Military strategy is of all the human sciences at once the most ancient and the least developed. It could hardly be otherwise. Its votaries must be men of decision and action rather than of theory. Victory is the payoff, and is regarded as the most telling confirmation of correct judgment. There is no other science where judgments are tested in blood and answered in the servitude of the defeated, where the supreme authority is the leader who has won or can instill confidence that he will win.

Some modicum of theory there always had to be. But like much other military equipment, it had to be light in weight and easily packaged to be carried into the field. Thus, the strategic ideas which have from time to time evolved have no sooner gained acceptance than they have been stripped to their barest essentials and converted into maxims. Because the baggage that was stripped normally contained the justifications, the qualifications, and the instances of historical application or misapplication, the surviving maxim had to be accorded a substitute dignity and authority by treating it as an axiom, or, in latter-day parlance, a “principle.”

When Max Weber published in 1906 two book-length studies of contemporary Russian politics, Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Russland (On the situation of bourgeois democracy in Russia), and Russlands Übergang zum Schein-konstitutionalismus (Russia's transition to pseudo-constitutionalism), he was venturing upon a field of inquiry in which he had previously shown no interest, and which seemingly lay entirely outside the range of his professional qualifications. He was by this time widely known as an economic historian specializing in agrarian and financial problems, and in the methodology of the social sciences. True, two years earlier he had also departed from his specialty by writing on the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism, but in that instance his deviation had not been quite as radical, since these studies had concerned the economic implications of a religious movement. What could have induced him, so shortly after recuperation from a nervous breakdown which had incapacitated him for the better part of five years (1897–1903), to interrupt his academic routine, acquire a reading knowledge of Russian, and devote several months to the tedious perusal of the Russian daily press? Why did he, as his widow and biographer reports, “follow for months in breathless tension the Russian drama” of 1905? Weber's interest in Russian politics, it is obvious, had deeper motives than mere fascination with current events; indeed, it was intimately connected with his two most vital concerns: the future of Germany, and the future of free society.

Intensive study of factors affecting the relative power position of states “in the long run”—location, human and material resources, level of economic development and rate of capital formation, national solidarity, etc.—is no substitute for consideration of certain other factors which operate in the short run and determine the extent to which a state's power potential is utilized to achieve specific foreign policy objectives. Wars are fought or threatened and diplomatic settlements or impasses reached in the short run. So are decisions affecting all these grave matters, and sometimes with long-range consequences.

The main link between a state's long-run power potential and its government's achievement of present-day policy objectives are decisions taken regarding the level and character of military preparedness. Power potential is not a complete substitute for fighting capacity, especially when wars may begin with thermonuclear attacks which destroy the potential or prevent its being mobilized in time to influence the outcome of the war. Nor is it a substitute for the particular kinds of fighting capacity most efficient in deterring and localizing war.

Communist China has broken with the Chinese cultural tradition, which it attacks and condemns. This break was prepared in part by the transformation of China during the declining years of imperial rule and in Republican times. But whereas this period was marked by the disintegration and disappearance of old institutions and some uncertainty about things to come, a new, rigid doctrine and social structure are now being introduced to integrate a new society within a totalitarian state. The old values have been discarded, but some of the organizational patterns of the past have been carried over, or have reappeared in the new system. The Communists are attempting to impose their system on Chinese society through the agency of an ideologically oriented elite which not only holds official position in government but also controls society itself. The degree of success which this system achieves may depend in part on the extent to which Chinese society has been prepared by its tradition to accept a centralized bureaucratic state working through a trained elite. In addition to helping us to assess the degree of preconditioning in China for Communist rule, an analytical study of imperial China may provide us with a greater understanding of the social and political techniques which a bureaucratic state employs, and which become of such special importance for a totalitarian government. What, then, were the key features of the imperial state and society which the Communists have retained or replaced in their own way, and what was the role played by the educated elite of the past?

The imperial state aimed at a strong control over Chinese society. The struggle to keep an all-powerful central rule was the dominant concern of every Chinese dynasty. The center of all authority was the emperor and the court, the embodiment of the interests of the state. Serving the emperor was a group of officials, small in number compared with the size of the country and the population, and with the importance of the functions to be carried out. These officials represented the interests of the state as a whole—its concern with the well-being or acquiescence of all groups of the population. The last Chinese dynasty had in addition special support from a group which served the state without being a part of Chinese society. The Manchus had come as conquerors from the frontier of the Chinese empire, with their forces militarily organized into units known as “banners.” When the Manchu dynasty was set up, the Manchu banners were kept apart from the Chinese people and the bannermen remained an inner core of dynastic supporters used both as a military force and in key official positions. But these bannermen were only a small group, largely unqualified for the complex tasks of Chinese administration, and thus the Manchu dynasty, like its predecessors, had to recruit its state administration from Chinese society.

Regardless of whether a detailed Five-Year Plan is in operation or not, there is in Communist China every indication of a determined, relentless, and massive effort to pursue a program of industrial expansion. The rapid rate of recovery, the restructuring of the institutional framework, the possession of an industrial base in Manchuria, the termination of hostilities in Korea, and, above all, the application of political and social power to the mobilization of resources in the hands of the state are all factors that have enabled the regime to raise the rate and level of investment considerably above that of the past. At the same time, the regime is mobilizing not only capital, but technique and entre-preneurship as well. In essence, the Chinese economy—after being more or less stationary for centuries, with only erratic and partial spurts of growth in recent decades—seems to be entering, for better or for worse, a self-sustaining growth process.

Barring another world war or a major agricultural crisis in China, the long-run question before us is not whether the Chinese Communist economy will grow at all, but whether the rate of growth will be sufficiently rapid so that the forces of the industrial revolution will be in a position to defeat the Malthusian counterrevolution. Given the previously discussed conditions and limitations, how rapidly may industrialization be expected to proceed? Obviously, these questions can only be answered conditionally and hypothetically. However, before approaching this problem, it may be well to take a schematic look at the “size” and “structur” of the Chinese mainland economy in 1952, which may be considered as the point of departure for the upward climb.