Honourable Mention: The Observable “Cult of the Defensive”: PLAN Strategic Shift Toward a Blue Water Navy and American Strategic Perception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is undergoing a massive overhaul in its command/control structure, doctrine, and organization. Since 2015, the Chinese military budget allocation has placed an emphasis on modernizing and expanding its maritime forces, making possible a blue-water, offensive, roaming capability. As General Secretary Xi Jinping pushes for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation through a process of “peaceful development,” American security officials are unsure of how to best interpret Chinese intentions. Given that Chinese rhetoric does not match its pursuit of specific weapons capabilities, the US is focussing its naval might on China’s littoral, hoping to contain Chinese expansion into the South China Sea. With differing grand strategic preferences, the US and China are embroiled in an active security dilemma. Following the work of Alastair Johnston on strategic culture, this paper argues that key to understanding Chinese development and its use of military force is an examination of how the Chinese have exercised coercive power to fulfill political goals in the past. Though China ostensibly adheres to a pacifistic, Confucian strain of strategic culture, there exists another realpolitik thread that runs through to the present. By observing specific PLAN weapons systems development and their deployment, this paper suggests that Xi Jinping is willing to exercise force to fulfill his grand strategic goals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".