active defense over time based on changes in strategic circumstances, its general principles have remained consistent. Contemporary PRC writings describe the tenets of active defense as:
- Adhere to a position of self-defense and stay with striking back. This describes the basic principle for the use of military force under active defense. The PRC’s 2019 defense white paper describes this principle as, “We will not attack unless we are attacked, but we will surely counterattack if attacked.” Active defense may entail defensive counterattacks in response to an attack or preemptively striking an adversary that the PRC judges is preparing to attack.
- Combine strategic defense with operational and tactical offense. This aspect offers two approaches to warfare influenced by Mao Zedong’s notion of using defense and offense in turns. First, active defense may involve offensive campaigns, operations, and tactical actions in support of the strategic defense. These may occur rapidly and along “external lines.” Second, it uses strategic defense to weaken the enemy and set the conditions to transition into strategic offense in order to secure victory. Strategic defense is not equivalent to deterrence but includes deterrence. Strategic defense also includes actions taken after deterrence has failed, such as conducting conventional strikes against an adversary.
- Taking the operational initiative. This aspect emphasizes the effective use of offensives at the operational and tactical levels, avoiding enemy strengths, and concentrating on building asymmetric advantages against enemy weaknesses to “change what is inferior into what is superior.”
- Strive for the best possibilities. This calls for thorough peacetime military preparations and planning based on fighting the most challenging threat under the most complicated circumstances “in order to get the best results.” This aspect stresses the importance of setting conditions in advance and suggests it is preferable to be prepared and not fight, than to fight unprepared.
- The dialectical unity of restraining war and winning war. This tenet seeks to resolve the dilemma that using too little force may protract a war instead of stopping it while the unconstrained use of force may worsen a war and make it harder to stop. Calling for the “effective restraint of warfare,” this tenet seeks to avoid war first through sufficient military preparations and powerful conventional and strategic forces that act in concert with political and diplomatic efforts to “subdue the enemy’s troops without fighting.” If war is unavoidable, however, this aspect calls for restraining war by taking the “opening move” and “using war to stop war.”
- Soldiers and the people are the source of victory. This integrates the concept of active defense with the concept of “people’s war.” People’s war comprises subordinate military strategies, “guerrilla war” and “protracted war” that Mao saw as a means to harness the capacity of China’s populace as a source of political legitimacy and mobilization to generate military power. Contemporary PRC writings link “people’s war” to national mobilization and participation in wartime as a whole-of-nation concept of warfare.
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OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
