• China lacks experience dealing with military crises and has attempted to compensate by investing considerable intellectual capital to develop theories and strategies for managing escalation with potential adversaries.
• China’s military strategists believe that if a crisis breaks out, it can be “controlled,” and escalation can be “managed” by applying scientific principles and advanced military technology.
• People’s Liberation Army strategists have developed a conceptual framework for managing crises called “effective control” (youxiao kongzhi) — a flexible, graduated tool designed to guide political and military action during times of tension.
• Due to an overreliance on theoretical underpinnings, China believes it can control all facets of military escalation. This could make China’s leaders overconfident in their ability to prevail in a conflict and increase the risk of escalation in a military confrontation between China and the United States.
• The writings of Chinese military strategists omit how China’s behavior may be perceived — or misperceived — by an adversary. Absent is an acknowledgment that China’s actions, such as in space or cyberspace, may be viewed as provocative and grounds for the tit-for-tat escalation that Beijing seeks to avoid.
• Further research is necessary to explore the actions that China’s military may employ to manage escalation and how adversaries may interpret them. 

A pressing challenge facing the United States and the international community is whether the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can be incorporated into the liberal international order while minimizing the potential for conflict as its national power grows.¹ Should a crisis occur, how would China and its leaders manage the situation to prevent it from spiraling out of control?

The potential for a crisis — either accidental or deliberate — is ever-present and arguably increasing. China is engaged in territorial disputes with several of its neighbors and has repeatedly clashed with key U.S. allies and partners. Japan and Australia are remilitarizing or strengthening their capabilities to counter China.² Cross-strait tensions have increased, with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) resorting to increasingly coercive behavior near Taiwan.³ Nuclear-armed India has an unsettled, protracted border dispute with China.⁴ There is also growing awareness that U.S. military operational concepts designed to counter Chinese aggression and defend U.S. allies and partners may inadvertently worsen dangerous situations.⁵ 

Given these tensions, particularly between China and the United States, it is instructive to examine how PRC strategists view crisis management and escalation to discern how China may approach a conflict with a near-peer competitor. The historical record, however, provides limited material for Western analysts to draw from regarding PRC views on escalation. For one, China has limited modern warfighting experience — its war with Vietnam in early 1979 was the last time the PLA was deployed abroad. Similarly, China has experienced only one nuclear crisis: the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict.⁶ This lack of experience increases the danger of escalation in a U.S.-China military confrontation. China may struggle to manage military escalation, and the United States may have an insufficient understanding of China’s actions in practice versus what China preaches in its military texts. 

To compensate for its lack of military experience, China pays particular attention to the experiences of other countries. PRC strategic thinking has traditionally emphasized learning from history and “using history as a mirror” (yishi weijian). Chinese literature on “war control” and other authoritative documents, such as The Science of Military Strategy (SMS), suggest that PRC experts think of military issues from a systematic, “scientific” perspective.⁷ They ultimately believe that China can exert sufficient control over military escalation and craft a sound military strategy if all factors and dynamics are accounted for. This encourages China to pay close attention to historical crises and conflicts in order to identify key factors and lessons learned from other nations’ conflicts, thereby creating a theory of escalation control and dominance that implies a high degree of confidence in China’s ability to manage escalation during times of crisis.⁸

Drawing from authoritative PRC sources, PLA strategists, and Western scholarship, this article offers a preliminary assessment of PRC thinking on military escalation and what China refers to as “war control” (zhanzheng kongzhi). While this paper offers some initial conclusions, its findings are meant to raise questions for further research in the analytic community on how China views military escalation and, in turn, how the United States and other Western nations can accurately predict and interpret PRC signaling in crisis scenarios. 

A number of published studies by Western analysts provide an intellectual starting point for understanding PRC perspectives on crisis management and escalation.⁹ In addition, a series of PLA doctrinal texts, most importantly the Academy of Military Science’s 2013 edition of SMS, offer authoritative PRC interpretations of how the PLA may approach escalation and conflict with potential adversaries.¹⁰  

PLA strategists have developed a framework for conceptualizing and managing crises¹¹ called “effective control” (youxiao kongzhi) — a flexible, graduated tool designed to guide political and military actions during times of tension. PRC strategists argue that the international system is increasingly defined by crises other than war and that, despite their inherent uncertainty and complexity, they can rely on the effective control framework to achieve satisfactory outcomes.¹² Effective control has four components: 1) effectively shape the situation, 2) control the crisis, 3) curb the war, and 4) win the war (Figure 1). This concept has long been present in authoritative PLA doctrinal writings, including the 2013 edition of SMS, and was notably used by Xi Jinping in his 19th Party Congress report in 2017.¹³ 

Figure 1: China’s Escalation Management Continuum

Effective control can be broadly understood as the need to reduce the risks and damage of warfare, limit escalation, and terminate war on terms favorable to China. Controlling the situation requires that “war commanders seize the initiative in war; be able to control war aims, means, scale, rhythm, time, and scope; and strive to achieve, at a relatively low cost, a favorable war outcome.”¹⁴ Three of the concept’s four components — effectively shape the situation, control the crisis, and curb the war — emphasize the need to manage escalation before the onset of hostilities. The priority is war avoidance, fighting only when prepared, ensuring military goals do not subsume political goals, and terminating a war to ensure postwar stability.¹⁵  

The concept also focuses on the overall context in which a war is fought, especially its prevention and containment. This suggests that, in the event of conflict, China would apply a highly scripted, scientific approach to escalation in which it manipulates escalation dynamics throughout the conflict’s various stages. PLA strategists believe this approach, properly implemented, can help China overcome a lack of experience on the battlefield by executing a prescribed set of scientific principles for escalation management. In a real-world scenario, however, it is uncertain that this highly theoretical approach can be adapted to the fluid and unpredictable dynamics of war. Nonetheless, when paired with military operational imperatives and doctrinal writings on winning wars under informatized conditions, effective control provides a useful framework for understanding how China might approach escalation during various stages of a conflict.¹⁶  

The first component — to “effectively shape the situation” — seeks to actively manipulate the peacetime environment to prevent crises from escalating while maximizing PRC leverage over external conditions. For the PLA, this includes comprehensive planning for a wide range of contingencies during peacetime and using both military and nonmilitary tools to establish advantageous strategic conditions conducive to internal and external stability.¹⁷ Tools of manipulation include information operations, strategic deterrence signaling, diplomatic messaging, public statements, and peacetime mobilization efforts to prepare for crisis scenarios.¹⁸ The concept of “momentum” (shi) is vital to this phase. PRC strategists believe that maintaining positive momentum can lead to victory without having to resort to military force.¹⁹ The ultimate goal of shaping the situation is to minimize risk and prevent a crisis from taking shape while also preparing the domestic population and military for a crisis should one break out.

If a crisis occurs, the effective control concept progresses through three components: first, controlling a crisis; second, if PRC deterrence actions fail, curbing the outbreak of war; and third, if necessary, winning the war on PRC terms. During the “controlling a crisis” stage, the aim is to minimize risk and achieve limited strategic objectives by leveraging all elements of national power, including deterrence and non-war military activities. In this stage, “effective control” is meant to prevent war, exploit opportunities, and prepare the PLA for potential escalation.²⁰

It is important to emphasize that PLA leaders believe that China can utilize all tools of national power to prevent a crisis from evolving into a kinetic conflict. As Burgess Laird describes, “PRC writers recognize containment and control of crises as critical aspects of military strategy that function to prevent small crises from escalating into larger ones and large ones from escalating into wars.”²¹ Laird correctly emphasizes that the PLA views crises as something that must be controlled to avoid jeopardizing the “nation’s development in the period of strategic opportunity.”²² If mishandled, a crisis could “create serious interruptions and damage to the nation’s development and the security situation, and even influence the nation’s rise and the course of history.”²³ The “controlling the crisis” stage also involves the use of diplomatic, political, informational, and economic tools to manage escalation while mobilizing the military for potential conflict and enhancing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities. Heightened military exercises and training activities, as well as prepositioning mobile assets, also commence during this period.

The third component of effective control — “curb the war” or, as the 2013 SMS states, “controlling war situations” (kongzhi zhanju) — occurs when a crisis has evolved past a state of peacetime tension and kinetic activity has begun. Here, PLA strategists begin to employ more military measures, including lethal force, in an effort to bring an end to hostilities and limit the scope of conflict. This is where a tension arises between the means of controlling escalation and the less-controllable factors that can lead to unintentional escalation on the battlefield. On the one hand, PRC strategists seek to “ensure that military goals support political goals,” strive for a “favorable situation on the battlefield” that does “not expand political goals and escalate the war,” and only “start a war once completely prepared.”²⁴ On the other hand, PLA doctrine stresses the need to “seize the initiative” early in a conflict, viewing crises as “windows of opportunity” to resolve contradictions in the external security environment. The 2013 SMS, for example, calls for China to “both prevent crises from becoming conflicts” and “dare to use war to stop war, unifying deterrence and actual fighting.”²⁵

In fact, numerous PLA writings contend that an important factor in controlling and winning a war is the ability to seize and maintain the initiative early in the conflict and to maintain this initiative throughout.²⁶ As one PLA academic finds, “without battlefield initiative, war situation control would be very difficult to carry out, and war victory would lack [a] reliable guarantee.”²⁷ To achieve this, the PLA must quickly and decisively attack an opponent’s strategic strongpoints. The 2013 SMS, for example, argues:

As soon as preparation is sufficient, and it can truly be grasped, concentrate on a rapid, quick and violent attack. In the relatively short opening period, strive to catch the enemy unaware, seize control of the battlefield initiative, completely destroy the enemy’s operational system, intimidate the enemy’s will to wage war.²⁸

Cyber and space attacks are central to seizing an early initiative and neutralizing an opponent’s command and control. Some PLA analysts argue in favor of precision air and space first-strikes at a conflict’s outset to deter an enemy from continuing the fight,²⁹ believing that crippling an adversary’s cyber capabilities and conducting electromagnetic interference against space and network systems would provide “escalation dominance” short of outright war.³⁰

Finally, as the PLA moves to the “win the war” component, PRC war planners shift their focus to achieving victory on the battlefield while limiting escalation in the nuclear domain and ensuring alignment with overall political objectives. This includes setting the terms of war termination, mobilizing the population, and ensuring the survival and legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party during the postwar phase.

When the PLA’s operational imperative of “seizing the initiative” (zhengqu zhanzheng zhudongquan) early in a conflict is considered alongside the effective control framework concept of “curbing and winning a war,” a fundamental contradiction arises. On the one hand, PLA planners emphasize exercising restraint and controlling escalation; on the other, they simultaneously advocate for escalatory actions early in a conflict — using space and cyber activities, and, in some cases, preemptive conventional attacks — to degrade an adversary’s command and control and weaken its “will to fight.”³¹ This paradox could lead to a tit-for-tat escalation scenario that PRC leaders seek to avoid.

From this perspective, PRC theories on escalation share similar intellectual motivations with the nuclear strategist Herman Kahn’s theory of “escalation dominance,” which was popularized during the height of Cold War deterrence and nuclear strategy in the 1960s and 1970s. Kahn posited that a state’s ability to maintain a superior position over an adversary across a range of escalation thresholds rested on its ability to “out-escalate” a rival state. Escalation dominance serves as the most effective deterrent to conflict as well as the most reliable means for managing escalation if deterrence fails.³²

The 2013 SMS also suggests that the PLA views brinkmanship as an effective deterrent in “escalating to deescalate” certain conflict scenarios. It states, for example, that, “when necessary, we should adopt appropriate brinkmanship operations, and through this adoption of limited-yet-effective warning [shot] kinetic attacks and information attacks, compel the adversary to retreat-to-avoid-defeat, to see the danger and halt.”³³ In assessing the PLA’s response during the 1958 artillery bombardment of Jinmen, it further states:

[O]ur military succeeded in the usage of brinkmanship, achieving [the twin goals of] striking Jiang and deterring American intentions. [As] Mao Zedong once noted, ‘They’re on the brink of war, and we’re also on the brink of war. We use [our] “the brink of war” to counter [their] “the brink of war—as a result, they don’t dare to advance, just leave it at the brink of war.”³⁴

Thus, when the principles of the four components of effective control are combined with the operational courses of action that PLA strategists advocate, the core tenets of the PLA’s ability to “control” conflict escalation, as well as how PRC moves will be interpreted by an adversary, start to break down.

The thinking of PRC military strategists has important implications for the United States and its allies and partners. First, and most importantly, while China maintains an overall aversion to a crisis with the United States, the PLA believes it can control all facets of military escalation if it occurs. A chain reaction could unfold in which China pursues an “active defense” strategy — escalating a conflict to show resolve and restore deterrence — while assuming that its actions are readily understood by the adversary as defensive in nature. The adversary, however, may interpret China’s actions as hostile or provocative and escalate in kind, leading to countermoves by both sides that could spiral the crisis beyond control. These dynamics, when combined with China’s lack of wartime experience, may paradoxically make PRC policymakers overconfident in their ability to prevail in a conflict with the United States, and they may fail to account for how perceived intentions can drive further escalation.

Second, the PLA likely views crises as opportunities to change the status quo in its favor by advancing territorial claims, testing the United States’ commitment to its allies and partners, or signaling displeasure with the actions of other countries. While this playbook has arguably been successful during peacetime tensions and regional flashpoints (e.g., in the South China Sea), these theoretical drivers begin to break down during kinetic conflicts in which signaling resolve and implementing scripted moves to control escalation may not be received in the way that PRC strategists intend.

Third, China and the United States have fundamentally different understandings and approaches to crisis management and response due to the fact that PLA writings omit consideration of how PRC actions may be perceived — or misperceived — by an adversary. The potential for an adversary to view PRC actions early in a conflict (e.g., actions in space or cyberspace) as provocative and grounds for counter-escalatory responses is absent from PRC writings. This mismatch could be the basis for unintended escalation between the United States and China.

The author thanks the reviewers’ comments and feedback, which greatly enhanced the rigor and underlying analysis of the paper.

1. Kurt M. Campbell and Jake Sullivan, “Competition Without Catastrophe: How America Can Both Challenge and Coexist with China,” Foreign Affairs, August 1, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/competition-with-china-catastrophe…. See also Avery Goldstein, “First Things First: The Pressing Danger of Crisis Instability in U.S.-China Relations,” International Security 37, no. 4 (2013): 49–89.
2. Andrew D. Taffer and David Wallsh, “China’s Indo-Pacific Folly: Beijing’s Belligerence Is Revitalizing U.S. Alliances,” Foreign Affairs, January 31, 2023. See also “AUKUS: UK, U.S., and Australia Launch Pact to Counter China,” BBC, September 16, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58564837.
3. Oriana Skylar Mastro, “The Taiwan Temptation: Why Beijing Might Resort to Force,” Foreign Affairs, June 3, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-03/china-taiwan-w….
4. Ethirajan Anbarasan, “China-India Clashes: No Change a Year After Ladakh Stand-Off,” BBC, May 31, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57234024. See also Chidanand Rajghatta, “Nuclear Weapons: India Keeps Pace with Pakistan, but Focuses on China,” Times of India, June 3, 2013, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Nuclear-weapons-India-keeps-p….
5. For a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the United States’ current operational concepts relative to China, see Elbridge Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). See also Michael Beckley, “How Primed for War Is China?” Foreign Policy, February 4, 2024, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/04/china-war-military-taiwan-us-asia-…; and David C. Gompert and Terrence Kelly, “Escalation Cause: How the Pentagon’s New Strategy Could Trigger War with China,” Foreign Policy, August 3, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/03/escalation-cause.
6. Lyle Morris and Rakesh Sood, “Understanding China’s Perceptions and Strategy Toward Nuclear Weapons: A Case Study Approach,” Asia Society Policy Institute, September 5, 2024, https://asiasociety.org/policy-institute/understanding-chinas-perceptio….
7. Shou Xiaosong, ed., 《战略学》 [The Science of Military Strategy] (Beijing: Military Science Press, 2013), 114. See also Xiao Tianliang, 《战争控制问题研究》 [Research on Problems of War Control] (Beijing: National Defense University Press, 2002).
8. The cases included Kosovo, the Falkland Islands, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command contingencies, U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, and Russian small wars and counterinsurgency operations. See Andrew Scobell, David Lai, and Roy Kamphausen, eds., Chinese Lessons from Other Peoples’ Wars (Carlisle: U.S. Army War College, 2011).
9. Forrest E. Morgan et al., “Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century,” RAND Corporation, July 8, 2008, https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG614.html; Burgess Laird, “War Control: Chinese Writings on the Control of Escalation in Crisis and Conflict,” Center for New American Security, March 30, 2017, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/war-control; and Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation,” International Security 4, no. 2, (2019): 61–109. See also Roy D. Kamphausen, ed., China’s Military Decision-making in Times of Crisis and Conflict (Washington, D.C.: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2023); and Alexandra T. Evans et al., Managing Escalation: Lessons and Challenges from Three Historical Crises Between Nuclear-Armed Powers (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2024).
10. Shou, 《战略学》, 114.
11. PLA theorists view a “crisis” as marked by three major attributes: the existence of a threat to a “core interest of a relevant party,” a “sense of urgency,” and a “serious danger that the situation may lead to armed conflict.” See Zhao Ziyu and Zhao Jingfang, “论军事危机的管控” [On Control and Management of Military Crises], China Military Science, July 2, 2013, 62–71. The differing interpretations of “crisis” between U.S. and PRC scholars can be seen in Michael D. Swaine, “Sino-American Crisis Management and the U.S.-Japan Alliance: Challenges and Implications,” in Managing Sino-American Crises: Case Studies and Analysis, ed. Michael D. Swaine and Zhang Tuosheng (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), 84–85.
12. U.S. Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China (Washington, D.C., November 2021), 155, https://media.defense.gov/2021/Nov/03/2002885874/-1/-1/0/2021-CMPR-FINA…. See also Daniel Shats, “Chinese Views of Effective Control: Theory and Action,” China Aerospace Studies Institute, September 2022; and Zhou Ruochong, “新时代下，有效管控危机利于国家的安全稳定发展” [In the New Era, Effective Crisis Management Is Conducive to the Country’s Safe and Stable Development], People’s Liberation Army Daily, April 12, 2018.
13. Xi Jinping, “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” October 18, 2017, available at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/19thcpcnationalcongress/2017-11/04/c…. The “Effective Control” theory has since been codified as part of “Xi Jinping Thought on Strengthening Military Theory for a New Era,” for example, in Liu Guangming, “习近平强军思想的道理学理哲理” [The Rationale, Theory, and Philosophy of Xi Jinping’s Thought on Strengthening the Military], Party Building, no. 12 (2023). The 2013 SMS determines that “effective control” “will require the armed forces to always conduct activities under the overall situation, place safeguarding national sovereignty and security first, resolutely maintain the country’s core security and core interests, strive to shape a peaceful and stable security environment, attach importance to crisis prevention, conflict resolution, and war containment, and when necessary, dare to stop a war with a war, control the war situation, and win the war.” Shou, 《战略学》, 102.
14. Cunningham and Fravel, “Dangerous Confidence?”
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 12.
17. U.S. Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 155.
18. Wang Xixin, “再论控制战” [Further Discussion on War Control], China Military Science, April 15, 2014, 60.
19. Jin Kai, “How Sun Tzu Would Understand the China-India Doklam Standoff,” Diplomat, August 7, 2017, https://thediplomat.com/2017/08/how-sun-tzu-would-understand-the-china-….
20. M. Taylor Fravel, “China’s Changing Approach to Military Strategy: The Science of Military Strategy from 2001 and 2013,” in China Evolving Military Strategy, ed. Joe McReynolds (Washington, D.C.: Jamestown Foundation, 2016), 16.
21. Laird, “War Control,” 9.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Shou, 《战略学》, 113.
26. Alison A. Kaufman and Daniel M. Hartnett, “Managing Conflict: Examining Recent PLA Writings on Escalation Control,” CNA, February 2016, 66, https://www.cna.org/reports/2016/examining-recent-pla-writings.
27. Zhang Yu, Liu Sihai, and Xia Chengxiao, “论信息化战争的战局控制艺术” [On the Art of War Situation Control in Informatized Warfare], China Military Science, no. 24 (2010).
28. Kaufman and Hartnett, “Managing Conflict,” 68.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 65. RAND’s Jeffrey Engstrom comes to similar conclusions in his analysis of PLA concepts of system confrontation warfare. He finds that China’s “system destruction warfare” seeks to paralyze the functions of an enemy’s operational system early in a conflict, which includes “strikes that degrade or disrupt the flow of information within the adversary’s operational system.” See Jeffrey Engstrom, Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare: How the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Seeks to Wage Modern Warfare (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2018), 15–16.
31. For example, PLA strategists advocate that “active defense” implies that the Chinese military will take “preemptive offense actions” during the course of signaling “defensive-oriented strategies.” This comports with PLA and Chinese Communist Party writings on “establishing a strong active defense system of deterrence, which is key to preventing the escalation of conflict during a military crisis.” See “美国智库分析解放军‘主动防御’战略” [U.S. Think Tank Analyzes the PLA’s “Active Defense” Strategy], World Outlook, December 24, 2007. See also M. Taylor Fravel, Active Defense: China's Military Strategy Since 1949 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
32. Michael Fitzsimmons, “The False Allure of Escalation Dominance,” War on the Rocks, November 16, 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/11/false-allure-escalation-dominance.
33. Shou, 《战略学》, 119.
34. Ibid.