China already has fielded precision missiles that can range targets in Guam, and the latest open-source estimates indicate that the country is on the verge of being able to hit moving targets up to three thousand kilometers from the mainland, well into the second island chain. Meanwhile, China’s first aircraft carrier has undergone flight trials, and several additional carrier keels have been laid. Finally the entire Chinese military has been shrinking in size as part of the effort to boost the quality of the force through the acquisition of new technologies, along with improvements in training and personnel policies.

Certainly, military modernization is not the only aspect of today’s China worth watching, but it would be reckless to exclude it from efforts to parse China’s future. Schell and Delury do an outstanding job of uncovering the thought and work of key Chinese reformers and leaders from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their coverage of the late Qing period includes discussions of Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guofan, self-strengthening military commanders favored by the Empress Dowager Cixi. If China’s twenty-first-century self-strengthening effort continues as planned, with emphasis placed on both economic and military power, it might be worth including more contemporary Chinese defense intellectuals in a future edition of the book—such as, perhaps, Admiral Liu Huaqing, the so-called Alfred Thayer Mahan of China, who articulated the island-chain strategy in 1982. In the meantime, following the logic of Schell and Delury, we can say definitively that, if China continues on its present trajectory of economic and military expansion, it will become a bolder actor in the world, not a more democratic or responsible one.

Jacqueline Newmyer Deal is president and CEO of the Long Term Strategy Group, a Washington-based defense consultancy, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

¹ As Schell and Delury explain, though Feng was actually writing from Shanghai, the place name Bin (near present-day Xian) would have evoked for Chinese readers the ancient Zhou dynasty king Wu, a symbol of resistance to foreign barbarians. By situating himself in a hut, Feng acknowledged the boldness of his endeavor—daring to advise the imperial court on statecraft and strategy from his perch as a mere provincial official.

² In addition to revealing Western technical secrets, Chinese spying serves the aim of helping Beijing better understand its rival, consistent with the lesson that Wei Yuan drew from the first Opium War.

Image: Flickr/Kentaro IEMOTO. CC BY-SA 2.0.