Orbis最新文献

This article begins with a brief survey of the literature on Chinese strategic and military culture; introduces an array of historical and cultural factors that this author believes have affected the worldview and organizational practice of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in general and the Navy in particular; and examines the implications of these cultural tendencies for PLA behavior past and present.

This article reassesses the impact of Artificial Intelligence on war and revisits an article published in 2018 by one of the authors in Orbis. Despite the remarkable progress in generative AI, the authors contend that war’s essential nature will be impacted to a degree but will not be substantially altered.

When it comes to risk, in peace, crisis or war, context isn’t everything. But it’s almost everything. US security faces an increasingly nuclear context as these weapons have spread to nine countries, and counting. China’s nuclear breakout is especially significant. Moreover, new technology (AI, hypersonic missiles, smart drones, cyber) create options unseen in the Cold War for conventional counterforce attack of enemy nuclear missiles. The growing nuclear context shapes how—and even whether—the new technologies will be used in peace, crisis, or war. The US must avoid a situation where it faces a choice of capitulation or nuclear war

The system of alliances is the only element of US power that has not diminished in relative terms throughout the past decades of China’s rise. The gap has narrowed between the hegemonic power and the rising power in the economic, technological, and military fields. However, the recent attempts of the United States to use it to counter Chinás growing international influence have yielded mixed results. This article contends the United States is more successful in shaping the responses of its allies when it employs proactive strategies rather than passive responses.

In 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched the “foreign-related ‘rule of law” (FROL) reform, a reform that purports to modernize the intersection between Chinese domestic law and foreign and international law. Like many of China’s outward-facing initiatives, the FROL is more a loosely defined political discourse than a clear policy. Nonetheless, this article argues that the FROL may have implications for the role of Chinese law in China’s evolving foreign policy engagements. There are two overlapping contexts for the FROL: the first is purportedly defensive and reactive in nature and pertains to the US-China trade war and the exercise of lawfare in shaping that trade war. The second context is more assertive and proactive as the CCP proposes “Chinese-style modernization” for developing states around the world. Although Chinese-style modernization is more a creature of policy than formal law, law is becoming an important element in China’s approach. Against this backdrop, the FROL seeks to promote China’s definition of “rule of law” (fazhi) overseas and to integrate Chinese law into foreign and international law. Whereas the FROL marks a new stage in China’s legal development, its consequences for US-style rule of law and democratization are mixed. On the one hand, China explicitly proposes an alternative to that of the United States but, on the other hand, alarmist reactions need to be tempered by the empirical realities of China’s capacity deficiencies.