy, are preferable to others, like dictatorship; that calculations...